Word: horn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After illusionist Roy Horn was mauled by one of his own performing tigers on a Las Vegas stage last October, grieving fans held vigils outside the hospital where the critically injured showman was admitted, and placed mementos at the foot of a Siegfried & Roy statue on the city's Strip. Sixteen time zones away, in a drab industrial building at the far end of a Hong Kong subway line, the shock was felt just as much. Imagi, a fledgling animation company, was in the running to make Father of the Pride, a prime-time comedy cartoon about the private lives...
Hearing a horn in the distance, the men abandon their graham-cracker snacks and scurry off to man the cameras. A hush falls over the fans as a trash train, hauling a wall of Dumpsters to New York City, rumbles by. Almeida smiles and afterward offers his best defense yet: "I could find better things to do. It's just that, uh, I'm doing this...
Warner Bros. president and COO Alan Horn insists that none of the chaos or overruns worried him. "We can plan a budget in advance," says Horn, "but it's a little tricky, you know? We're sacking Troy. I had complete faith in Wolfgang. I wouldn't have him do Miss Congeniality, but with this, I was not concerned...
...Despite Horn's sangfroid, there is no guarantee that Troy will be a hit. Summer blockbusters have become the riskiest investment in the film business. In his book Hollywood Economics, economist Arthur De Vany analyzed 2,015 movies to determine what succeeds and what fails. The answer, best summarized by screenwriter William Goldman, is that "nobody knows anything." What De Vany did learn is that moviegoers behave according to the principles of Bose-Einstein condensation--a fancy way of saying they are more likely to go to a movie if they receive an "authentic signal" that other people have enjoyed...
...Horn insists Troy is a safe bet when home-video and foreign-box-office revenues are factored in, but even he admits there's risk. So why make such a sprawling hydra of a movie and throw it into Hollywood's most competitive season? In part because no one knows anything. Troy could be a monster hit. But for everyone from Petersen and Horn to the lowliest production assistant, the audacity of the enterprise is, in large part, the point. "As an actor [on a movie like this], you get to feel like you're an explorer," says Bana...