Steven Soderbergh kindly asks the folks at Page Six to kiss his ass AND his Oscar

It is always so cute to see Page Six get really nasty with one of its subjects for absolutely no reason, especially when hard-and-fast (and misleading) numbers are involved. Take today's item about Steven Soderbergh, in which Richard Johnson and Co. deconstruct the Oscar-winning filmmaker's box-office track record in the wake of his recent comments that the film industry is "out of whack."

First, some background: The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson wrote last Friday about Soderbergh's six-film pact with HDNet Films and 2929 Entertainment, which has already yielded the minor (and micro-budget) masterpiece Bubble. As film followers have been reminded repeatedly since last spring, Soderbergh's HDNet pictures will "open day-and-date in theaters, on [cable channel] HDNet Movies, and on DVD":

"This is my response to certain trends in the entertainment industry," says Soderbergh, who believes that the good old days of watching 35mm movies in theaters, where they play for weeks at a time "are gone. I wish it weren't so. Everything changes and evolves and we've got to get with it, embrace it and find a way to make it work. The movies are not the way they used to be when I grew up. It's 30 years later!"

That makes sense enough. But something about Soderbergh's perspective rankled the Page Six gang a little too violently, provoking a little dollar-fueled blastback this morning in an item headlined "Not a Bottom-Line Guy":

Hollywood insiders point out that Soderbergh doesn't really have an eye for the bottom line and shouldn't be talking about the business end of things. For example, this year's The Jacket (which Soderbergh directed and produced) was made for $25 million, but grossed only $6 million. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (produced) was made for $29 million, but grossed $16 million in the U.S.; Welcome to Collinwood (produced) was made for $12 million and grossed a mere $350,000; Solaris (directed) was made for $47 million, and grossed $15 million. Even his "hits" don't do much — Ocean's Twelve was made for $110 million and grossed only $125 million. Far From Heaven (produced) cost $13.5 million and grossed $15 million.

Now, I know that calculators are not among the dumptrucks' worth of swag that desperate publicists drop off at Richard Johnson's door all day. And nobody can argue that The Jacket (a John Maybury film, incidentally), Collinwood and Confessions all underachived quite dramatically, even though Soderbergh was one of a combined 34 producers who worked on the films.

That being said, a little extra research would have determined that Steven Soderbergh is anything but a box-office slouch. The two "hits" Page Six cites today actually fared a little better than Johnson lets on: If we are to believe IMDB (and why not, since the alternative is the New York Post), Ocean's Twelve actually pulled in $233 million in worldwide revenues, while Far From Heaven more than doubled its money in the international market. A few Soderbergh films Page Six omitted—Ocean's Eleven, Traffic and Erin Brockovich—did roughly $760 million in global B.O. And those numbers count neither the films' video, cable and network TV deals nor their five Oscars, which I have heard studios are also fond of.

So I guess all of this is basically one geek's long-winded way of wondering who put the chip on Page Six's shoulder. In other words, maybe the question becomes sort of a meta-blind item: "Which 'Hollywood insider' called in a favor to Page Six in an attempt to undermine acclaimed filmmaker Steven Soderbergh on the eve of his terrific new film's release? Rumor has it that the director's lean, ambitious vertical distribution model threatens the old-fashioned model maintained by dinosaurs like the Post's sister company 20th Century Fox. But nobody can quite figure out why the Page Six crew chose to knock Soderbergh where he is least vulnerable: His gilded-leaf balance sheet. After all, the guy technically still has yet to atone for Kafka."

So, New York? Who was it? Just asking.