Critical Acclaim for the Boffo Bottom Line

Some of you, particularly those under 30, are not going to believe this. But there was a time in America when weekend box office receipts were not broadcast by Sunday night news anchors who spoke as if empires were tumbling.

Ask your parents, or maybe your grandparents, if you think I’m kidding.

Once was a time, I swear it, when the Monday papers did not join the celebration with breathless headlines, accompanied by box scores, about gazillion-dollar grosses for movies starring apes, dinosaurs or kick boxers.

There also was a time, kids, when the sports page did not print as many dollar signs as the business page. Have I dated myself yet?

Monday morning. I’m driving to work with the radio going, and I’m told that ex-Clipper Maurice Taylor, a look-at-me-I-can-dribble-through-my-legs- and-I-get-maybe-six-rebounds-a-game NBA hack, has signed a six-year, $48-million contract with the Houston Rockets.

The $48 million--chump change by pro sports standards--is useful information if you yourself are contemplating an NBA career. Those of us who aren’t can only become depressed, if not hostile. I suspect the guy who threw a dog into the path of a moving car in San Jose had just heard such a report.

Why do we need to know?

I punch up another radio station and assume a cure for cancer has been discovered. That’s the tone of a story, anyway, in which I am informed that “Rush Hour 2” had a $67.4-million haul over the weekend, the best August debut in history. My own paper’s headline declares, “It’s Rush Hour at the Box Office.”

I would love to join the popcorn-munching hordes and try to help push “Rush Hour’s” gross over the $100-million mark before nightfall.

But great masses of people are also buying Mariah Carey records and reading “Chicken Soup for Ignoramuses,” or whatever the latest installment in the series is called. So something tells me “Rush Hour” is no “Citizen Kane.”

Go ahead and call me a snob. Any movie that popular has got to be bad. But box office fever is so prevalent, it has become a qualitative measure. And the media gladly buy into it, perpetuating the celebration of cultural mediocrity.

“I was watching a show like ‘Access Hollywood’ or something, and they were interviewing the director of ‘Rush Hour’ and talking about the gross receipts,” says Jill Stein, a lecturer at UCLA’s LeRoy Neiman Center for the Study of American Society and Culture.

Stein says that on this puffball TV show, the director confessed that $45 million was his topside expectation.

“He was being congratulated,” Stein says with proper dismay. “And it had nothing to do with the content or quality of the movie.”

None of us is so naive as to think Hollywood is anything other than a bottom-line industry. It’s king of the world, in fact. But when the Angels or Dodgers have a home game, we don’t tell you how much money they made. We tell you how many people showed up.

So why is it different with movies?

“It started in the early ‘80s, when some of the so-called blockbusters became part of the culture,” says Paul Dergarabedian of Exhibitor Relations, which gathers and distributes box office receipts based on numbers provided by the studios.

(I’m sure we can trust the studios’ accuracy. In fact, I checked with the fictional movie critic created by Sony Pictures to promote a recent movie aimed at a ninth-grade audience, and he said everything’s on the up and up.)

“The ‘Godfather’ was one of them, when people were lined up around the block,” Dergarabedian says. “ ‘The Exorcist’ was another, and then of course there was ‘Jaws’. . . . and the ‘Star Wars’ movies. By its nature, a blockbuster means big money. That’s what we’re talking about, is dollars.”

Maybe I should just embrace the idea. Before long, we’ll probably get a running gross in the corner of the screen while we’re watching the movie.

Besides, I kind of like that the box office scoreboard is a double-edged sword.

Take “Original Sin,” a new release starring Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie. It opened, as they say, at a paltry $6.4 million, which barely covers the collagen budget for Jolie’s lips.

The good news is that in hit-happy Hollywood, a dud like “Original Sin” will sink through hell’s cellar before any of us is tempted by it.

And if you’re wondering how I can say that about a movie I haven’t seen, the ad includes a rave from Rolling Stone’s pinhead Peter Travers. It’s got to be horrid.

Box office mania. Dollar signs as athletic statistics. Oscar Wilde had us figured out a long, long time ago.

We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.