I should add that that’s an estimate, and who knows how many young females may or may not escape the nation’s football obsession for what my old cinephile compatriot Keith Uhlich terms an “enjoyably trashy” film. Keith, writing for Time Out New York, was one of 36 Rotten Tomatoes critics to pay to get in to see the film over the weekend, and one of only two to have anything nice to say about it, backhandedly or otherwise.

Scrolling down a bit further on the Box Office Mojo weekend chart nobody, outside of some lower budget Oscar contenders, has much to be happy about. The James Cameron-produced 3D outing, “Sanctum,” came in pretty much as expected with an estimated and entirely lackluster $9.2 million for hit-deprived Universal. Now, if I was playing the expectations game the studio wanted me to play, I’d say it was a surprise winner because it beat the $6-8 million figure the suits were apparently low-balling with last week. In any case, none of that has any impact whatsoever on the film’s $30 million budget and the not small marketing costs. The critically dismissed watery cave thriller from Australia may do a lot better overseas.

The #3 film was “No Strings Attached” which somebody likes, even if I didn’t. It held pretty decently for Paramount in its third week. Its estimate is $8.4 million, and I suppose a decent Superbowl Sunday is very possible for this very female-skewing entry.

As for the fourth and fifth place entries, Weinstein’s “The King’s Speech” is hanging in there, royally, with $8.3 million estimate; Sony’s “The Green Hornet” is still well short of making back its $120 budget with $6.1 million estimated for this week and a roughly $87 million total. I don’t usually talk that much about marketing costs, but it’s important to remember that they’re significantly larger than actual filmmaking costs and, for a movie like “Hornet,” undoubtedly enormous — though there’s always merchandising profits to consider.

Last week’s #1 God v. Satan thriller, Warner Brothers’ “The Rite,” sank down to cinematic purgatory this week with a larger-than-average 62.4% second weekend drop, earning an estimated $5.5 million and change in fifth place. The former #3 entry, “The Mechanic,” about a taciturn hit-man and his hot-headed protegee, endured a very typical 53% drop for the second week of an action film. It earned a not-so-killer $5.37 million estimate for the revived CBS Films, which is still waiting for its first real hit of this incarnation.

As predicted back on Thursday night, the PG-13 exercise in exorcist hi-jinks, “The Rite,” lead the weekend and gave Warner Brothers #1 bragging rights. It was not the prettiest victory, however. With roughly $13.8 million in grosses, it was either at the low end or even slightly below the numbers that were trumpeted before, with some estimates going up to $20 million. Also,of course, in actual business terms being #1 is pretty meaningless except for the next weekend’s advertising.

The #2 movie was last week’s topper from Paramount, “No Strings Attached.” It earned $13.4 million, falling a significantly better than average 31.8% in its second week, indicating good worth of mouth. (Which, since I kind of hated the movie, kind of annoys me. Why are you people saying good things about it?) The attempt at raunchy but adult romantic comedy will be breaking $40 million total by tomorrow, which is pretty decent considering that veteran director Ivan Reitman kept the budget to a modest $25 million.

“The Mechanic,” which I’ve been covering here and at our sister site, performed not-horribly for the revived CBS Films with $11.4 million and change. It’s very reasonable budget for an action film, $40 million, means that it’s another modest success for star Jason Statham. I nevertheless agree with Bullz-Eye reviewer David Medsker that Statham deserves better. The original 1971 version of the film also deserved better, though even I have a hard time arguing that an action-inflected meditation on the nature of modern day evil like the original would do any better. Still, I wish they had cut the budget by half and kept it closer to the blunt spirit of that film or, failing that, increased it by one-third and just made a silly action-movie that was fun. Instead, it’s kind of a neither fish-nor-fowl situation.

“The King’s Speech,” which expanded significantly in terms of theater count this weekend, failed to generate the surprise some said might be in the offing. It did pretty much exactly the kind of solid and stately business one would expect from a figurehead and came in at a very solid and respectable $11 million or so. It was in 5th place just barely behind “The Green Hornet” which, at about $78 million so far, still has a ways to go to match its $120 million budget.

Unlike other notables, writers are still allowed to be a little mysterious. Indeed, other than the fact that he wrote several widely acclaimed movies, an episode of the legendary television series “Route 66,” some plays, and directed a few movies, very little information is available online about Lewis John Carlino.

Carlino is probably best known as the director and writer of 1979’s “The Great Santini,” a beloved sleeper about a military family based on a novel by Pat Conroy and featuring one of Robert Duvall’s greatest and most bombastic performances. “Santini” is, however, one of the more conventional films in the Carlino cannon.

In 1966, he adapted a novel by David Ely into John Frankenheimer’s famously eccentric paranoid science-fiction thriller starring Rock Hudson, “Seconds.” Less well remembered are his non-“Santini” directorial efforts. “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea,” a bizarre and intense 1976 drama based on a book by Yukio Mishima, and “Class,” a 1983 comedy in which Jacqueline Bisset has an affair with brat-packer Andrew McCarthy, the best friend of her son (Rob Lowe). In between, Carlino also wrote the acclaimed fantasy drama, “Resurrection” starring Ellen Burstyn. After 1983, Carlino stopped directing movies entirely and his credited writing work declined dramatically.

Now a soft-spoken seventy-something intellectual, Carlino met with a group of writers to discuss a remake of one of his best known films, “The Mechanic.” The 1971 original starred Charles Bronson as a troubled but ultra-stoic hit-man who tries to end his isolation by taking on a protegee (Jan-Michael Vincent), even though his last hit was on the young man’s father (Keenan Wynn). Despite its action film trappings — including a nicely accomplished quarter-hour dialogue-free opening set-piece — it’s an often chilling look at men who have embraced death and cruelty. Bronson’s character does have a “code,” but it’s not a moral one. His aim is to embody an amoral version of existentialism that might be familiar to readers of Albert Camus’s “The Stranger.”

The new version, which stars Jason Statham and Ben Foster as the cool-blooded killer and his more hot-headed mentee, keeps enough of the original story and dialogue that Carlino is a credited screenwriter on the film. This time, around, however, Statham’s character is less vicious and the movie hits a number of more familiar action-flick beats. Viewers looking for traces of Camus will have to go elsewhere.

So, one of us asked, did Carlino like the new version? Since this was a press junket organized to publicize the new film, of course, he said, “yes,” but there was more.

“So much of that movie is the spectacle of it. A lot of times in films that are made now, that have a lot of special effects and stuff, the characters seem to get lost. So, the film becomes a film about effects. Here, what they were able to accomplish is [that] they kept the human relationship very central to the story while all this visual circus is going on around you. I think [screenwriter] Richard [Wenk] and the director, Simon [West], were able to meld those two elements and keep it really personal, at the same time providing this big visual entertainment for the audience. It’s kind of unique.”

Getting a bit deeper into Carlino’s career, why did he direct only three movies?

Carlino hesitated a long time before answering. “Something happened in my personal life, in my family, a tragedy that made me not able to pursue my career as a director any more, but I still kept writing. It was just not in the cards any more.”

In a rare show of good taste by some of the journalists there, no one followed up with a question about the nature of the tragedy, although we all assumed it would be something that could be easily researched. We were wrong. I have as much morbid curiosity as anyone, and as far as I can tell, Carlino’s private tragedy, whatever it was, remains entirely private.

Still, one of us wondered if Carlino had any regrets in terms of preferring the solitary life of the writer to the more gregarious and public work of a director.

“I liked directing. Of course on [“The Great Santini”], it was a great privilege because of the people around me that were brought into that film. Wonderful, wonderful actors.” The cast also included a very young Michael O’Keefe and a thirty something Blythe Danner.

The Italian woman who’d been asking all but one or two of the questions so far, next asked the name of Carlino’s favorite writer. The answer was Herman Hesse, author of such fantastical philosophical novels as “Steppenwolf.”

I asked if Carlino had ever thought about doing a film version of one of Hesse’s books.

“Yes, I did. Early on I wrote a script. I was in a partnership with another gentleman to do ‘Siddhartha,'” Carlino said, referencing the Hesse novel about a character whose life in some ways mirrors that of the Buddha. “Conrad Rooks did it, but not my script. It’s a perennial great story, even more important in our times. It really should be done as a contemporary film.”

Since, unlike most of Carlino’s other films, the original “The Mechanic” was a wholly original work, just where did it come from?

“Oh, God. You know, everybody talks about gangsters, crime and stuff like that. But, as a writer, I’m really curious [about] what goes on in somebody’s mind. You can talk about the act in the abstract, but when you deal with it in actuality, how does a person make that adjustment in their mind and go home at night and play with his kids and be with his wife? That curiosity, as a writer, led me to do a lot of research on killers and their methods, that sort of thing. I thought it would be really interesting to do a character that, because of the work he does, is locked in such isolation that he’s desperate for a relationship.”

Someone else asked if Carlino thought that theme was maintained in the new version.

There was some hesitation before Carlino spoke again. “I’m not sure that they did it that well. Maybe not,” Carlino said, accurately enough.

In general, how did Carlino feel about the way his script had been rewritten?

“I thought that Richard did some really interesting things with it. As I said, the central issue of this is that, if somebody is so desperate for a relationship, which was the original, that he has to train another assassin. The irony is the better you train him the more capable he is of killing you and he has one agenda and you have another agenda — I thought they really maintained this really well. The difference of this material was that it was much more complex in terms of the Ben Foster character. In my original, it was just a question of one-upmanship. In this one, he has all this anger and no place to put it until he learns that Bishop [Jason Statham] was responsible for the death of his father. It’s not going to go in that direction….I thought it was really a much more complex approach to the character he had created…”

What does Carlino think of remakes generally?

“I’m mostly disappointed in them. Maybe that’s a bit unfair because, usually if I’m really concerned about a picture that I really like, then, because of my age, I have a certain set of cultural values that I attach to the original that I don’t find in the remakes. But that doesn’t mean they’re not as effective in this culture.”

Speaking of culture, with all the technological changes that have impacted the movies, what does Carlino think of the current state of the cinematic art?

“When I see a movie, whether I see it at the theater or I see it at home theater, my experience is like everybody’s experience. I just put the disc on, or I go to the movies. I sit there in the dark and I say ‘take me.’ That’s my requirement, ‘take me.’ That’s the reason why [movies] exist. I see two things happening in the film industry. There’s a danger of the technology outstripping the human factor so that you get a lot of cartoon stuff. For me, in the culture that I grew up with it’s all about relationships and behavior. The technology, at times, can really enhance that and make a wonderful experience for you.”

“On the other hand I’m so pleased and optimistic that these things can exist side-by-side. When I see a movie like ‘The King’s Speech‘ — wow. Everybody tells you can’t do a drama, they will never be successful. Every time I pontificate about how I feel about something, somebody comes along and breaks the rule.”

Asked about what movies “took” him this year, Carlino named a few others: “The Fighter,” “Black Swan,” Charles Ferguson’s documentary “Inside Job” and the underrated English historical-political comedy, “Made in Dagenham.” From there, we moved on to what Carlino is writing these days.

“I’m working with small independent company out of Seattle on an adaptation of a book called ‘Losing Nelson’ written by Barry Unsworth. I just finished a script for that and we’re hopefully that together. As you know, it’s hard in today’s market to get an independent drama [made].”

That was followed by some more chatter about the contrast between the unprecedented availability of films via Netflix and other services and the fact that most filmgoers are, at best, slow to catch up with older films. For example, the original version of “The Mechanic” can be viewed via Netflix streaming, which is how I caught up with it. (I have since learned that at least one of the DVD versions available may be a poorly re-edited chop-job, so caveat emptor.)

We then found out that, alas, that we weren’t going to get any funny or interesting anecdotes about original “Mechanic” Charles Bronson. Bronson was, as Roger Ebert learned, one strange, strange dude. Carlino, however, only met him once and they apparently just talked about the script.

I took the opportunity to ask about what struck me as the remarkable aspect of Carlino’s “The Mechanic.” The first film was, as I’ve mentioned, extremely blunt about what it means to be a hit-man and makes no attempt to make these two professional murderers sympathetic. Carlino discussed how the newer film, which is considerably glossier, goes out of its way to “humanize” its leads.

“There is some attempt to make them sympathetic…It’s a hard line to follow. It’s a real tightrope. How do you do that, with what’s going on,” Carlino said, alluding to a scene where, trying to extract information from a criminal, Jason Statham’s character puts the crook’s daughter’s hand into a garbage disposal and says he’ll turn it on if he doesn’t get his information. We are led to believe it is no idle threat.

“The character does anything to accomplish what he needs to accomplish. That’s just it. What’s really interesting about this movie is that [screenwriter Richard Wenk] makes this statement which I thought was really good. He says ‘Watch out for vengeance, it’ll get you killed.’ That was a kind of throw-away line, but it’s a really important line because that’s how the movie ends up. In the original, the first time you see him at home, do you remember what he’s doing?” Carlino asked.

Neither I or another writer there who was a fan of the original could answer precisely.

“He’s got a big art book in front of him. He’s looking at the triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch. He’s turning the pages and you see all these grotesque figures in hell and the torments that they’re suffering…That’s a nice opening statement for that character…”

That, of course has pretty much nothing to do with two of the new version’s real-life father and son producers, Irwin and David Winkler. For the remake of the 1971 actioner, the pair have teamed up with another parent-and-offspring team, Irwin Winkler’s long-time producing partner, Bill Chartoff and his son, Robert. (For the record, there are a total of ten producers and five executive producers credited on the film.) Both individually and with Bill Chartoff, the elder Winkler has been involved with a remarkable number of good movies and a few genuine classics, starting with Sydney Pollack’s pitch-black Oscar winner, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and also including two of Martin Scorsese‘s signature works, “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas.” Winkler and Chartoff also, of course, produced “The Mechanic,” the first time around when it was as much of a chilling look at sociopathy as it was an action flick.

Like any great producer, Irwin Winkler has had his share of interesting financial failures.  There was the ultra-culty early John Boorman film, “Leo the Last” and Martin Scorsese’s big budget 1977 disappointment “New York, New York.” Fortunately, there was also the occasional modest but high quality success like Bertrand Tavernier’s great 1986 love letter to jazz and jazz fandom, “‘Round Midnight.” He and Bill Chartoff were also key players in one of the most enduring franchises in film history, the one that started with a low-budget boxing drama called “Rocky.” Since 1991’s “Guilty by Suspicion,” Winkler has also occasionally directed. His most recent films include the musical Cole Porter biopic, “De-Lovely,” and the Iraq war drama “Home of the Brave,” which received a speedy burial.

For his part, son David Winkler has worked on a number of television movies as well as with his father on 2006’s “Rocky Balboa.” He also directed the 1998 drama, “Finding Graceland” starring Harvey Keitel.

I was personally anxious to talk to Winklers during a recent L.A. press junket for “The Mechanic” because of an oddball “only in L.A.” family anecdote. I was nevertheless beaten to the punch by an Italian reporter with a rather distinctive interviewing style who tended to dominate the discussion.

“Father and son,” she said, “and in the movie there is a conflict between father and son. How did you live?”

“We didn’t have any conflict,” Irwin Winkler responded.

“Any conflict, whatsoever?”

“Nobody’s made that comparison.” David Winkler couldn’t take a question like this seriously. “I do what I’m told,” he said

“Me, too,” said the elder Winkler.

Then I was able to play the parental card with a question, though on the maternal side. At some point in the 1980s, my mother was dabbling in commercial real estate and found herself escorting Winkler to some potential locations for one of the “Rocky” films. By this time, the films were an institution and Sylvester Stallone a genuine international superstar. However, then as now, my mother had minimal interest in, and less knowledge of, any movie made after 1965 or so. When she escorted the producer to a potential location, Winkler supposedly said words to the effect of “Sylvester might not like this place,” she responded, “Who’s Sylvester?”

“And what did I say?” asked Irwin Winkler.

“You laughed,” I replied “You apparently found it adorable that she just wasn’t that interested in the film business.”

Winkler nodded and clearly had nothing to add. It was time to segue quickly as David Winkler had been making jokes about telling his mother of his dad’s meeting with my mother. Did the venerable producer have any memories of that time — not of my mom, of course — but simply relating to how the film business has changed in thirty years?

“Basically, it’s still hard to make a good movie. It’s still hard to make a small movie. It’s still hard to make a big movie. It’s still hard to make a movie with a big star. Those things have always been difficult. I don’t think it’s changed very much. It’s just tough.”

Speaking of film-making being a hard slog, someone mentioned the fact that this new remake of “The Mechanic” has been in motion since the early 1990s. That’s a long time to keep working on a project.

“Yeah. Probably the second biggest item in the budget is unproduced screenplays. We had a lot of writers writing them,” Irwin Winkler said.

Were any of those discarded drafts by writers we would know?

“I think you’d know ’em all. They were all really high priced. I don’t think it’s fair to them to mention the fact that they took a lot of money and didn’t deliver anything.” After time for a laugh, the elder Winkler added, “They weren’t too bad, really. It’s enough to say that the Writer’s Guild didn’t give them any credit on the movie, but we did a lot of screenplays. We spent a lot of money. What happened was, a lot of the writers would write more interesting and bigger action sequences. It started to work for us when we went back to [Lewis John Carlino’s] original script which really dealt with the relationship between the Ben Foster character and the Jason Statham character. ”

So, what specifically worked about the screenplay they went with?

David Winkler answered first. “It was something you don’t see nowadays. You don’t see movies that are more serious in tone, that the action is not ‘Spider-Man.’ As much as I like those movies, I think people like to feel that there is something around the corner that is realistic and not necessarily big and high-tech. Here’s a man whose code of honor is to kill people in way that is a little more subtle than what the C.I.A. would do. It was very faithful to the original in terms of structure and tone. It’s got a satisfying ending, but it’s still somewhat dark.”

Our Italian friend then asked, in a rather long-winded way, which of Irwin Winkler’s many movies “lived in his heart” — i.e., was his favorite.

Winkler responded that it would have to be one of the movies he personally directed because of the greater commitment directors make to their movies, and his favorite was “De-Lovely.” “I loved the music. I loved Kevin Kline.”

Since “De-Lovely,” while not a giant hit, got a decent amount of attention, I wondered if there was something Winkler had done that he was less well known but which he wished more people knew.

“Yeah, my last movie, ‘Home of the Brave.’ It was the first film that really came out about the war in Iraq and about the soldiers coming home. I loved doing it because I did this big action sequence in the beginning. I’d never done anything like that either as a producer or a director. Then, I thought I really got into the character of these servicemen and women and the problems they had after [returning from] the war. I was very, very disappointed that we didn’t get any audience. We didn’t get reviewed…It really got almost no distribution. We had made a deal with MGM and they were supposed to spend a great deal of money on it. We opened against all these big movies over Christmas, which was probably crazy, in two theaters. We didn’t do any business and that was the end of the movie.”

Winkler continued. “I co-wrote it — it was my original idea and I got [story] credit for it from the Writer’s Guild. I worked very closely with the writer [Mark Friedman] who did a terrific job. We went off to Morocco to shoot it and then up to Spokane to shoot the American part. I was away from my family for a considerable amount of time. Whenever we showed it to servicemen, or ex-servicemen, they were very moved by it.”

Does that kind of lack of recognition really hurt, someone else asked, or after so many years in the movie business was Irwin Winkler able to just let it go?

“I’m still talking about it,” he deadpanned. “I haven’t directed another movie since,” he continued to further prodding. The poor reception of the film clearly bothers him more than a little, but he had to admit that the Iraq war has turned out to be a difficult subject to make a successful movie about. “‘Green Zone‘ was a terrific movie. Nobody went to see it. It was part of that trend nobody wanted to see the war in Iraq.”

One of us wondered about Irwin Winkler’s long association with MGM, as their star has very seriously faded in recent years.

“When I got there their star was fading! From 1966 on their star was fading!” Winkler said to some laughter. “I don’t know. I made movies for Paramount. I made them for Warner Brothers. I made them for Fox. I made them for everybody. But, you’re right, most of them were [with MGM], but it was U.A. [United Artists]. We made ‘New York, New York.’ We made ‘The Mechanic.’ We made ‘Busting’ [a just about forgotten action film starring Elliot Gould and Robert Blake]. We made ‘Raging Bull.’…Then MGM basically merged with UA, so it ends up with the MGM label, but a lot of them were U.A., which was a great place to work.”

Then came a question about the film’s production company, Millennium Films, which the questioner felt had a somewhat unusual approach to film-making these days.

David Winkler answered. “Thank God there’s somebody like Avi Lerner. CBS Films bought our movie and decided to distribute it after seeing it. Avi is one of the few remaining gamblers who will sell a movie based on its foreign sales, put his own money on the line to get the movie made, and then hope it sells. There used to be a lot of Avis ten years ago. Now it’s a difficult world to get a movie made.”

What are the Winklers up to now?

“We have a film in post-production right now called ‘Trespass,'” Irwin Winkler answered. “Joel Schumacher directed it for us with Nicole Kidman and Nicolas Cage.”

Looking at the press material, I got the somewhat incorrect impression that Irwin Winkler had been involved with a number of very tough “existential” films involving killers and not only the 1971 “The Mechanic.” In particular I was thinking of John Boorman’s somewhat arty, ultra tough first film adaptation of Donald Westlake’s The Hunter, “Point Blank” starring Lee Marvin.

David Winkler joked that maybe it was because he and partner Bill Chartoff were “closet hit-men.”

The elder Winkler responded, “Maybe I’m a closeted existentialist. Those are the two. We made more personal dramas. I kind of like ‘The Gambler’ a lot better.”

I couldn’t exactly disagree as the 1974 film written by James Toback, directed by Karel Reisz and starring James Caan as a gambling-addicted literature professor was a terrific piece of work that I suddenly had the desire to revisit the moment Winkler brought it up. I also mentioned another classic, Sydney Pollack’s film version of Horace McCoy’s bleak depiction of dance marathons during the Great Depression, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” It was the 1970s and that’s probably the best explanation of the tone of these films which, today, no major studio film producer would dare touch.

After that, what seemed like idle questions about what the two Winklers thought of “The Social Network” and “The King’s Speech” (they both thought both were very good), led to an observation from Irwin Winkler.

“In all the press we’ve been doing, we’ve been talking about how difficult it is to make films today and all that. Then, when you look at the films that we think are going to be nominated for an Academy Award…they’re all kind of small, intimate, interesting films. The biggest one is “True Grit” which is budgeted at under $40 million. You don’t have “Lawrence of Arabia” — unfortunately, I’d like to see “Lawrence of Arabia” — but you have these small dramas like “Black Swan” or “The Social Network,” [and] “The Fighter.” All these films seem to be not only getting attention, but also getting business,” Winkler said, alluding to “The Hurt Locker,” which, despite being a Best Picture winner, was far from a box office dynamo. (The exception to the trend of smaller movies being major league Oscar contenders this year is obviously “Inception.”)

Was Winkler surprised by the unexpectedly large success of “True Grit”?

“I’m stunned by it. I’m not only stunned by it, we pulled out a screenplay we had from 1993 that was sensational that we literally haven’t done anything with in 18 years. We just put it in a drawer because we knew we couldn’t get anybody to finance a western in the last 15 years…We took it out of the drawer this week because we said, ‘Okay, now maybe you can get a western off the ground.”

Of course, the matter of which films succeed and fail at the box office has always been a mystery.

“I’ll tell you how the mystery is,” Irwin Winkler said. “We were in the mixing room doing the final edit on ‘New York, New York.’ My editor was Marcia Lucas, who at the time was George Lucas’s wife. ‘My husband can’t finish this film that he’s doing.’ She called it a ‘cockamamie film.’ He can’t finish because he’s running out of time at Warner Brothers in the mixing studio. So, [she asked if] he could come when we finish mixing ‘New York, New York’ at like 7:00 at night. Could George bring in his film and finish it up at night? So, I said, ‘Sure.’ I couldn’t say ‘no.’ That was ‘Star Wars.’ She called it a ‘cockamamie film.’ Nobody knew what it was gonna be. What William Goldman said is true, nobody really knows anything about moves, about Hollywood.”

“By the way, ‘New York, New York,’ we made it at almost the same time as ‘Rocky,’ United Artists, which financed both films, said ‘We’re going to make a fortune on ‘New York, New York.’ [It had] Liza Minnelli, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese directing it, a great song…First of all, nobody wanted to play the song. It took two years for Frank Sinatra to make a recording of ‘New York, New York’ for it to be a hit. ‘Rocky’ became the hit and ‘New York, New York,” nobody cared about.”

Changing topics slightly, did David Winkler want to follow in his father’s footsteps a bit and return to directing movies as well as producing them?

“I have a four year-old boy and a two year-old girl. The idea of being so engrossed in something from six in the morning until ten at night…I found something more fun than directing.”

So, is producing movies easy, compared to directing?

“I don’t know if it’s easier,” Irwin Winkler said. “It’s different.”

“It’s easier on your family,” David Winkler added.

After that, the Winklers and us journalists meandered through a few odd subjects, including praise for co-star Ben Foster and the popularity of animated family films, which they enjoy but are happy to leave to the experts at Pixar and elsewhere. Then, we returned to the topic of supposedly moribund genres like musicals and westerns. Someone’s gag about remaking “New York, New York,” a problematic musical drama which has failed to accumulate even much of a cult following over the years despite being directed by Martin Scorsese, led to a nice summation of the situation by Winkler as he commented on the success of “True Grit.”

“It also tells us you never know what genre is gonna work. The only genre that works is the ‘good’ genre. In other words, you make a good movie and people are going to see it…When we made ‘Rocky,’ everybody said ‘nobody wants to see boxing movies.’ ‘Women won’t go to see a boxing movie.’ ‘She’s not the prettiest in the world; he’s not the handsomest in the world — it’s not Robert Redford up there.’ Yet, people went to see it. I think the best advice we could have for ourselves is ‘make something good and, hopefully, they’ll come.'”

The other major new release, “The Mechanic” from CBS Films, is expected to do less well despite actually getting significantly better reviews than “The Rite.” I’ve been covering it here and had fun at its junket, but I have to say I find the R-rated action-heavy hitman thriller a pale reflection of the 1971 original. It wasn’t precisely a great film, exactly, but its honesty about the evil of its protagonists makes for oddly hypnotic viewing. The new version, however, has got two strong leads in Jason Statham and Ben Foster and that, plus some heavy-duty action, will apparently be enough to earn it as much as $10 million, say the gurus.  It really looks like this is one weekend where blockbusters really aren’t dominating at the box office.