The New King of the Media? (Narnia’s Anschutz, plus Hollywood’s Has-beens)

Phil Anschutz’s film-making ambitions started off fairly rocky. It’s not that he didn’t have any hits. Ray grossed $75 million; the low-budget kid’s movies, Holes and Because of Winn-Dixie grossed $67 million and $33 million respectively. But he also had two huge-budget flops, Around the World in 180 Days, and Sahara.

Fortunately, Anschutz’s other project, Qwest Communications, a telephone company, has done well of late and Mr. Anschutz had plenty of money to try again. He aimed for the fences with the first movie of Chronicles of Narnia franchise, the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and he hit a home run. The receipts of the Narnia film has already surpassed its production costs in the United States alone, and could easily make another $100 million – or significantly more.

The news keeps getting better. Foreign receipts are equally stellar. The movie appears to be exactly the type of movie that does best on DVDs. And it’s based on only the first of a seven-book series. Anschutz, who already has $5 billion, could make several billion more by the time the series has played out. Other projects coming out soon include a live action/CGI version of E.B. White’s classic, “Charlotte’s Web.”

With such deep pockets, Anschutz can keep making risky moves. He bought the San Francisco Examiner last year for $20 million. But he also trademarked variations of the name Examiner for 60 more cities. His first expansion market was Washington, D.C., where he bought Journal Newspapers, publisher of three suburban dailies. The two Examiners publish almost half a million newspapers, but that may be misleading since they are distributed for free. According to Business Week, the strategy is to “outflank” rival newspapers by targeting young, college-educated readers in affluent zip codes.

Phil Anschutz’s projects are not identifiably conservative. The Examiner publishes some articles and columns which portray President Bush in a positive manner, but also some of the most vitriolic and simply unfair screeds ever published in mainstream newspapers… and that says much. But Anschutz is trying for some of the mainstream American audience that the older “mainstream” newspaper and movie companies have neglected. And he looks to make a ton of money in doing so. The Examiner newspapers' front page declares an intent to preserve American journalistic institutions, and the Anschutz, a former Sunday-school teacher, while not being a member of the "religious right" per se, does aspire to spiritually positive film-making.

Anscutz was not a target of federal investigations looking into alleged financial irregularities at Qwest Communications.

Mel Gibson. It’s good to wait for inspiration – Joan of Arc wasn’t content to do God’s work by liberating Paris of the British; she wanted to conquer the British empire, and got herself killed in the process – But, Mel still hasn’t given any indication of what he plans to do with the hundreds of millions of dollars he made from “The Passion of the Christ.”

George Lucas. OK, he’s made billions in the past. But what’s he going to do for an encore, now that he’s exhausted the Star Wars series? Swallow your pride, George, and hire a screenwriter.

Howard Stern. He’ll make lots of dough with his new Sirius deal, but he will only be able to preach to the choir.

Rupert Murdoch. Poor Rupe can’t find a suitable heir for taking over his media conglomerate. The New York Post went from pathetic right-wing rag to pathetic left-wing rag. Fox News is steering hard to the left, and seems to be peaking. And News Corp is down more than 10% this year. O n the other hand, 20th century Fox had a great year.

Sony Films. Three years ago, Sony Films had receipts of nearly $1.6 billion. This year, they are down to under $880 million.

David Geffen. Dreamworks SKG was supposed to be the next big studio. But the studio’s only hits in the last couple of years have been the animated projects (Madagascar, Shrek, Shark Tales) of Jeffrey Katzenberg, the “K” in SKG. Spielberg has released a pair of bombs (Memoirs of a Geisha, Munich), but they were distributed by other companies. And Spielberg (the “S”) is talented enough he can always profit whenever he decides to give up his political screeds. But now that Dreamworks is on the chopping block, whither Geffen, the “G”?

Harvey and Bob Weinstein. In 2001, The company created by the Harvey and Bob Weinstein, Miramax, sold $611 million worth of tickets to North American audiences. The Weinstein brothers had sold the company to Disney, but had considerable creative influence. This past year, Miramax made sold only about 1/4th that many tickets. The Weinstein Brothers are out, and have a new film company, Weinstein Company. But although the new company has been mildly successful, any artistic pretense or hopes of going mainstream are gone. The new company makes the lowest dreck in Hollywood, like “Wolf Creek,” offering graphic torture as entertainment. Other movies include “The Libertine” the sex-change comedy “Trans-America,” and “Derailed.”

Ted Turner. And, Time Warner’s films aren’t having the good year it looks like they are is having: Warner Brothers is up $160 million in the last two years, but New Line is down $514 million.

O my God... I just realized what he's up to... It IS religious

Well, I hope he tells the truth about Mayan religion and their practice of human sacrifice. The liberals will be apoplectic, since the myth of the idyllic native civilization prior to the Spanish conquest has been a staple of gov't school "social studies" fare for decades.

Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims
Using high-tech forensic tools, archaeologists are proving that pre-Hispanic sacrifices often involved children and a broad array of intentionally brutal killing methods.
For decades, many researchers believed Spanish accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries were biased to denigrate Indian cultures [Hmmm...], others argued that sacrifices were largely confined to captured warriors, while still others conceded the Aztecs were bloody, but believed the Maya were less so.
"We now have the physical evidence to corroborate the written and pictorial record,'' said archaeologist Leonardo Lopez Lujan. He said, "some 'pro-Indian' currents had always denied this had happened. They said the texts must be lying.''
The Spaniards probably did exaggerate the sheer numbers of victims to justify a supposedly righteous war against idolatry, said David Carrasco, a Harvard Divinity School expert on Meso-American religion.
But there is no longer as much doubt about the nature of the killings. Indian pictorial texts known as "codices,'' as well as Spanish accounts from the time, quote Indians as describing multiple forms of human sacrifice.
Victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced to death, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples.
Children were said to be frequent victims, in part because they were considered pure and unspoiled.
"Many people said, 'We can't trust these codices because the Spaniards were describing all these horrible things,' which in the long run we are confirming,'' said Carmen Pijoan, a forensic anthropologist who found some of the first direct evidence of cannibalism in a pre-Aztec culture over a decade ago: bones with butcher-like cut marks.
In December, at an excavation in an Aztec-era community in Ecatepec, just north of Mexico City, archaeologist Nadia Velez Saldana described finding evidence of human sacrifice associated with the god of death.
"The sacrifice involved burning or partially burning victims,'' Velez Saldana said. "We found a burial pit with the skeletal remains of four children who were partially burned, and the remains of four other children that were completely carbonized.''
While the remains don't show whether the victims were burned alive, there are depictions of people -- apparently alive -- being held down as they were burned.
The dig turned up other clues to support descriptions of sacrifices in the Magliabecchi codex, a pictorial account painted between 1600 and 1650 that includes human body parts stuffed into cooking dishes, and people sitting around eating, as the god of death looks on.
"We have found cooking dishes just like that,'' said archaeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa. "And, next to some full skeletons, we found some incomplete, segmented human bones.'' However, researchers don't know whether those remains were cannibalized.
In 2002, government archaeologist Juan Alberto Roman Berrelleza announced the results of forensic testing on the bones of 42 children, mostly boys around age 6, sacrificed at Mexico City's Templo Mayor, the Aztec's main religious site, during a drought.
All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry.
"It was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of sacrifice,'' which was probably done by slitting their throats, Roman Berrelleza said.
The Maya, whose culture peaked farther east about 400 years before the Aztecs founded Mexico City in 1325, had a similar taste for sacrifice, Harvard University anthropologist David Stuart wrote in a 2003 article.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, "The first researchers tried to make a distinction between the 'peaceful' Maya and the 'brutal' cultures of central Mexico,'' Stuart wrote. "They even tried to say human sacrifice was rare among the Maya.''
But in carvings and mural paintings, he said, "we have now found more and greater similarities between the Aztecs and Mayas,'' including a Maya ceremony in which a grotesquely costumed priest is shown pulling the entrails from a bound and apparently living sacrificial victim.
Some Spanish-era texts have yet to be corroborated with physical remains. They describe Aztec priests sacrificing children and adults by sealing them in caves or drowning them. But the assumption now is that the texts appear trustworthy, said Lopez Lujan, who also works at the Templo Mayor site.
For Lopez Lujan, confirmation has come in the form of advanced chemical tests on the stucco floors of Aztec temples, which were found to have been soaked with iron, albumen and genetic material consistent with human blood.
"It's now a question of quantity,'' said Lopez Lujan, who thinks the Spaniards -- and Indian picture-book scribes working under their control -- exaggerated the number of sacrifice victims, claiming in one case that 80,400 people were sacrificed at a temple inauguration in 1487.
"We're not finding anywhere near that ... even if we added some zeros,'' Lopez Lujan said.
Researchers have largely discarded the old theory that sacrifice and cannibalism were motivated by a protein shortage in the Aztec diet, though some still believe it may have been a method of population control.
Pre-Hispanic cultures believed the world would end if the sacrifices were not performed. Sacrificial victims, meanwhile, were often treated as gods themselves before being killed.
"It is really very difficult for us to conceive,'' Pijoan said of the sacrifices. "It was almost an honor for them.''

Tell the truth Mel!

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