Flop goes the movie, in hiding goes the exec

IN Hollywood, it’s always safest to kick a man when he’s down.

Last week the movie jungle was abuzz with glee over the lackluster opening of “Mission: Impossible 3,” largely because Tom Cruise’s popularity in Hollywood is roughly on a par with Dick Cheney’s. This week the knives are out for “Poseidon,” an eye-rolling remake of the 1972 epic that had such a dismal debut, barely cracking the $20-million mark in its opening weekend, that naysayers have dubbed it the disaster movie that really is a disaster.

The reviews were not kind -- the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern called “Poseidon” a “deeply dreadful movie.” Inside the industry, talk focused on who at Warner Bros. would take the blame for a $160-million project that will depend on gullible filmgoers in Stuttgart and Senegal to make its money back. In a business where envy and insecurity reign supreme, there’s nothing worse than having a movie that doesn’t open. If you don’t feel bad enough already, someone else will be happy to rub some salt in your wounds.

Hollywood is so enamored by success that few people can cope with the flop sweat of failure. “You feel as if you’ve been sucker punched, like the wind’s knocked out of you,” says former Warners production chief Bill Gerber, now a producer, who has survived stinkers like “The In-Laws.” “It’s agonizing. As a producer, you can be working on a movie for 10 years and then by Friday night, it’s over. And it’s a very public humiliation. It’s tough walking into the Grill on Monday, feeling the pain.”

Not that you can’t see it coming a mile away, especially in today’s instant-info world where research tracking numbers paint a pretty accurate picture of a movie’s box-office potential in the weeks leading up to its release. By early last week, the bad buzz about “Poseidon” was fueled by NRG tracking numbers that showed that while 27% of moviegoers said “The Da Vinci Code” was their first-choice movie and 17% said “X-Men: The Last Stand” was their first choice, “Poseidon” was a first choice of a mere 6% of moviegoers.

“As the head of a studio, you can see it coming,” said Joe Roth, who has run 20th Century Fox, Disney and Revolution studios. “The tracking surveys are pretty accurate, at least on a pass-fail basis, so you have to prepare yourself. But the actuality is always worse. This is a business where, in terms of emotions, the hits are always bigger but the flops are always bigger too.”

After a fall, some people flee the city, seeking refuge. Others stay inside, the doors closed and lights dim. When I had lunch with producer Brian Grazer after one of his movies fizzled, we stayed in his office instead of heading over to the Grill. “Going out is just too awkward,” he explains. “Nobody knows what to say. And if I don’t know what they mean when they say ‘congratulations’ after I’ve had a hit, how do I know what they mean when they say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry?’ ”

After all, who wants to work the room when your friends, not to mention your enemies, can barely disguise their glee at seeing you fall on your face? “That’s definitely what made it hard for me to get out of bed after ‘Dumb and Dumberer’ came out,” says New Line production chief Toby Emmerich, recalling his reaction to the 2003 summer sequel that, as the saying goes, aimed low and missed. “You don’t want to face all that negative energy.”

The negative energy is, of course, not new. In “Final Cut,” Steven Bach’s bracing account of the making of “Heaven’s Gate,” the former United Artists executive recalls being at a virtually empty ballroom where the studio had a reception after the ill-fated movie’s premiere. If the mood were not already grim enough, Bach was accosted by the manager of one of the actors in the picture, who said with gin-soaked breath, “Now I can tell you what I’ve always wanted to tell you, which is what a [jerk] you are.”

Producer Steve Tisch hasn’t forgotten the lonely feeling of having to put on a brave public face after making “The Postman,” a costly 1997 Kevin Costner dud. “When you go to the Grill for your Monday lunch after you’ve had a $100-million movie that flops, you have the feeling as you’re walking by everyone is whispering, ‘There’s the poor guy who produced “The Postman.” ’ It can be very humbling.”

Roth says he learned from watching how people like Barry Diller and Michael Eisner handled failure. “They were good in defeat,” he said. “In fact, Eisner was much better in defeat than in victory. He’d always say, ‘Try as hard as you can, take your chances, then get on with life.’ Privately you’re at home, depressed, retching, not answering the phone or reading the papers. But you have to come into the office on Monday and try to be optimistic, without being an idiot about it, like jumping on couches. You just put it behind you.”

Producer Sean Daniel was the head of production at Universal for someone who really hated to lose -- industry titan Lew Wasserman. “When a movie failed, Lew was profoundly unhappy and he shared it with you -- you knew it,” he recalls. “But he had perspective. He’d remind you that this was just one event in the big picture and you should never lose sight that you’d live to fight another day.”

Still, the signs of defeat are unmistakable. “The sound of failure is silence,” says Terry Press, head of marketing at DreamWorks. “When you have a hit, your phone starts ringing at 6:45 a.m. and never stops. In failure, there is a deafening silence. No calls from distribution, no calls from journalists, no calls from the filmmakers. It’s the Hollywood version of bird flu. You feel like everyone is saying, ‘Get my mask out. I don’t want to be near any failure germs.’ Even your own relatives don’t call.”

For producer Mike De Luca, who was head of production for years at New Line Cinema, nothing was quite as fraught as riding in the elevator up to the office with studio chief Bob Shaye after a bad opening weekend. “Bob and I had known each other a long time, so when I’d lost him a lot of money and we got in the elevator together I could tell by the way he looked at me -- and didn’t say anything at all -- that it was going to be a very long day.”

Some movies have such walloping bad press along the way that by the time they open it almost feels as if the worst is over. In 1992, when he made “Toys,” producer Mark Johnson was shocked to hear his film trashed before anyone had seen it. “We were on a dubbing stage, trying to finish the movie, and one of the morning TV talk shows had a reporter going through the lineup of summer films, and when he came to ‘Toys,’ he said, ‘This is going to be a real stinker.’ I mean, we hadn’t even finished the movie, and we were already marked as a disaster.”

De Luca, who greenlighted “Town & Country” at New Line, wasn’t even around to suffer when the movie was released. “The studio was so sure it was a flop,” he recalled, “that they preemptively fired me before the movie came out.”

So is there any way to retain a healthy psychological perspective? Or should you just go out and get drunk, a popular remedy for generations of hard-driving industry strivers? The New Hollywood opts for a more holistic approach. For Tisch, surviving a flop is a lot like going through the seven stages of grief, moving from anger and denial to knowledge and acceptance. As Emmerich put it: “Whether it’s a giant bomb or a huge hit, it’s always better not to smoke the Hollywood crack pipe. It’s just as bad to over-celebrate a giant hit as it is to be masochistic about a huge flop. They’re both going to send you to the wrong place.”

Press says that when she has a failure, she stays home and cooks. “It’s therapeutic. You put all these things in a bowl, shove it in the oven and out come brownies. You feel like -- finally I succeeded at something.”

Going into the weekend, Warners, at least publicly, still sounded optimistic about “Poseidon.” While admitting that “we’re a bit taken aback by the tracking numbers,” studio chief Alan Horn said, “the tracking looks good overseas -- it’s doing even better than ‘Troy.’ ” He reminded me that several Warners films that had been judged flops in their U.S. openings had gone on to success in the international marketplace. “I’m not a one-weekend guy,” he said. “I don’t count the votes till they’re all in.”

If things don’t pan out for “Poseidon,” the Warner execs might try the De Luca recovery method. After “Zathura,” a film he produced, tanked last year, De Luca screened “Elf,” the 2003 hit made by the same director, Jon Favreau. “It was a good way to remind myself that I’d worked with someone I admire,” he said. “When I’ve had flops I’ve watched ‘Caddyshack’ to make me laugh, or ‘Godfather 2’ to inspire me. It reminds you that great movies exist, even if you didn’t actually make one this time around.”

“The Big Picture” appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Questions or criticism can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein @latimes.com.