Somebody told me there were more than 70 movies that opened in the United States last month. I didn't take their word for it -- although it sounded about right -- so I went to www. boxofficemojo.com and rooted through their databases for my own count. So now I can say with confidence there were at least 59 movies that opened theatrically in the United States in December. There probably were a few more, so for the sake of easy math let's say 60 movies opened in December.
   Here in Little Rock, we got 15 of those December releases, and a couple of more new films that had opened elsewhere in the country earlier in the year. Northwest Arkansas got fewer films than Little Rock -- I know Dreamgirls didn't open there (it will probably arrive Jan. 12 when the film expands to 1,800 theaters) -- probably about a dozen of the possible films.
   If we look at it that way, 25 percent of the movies that opened in the United States in December made it to Little Rock; 20 percent of those movies opened in Northwest Arkansas.
   Sounds pretty pitiful, doesn't it? Makes us seem like a real cultural backwater.
   But you need to understand that if Arkansas is a cultural backwater, then so is roughly 95 percent of the country. Because a lot of those films that opened in the United States in December didn't open in more than a handful of theaters.
   For instance, Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima (the companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers) is one of the best-reviewed films of the year. In their analysis of critics' Top 10 lists, the Movie City News Web site (www. moviecitynews.com) has it listed as the fifth-highest rated film of 2006. But it only played on five screens in 2006. Fox Searchlight's remarkable Miss Potter was on two screens. The Weinstein Company's Breaking and Entering only showed up on one screen.
   Notes on a Scandal got a bit wider release: 22 screens. Pan's Labyrinth: 17.
   Savvy moviegoers understand that a lot of these limited runs are simply to qualify the film for Academy Awards consideration. You can't win an Oscar in February 2007 unless your film opened in a U.S. theater sometime in 2006. Film critics get to see most of the December releases in or before December so they can write about them in their annual "best of" pieces and vote for them in critics' polls, but most moviegoers don't have a chance to see them until mid-January or early February and sometimes even later.
   Why is this? Well, obviously we don't have enough screens in Arkansas for every film that's released during December. And even if we did have the capacity, the studios have made a science out of knowing exactly how many prints they need to make of a given movie in order to satisfy demand and maximize their profits. Take a film like The Last King of Scotland. While it was released on Sept. 27, it still hasn't made it to Arkansas. (It should open in Little Rock on Jan. 19. Unless things change.) Why? Because Fox Searchlight doesn't have enough prints of the movie to book it all across the country -- the widest release it has had so far is 113 theaters.
   Now we can question that release strategy -- I'm assuming that The Last King of Scotland will show up in a lot more theaters after Forest Whitaker gets his Best Actor nomination (he's assumed to be a lock for the nomination, and the oddson favorite to win the award) -- but we can be sure that people have thought about it and decided this is the best way to wring the most money out of the project. No doubt the DVD will sell well -- and it probably won't be that long after the Oscars that it's released.
   I don't see it as my job to comment much on the financial fortunes of specific movies. I think the emphasis on awards and box office has a deleterious effect on the practice of criticism, but acknowledge that the subject is interesting in and of itself. But I have neither the expertise nor the access to report on these business aspects -- my job is to talk about the movies and what they mean to the way we live.
   And anyone who doesn't understand that Arkansas enjoys a better-than-average movie culture isn't paying attention. Almost every movie of note had a theatrical run in the state last year, and all those movies we keep hearing about will get here eventually. We've got several film festivals and the potential -- if the Legislature cooperates -- for a home-grown film industry here. I understand the frustrations of movie buffs who hear about movies like The Good German and Little Children and Volver months before they have an opportunity to see them. But what people need to realize is that we're not unique in having to wait weeks or months to see these films -- if you live in New York or Los Angeles you're in luck, but if you live in Memphis or Phoenix or St. Louis, you'll wait. If you're in Little Rock or Springdale, you might wait a little longer.
   I believe -- because people who know have told me -- that we have just about the right number of screens for our population. If someone opens a new theater with five screens, five other screens are going to go dead. We've got all we can handle now, and consumer demand requires most of those screens to be devoted to movies like Rocky Balboa and The Rise of Taj. Anyone who has ever been to a Sunday afternoon show at Market Street Cinema knows there's no real economic reason for films like Sherrybaby to play here. While a lot of people said they were interested in seeing The Color of the Cross, according to Market Street owner Matt Smith, almost no one actually showed up and bought a ticket when it was playing there.
   That's fair -- movies are entrepreneurial ventures and no one should feel obliged to "support" a film. We go to movies we expect we'll enjoy or that will otherwise provide us with some benefit, not to get our cultural, political or social tickets punched. But readers often ask me why a certain film they've heard about hasn't yet opened locally. And all I can tell them is be patient, they're coming. Almost everything gets here eventually.
   Which is a lot better than it was 10 years ago. E-mail :
   

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

This story was published Friday, January 05, 2007