I’ve always liked Patrick Goldstein: In the old days (the ‘80s) when the Los Angeles Times barely admitted the “industry” existed, he was one of the few capable of giving you an inside look.
Of course Patrick (like any good reporter) had an unfair advantage -- he had embedded himself in the industry by being married to the head of PR for Paramount, at the time the hottest studio in town. (That was when Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Don Simpson and Dawn Steel were shaking up the industry with surprise hits like “Flashdance,” “Footloose” and “An Officer and a Gentleman” and winning critical plaudits with “Reds” and “Terms of Endearment.”) Of course, that gang ultimately broke up -- and, unfortunately, so did Patrick’s marriage. But he rebounded with his always insightful column on the industry for the Times, “The Big Picture.”
But even Patrick misses now and then -- as I would argue he did last week with his column on Fox marketing chief Tony Sella and the “failure to open” Fox’s big-budget “Knight and Day,” starring onetime heartthrob Tom Cruise and an aging Cameron Diaz.
How big a bomb is the $117 million movie (with an additional $130 million reportedly spent on marketing)? Google “Knight and Day” and what comes up is a “Save Tom Cruise’s Career; See ‘Knight and Day’” site, while the next discusses how Paramount (which already kicked Cruise off the lot) is now considering replacing him with Shia LaBeouf in “Mission: Impossible IV”!
Or, let’s put it more succinctly: Cruise and Diaz and a $200 million-plus expenditure finished a lagging third not to just a cartoon in its opening weekend but to Adam Sandler, now a bigger star than Cruise! Then there was this weekend, when Cruise and Fox couldn’t even scare up more than $10 million -- a 48% drop in one week alone, putting them now only in fifth position after just two weekends!
Unfortunately, while Goldstein quotes Sella as saying “Blame me” -- and not Cruise or studio head Tom Rothman -- Goldstein makes clear in his opening that Sella is just being a good soldier, taking the fall for Cruise and his boss, by pointing out that “many in the industry, 
including several people close to the film, were privately pointing fingers at Fox co-chairman … Rothman, who picked the movie’s title and micro-managed its marketing campaign.”
How do I know? Well, I’ve been there with both of them -- Tom & Tom; Cruise and Rothman, that is -- in similar situations.
I first met Cruise in the mid-1980s, when I was a young correspondent for Newsweek and he a young star coming off his first hit, “Risky Business.”
A year or so later, it was clear Cruise’s next hit was going to be “Top Gun,” the beginning of the new rock’n’warfare genre pioneered by Simpson and partner Jerry Bruckheimer that ultimately begat such copies as the trio of “Iron Eagle” movies.
