Digital Joe #33

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Growing up, I was always taught to do onto others as you would want them to do onto you. That meant you don´t do anything to someone else you wouldn´t want them to do to you. Fair enough, right? It also meant, in my mind anyway, that if you´re on the winning side of a competition, you win gracefully. Tell your opponent they played well, that you enjoyed the game and look forward to it again. If you lose, you congratulate your opponent and don´t cause a scene.

Evidently, a couple weeks back when the New York Yankees were eliminated from the postseason by the Detroit Tigers, that simple life lesson passed over George Steinbrenner. In his usual way, he huffed and he puffed, threatening to blow the entire Yankee house down. The one thing he didn´t do? He didn´t take the loss like a man. No congratulating the Tigers. No saying his team-his overpriced team of all stars-simply got outplayed. It had to be all about him. Which is fine, since we´ve all become more than accustomed to that behavior from him.

(Here´s an idea: maybe he should takes lessons from the Detroit Lions, a team who knows how to be graceful in defeat. They´ve had plenty of experience in recent years.)

There are sore winners and there are sore losers. They´re both annoying, quite frankly. It´s been well documented in the pages of "Digital Joe" that I was and continue to be a huge fan of "Brokeback Mountain". I´ve seen "Crash" and still consider the former a better movie. But that´s not the point right now. The point is that the author of the "Brokeback" short story, Annie Proulx, was a sore loser after this past year´s Oscars. She threw out some nasty terms like homophobia to make excuses about why "Crash" beat her baby for the Best Picture award. I´m sorry to say the movie lost the big award. But that doesn´t give anyone carte blanche to say the Academy is homophobic and all the assorted derogatory ideas that come to mind with that charge.

The same can be said for the winners. Remember a couple years back when Roberto Benigni won the Oscar for "Life is Beautiful"? How he walked on the back of the seats to get to the stage? Yep, back winner. I completely understand he was happy…overjoyed even to be recognized. But it was outside any kind of norm for the Oscar ceremony that he seemed to be rubbing in the fact he won.

In light of our vast history of not being able to conduct ourselves appropriately, it shouldn´t be any shock that "All the King´s Men" director Steve Zallian is an ungracious loser. Maybe loser is too strong a word. He´s just a "non-winner". After the film about Louisiana politics (and a remake at that) debuted to a dismal $3.8 million dollars, he fretted that studios are reluctant to finance movies like "Men" because there is rarely financial payoff. He also continued to say he didn´t understand why audiences didn´t flock to the film, why the critics ravaged it and it felt like he had gotten hit by a truck.

I almost sound like a broken record here: I understand his frustration. Filmmaking isn´t something you do on the weekend as a diversion from your full time job. It is your full time job. It´s the only thing you think about for months-maybe years-on end. The script, the locations, the financing, the casting, the directing, the editing…it just goes on and on. And to have the entire endeavor fail so spectacularly, so totally and on an international stage: it´s actually amazing to me there aren´t more suicides by filmmakers who´ve seen their films crash and burn.

As a writer/director, you might want to shake every single person who doesn´t go to see your film. You may even want to pay off a highly regarded critic or two to give your film a good word. Alright, neither of those are really appropriate solutions to the problem. (The smart ass in me says that the solution-the only solution-is to make a good film next time…but we won´t bring that up.) Despite all the blood, sweat and tears that go into any filmed production, you have to at least be gracious no matter what the outcome.

Rubbing your success in the faces of the directors you beat on opening weekend, either directly or indirectly, is childish. It´s immature and it shows a lack of humility. Why humility? Because it could very well be you sitting at the bottom of the heap next time. Face facts: no one wins them all and no one loses them all. Most directors will eventually land in the middle.

How many times has Martin Scorsese been passed over for a Best Director Oscar? So many that I can´t remember the number anymore. But has he ever griped, complained or been anything less than a gentleman about losing? Not that I recall. I get the feeling people like him are an older breed, a person in the industry who knows they are damn lucky to be there and doesn´t take anything for granted. You don´t hear Steven Spielberg complain about not being nominated, do you? Did Peter Jackson grumble and cause a fuss when the first two installments in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy didn´t win the Best Picture Oscar? No, he didn´t. He just continued to work, content in knowing he was pleased with the end product.

What Zallian said-no matter how he wants to spin it-sounds like the complaining of a man not happy with his own production. It is well known the picture sat on the shelf for a year before it got released in September. There had to be a reason for it. Was the studio not happy with it? Did Zallian know he could have done a better job? Was it considered a failure within the studio community before a single critic or paying consumer got to see it?

We´ll probably never know. Whatever the issues surrounding the picture, one thing is certain: it failed to live up to all sorts of expectations. This should have been the Oscar film of the year; instead, it´s laughably and one of the year´s biggest busts. Zallian being publicly distraught over "All the King´s Men" not working doesn´t help matters. He wants our sympathy but fails to remember we all have our own failures in life. If there are no failures in your past, then something is dangerously wrong.

Failing at something isn´t a bad thing, per se. It´s a learning experience. Instead of mulling what you did wrong last time and living in that moment, you move on and try not to make those same mistakes again. The key is that you learn from where you weren´t successful and don´t make those same mistakes again. "All the King´s Men" has plenty of problems with it and there are lessons to be learned from the production. But it seems like Zallian isn´t going to learn from them. Instead, he just wants pity, for people to say "oh, the poor guy…no one liked his movie".

Sorry, but that´s the risk the director takes anytime they get behind the camera. And it´s the risk we all take by simply living our lives.

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