..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

The Mean Season … As If Mean Girls strutted their stuff and it was considerable as the hip, teen comedy led the weekend with an estimated $24.6 million. However, an additional quartet of national debutants took poor seconds in a generally tepid marketplace bracing for the onslaught of summer releases that begins next weekend with Van Helsing. It was back to school for Paramount with Mean Girls … and not a moment to soon. The studio's last hit was School of Rock and the current success echoed back to Clueless. It's also worth noting that it's had a long string of films targeted to teenage girls thanks to its synergistic hook up with MTV, but this caustic valentine is tied to Saturday Night Live. And, not surprisingly, exit polls indicated its audience was 70% female and 50% teen. That demo found its movie. The new teen fave also took a large bite out of last weekened's frosh entry 13 Going on 30 but the second frame of the psychological thriller Man on Fire held well, ranking second with an estimated $15 million. Overall business should tally in at slightly more than $100 million for a modest 1% bump from seven days later but was a significant 36% down from the 2003 slate. One year ago, the summer got an early bang with the $85.6 million bow of X2: X-Men United and Disney's counter programming of Lizzie Maguire debuting second with $17.3 million. A trio of the new releases clustered behind the top three with the romantic comedy Laws of Attraction and the chiller Godsend in a tight race for fourth spot. Godsend was the clear winner Friday but slipped behind the Pierce Brosnan-Julianne Moore outing on Saturday and the Omen for it darkens today. Laws of Attraction looks to be roughly $100,000 ahead for the three days with $6.8 million and both films registered disappointing theater averages just shy of $3,000. DreamWork's ironically titled Envy engendered little of that emotion as the social satire scraped out about $6 million in the crowded marketplace. Still, it was generally a title challenged frame with Godsend generating less than angelic grosses and Laws of Attraction defying commercial magnetism. Also on the casualty list was the biopic Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius on the 1920s golf legend. It grossed about $1.1 million in the round played without a handicap to theater averages of less than $1,000 and was the sort of grand slam one doesn't want in the movie arena. The weekend was also quite active with specialized and regional fare. The latest from Bollywood, Eros Entertainment's Main Hoon Ha, was tuneful with close to $600,000 from 85 engagements and Alliance's latest Quebec offering Monica la Mitraille had a fair start of $260,000 from 88 screens. The kid's baseball entry Mickey, produced and written by John Grisham, entered six markets and managed to hit a single with a gross of about $77,000 from 42 venues. In specialized outings, The Saddest Music in the World hit the right note in its debut on four screens (three in Canada) with an estimated $52,000. Comparatively speaking, it marks a commercial breakthrough for filmmaker Guy Madden. Zeitgeist's fest fave Since Otar Left deposited a respectable $11,000 from two Manhattan locations and in a season marked by "he has risen," the reissue of Monty Python's The Life of Brian resurrected an impressive $27,500 from four playdates. - by Leonard Klady