There's no question that the opening week of Al Gore's global warming warning An Inconvenient Truth was an unqualified success. Although only playing on four screens in New York and Los Angeles, it broke 3 records for per screen average - best of the year to date, best ever on a Memorial Day weekend and best ever for a documentary. However, somewhat strangely, the top liberal blogs haven't mentioned any of this, with one only citing the fact that it was the top per screen average over the past weekend. The question is, are liberal blogs underplaying the Gore numbers for some reason or do they not understand the numbers well enough to know what to talk about?
Although almost all promoted the film in advance of its NY and LA openings, five of the top 7 progressive/liberal/leftist political blogs in the country - Daily Kos (which is #5 on the Technorati List of Top 100 blogs), Crooks and Liars (#18), Talking Points Memo (#38) and AMERICAblog (#53) - made no mention of the film's box office success, success spurred, at least in part, by organized liberal groups.
Only Think Progress (#20) and Eschaton (#69) reported any news on the box office figures, although both reports were incomplete. Eschaton's came after the first day of screenings. Linking to Box Office Mojo, they wrote:
On Wednesday an inconvenient truth was the #11 movie
in the country despite being in only 4 theaters, earning
$78,994 ($19,749/theater). The #10 movie was showing
at 1,265 theaters, earning 117,000, or $92/theater.
Nothing since then. (See our first day screening reports here and here, and our weekend summary here).
Meanwhile, Think Progress, which wrote extensively about the attacks on Gore leading up to the premiere was the only one of the seven to post anything about the weekend's numbers, writing a very short and incomplete blurb yesterday:
$70,500.
Average gross per screen for An Inconvenient Truth
over the holiday weekend, the highest average in the
nation.
We wrote to Think Progress after reading that to let them know that the film had done much better than that, but no word on whether anyone reads the emails over there.
Strangely, even the Green blog Treehugger which had initial linked to Eschaton's first post, came back with an update that played off the Think Progress post and offered a backhanded complement as well:
An Inconvenient Truth made an average of $70,500
per theater over the weekend (according to BoxOffice
Mojo), which is the highest number in the USA and
quite impressive for a scientific documentary.
(emphasis mine)
Impressive for a scientific documentary?
Let me repeat: Best numbers for a documentary ever. Best Memorial Day numbers ever. Best numbers of the year.
OK, OK, let's throw in the caveats. Yes, it could expand this Friday to places like Dallas and Chicago and it could bomb. Ten people could show up. Boston may decide the weather is far too beautiful to be depressed by Al Bore. And don't even get me started about what happens when it gets to Birmingham or Scottsdale or Peoria. And OK, sure, it's not gonna play in the so-called red states. And sure, it's more sexy to talk about that big Brett Ratner movie that everyone was dying to see (and which did huge box office, but didn't break any records). And yes, the big dropoff from Monday to Tuesday (off a hefty 67%) could be the first chink in Al's armor. I'll grant it all.
I just think that it's funny that when a crazy loon shilling for big oil (Exxon in particular) goes on Fox News and compares Al Gore to Joseph Goebbels, all of these blogs snap to attention (you can see it at Kos, AMERICAblog, Crooks and Liars, Think Progress or, well, hell, just go and blogsearch the damn thing.
By the way, the guy said:
That’s the problem. If I thought Al Gore’s movie was as
you like to say, fair and balanced, I’d say, everyone
should go see it. But why go see propaganda? You don’t
go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about
Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see
the truth about global warming.
So yes, kudos to all these blogs for standing up for Gore and the film in advance, particularly when the attacks could have had some impact, could have reinforced the line that "Gore's a bit nutty:. I'm glad that a blog like Think Progress has done such a good job of responding to every offensive, no matter how ridiculous.
But something amazing happened last week. The kickoff weekend of summer and a bunch of people in a city that doesn't normally come out for documentaries, turned out in force, in "Crouching Tiger numbers" for an Al Gore lecture-cum-movie. You'd think they'd take a moment to talk that up, to let success breed success.
For me, it's all part of the same thing that I'm occasionally trying to hammer on this blog - that documentaries continue to reach audiences in larger numbers and in different ways each year. When we in the documentary community have a moment like this - and again checking those caveats above, maybe it's just a moment - we should brag about it. Biggest opener of the year. Is a documentary. Does that mean that if An Inconvenient Truth gets an Oscar nomination next year, we'll have any more luck convincing the Academy to announce it's name on nominations morning? Unlikely. But just like those who are hoping the film will move the dialogue on global warming, I hope that each documentary success will continue to propel the thoughts of others (the Academy, theater owners, distributors, producers) that nonfiction filmmaking is here to stay.
And not just documentary as one idea - but a kind of filmmaking that can be anything a filmmaker imagines - a muckraking guy in a baseball cap, a nature film, a bunch of interviews with former radicals, a musician talking about his life, a former vice president teaching a seminar - anything.
So, yeah, I'm gonna keep on watching the progress of this film as it moves around the country.
And so will the folks at Indiewire, who of course have an excellent box office recap by Steven Rosen and also an interesting piece by our pal Jonny Leahan, who contributed to our original conversation here. Jonny talks to producer Lawrence Bender and Participant Production's Diane Weyermann.
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