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You can lead a reporter to executives, but you can't make him think.

In his opus on the end of the year in Hollywood, "In a Distressed Year, Hollywood Smiles," Brooks Barnes truly embarrasses the New York Times.

The piece is a mess. Besides some of the cheesy writing ("By year's end, it was enough to make Daniel Day-Lewis break into song."), there are all kinds of problems.

1. There are alleged facts that have not been checked, other than to quote Box Office Mojo... never considering where BO Mojo gets its figures on the number of ticket sales. Answer: They make them up... just like everyone else who offers up these bogus untracked numbers. The only clue - and not a completely accurate one - comes from the MPAA each March, which offers a "per ticket" price based on major studio releases only. The standard guessing technique is to add a quarter and avg the number vs gross sales. Of course, given Barnes urge to hype 3D, this makes no sense at all and neither Mojo nor any other box office tracker knows what the actual numbers from 3D sales are, which twists the per-ticket cost further.

But Barnes gives 3 paragraphs at the top of the story to parsing made-up numbers from Mojo vs made-up numbers from 2002... which is relevant to no one who actually wants to know anything about the financial year in the movie business.

2. The obsession with 3D is out of control. If 25% of every single ticket sold from every one of the year's fourteen 3D releases (to date, including Avatar's opening) was attributed to the 3D premium - which is overstating it by at least 25% - the total that 3D contributed to ticket sales was $312m... or 3% of the gross for the year. It's not insignificant... even if it's really 1.5%... but it represents a fraction of the increase in box office this year. It is certainly not, "by far the biggest contributor" to this year's uptick at the box office.

And even his gross number for 3D films, that doesn't account for the films being just as playable without 3D, $1.3 billion, is a projection - though he doesn't know it - which by the way, is $52 million more than the actual figure as of today's estimates.

3. This utter crap about... well, I will quote... "(T)he uptick in moviegoing has studios for the first time in years focusing more on delivering must-see films than churning out poorly executed movies and letting DVD sales pick up the slack."

Bullshit.

Seriously. Embarrassing bull... from a major newspaper... the paper of record.

What planet does he live on, this reporter? The studios weren't trying for years? And now they are? Does this idiot know that 90% of movies released this year were in production or about to start production in 2008? So they started trying to make "must-see films" in 2008, anticipating the meltdown in the fall of 2008? Does he put together the fact that two of the six operational majors are under new leadership hired in the last five months? So the new execs are trying and the old execs were just sitting around waiting for the DVD sales?

There is no question that there was an enormous reliance on DVD sales to assure profitability. But Barnes doesn't seem to have the slightest idea how that played out at studios, which were not and are not producers of low-budget junk that is produced just because it can make revenue.

Does he understand how insulting this is to the people who work at the studios? And how unfair? Success and failure are not, in this business, a matter of trying. It is a matter of a whole range of variables that often, but not always, include bad decision making.

Does he get that the box office has been up every single year for the last four years and that 2005 was an anomaly after 2004 was the biggest year in movie history, particularly featuring The Passion of The Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 as one-in-a-generation anomalies?

4. The DVD Downturn - Again... completely half-assed. First, he quotes a number for the overall downturn in DVD sales in the first half of 2009. But that number means NOTHING. The reason that the media and the analysts (oy) didn't notice the DVD downturn for its first 3 years was because the non-feature film DVD business masked the downturn in sales of feature films. The overall number was up... but movies were down for years before anyone noticed.

Now, I understand that no one was going to tell the New York Times what their DVD revenue numbers were for 2009 vs 2008 or 2007. And I understand that this is not a piece about DVD revenues… but that is another huge mistake, along with more throwing around of domestic box office figures only when worldwide numbers are readily available.

The movie business lives and dies on domestic box office, international box office, DVD sell-thru, DVD rentals, and other ancillaries. Every dollar from every one of these areas matters. With the exception of some small comedies, no studio movies are greenlit in this era without anticipation of significant revenue from non-domestic theatrical. DVD revenue is still often greater in net return than that worldwide theatrical because so much more is netted on each unit sold.

But most egregiously, Barnes doesn't seem to understand how the revenues work and how each factors in. He throws out the $1 billion figure as the loss in the first six months of the year, but his failure to create context goes well beyond just plopping out a gross number for an alleged drop in DVD sales, which includes TV, but even fails to say what number this $1 billion is being sliced from.

He doesn't even mention Blu-ray, which is central to the studios' efforts to recapture a higher price point on DVD sell-thru, even more important than 3D.

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