Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (34 page)

Woman plans and God laughs. But things look good. Somehow next year feels like the one I’ve been planning for (though I say this every year). Frankly, Crazy Pollyanna is the only tenable posture you can maintain in this business, otherwise you just give up or give in. I always say attrition kills more producers, directors, writers and agents than combat.

When Oscar Season 2012 came along, it was a 180-degree turn to the studios from the indie-driven year before. There was a fancy offering from almost every studio that fit the Venn diagram of potential commercial plus Academy Award quality. Sony had Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden,
Zero Dark Thirty;
Warner Bros. had Ben Affleck’s
Argo
and Christopher Nolan’s
The Dark Knight Rises;
Universal had the adaptation of the evergreen theatrical musical
Les Misérables;
MGM had Sam Mendes’s smash James Bond offering,
Skyfall;
Paramount had Robert Zemeckis’s redemptive
Flight;
Fox had Ang Lee’s adaptation of
Life of Pi;
and Disney/DreamWorks had Spielberg’s
Lincoln.
That’s literally one for each. Amazing.

That’s a lot of quick reaction to a market that is indicating its desire for more original and adult fare. I think the studios are responding to the unexpectedly successful runs of the hit Academy Award winners of recent years (
The King’s Speech, The Social Network, Moneyball, The Help
). What they are doing is very smart: They are exploiting their best assets—director relationships and access to good material—in service of both the audience and the bottom line. The good news about attention-deficit-disorder executives with bouncing knees is that they don’t sit still very long
in the face of compelling counterevidence. Will they act on the right principles this year? The studios had a lousy summer in 2012, but a great spring and fall, and the biggest Christmas ever. Is this rebound the reaction to the great mistakes made after the Great Contraction? What will that mean for 2013’s summer tentpoles?

Ah, Hamlet, that is the question. We cannot judge the business by what happens during Oscar Season. It’s like judging your own work behavior only by the times your boss is in the room.

THE FUTURE OF THE BIZ

Is God laughing at the movie business? With all our bad karma and bad-faith deals, comparing what we do to brain surgery and war, is it possible we have so disgusted God that He decided to test us like Job? To make all of the money grabbers suddenly find they were in a business that couldn’t make money? Or in which, as my grandmother used to say, “you couldn’t make a living, you could only get rich”? Is there still a business in the business, as Oly would say, or a future in the business that we have traditionally, and now horribly, drawn our children into?

I wanted to talk with Michael Lynton, chairman of Sony Pictures. I knew he would have fascinating insights into where we were headed. A politically and culturally active member of the L.A. community, Lynton, like Peter Chernin, came out of publishing in New York, and his intellectual reach is wide and rich. I sat down with him, a very modest man with a bare yet elegant office in the Irving Thalberg Building, where he and his partner, Amy Pascal, work.

“Are the glory days gone?” I asked him. “The days when we had a cushion that allowed us to make movies in the middle, that weren’t either tentpoles or tadpoles?”

He was quick to reply. “There was so much money swilling around in the system in 2006 and 2007, when you could afford to
make enormous mistakes because of the safety net of the DVD business. That gave the false illusion that you could get by.”

The good old days as false illusion,
I thought sadly.

“I’m a little reminded,” he went on, “in a funny sort of way, of the Netherlands.” Lynton was born in Holland. “In the seventies, when we had offshore oil, we had eighteen percent unemployment. But we didn’t have to fix what was structurally wrong with the economy, because we had so much money coming in from something that cost so little to produce, we could afford all these social services.”

I said, “Like Norway.”

“Norway is a good case in point,” he continued. “You didn’t really have to have underneath it all an economy that was actually functioning. In a funny sort of way, I don’t think this is an unhealthy thing. I think it’s going to get everybody’s head straight as to what things probably
should
cost. You’re more experienced than I am at making movies, at how much it
should
cost to produce a movie.”

Less than they are making them for, that’s for sure, I thought.

“I’m Jewish,” he said. “But I come from a Calvinist Dutch background, and my basic feeling about things is that people perform better when there’s less. I’m saying something that’s not new, but we see it in our everyday life. The one thing human beings do not do well with is abundance.”

“They go cuckoo,” I said.

“It’s self-destructive,” he added. “We eat too much when there’s too much food in front of us, we drink too much when there’s too much liquor in front of us, we spend too much when there’s too much money in front of us. Abundance is simply something that we are not genetically geared for.” He was bringing this around to a philosophy for his studio. “But there’s incredible ingenuity and innovation available to people when all of a sudden you say to them, ‘Here’s a number. What can you do?’ ”

I said, “They do better.”

I’d lived it with Terry Gilliam on
The Fisher King,
who, while working under the constraints of a limited budget for the first time, did some of the finest work of his career. Unlimited budgets make for a lack of precise decision-making. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that.

“So that’s how you and Amy green-light the tough ones like
Moneyball
?” Amy worked on
Moneyball
for seven years before it was green-lit. Because baseball is inherently American and the business was becoming increasingly internationally oriented, she had to keep improving the script and modeling the budget downward while holding on to its most important element, its star, Brad Pitt. She had to cut the budget without compromising the quality of the picture or she could lose him, and thus the chance of making the film, a character piece that had to attract more than just baseball fans.

“One of the things that’s brilliant about Amy is that she has a remarkable ability to want to change who she is and how she does business, and the minute she spotted the change in the world order, she was responsive to that.”

“It’s not easy to have come into the business when Amy and I did,” I said, “and then have to totally change the way you work. The paradigm shifted in the middle of her reign.”

“That is what gives Amy longevity,” he said.

“So is it going to get better, this contraction?” I asked. “Like the bouncing universe, will it contract and then expand again?” I felt like I was asking Stephen Hawking about the fate of it all.

Michael answered, “Will we look back and say, ‘Oh my goodness, 2006 to 2007 was a glory moment for the movie industry, when there was more money in the industry than there ever was before or after’?”

“Or will ever be?”

“Yes, probably,” he answered, not sadly. “Those years may look
a little bit in retrospect like the movie industry probably looked in the thirties, when there was no competition, there was no television and you could churn out . . . God knows how many movies they were churning out in 1930; you could probably tell me thirty-nine. There was always a new double feature in the theaters, and everybody was going to the movies every week. I have no doubt that that time will not be seen again.”

I felt glum, yet Michael looked fine and went right on. “I think there’s going to be plenty of money in the system from all these new avenues we haven’t yet discovered to keep making movies. If we say we’re currently all making around twenty, then it’s probably going to be closer to fifteen or sixteen, which isn’t a bad thing. It means that the weekends get less crowded and movies get to live longer in the movie theaters. I think everything is going to be more modest in terms of how movies are made. I think we all, executives included, will live a little bit more modestly, which is not a bad thing either. I have every confidence that this is going to get itself figured out.”

The thought of the movie biz princes living modestly almost made me giggle. Oh, screw it, who cared how everyone else lived as long as good movies got made. So I asked him the big question.

“And what of all these sequels and superheroes and the like? Will they conquer all?”

“I think at a certain point,” he laughed, “enough is enough. Throwing fireballs and running around in tights.” And then he added, “Except Spider-Man, of course.” From his mouth to God’s ears.

Of course in this case, God is the audience, despite what Adorno might say. He didn’t know about the Internet. Marketing may try to tell you what you want to see, but if you hear it’s a stinker, you’ll refuse to go. That has become clear. The audience has made the specialty market flourish like mad this year, going to little tadpoles like Wes Anderson’s
Moonrise Kingdom
—a wonderfully reviewed
tadpole about two awkward twelve-year-olds who run away together—and
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,
about a trip to India gone wonderfully awry, starring Dev Patel (from
Slumdog Millionaire
), Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson and Maggie Smith.
Marigold
has made over $117 million worldwide and cost only $10 million pre-Oscars, without any prior awareness and marketing outside of word of mouth. The audience crowned the Oscar winner about the stuttering king,
The King’s Speech.
It helped
The Help
—based on a book about black domestic workers in the South in the sixties and their white teen champion—become the fifth most profitable movie vis-à-vis budget to box office of 2011. These successful tadpoles make a case to the studios—and not just to their classics divisions—about their profitability and reinforce the notion of the “audience’s confounding craving for something different.”

At times like these—when there is some uncertainty as to what movies to make—the industry can be a mirror of the audience’s taste, and the best creative execs are receptive to the wishes of the most fervent moviegoers out there. If we can reduce the costs of marketing these movies, more can be made. Perhaps the Internet, our piratical nemesis, our entrepreneurial enemy in the first round of our failed congressional regulations, ultimately holds the answer to our hard marketing-cost issues. As online campaigns become more and more effective, perhaps they can help not just the movie’s fan base but also the larger general base for opening weekends. And perhaps we can be part of the solution to their unknown advertising capabilities. He that taketh away sometimes giveth back.

VIOLENT PHASE TRANSITIONS: THE ONLY WAY HOLLYWOOD IS UNLIKE HELL AND MORE LIKE THE HEAVENS

In astrophysics, there are fascinating phenomena called violent phase transitions, wherein things hardly change at all for eons—literally hundreds of millions of years—and then all of a sudden everything changes at once. Of course, unseen gravitational forces have been building toward that phase change, gases have been swirling faster and faster for ages, dust particles have been condensing, but not in ways anyone would notice (if there were anyone to look). But all that slow swirling movement coalesces in an unexpected moment into a grand celestial catastrophe of creation and destruction. Thus it is in the movie business. Things just go their nutty, merry way for years, unchanging, until we get hit by an asteroid like the DVD collapse, and the dense suck of technological change creates huge gravitational forces that condense and transform and reconstitute all matter in their wake. Gigantic implosions occur, destroying old models. Movie stars open movies! Let’s sell a script this weekend! Chick flicks! Disney buys X in competitive bidding! Pitches are dead. Drama is dead. You can’t sell anything anymore! Spec market over . . . until nothing familiar is left.

Seemingly at random, new explosions and implosions create new matter. In the movie business, with our violent phase transitions, old structures and models are destroyed, but it is ever so clear that new models always evolve to take their place. A new structure of the universe is emerging, barely visible in its outlines but presenting itself on the horizon daily and expanding like the universe.

This new phase of the universe is called “narrowcasting.” Tadpoles are the narrowcasts of the movie business. They have a specific targeted audience, like
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,
yet they can break out to a wide audience if they work in narrowcast (a tiny release, in a film’s case, that then goes into wider release as
word spreads, or after an Oscar campaign, as in
The King’s Speech
and many others). Anyone can make a movie and get it distributed somewhere online if not in theaters. New theatrical distributors and online distributors are born every day, like stars in a stellar nursery. Distribution and production were the bottlenecks through which the studios used to control moviemaking. Movies were expensive, and only studios had the funds for production. Distribution was limited and controlled by the studios, and nearly impossible for an outsider to penetrate. Digital moviemaking ended this bottleneck in a few milliseconds for both production and now online distribution, where a movie can be discovered by anyone, anywhere.

Soon people will stop looking to their local mall—like teens already have—and go instead to their computer or home entertainment system to find a new movie or television series they’ve just heard about. With fewer movies, the best of these will eventually make it to the mall too. Instead of relying on studios to make the “show” pieces of the show-business equation, we will increasingly see programming from brand-new and aggressive content providers, trying to establish themselves by trolling the edges and inlets of pop culture. And they have an audience already.