Barsoom or Bust

The MetaFilter thread on the prospects for Disney's Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation John Carter featured two highlights:

1. A link to Geoff Ryman's short story, The Film-makers of Mars; and,
2. An epic comment by It's Raining Florence Henderson alluding to the early negative buzz on the film in a novel way:

We was comin' back from the planet Barsoom… just delivered a bomb. The John Carter bomb. Two hundred and fifty million dollars went into the drink. Disney went down in 12 days. Didn't see the first suit for about a half an hour. Marketing hack. Fresh MBA. You know how you know that when you're in the water, Chief? You tell by looking from the hair product to the PDA. What we didn't know, was our movie had been so underrated, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us as a flop for a month before release. Very first light, Chief, suits come cruisin', so we formed ourselves into tight focus groups. You know, it was kinda like old squares in the battle like you see in the calendar named "The Battle of Heaven's Gate" and the idea was: suit comes to the nearest man, that man he starts pointin' and hollerin' and deflectin' and sometimes the suit will go away… but sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that suit he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about a suit… he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be living… until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ledgers turn red, and despite all the pointin' and hollerin' , they all come in and they… rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred million. I don't know how many suits, maybe a thousand. I know how many dollars, they averaged six hundred thousand an hour. On Thursday morning, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Key grip. I thought he was retired. I reached over to congratulate him. He sobbed, totally under water just like a kinda dead fish. Upended. Well, he'd been vested just that afternoon. Noon, the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a venture capitalist saw us. He swung in low and he saw us… he was a young gun, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper. Anyway, he saw us and he come in low and three hours later a big fat Happy Meal toy contract comes down and tries to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened… waitin' for the residuals. I'll never work CGI again. So, Two hundred and fifty million dollars went into production; 316 dollars come out and the suits took the rest. Anyway, we delivered a bomb.