Fact Checking Sharon Waxman...Again

Questioning Sharon Waxman's reportage skills is not exactly a groundbreaking endeavor. I'm not only not the first to hop this train; I actually hopped it myself two years ago, in a short-lived column on Cinematical where I called out Waxman and friends for pumping the box-office-slump vein that was all the rage the summer of 2005 (succeeding regimes have, for reasons unknown to me, taken the heading in a different direction).

I'm not particularly eager to sink into old habits, but Waxy's playground latest conversion of laziness into dollars (possible subtitles: "I H8 David O. Russell"; "Writer's Block Makes Cameron Crowe Nostalgic For An Imaginary Lost Era"; "Laura Ziskind, An Important Artist When She Produced Fight Club, Is Now Just A Sellout") inspired me to crunch (or, at least, Google) some numbers.

I'm particularly concerned with Waxman's assesment that I <3> Huckabees, the fourth film directed by David O. Russell, is/was "disastrous." The actual sentence: "Mr. Russell, widely admired for his original mix of comedy and seriousness in Flirting With Disaster and Three Kings, has dropped from view since his disastrous I Heart Huckabees in 2004, and is not close to making a new film."

Waxman's personal relationship with Russell has been well documented. I like Russell's work very much, but even I can't defend his interpersonal skills; he is, reportedly, not just a New Age kook, but a New Age kook who likes to beat up his more famous colleagues (search this page for the terms "fistfight" and "headlock"), and that's just unspeakably offensive. Still, for a first-stringer at what is suppossedly the nation's classiest daily paper, Waxman has proven that she's not above leveling petty threats: an email sent from the journalist to the director shortly before the publication of her own personal S.C.U.M. Manifesto, Rebels on the Backlot included this gem: "I think you'll regret your nasty behavior when you read the book. But that'll be way late in the day."

So it's clear that Waxman's vision is a bit clouded by contempt. But is that a proper excuse for sloppy journalism? Here are a few random facts I collected in relation to films mentioned in the article:

• World gross of the "disasterous" I <3>: $21 million; it never expanded beyond 900 screens in the U.S.
• Domestic gross of One Hour Photo, which Waxy holds up as the hit that makes her miss Mark Romanek: $31 million on a fairly wide, 1,330 screen release
• Domestic gross of Fight Club, which, as Waxy conveniently forgets, was considered a bomb until a year or two into its DVD release: $37 million on 2,000 screens
• Blatant lies peddled about David O. Russell: at least one. She claims he's "not close" to making a film, but that might have something to do with the fact that he's producing a pilot for FX. He's also attached to direct a Vince Vaughn project, according to IMDB.

I could go on and on, but I have work to do. Bottom line: It's one thing that Waxman chose Hollywood journalism as an outlet for her obvious contempt for film and filmmakers; it's another that her hate speech is consistently propelled by petty, personal issues, and is quite often verifiably inaccurate.