Joe Roth: At Least My Crap Made Money
Revolution Studios head Joe Roth should know better than to bore people by describing his dreams, especially if the person he's boring is a columnist from the LAT and running a tape recorder:
"I dreamed last night that I fired [Revolution partner] Tom Sherak," he says with a wry grin, sipping a Diet Coke between takes. Roth said that, in the dream, he was sitting with Chris Columbus, who's directing a film of the stage musical "Rent" for Revolution. "Tom came in, singing and dancing, all excited, saying, 'I got our trailer on the front of "Star Wars!" ' And I go, 'Which trailer, the one for Chris' movie or the one for mine?' And Tom says, 'Neither! I got the trailer for "Die Hard 3!" '
"I started yelling at him, 'What about my movie, you son of a bitch!' And Tom said, 'Hey, I gotta do what I gotta do.' So I fired him."
This one certainly doesn't require much Freudian analysis, but once you open the floodgates, everyone will feel compelled to share their own dreams. For example, we dreamed that later on in the column, Roth wrapped the supposed humility of realizing that he's churned out crap in a self-aggrandizing disclaimer about his financial success, which sounded something like, "My unwillingness to be exposed to failure has prevented me from being viewed as a serious director. I guess I've been hiding behind making money for my company." Then the dream really got weird, as the Revolution logo rose in the sky, transformed into a giant set of buttocks, then showered the earth with turds labeled "Christmas with the Kranks" and "XXX: State oft the Union." What do you suppose that means?