Well that’s everybody then. My father just bought a cell phone.
Month: September 2007
Naturally, all things Wikipedia should be taken with a grain of salt, but I’m finding this list of box-office bombs sort of fascinating. It’s full of plenty of no-brainers — and, I’m sure, plenty of future fuel for the AV Club’s Nathan Rabin and his regular “My Year of Flops” column — but there are a few surprises. Well, okay, one genuine surprise. Almost Famous was a bomb at the box office? Apparently, it only earned back a little more than half its budget at the domestic box office. There are some other really good movies on the list (Serenity, Slither, Solaris), and some for which I’ll admit a perhaps unhealthy fondness, but there aren’t many like Almost that have gone on to be considered a real success.
The single lowest grossing film of all time? Zyzzyx Road. It ran for just under a week in one theater in Dallas, TX, in 2006. Only six people went to see it, earning the film thirty dollars (.001% of its budget). According to Entertainment Weekly:
In truth, nobody was supposed to see Zyzzyx Road at all. The Dallas screening was never meant to be a real theatrical run. Instead, it was set up to fulfill a Screen Actors Guild agreement, which permits low-budget films to pay actors a lower rate as long as the film gets a domestic theatrical release. The Dallas ”opening” was merely a formality. ”I didn’t want an audience,” says Grillo. ”We looked at it and said, What’s the cheapest way we can get out of this mess? We rented the theater for $1,000.”
I almost want to see it now.
Today’s spam: “Work from home as a travel agent.” A travel agent that never goes anywhere? Huh. That’s sort of ironic, isn’t it?
But this raises a question: does anybody really use travel agents anymore? By and large, hasn’t the internet made them obsolete?
Is that why they can’t bring themselves to leave their homes?
cuz when one lone phone rang
in two thousand and one
at ten after nine
on nine one one
which is the number we all called
when that lone phone rang right off the wall
right off our desk and down the long hall
down the long stairs
in a building so tall
that the whole world turned
just to watch it fall
– Ani DiFranco, “Self Evident”