REEL DEALS 2001 was a record year at the box office, with domestic ticket sales reaching $8.41 billion, surpassing the $7.7 billion earned in 2000. So said Motion Picture Association of America chief Jack Valenti yesterday in his annual report at ShoWest, the theater owners' convention in Las Vegas. Despite a slumping economy and the aftermath of 9/11, the number of tickets sold rose 5 percent to 1.49 billion, the highest total since 1959. Other good news for the industry: The average cost of producing and marketing a studio movie dropped four percent to $82.1 million. However, all that savings was on the shooting side, where average costs were trimmed 13 percent, from $54.8 million to $47.7 million. The price of marketing films rose, however, from $27.3 million to $31 million. Overall, the news was good for the exhibitors, who've suffered a wave of bankruptcies and theater closings in recent years; the survivors managed to earn record grosses even with a smaller number of screens in operation.
TUBE TALK Barbara Walters slammed her network's secretive attempt to topple Ted Koppel and lure David Letterman away from CBS to replace him. During yesterday's episode of ''The View,'' she said, ''What troubles me in particular is the way Ted was informed and the way I was told last year when ABC decided to move '20/20' from Friday to Wednesday... to make room for an entertainment show [''Once and Again''].'' Like Koppel, she said she could appreciate the network's economic argument but not its cavalier treatment of its news stars. ''Not to be told until after the fact or never asked if we have any thoughts as to what alternatives there might be, to be treated as dispensable and irrelevant -- is thoughtless and hurtful.''
In fact, about the only major ABC News personality who hasn't commented about l'affaire Koppel is Diane Sawyer, whose ''Good Morning America'' stands to benefit most from a Letterman lead-in. After all, if Dave's ABC show were the last thing you watched at night, your TV would already be tuned to ''GMA'' when you turn it on in the morning.
ABC scrambled to react to yesterday's USA Today story that claimed the network was also trying to push Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts out of their Sunday morning ''This Week'' jobs and replace them with younger correspondents George Stephanopoulos and Claire Shipman. ''A report today concerning the future of ABC News' 'This Week' is false,'' the network said in a statement. ''We have enormous trust, respect and admiration for Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. 'This Week' remains an important part of the ABC News schedule with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts as hosts.''
Nonetheless, by the end of the day, Roberts had announced her resignation from the show, effective in November, when her contract expires. Roberts said she had decided privately 18 months ago that she would end her 14-year tenure on the program in order to spend more time with her family (she has two grandchildren in Los Angeles and one in London), but she felt the USA Today story forced her to go public. ''Because of reports of things were happening, I felt like I was in a position where people were calling me and I wasn't going to lie,'' she told Reuters. She said she plans to remain at ABC, and the network did not say when or if it would name a replacement host.
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