This anti-union movie bombed at the box office.
Earlier this week, we educated you about the right-wing billionaire who producedAi??Won’t Back Down, a film that premiered on Friday that demonizes teachers unions. Since then, critics trashed the movie, over the objections of astroturf groups that are promoting it.
Now it appears that movie audiences agree that the film isn’t worth watching. Box Office Mojo reports that the film debuted in eigth place, which it says is one of the worst debuts ever for a wide-release movie:
In eight place,Ai??Won’t Back DownAi??debuted to an atrocious $921,000 from 2,515 locations. It will earn around $3 million this weekend, which will be one of the worst debuts ever for a movie inAi??2,500 or more theaters.
The anti-teachers union documentary Waiting For Superman — also produced by the same right-wing billionaire — also performed poorly at the box office. It appears that Americans are starting to tire of simplistic propaganda designed to demonize teachers but propose no constructive solutions for the American education system.
they must have had a really low advertising budget, this is the first i have heard of this film.
Actually, “Waiting for ‘Superman'” performed extremely well, making $6.4 million at the box office despite its widest release being 330 theaters. It’s the 24th highest-grossing documentary of all time.
This is too bad. I was under the impression that this film was not as much about union bashing as it was about the positive prospects of parents and teachers collaborating rather than fighting one another.
I know that unions have been too powerful in the past and there is a need for some balance, but moving to a non union state recently has really opened my eyes to the value unions play as well.
I guess I will have to go see the film and evaluate for myself.
I posted this before, in a different form, with a lot of typos due largely to rushing things when ticked offce, but it remains, I can’t believe, in an election year, as a life-long progressive Democrat, that I fell for this. My wife and I decided to go to a matinee for the first time in a long time and ended up going to We Won’t Back Down. There is certainly some good acting and film production work behind the film, but this does not change the fact that the film is right-wing propaganda, straight and simple. And what’s worse is that it is not truthful.
In some ways, I think the actors, writers, and directors involved in it ought to be ashamed of themselves—unless, of course, they are themselves right-wing and anti-union. I’m certainly ashamed of myself for having dropped around twenty dollars into the coffers of Walden Media, the right-wing corporation, owned by right-wing superstar P. Anschutz, that brought us the film. This is the last time this will ever happen with me, I’ve pledged. I am a big advocate of free speech. Right wingers can make their films. I can make a consumer choice, voting with my dollars. I have decided to give three times as much in contributions this year to the DNC as a result. Atonement.
But even with freedom of speech and the perfect right of any conservative billionaire to start any film production company he wants and make any propaganda piece he so chooses, and whatever the motives that explain why viewers, actors, and film workers have given their support to the film, the irony could not be more stunning. The American film industry is one of the most successful industries in the world, and it is at least ninety percent unionized. It is one of the most unionized industries in the United States. The outstanding quality we have come expect from the film industry is due to the high standards that have been developed and sustained by unionized workers.
Then comes teachers’ unions. This film wants us to believe that unionized teachers are responsible for the decline of education in the United States, and that union officials want to sustain schools of inferior quality. This is just not so. Yes, there are some truly crappy union teachers, just as there are some truly crappy actors and directors, but the few do not set the model for the vast majority, who are able to dedicate themselves to their work, work that is guided by a vision, and their vision of their work, above all else, calls for excellence.
You want to talk about causes? Well, how about fanatic Republican politicians refusing to fund public education? These are left out of the picture (pun intended) given by Anschutz’s Walden Media’s We Won’t Back Down. It’s interesting. In the world of the movie, public schools have been suddenly detached from economic and political processes and put in the hands of a small group of really disgusting opportunists who have high-ranking union jobs and control a bunch of mindless governmental bureaucrats who put their children in private schools. This is just not so. If you don’t believe me, just ask your local principle or go to a PTA meeting. It’s just not so.
It is deeply disturbing that Gyllenhaal and Davis sold their talents in this way; it is something like scabbing, but in another way, it is just plain professional suicide. I don’t think it is suicide just because of the political message. It is something else, something closer to the most fundamental aspects of film audience psychology. We love our actors. We learn to hear their voices as our own. We identify with them, dress like them, picture ourselves being them. So you end up with someone like me—a fat, balding old guy who views himself as a failure–being able to get up each day and face the hardships of life because he motived, in part, by the fantasy of himself as Matt Daimon, who has everyone knows, speaks the essential truth and never fails to march into the depths of hell and make things right.
The films are fictions. They might be “based on real life,” but they are still fictions. But when those images start flickering on the big screen, the fiction goes away, disbelief is suspended, and we trust the actors to tell the truth. They might be lying to us in the general scheme of things, as artists, but as Hemingway said, art is a matter of lying so that you can get at a deeper truth, and the deeper truth is what we expect. And when you get halfway through the film, as I did, and realize that you are in the middle of a really ugly lie that is leading to anything but truth, you feel burned in a big way.
There were three of us in the theater at that point, by the way, and two were on their cell phones, contrary to the warnings given at the beginning. And I did not mind a bit. Let Freedom (from lying) Ring.
While I was sitting there listening, in part, to the cell phone noises, I wanted to tell Maggie something. You know, stop the film, respectfully request a few minutes of Maggie’s time, and talk with her. I wanted to say to her that if she wants to play the frustrated and frightened parent of a dyslexic kid in a decaying, underfunded urban school district, she should talk with the parents of such kids and learn about how, over the past forty years, beginning with the reforms of Anschutz’s good buddy Reagan, conservative politicians created things like block grants and cut programs that addressed the needs of such kids. And she might also talk with out-of-work factory workers, who lost their jobs when their factories were moved overseas after conservatives in Congress removed tariffs that protected American industrial products. A huge number of the fifty thousand factories that were ripped up an taken to China were in Philadelphia, and when those factories were gone, so was the tax base that supported the schools. She needs to talk with lots and lots of parents. She needs to get the story from the trenches. What has happened and what can happen involves a lot more than just blaming unions.
And she should know that if parents want to reorganize a school as poorly managed as was the fictional Adams Elementary, somewhere in fictional Philadelphia, they can do so with the endorsement of many, many unionized teachers, organizers, and, yes, bureaucrats. For example, a real school might be reorganized as a “teacher-parent owned” entity, and as a teacher-parent owned business, such a business could find any number of unions willing to give their full support to helping with the effort.
I’m not in a union, by the way. But I have been a teacher, and what I have seen happen in schools that are not unionized has often made me angry and depressed.
In this movie, a union teacher is depicted forcing a little girl to sit in her chair and wet her pants. The little girl is then confined to a janitor’s closet. When I was in third grade, I was in a non-unionized school. The teacher was a woman who one day forced a little girl to sit at her desk until she wet her pants. She was not then forced into a janitor’s closet, but it was still bad. I remember this vividly. The urine was running all around my feet, and I was also forbidden to get up. In the end, the teacher got in trouble, and this and that was done to formally correct the situation. Ironically, the victimized little girl was the daughter of another teacher. In the movie, we are shown a “union teacher of the year” who supposedly did what my non-union teacher did. I just don’t believe it. My guess is that the teacher I had in third grade was an angry, isolated, frightened, an overworked woman who did not have help when she needed it and allowed things to get out of hand—you know, the sort of thing that unions work hard not to have happen.