Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (2 page)

I felt plenty of tension on the studio lot from a string of recent flops
¹
and bad word on the street.
Paramount’s not buying anything! They’re underbidding! Not bidding! Who’s getting fired? What the hell are they making?
How to Lose a
what?
Everyone was smoking and speculating on the quad as always, but the joy of putting
How To Lose a Guy
together inured me to any drama behind the scenes.

But as our team made
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,
the fate of Paramount and Hollywood was beginning to undergo—I don’t think it would be exaggerating to say—cataclysmic change. The studio that I had joined after six comfy, productive years at Fox was about to experience an enormous realignment due to both interior and exterior convulsions. Some studios had an easier time during the transition, because they were more prepared for the transformed landscape that lay ahead. Disney, for example, had revenue from its theme parks and cable and broadcast networks like ESPN and ABC, so it was variegated as a conglomerate and not dependent on its movie income. Fox was reaping profits from its wide international presence. As a global media company, it was aware early of the power of the global market and made the most of its international penetration in movies and in TV via its satellite network Star TV and its broadcast networks. Warner Bros. had its moneymaker, HBO, but had problems at the time as a result of its takeover by AOL (the squid eating the whale). The more a studio depended on the domestic movie business for its income, the harder the turn would be.

I think none had a hairpinier turn to make than Paramount, as they lost many and hustled many more overboard. Yet the New Abnormal that followed the convulsions has no better representative than the Paramount that emerged: Pictures are now chosen for reasons, we will see, based not on gut as in Sherry’s day—or David
O. Selznick’s, for that matter—but on whether they are properties that can be marketed into international franchises. With
Iron Man, Mission: Impossible, Transformers,
and
Star Trek
all among its key international franchises, Paramount emerged from this long fray as a key player in the New Abnormal. And it all began to happen soon after Mr. Dolgen, the board at Viacom, and the rest of us were swept up in gale forces that weren’t unlike the tornado that took Dorothy into Munchkinland. For us in the movie business, we landed not in little Munchkinland, for sure, but in giant Franchise-land. The New Abnormal.

In the past ten years or so, the studios have tried to patent a formula for surefire hits, and their product is filling your multiplex. They are what the industry calls “tentpoles”: sequels, prequels, reboots. Origin stories with a brand-new cast like
The Amazing Spider-Man,
with Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, and
X-Men: First Class,
in which James McAvoy plays the young Charles Xavier from the original
X-Men;
or brand-name multimillion-dollar megashots built on familiar properties like comic books (
The Avengers,
the
Dark Knight
trilogy,
Spider-Man, Thor, Captain America, Green Lantern
), or best-selling novels (à la
The Hunger Games, Harry Potter
or
Twilight,
and now
Fifty Shades of Grey
); remakes (
Planet of the Apes, The Thing
); fairy tales (
Alice in Wonderland
and its spawn,
Snow White and the Huntsman
and the failed twin
Mirror Mirror
); and video games (
Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft
). Handheld games born as iPhone apps like
Angry Birds
are now becoming properties-cum-movies, as are board games based on books (like
Jumanji
), or just plain games (like Hasbro’s Battleship); and, of course, toys (Transformers, G.I. Joe). (Hasbro is a movie company as well as a toy company now.) These properties are meant to work with or without a star and have a built-in audience in the United States and overseas. They are developed inside the studios’ development factories, designed by committee for surefire success.

A tentpole movie was once merely the stanchion that held the yearly studio circus calendar together: Big Christmas Movie. Big Easter Holiday Break Movie. Big Summer Movie. Each studio built what it called its “slate”—its compilation of yearly pictures—around these seasons because the greatest attendance was garnered during these distribution periods: Kids were out of school; families went to movies together; teens went in gaggles to malls. Business drove business drove business. If one theater was full, you would go to another, then return the next day for the movie you’d planned to see. Blockbusters and family movies were designed to position each studio to win each of these seasonal races like a studio Olympiad, and, like the Missile Defense System under Reagan, they had no cost-containment quotient. Win at all costs.

Around ten years ago, there was only one, at most two, tentpole from each studio each distribution season. But then things started to change. Inexorably, in the transition to the business model of the New Abnormal, the studios have grown their slates into a diet of pure tentpoles, with almost nothing in between. We producers fight for the precious diminishing space you could justifiably call the “in-between.”

So the question is, with all these tentpoles, franchises, reboots and sequels, is there still room for movies in the movie business?

As we noticed in Oscar Season 2013, it is still the Old Abnormal for some: That is, movie stars like Ben Affleck and George Clooney, who made
Argo
—an original—and super-AAA directors like Steven Spielberg (with
Lincoln
) and Ang Lee (with
Life of Pi
) still get to make real movies, and thank heaven for it. Though the money is still tighter than before, the studios don’t like to say no to these people. When they can’t get them to make tentpoles, which they always try to get them to do—remember George Clooney in
Batman
? Or Ang Lee directing
The Hulk,
and of course Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy—the studios will work with the stars’ agendas and help finance their best projects.
After Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar for
The Hurt Locker
(which made practically no money even after it won the Oscar), Sony financed her
Zero Dark Thirty,
and it is a commercial and critical success.

So James Cameron can make anything he wants; ditto Christopher Nolan and now Ben Affleck and George Clooney. The same is true of many others, whose mere participation in a movie makes it a marketable tentpole. Some studios will beg, borrow, or whittle down a budget to make these movies—and the audience is the better for it, so starved are they for fresh material. We need more movie stars who can produce and direct, and directors whose movies become Oscar-winning blockbusters. Can we live on this fancified diet alone? And will the trend thrive, or is it a temporary reaction to a starved domestic audience? And what of the rest of us, living off of Mt. Olympus?

This is one of the most significant differences between two eras—the Old Abnormal, roughly the 1980s through the early start of the decade, and the New Abnormal, from roughly 2008 on—though some forces began to congeal earlier. I have come to see these two eras as almost two different movie businesses. The differences are various, from what movies are produced to how we make them and for whom. The proliferation of giant franchises nearly year-round is both a sign of the end of the Old Abnormal and the imprimatur of the New Abnormal. The dearth of movies that used to fill the time between them is part of the collateral damage from the transition.

These huge tentpoles, $200-million-fueled missiles, are lined up on the studio distribution pads with their “must-have” famous names and launched like international thermonuclear devices toward foreign capitals where 3D is candy. International has come to be 70 percent of our total revenues in the New Abnormal. When I began in the Old Abnormal it was 20 percent.

The great great tentpole squall of May of 2011 was a dramatic—if
breathless for those of us with XX chromosomes—example of an in-between movie (one not designed for a summer release date) being tossed into a rough sea of big action movies: Judd Apatow’s female comedy
Bridesmaids.
It was a movie with no stars to speak of, no preawareness, starring women, and likely to do bupkis abroad. What was the strategy? It was clearly counterprogramming for women. But was it an attempt to throw chick flicks overboard in the week of
Thor
to prove that women’s movies couldn’t swim with the sharks? It was the kind of summer that featured what I think of as “Man” movies—movies with titles that either contain the word “man” or at least feasibly could:
X-Men: First Class, Thor
and
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides;
all we were missing was Iron Man and Batman. How were four unknown (outside of television) women going to compete in this company?

This was the reality
Bridesmaids,
the unknown chick flick, faced on its May 13 release date. The weekend before, a sister romantic comedy, Kate Hudson’s
Something Borrowed,
was flattened by the second week of Universal’s
Fast Five,
the spectacularly successful action franchise about drag racers. It was still racking it up overseas and at home by spicing up its cast with the utterly brilliant addition of the popular action, and former wrestling, star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and it showed no signs of slowing.
Thor,
opening directly against
Bridesmaids,
was expected to be a smash. It was tracking through the roof, as we say, expected to open at $60 million. Hiring “Shakespearean” Kenneth Branagh gave this Marvel silliness all the gravitas it needed to track well with what Hollywood marketing likes to call “older men”: men over twenty-four. (Not just women get ageist angst around here.) It was going to bring in every male everywhere and their dates. By opening weekend,
Bridesmaids
was expected to open with $15 million at the box office at best.

If it performed as the tracking numbers suggested—between $15 million and $17 million—chicks were done for. Movies in the
summer were expected to make $30 to $60 million on opening weekend to compete.
Bridesmaids,
made for a fraction of the cost of a normal summer movie, wouldn’t have to reach this blockbuster bar. But it couldn’t just fizzle out. How did this potential extinction come to pass? It’s like we all went to sleep one day in Hollywood and woke up living in Tentpole City.

There is obviously more at stake here than bloody (well, not bloody, unfortunately for sales) chick flicks. The question really was, can the original movie with a good story get made for its own sake in today’s Hollywood, as it could when I started? Could I get
The Fisher King
made with Terry Gilliam (the phenomenally talented and eccentric director of movies like
Brazil, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
and
12 Monkeys
) and the best script I ever had? (Ha! No way!)

When the late, great producer Laura Ziskin was asked by the
Hollywood Reporter
which of her great movies before
Spider-Man
she couldn’t get made now—including the Kevin Costner political thriller
No Way Out
and Julia Roberts’s seminal breakout hit,
Pretty Woman,
she answered, “None of them.”

(EXCEPT AS TINY INDIES WE WILL CALL “TADPOLES”)

Field of Dreams

Pitch:
It’s about a guy who builds a baseball field in Iowa to bring back his dead dad.
Pass.

Forrest Gump

Pitch:
A totally stupid, nice guy travels all over the world, selling shrimp and running into famous people as he looks for his screwed-up girlfriend—who is kinda over him, if she was ever into him.
Outta here.

The Fisher King

Pitch:
A homeless man finds redemption for a radio shock jock.
Can I get back to you on that? At Sundance?

Driving Miss Daisy

Pitch:
A happy and wise chauffeur in the South has an endearing relationship with his elderly charge.
Exactly how “elderly” are we talking?

The Big Chill

Pitch:
A reunion of sixties best friends celebrating their dead bestie.
So, wait, is it actually
set
in the sixties?

The Graduate

Pitch:
A returning college graduate has an affair with the wife of his father’s law partner and runs away with her daughter.
Are you French?
Or,
Um, okay, we’re not making Swedish movies here, unless they’re by Stieg Larsson
.

Moonstruck

Pitch:
An unlucky widow falls in love with her fiancé’s brother. Romantic magic ensues.
You lost me at “widow” and nearly killed me at “romantic magic.”

I could go on, but it just gets increasingly obvious and depressing that the more we love the movie, the less likely it would get made now, at least in the studio system.

Everything was off-the-charts Abnormal, and we were still trying to play a game that wasn’t playable anymore. It was a weird, changing, Darwinian time. Conditions were changing as fast as I could figure them out, and then would change again. Movies are now an endangered species in the very place that makes them. My son Oly, who now works as a literary manager at 3 Arts, echoed the
sentiment: “Making a movie because it’s good is so 2003, Mom.” It struck me that
risk taking
itself was at stake. Hollywood, a town built by mavericks and rebels and mobsters, risk takers all, had now become utterly risk-averse. The very fact that a broad comedy like
Bridesmaids
—best friends coping with one’s wedding, accompanied by actual pooping in a sink—had fallen into the category of risk taking was a sign of extreme distress.