$10 Mil Per Laugh Makes Comedy A Safe Hollywood Bet [Do The Math]
Did the winter movie season--with its prestigious yet completely depressing crop of cattle-bolt murderers, paralyzed wink-authors, Alzheimer's sufferers, and the like--get you down? Fear not: As the NY Times reports, a massive crop of Hollywood comedies are coming down the pike. Didn't care for the potty-mouthed Russian Roulette humor of Semi-Pro? No matter, as every taste will be accounted for in The Great Comedy Rush of 2008: Apatowian sex farce, period screwball, and the wacky worlds of surrogate pregnancy and Mossad have all been covered. To predict how they fare, we might look to the past--in 1988, the Times notes, a recent writers strike and weakening domestic economy provided the backdrop to four comedies (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Coming to America, Big, and Crocodile Dundee II) that dominated that summer's box office. But as it turns out, there's a far simpler method to determine how much your dumb comedy is going to rake in:
Thomas Pollock, a partner in the Montecito Picture Company, whose "Old School" helped put Mr. Ferrell on the fast track five years ago, pointed out that heavily tested, carefully tuned comedies were on the whole wonderfully predictable.
"Multiply the number of big laughs in the movie times $10 million, and you get the ultimate domestic box office," Mr. Pollock said. "Ten big laughs, $100 million."
With the secret of the astonishingly simple Pollock's Principle now out, we imagine it won't be long before the curtain is drawn back, and Hollywood's other closely guarded theorems--such as Bay's Law (stating that the Force between any two screen explosions multiplied by 4000 pi times the number of stone-foxes in midriff-baring croptops is equal to the opening weekend take) and the Fanning Formula of Depreciating Precocious-Child-Actress Returns--become a matter of public knowledge.
Earlier this month, crushing rains left 20 people dead and over 20,000 stranded when overwhelming rainfall left five feet of standing water in the low-lying areas. This is on top of already taxed landscapes that flooded when melting Himalayan glaciers burst the 200 rivers that web across the country last year. Bangladesh under water is seeming like a real and permanent possibility.
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — whose claims are usually conservative — said that Bangladesh is heading to lose 17 percent of its land and 30 percent of its food production by 2050. That's like California and New York drowning, and the whole Midwest ceasing production of food.
If this happens, more than 20 million Bangladeshis will be without a patch of land to stand on. Though hardship in the country isn't entirely recent: since 1971, Bangladesh has endured over 200 disasters that have left a total of 500,000 dead and affected a total of 500 million people.
And I haven't even said anything about the plague of rats that's consuming all of their food. A plague of rats. I wish, wish there was more room for stories like this in the general consciousness — shouldn't we be hearing about this every night? Not to dwell on the gloomy, but just knowing about this makes the answer to this question pretty clear to me.
Reuters - The Polish prosecutor's office is
investigating allegations that there was a CIA prison in Poland
where al Qaeda suspects were questioned and guards might have
used methods close to torture, the prime minister's top adviser
said on Friday.
Did the winter movie season--with its prestigious yet completely depressing crop of cattle-bolt murderers, paralyzed wink-authors, Alzheimer's sufferers, and the like--get you down? Fear not: As 
