How do you measure the summer? Baseball games, picnics, trips to the beach? Around my house, it’s the Monday box office scores – rounded to the nearest million dollars, of course. The first three big movies of Summer 2007 – Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, and Shrek the Third – all opened with predictably big weekend hauls. But these three sure things didn’t overwhelm the general movie-going public quite the way most observers thought they would. All three have been panned by critics and aren’t generating the buzz many expected. Their performance opened the door for something a little less spectacular – the new Judd Apatow movie, Knocked Up, which has won rave reviews and could gain even bigger audience as the long hot summer continues – at least until the new Harry Potter movie opens. To talk about this summer’s movies – as well as the just-completed Cannes Film Festival, which she attended – I invited The Hollywood Reporter's Tatiana Siegel to join us today. For the past four years, Siegel has worked at The Hollywood Reporter covering the economics of the entertainment industry. She tracks three major studios: Sony, Paramount, DreamWorks, and MGM. Siegel also covers the agency beat, following the behind-the-scenes developments at such talent powerhouses as CAA, William Morris, and Endeavor. She has interviewed hundreds of studio executives, producers and directors and enjoys unique access to agents, managers and publicists. In this entertaining, informative, audio interview, Siegel reviews the financial performance of the summer's first blockbusters; offers her opinion on Pirates' second week box office plummet; points out the shrinking number of women directors in Hollywood; describes the scene at this year's Cannes Film Festival; explains why Frank Miller's adaption of Will Eisner's The Spirit moved up on the schedule and Sin City 2 stepped back; and finally, why Ari Gold and Vincent Chase still matter. Tatiana Siegel • •