suburban life & entertainment a smithesc and … last dozen years have ... phillips and bob...
TRANSCRIPT
A-list attrition? Movie studios find that stars like
Brad Pitt don’t necessarily pack ’em in anymore — Page 4
Out & About
“The Musicalof Musicals theMusical” opens
Sunday at theMetropolis
Performing ArtsCentre — Page 2
SECTIONTHURSDAY, MAY 15, 2008 4
Suburban Life & Entertainment
BY DEBOR AH DONOVANDAILY HERALD HOMES WRITER
T he three Smithebrothers hoistred “Smithe-O-Politans” in frontof The Bean in
Millennium Park.“It’s been a Smithe family tra-
dition for 50 years,” says Tim.“Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving,Christmas.”
“Ever since cranberry juicewas invented,” pipes in Walt.
“For Cinco de Mayo weswitch out vodka for tequila,”adds Tim.
Then, the trio — owners ofWalter E. Smithe Furniture andstars of their own offbeat TVads — roll up their suit pantsand wade barefoot in the park’sfountain.
It’s all for “Smithe and theCity,” a new ad debuting todayand a takeoff on the upcom-ing “Sex and the City” movie.The latest kooky Smithe com-mercial is modeled after theSarah Jessica Parker montageof New York City monumentsthat opened the popular HBOtelevision show.
“Instead of the girls from‘Sex and the City,’ we have theboys from Walter E. Smithe,”says Tim, who’s in charge of thecompany’s marketing.
As nonchalant in person as intheir well-known commercials,the brothers defy thunder and
rain to cavort around Chicagoicons.
Without blocking streets andasking permission only at NavyPier, the Smithes and a tinycrew rush from MillenniumPark to the Wrigley Building,North Avenue Beach, the DaleyCenter and the Art Institute.
The morning rain is fierce,at one point forcing the broth-ers to take a break and hud-dle around a covered table atMillennium Park.
An even greater blow toWalt’s showbiz poise duringthe shoot’s early hours was“almost getting killed in an ac-cident” while driving in fromBarrington Hills. And we won’teven talk about the hair jokeshe endures during the shoot.The shorter coifs of his slightlyyoungerbrothersTimandMarkhold up better to the elements.
But by the time the broth-ers get to Navy Pier, the sun istrying to peek through. AndWalt, a father of five, chats eas-ily with a group of junior highstudents from South suburbanMomence.
The youngsters — whose sog-gy field trip is a reward for workin honors classes — are recruit-ed to walk in the background asextras while director and cam-eraman Bill O’Neil shoots.
“We’re expecting a lot be-cause all of you kids are aboveaverage,” says Walt. “Tell yourteachers you learned more atNavy Pier than you would havein honors physics.”
The brothers have learnedover eight years of commercialsto be good sports. The dangerof a lightning strike groundsa plan to take the students fora ride on the Navy Pier Ferriswheel, and O’Neil jokes thathe could get better angles ifthe brothers jumped in LakeMichigan.
“At least one would not comeout — one of us would have aheart attack,” says Walt. “Theold one. The water’s about 48degrees.”
The statues at the Pier pro-vide some of the day’s best im-provisations. The brothers posewith the bronze statue of danc-ing children. Then in a moment
A
The more things change,the more they stay the same— even in an industry as tur-bulent as radio.
The last dozen years havebeen a time of immensechangeforradio,eversincethe1996 Telecommunications(so-called) Reform Act tookeffect. That triggered a fre-quency land grab by majormedia conglomerates, lead-ing to downsizing and copy-cat cookie-cutter formats.More recently, radio has beenas shaken as any other elec-tronic medium by the chang-es wrought by the Internet,for instance having to fightoff the impact of the ubiqui-tous iPod.
Yet look at the winterArbitron radio ratings re-leased recently, and it’s still
p e r s o n a l -ity-talk WGN720-AM andurban-con-t e mp or a r yWGCI 107.5-FM atop ther a n k i n g s ,just as it hasbeen for al-most everyq u a r t e r l ybook since
I’ve been doing this job (13¨years, for the record) andlong before that. And all-news WBBM 780-AM in thirdhas held that position as wellmore often than not over theyears.
In fact, talk about stability:WGN-AM swept first place inall weekday time slots amonglisteners 12 and older, and
that’s without benefit of theCubs. Spike O’Dell remainsheir to the legacy of WallyPhillips and Bob Collins asking of morning drive, butjust as clearly the swap ofmidday and afternoon timeslots involving John Williamsand Steve Cochran has to beconsidered a success. Stationexecs reportedly creditedsnow days and the NorthernIllinois University shootingfor keeping people tuned in,but snow days would figureto have an effect only in themorning, and it’s not as ifNIU was the talk of the townfor three months.
That probably had moreof an impact on ’BBM-AM,along with the endless rushof news — both importantand inconsequential — from
the campaign trail, whichalso did much to keep peopletuned to WGN-AM.
Yet radio continues to be anindustry that defies sweep-ing categorization. If the NIUshooting and the presidentialcampaign were beneficialto WGN-AM and ’BBM-AM,they couldn’t keep all-talkWLS 890-AM from droppingto 10th. A media maven likemyself can’t resist the im-pulse to point out that comeshot on the heels of the stationsacking much of its criticalnews staff.
Radio remains a treacher-ous business, and it’s not as ifthere isn’t abundant changerepresented in the ratings.Minority representation is
Furniture brothers aim for ‘Sex’ appeal in latest quirky commercial
SMITHES CITYAND
BILL O’NEIL/WALTER E. SMITHE FURNITURE
Walter, Tim and Mark Smithe show off “Smithe-O-Politans” — which they swear are a family tradition — in front ofThe Bean in Chicago’s Millennium Park.
PHOTOS BY JOE LEWNARD/[email protected]
The designer handbags, left, are a joke and a thank-you forwatching the commercial, says Tim Smithe. Karen Lynn, above,fixes Walter Smithe’s hair during the Daley Center part of thecommercial shoot.
Top-rated WGN, ’GCI remain above radio fray
Ted Cox
TV & Radio
Spike O’Dell anchors WGN 720-AM’s stable, consistent week-day lineup.
See SMITHES on PAGE 4
See COX on PAGE 4
THE
PAGE 4 SECTION 4 DAILY HERALD THURSDAY, MAY 15, 2008
CLF12M
Continued from Page 1
made just for guys known forselling sofas, they sit on themetal couch by the statue ofBob Newhart in his role asRobert Hartley, Chicago psy-chologist.
At the Daley Center, Timpulls out three designer hand-bags for the brothers to carryfor a stroll in front of thePicasso statue. This is histrademark “tongue-in-cheekthank-you to viewers forwatching our commercial.”
Vinetta Sims, a securityguard, volunteers fashionadvice, recommending whichpurse goes best with eachbrightly colored shirt.
Passers-by often recognizethe Smithes. They ask aboutworking with Ernie Banks andget a handshake or photo-graph.
“Mark was always the bestactor, Wally is most improvedplayer because he was awful,and I’ve always been average,”reports Tim, who lives in Win-netka.
Mark — the only one wholives in the city — shows offhis urban knowledge by talk-ing about concerts in the park,why the Smurift-Stone Build-ing has a sliced-off diamondtop and the benefits of seeinga movie at Navy Pier’s IMAX.
“When I grow up I want to
be a docent,” Mark says. “It’s abeautiful city, there’s so muchhistory.”
And Tim reflects on the suc-cess of past commercials thathave made him and his broth-ers household names.
“We’re trying to find themagic,” he says. “Start with adecent concept, show up andhave a great crew and themagic happens.”
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A-list stars stumble at box officeBY STEVEN ZEITEVEN ANDBORYS KITThe Hollywood Reporter
Anyone glancing at 2007 box officenumbers might have noticed a strik-ing absence of star power. Only fourof the top 25 highest-grossing pic-tures domestically were drivenprimarily by movie stars — the lowestnumber in history.
The data captures what is becom-ing a seismic and industry-reshapingphenomenon: A-list talent is havingtrouble packing multiplexes based onstar wattage alone.
With the exception of Will Smith —sixth on the 2007 list with “I AmLegend” — it’s increasingly clear thatother elements, from establishedfranchises to marketable concepts tosuch brand-name creators as TylerPerry and Judd Apatow, either giveactors a necessary boost or entirelyreplace them as the draw for movie-goers.
“There are not a lot of movie starsright now,” says Avi Lerner, who hasproduced movies with Bruce Willisand Robert De Niro. “The market hasbecome more selective.”
The decline of star power comes asconsumers are viewing film actorsdifferently. Such voyeuristic mediaoutlets as “Access Hollywood” andTMZ.com have demystified celebri-ties even as they feed unprecedentedinterest. Why turn out for a favoritestar’s movie if you can watch himwalk his dog on TV and the Internet?
“Mystique is what draws people tothe movies,” PMK publicist CatherineOlim says. “People want to go to themovies to get lost in a performance.And it’s hard to do that with so much
interference.”For the most part, stars and their
reps have warded off financial adjust-ments that should follow from thesebox office shifts. But there’s growingsentiment that star salaries are out ofproportion with star influence. Roll-backs, or at least a rethink, could becoming.
There’s a sense now that the inter-play among consumers, celebritiesand entertainment dollars is chang-ing. The new dynamics are achallenge the next generation of up-and-comers — Shia LaBeouf, SethRogen, Emile Hirsch and KatherineHeigl often are cited — could face.
“As audiences get younger, theydon’t care about movie stars in thesame way,” Sony Screen Gems presi-dent Clint Culpepper says. “The ideaof seeing a beautiful movie star onthe big screen just isn’t the same tothem.”
Such comedic actors as Ben Stiller,Vince Vaughn, Jim Carrey and WillFerrell have in the past year or so hitlongtime or even career lows. BradPitt has slid from a career high of$185 million for “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” toa paltry $4 million for “The Assassi-nation of Jesse James by the CowardRobert Ford,” low even by specialtystandards. Leonardo DiCaprio’s stockshowed signs of waning with 2006’s“Blood Diamond” ($57 million), afact that might have partly promptedthe major studios to pass on his buzzproject “Low Dweller” severalmonths ago.
When star power does still exist, itseems to be narrowing. At the heightof stars’ drawing potential in the1990s, you could drop such then-A-listers as Kevin Costner or ArnoldSchwarzenegger into pretty muchany movie and expect to gross $100million stateside. (How else toexplain “Robin Hood: Prince ofThieves” or “Kindergarten Cop”?)
Today’s top-paid stars, on the otherhand, need to be paired much morecarefully with material to score a run-away hit.
Matt Damon has been a key part oftwo of the most lucrative contempo-rary franchises (“Ocean’s” and“Bourne”), but his box office mojohas stalled in other turns (“The GoodShepherd”: $51 million domestic).Adam Sandler fails to open anymovie that isn’t one of his trademarkcomedies.
And George Clooney might becapable of helping drive ensemblefranchises like “Ocean’s,” but put himin a period screwball sports comedyand you have the dud that is“Leatherheads.”
Perhaps the star who best epito-mizes the new era is that ultimateA-lister, Tom Hanks. From 1998 to2002, Hanks had a whopping sixmovies, from war pictures to roman-tic comedies, that earned between$115 million and $215 milliondomestically. Outside of a built-inbrand like “The Da Vinci Code,” hehasn’t had a movie in that rangesince.
Many of these shifts stem from theway most studio movies are nowmade.
While a number of studios —Warner Bros., and to some extent,Paramount — still seek to build pro-jects around stars, others, such as Foxand Disney, are relying much moreon concepts. When newly mintedMGM executive Mary Parentaddressed a group of agents recently,she said the studio was looking fortitle-driven projects, not star-drivenones.
Meanwhile, stars are seeing theirstock devalued by the rise of WallStreet slate financing because sourcematerial often is regarded as a morereliable predictor of box office than astar, which explains the glut ofmoney now spent on everythingfrom “He-Man” to “American Girl.”
And even as international boxoffice becomes more crucial, it’shaving a peculiar effect on star powerbecause it’s becoming harder toargue that a particular A-lister willappeal so broadly.
Why spend so much on talentwhen it’s possible that audiences inPoland or Korea won’t know the dif-ference anyway?
The model of the future could beCarrey’s deal for “Yes Man,” in whichhe accepted no upfront money andwill earn a higher percentage of thefilm’s revenue. In the future, starsmight not be paid simply for beingstars; they’ll be paid for deliveringresults.
Cox: Spanish stations flex musclesContinued from Page 1
up, with adult-urban WVAZ102.7-FM joining ’GCI-FM inthe top five, and with bothbeing monsters in the 25-54age demographic prized bymany top advertisers.
More than that, Spanish-language stations have cometo the fore in Chicago, notjust longtime WOJO 105.1-FM and more recent WLEY107.9-FM (remember whenthat frequency was a jokeynostalgic disco station?), butupstart WPPN 106 .7-FM,
which used its format ofMexican classics to climbinto the top five, for the firsttime claiming the crown asthe top Spanish-languagestation in town. In fact, ’PPNand La Ley were the two topstations in the highly covetedmen 25-54 demo in middays.
The question is whetherthose ratings will hold whenArbitron finally imposes itspeople-meter methodology,long delayed but sti l lexpected to go online laterthis year. Minority stations inother markets have feared
their audiences might beunder-represented whenArbitron abandons diariesfor the automated devices.We’ll have to see, but rightnow minority stations havenever been stronger inChicago.
Yet WGN-AM and ’GCI-FMremain strongest of all. Themore things change …
• Ted Cox ([email protected]) writes Tuesday andThursday in L&E, Friday inSports and Friday in Timeout!
Will Smith’s “I Am Legend” did well atthe box office, but he’s one of the fewA-list stars who packed theaters.
JOE LEWNARD / j lewnard@da i lyhera ld .comThe Daley Center’s Picasso is one of the props for Mark, Tim and Walter Smithe in a new com-mercial for Walter E. Smithe Furniture.
Different perspective of celebritiesaffecting today’s moviegoers
Smithes: Commercials popular