Will Woodstock ’99 Rock Sales Racks?

Woodstock ’99 generated a lot of media heat with its rowdy, fiery finale, but will the mega-festival deliver any retail sizzle to the dozens of artists who took the stage? The album sales charts that arrive Wednesday will tell the tale, and it’s a good bet that the concert’s bad boys will get the biggest bump at the cash register. “It’s hard to predict who will benefit, and not everyone who played there will, but I’d say Limp Bizkit is a good suspect,” says Geoff Mayfield, director of charts for Billboard. Limp Bizkit, the rap-rock group from Jacksonville, Fla., had an explosive set on the second day of the festival that sent some fans into a destructive frenzy that foreshadowed the melee that marred the finale a day later. Limp Bizkit’s singer Fred Durst was criticized by some observers for perhaps inciting the crowd, but he also created controversy and headlines that may propel the group’s “Significant Other” back to No. 1 on the nation’s album charts (it spent three weeks there before sliding to No. 2 behind the Backstreet Boys in recent weeks), says Bob Bell, a music buyer for Wherehouse. Other acts retailers say may get a sales push: Metallica, Sheryl Crow, Kid Rock and the Offspring. How important can the festival’s global stage be? In 1994, Nine Inch Nails had a breakout performance at Woodstock that doubled its album sales the week afterward, Mayfield points out. Still, Bell says, it’s not a given that this year’s festival and its pay-per-view broadcast can deliver that kind of spark. “I’m skeptical about the awareness in general about the festival this time around,” Bell said. “I’m not sure people were paying all that much attention to it.”

A ‘Hooray’ for the Hollywood Film Festival

When the first Hollywood Film Festival opened in October 1996, it created controversy inside the film community because the promoter, Carlos de Abreu, had positioned his upstart event less than a week before the more prestigious AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival. With two film festivals bowing almost back-to-back, some wondered if the specter of dueling festivals would lead to confusion among the filmgoing public and some powerful film industry leaders privately fumed that they would never have lent their names as sponsors of the Hollywood Film Festival had they known the AFI might be hurt. Well, three years have now passed and, defying the naysayers, De Abreu says his festival is going stronger than ever (though it has now become a summer event). The festival drew 5,000 people its first year; last year about 10,000 attended. A one-time marketing executive at Cartier and author of a book called “Opening the Doors to Hollywood,” De Abreu had long dreamed of staging a film festival, but didn’t decide to pursue it until he contacted the State of California and found that no one had ever obtained the rights to the name “Hollywood Film Festival.” This year’s event features 50 films and begins Wednesday at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel (with many of the screenings at Paramount Pictures) and concludes with a gala banquet Aug. 9 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, where two-time Oscar winner Jack Lemmon will receive a lifetime achievement award. A spokesman for the Entertainment Industry Development Corp., which contracts with the city and county of Los Angeles to promote local filmmaking, said they support De Abreu’s festival.

Beavis and Butt-head Do Summer

While the major TV networks grapple with questions regarding shifting standards in prime time, MTV has chosen this week to again revel in the lowest of lowbrow humor. Not content with airing the premiere of “Beavis and Butt-head Do America,” the feature film based on its animated duo, MTV will herald that event with a three-day “moron-a-thon” beginning Friday that includes “classic episodes” of the TV series, interviews with creator Mike Judge and his alter egos, “making of” the movie footage, and the obligatory music videos from its soundtrack. The “Beavis and Butt-head” movie was a box-office hit, earning more than $60 million domestically and boosting MTV’s feature films unit, which also produced the recent dark comedy “Election.” This weekend’s festivities underscore how cable has used clever packaging and summer theme weeks to lure viewers away from network reruns, as well as the way these channels use air time to promote their movies and vice versa. The latest example of that is Comedy Central’s animated “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut”--a film sure to be shorter and significantly clipped when it finally airs on the small screen.

--Compiled by Times Staff Writers