Bad movies: why are they made?

Cafe Society
1

How is it that extraordinarily bad movies come into existence? I’m not talking about novelty movies or any movie that’s supposed to be bad, but regular movies whose creators likely had good intentions and were hopeful that their cinematic production would yield a nice profit. As I write this, I am thinking of Battlefield Earth as an example. I have never seen the movie, but I have read enough comments about it to know that it was a complete failure and an enormous waste of film and other cinematic resources. Id like to rent it just to see how bad a bad movie can be, but I’d be too embarrassed to do so.

Whether it’s Battlefield Earth or any other notorious flop, it amazes me that such movies get greenlighted in the first place. Why is that the people responsible for ultimately putting such a movie out are not able to see the obvious flaws that the general viewing public sees in them? One would think that at some point along the way, someone high enough in the chain of command would realize that a serious bomb is being produced and the production is going to cost the studio big time in the end. I’m sure we, the viewing public, have been spared from being exposed to hideously rotten movies whose production was stopped before being released, but several more manage to get released. Do the people making such movies really, honestly think that they have a money-maker on their hands? I know that not every movie out there can generate the revenue (not to mention the cult following) that Star Wars: AOTC and other mega-blockbusters do, but I was just wondering if anyone who is closely tied to the movie industry or someone who is more educated about these matters can share his or her thoughts about this.

2

Too much money spent on f/x and not enough on a decent script, I guess.

Never understood that myself. It’s like, haven’t you seen the final product, man!?!

3

Well, the really bad films generally occur on the studio level. With independent films, the ratio is much less, because youve got artists trying to fulfill their vision without inhibitions or studio execs hovering over their shoulders, asking them to change this, change that.

So when it comes to studio pictures, you’re right: They don’t sit down at a table and say, “Let’s make a really shitty movie.” It happens along the way of production, and it’s due to several reasons.

The biggest is because of the producers of the picture. Most could care less about the artistic integrity of the picture; they’re spending their money on it, so the flick better be successful at the box office. In order for this to happen, producers become formulaic. They look at what’s succeeded before, and then decide, OK, we’ll mold it toward that and direct it toward that audience. The best example is The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. Both were successful and the audience recieved them well. The production company (Universal) decides to make another one, and create a spin-off using The Rock. For some peculiar reason, it also made a lot of money. For what it’s worth, all three of those were crap-fests. But the point is, they made money. Thus, those kind of pictures will continue to be recycled in some manner until they’re just not banking it in anymore.

When directors and writers take different paths or make some funny turns that the producers don’t like, theyll ask to change certain things. Ad-hoc adjustments will be made to the script, usually making it worse. But in the crunch of time and money, people think they’re making the right decisions.

That’s the large of it. But movies are created with different components, too. If the script was wonderful and the movie was shot well but the editor screws it up, the movie can still be a crapfest. Making good films is a difficult thing. On the one hand you’re balancing appeasement to audiences, making something you think they’d enjoy seeing, and on the other, retaining artistic integrity.

4

I’ve always wondered if the people involved in bad movies, such as Battlefield Earth know they’re making bad movies or if they convince themselves they’re making the next great film classic. Surely at least a couple people on the set of Battlefield Earth looked at John Travolta with his alien dreads and intergalactic noseplug, shook their heads and said to themselves “This is going to be horrible.”

5

Fionn, they did but they also told themselves two things:

  1. People thought the Godfather and Star Wars were going to be unpopular suckfests. Perhaps we’ll get lucky.

  2. This movie isn’t sucking on account of anything I did. Naw, it’s the other guy’s who are screwing it up.

These two lies can take you a long way. :wink:

6

What I know about the production of movies is not first-hand, but comes from years of living with an older brother who is a self-proclaimed movie geek, so as always, take information from a Fish with a grain of salt or a dash of lemon.

Mr Salads, I think you’re on target when it comes to a picture created at the studio level. There are advance screenings, re-edits, focus groups, script editors, script polishing, and in many contracts with actors, sponsors, and other involved persons, there are sometimes script revision rights to be handed out. In general, if you see “Written by John Smith & Bob Jones and Bill Butler & Ed Brown” it’s generally a sign that the script was sent through too many hands.

A particularly powerful actor may get script rights and exercise them to the betterment, or to the detriment, of the film. Rumor has it that John Cusack agreed to do “Con Air” on the grounds that his character wore Berkenstocks. Jeff Goldblum reportedly wanted his character in “Independence Day” to be a fanatic recycler.

It may also be that other interested parties get script rights. Legend has it that the character of Bane was added to “Batman and Robin” because Taco Bell insisted on having 3 heroes and 3 villains to make a 6-cup set.

Independent films are also vulnerable to the Bad Movie syndrome but there is far less money at stake. “The Blair Witch Project” and “El Mariachi” were independents and made for shoestring budgets, and they wouldn’t have had to sell many tickets, relatively, to break even. However, they also get less money for advertising and promotion to attract people to the theater in the first place. For every one of those independent unknowns there is a “Bulworth” and “The Whole Nine Yards” which are independently produced by a big star (Warren Beatty, Bruce Willis) and are not subject to studio oversight. They still may trip up on focus groups and advance screenings, though.

The real problem with the system is that Hollywood makes no distinction between a movie that is Good and a movie that is Profitable. Hollywood sees “Titanic” turn very profitable, and turns around and gives us “Pearl Harbor” using the same formula.

Back in the day, studios had actors under contract for many years. They weren’t required to throw 40% of the budget at one star. They released 25 movies a year, each relatively cheap to make, each fairly low-key, were released for only a couple weeks at a time, and each usually made money moderately. Along came blockbusters like “Jaws,” “Rocky,” “Star Wars,” and others, and the notion occurred that one movie could make or break the entire budget for the year. Now a studio gives us 10 must-see best-movie-of-the-year can’t-miss wanna-be blockbusters and their stinkers are that much more obvious.

But why are they bad? Lots of reasons.

One is an over-reliance on market studies and testing to make a movie homogenous. For a movie to reach blockbuster status it has to reach a wide audience. This means the movie has a bunch of testosterone-driven explosions and eye candy, a romance wedged in somewhere, along with some comic relief shoehorned in on the side, and a nice modern soundtrack (“A Knight’s Tale,” anyone?).

Two is that new ideas are few and far between. A body-switch movie script floats around, and suddenly every studio has one (“18 Again,” “Like Father Like Son,” et al). A volcano movie (“Volcano,” “Dante’s Peak”) or Mars movie (“Mission to Mars,” “Red Planet”) will inspire copycats rushed into production to beat the Other Guy to the box office.

Three is that original, new movies are hard as hell to market. “The Princess Bride” is widely recognized as a fantastic film, but it wasn’t a blockbuster when it was released because it was a Family Swashbuckling Comedy Satire Romance Adventure. The studio had no idea how to sell it and so didn’t; as a result, nobody saw it in the theaters; as a result, the studio could say, “See? If it were good they would have come to see it.” A similar thing happened to “The Wizard of Oz.”

Last is an illuminating quote by Bill Goldman, author of “The Princess Bride,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Misery,” “Marathon Man,” and other screenplays. I don’t remember the exact wording, but he said in essence, “Nobody knows why one movie is successful and the other isn’t. It’s a total crapshoot.”

Hollywood knows this. They have become immune to watching crap. So we end up seeing a lot of crap because Hollywood knows that there’s no real reason why some really cheap, low-budget films succeed and some big-budget blockbusters stink to high heaven. They’ll greenlight it if it fits the formula and looks easy to market.

<8)))><

Disclaimer: I mention movies above without implication whether one is “good” or “bad,” only that they fit a certain production profile.

7

I think it’s so people like my friends and I can have what we so lovingly call Crappy Movie Night. Can’t have a crappy movie night without a crappy movie.

Honestly, where would the world be without shitty movies?

Also, don’t forget that a crappy movie in the US could have been a great movie in another country. Vanilla Sky was Obros los Ojos (“Open your Eyes”) in Spain, I believe; Just Visiting was something like The Visitors in France, Godzilla, well, you can figure the name out right there. When a movie gets popular over seas, people in Hollywood look at it and go “HEy, that movie got a lot of rave reviews over there, let’s make one four OUR audience.” The problem is 1) They often think the American public is stupid and will accept any crap given to us, and 2) they’re usually right (feel offended by that? If you saw Godzilla, you have no room to bitch).
If anyone out there has seen the movie Ring, it’s a Japanese movie that’s really fucking creepy, and what helps is it’s slow pace and tension. They’re making an Americanized version of it, that I feel confident is going to turn out like something more along the lines of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Could you imagine an Americanized blockbuster version of With a Friend Like Harry? These things suck, because sometimes, in converting to a new culture, you lose a lot of the tension/story/plot of the original that makes it so good. And, once Hollywood gets ahold of something like that, all the production gimics come into play, too many people fiddle with it and add in what they know “the American public wants,” and we end up with shit.

So, bust out the burbon, warm up the VCR, and get yourselves ready, because shitty movies are here to stay!

8

Hey, I feel no shame over being suckered into seeing Godzilla. My feeling before it was released was that there was no possible way save the inclusion of Jet Jaguar to screw up a Godzilla movie. You get the giant atomic monster, have it trash a city while the military flees in panic, maybe have another monster show up to wrestle into city flattening submission. It’s an easy formula for a fun movie that even then densest people in Hollywood couldn’t screw up, right?

Well, obviously history proved me wrong but before the movie was released there was no way to know that I wasn’t going to get a Godzilla movie when I went into see Godzilla.

9

Well, I think a lot of times people get too close to things, and can’t realize what their doing. They don’t see the forest for the trees.

Or maybe the just don’t care.

10

And then there’s the “This star is hot. Any movie made with this star in it is gonna make money” syndrome. May I present Last Action Hero & Hudson Hawk.

11

Last time I aspired to be a screenwriter, I was plagued by this question: Do bad films get made because rotten scripts get the greenlight, or because good scripts get mangled during production?

My aspirations fell by the wayside because I didn’t like either of those possibilities.

12

In the aspect of “good movies being mangled,” I have a story. One of my friends saw Kevin Smith speak at LSU a few years back, and he went into his description of the process for the now-dead (thank GOD) Superman movie staring Nicholas Cage (another example of the “Hey, this guy’s popular, let’s put him in every movie” syndrom). Here’s a few changes the producer wanted to make to the script:

Superman would walk around downtown, not fly.

In the fortress of Solitude, the producer wanted the villain to battle a polar bear because he heard that “Polar bears are the most deadly animals on the planet.”

In the end, he wanted Superman to battle a giant turantula, because he heard that “Turanchulas are the most deadliest spider on the planet.”

This producer’s next big movie was Wild Wild West. Which had a giant robotic turantula. Funny how that works.

13

Bad movies are made simply because no one working on them think they’re bad. The director of Battlefield Earth honestly believed (and still believes) he was putting together a first-rate film. Ed Wood felt the same way.

As far as concept is concerned, there is no concept that can’t be made into a first-class film (“Tarantula,” for instance, does a nice job with the giant spider idea), and none that can’t turn out to be a stinker.

A lot of it is a crapshoot; and it’s complicated by the fact that some really good films flop at the box office, and other bits of trash make lots of money. So even if there’s a feeling the movie stinks, people go through with it (and also because money has been invested and they don’t want to back out).

Finally, it’s wrong to blame Hollywood. There are plenty of lousy independent film (take a look at iFilm, for instance). However, there is a screening process for independent films: the stinkers are never seen by anyone but the director’s family. In Hollywood, the bad films end up with wide release, simply because you never can tell.

14

I second reading some of William Goldman’s memoirs (Adventures in the Screen Trade, What Lie Did I Tell This Time?, and Hype and Glory) for some insights into what might make a movie craptastic. But to summarize most of what he says into one pithy line (that echoes what RealityChuck just said), “They just don’t know.”.

For example, an example that Goldman gives in “Hype and Glory”. Did Spielberg one day call up the studio executives and say “Look guys, I just gave you Jaws, Close Encounters, and in a few years I’ll give you ET and Raiders of the Lost Ark. So let’s plunge fifty or sixty million dollars into a bomb called 1941”? And did the studio execs say “Hey, we love it! Here’s a check!”. No – they just didn’t know. On the face of it, you had a famous director, half the cast of Saturday Night Live (back when it was good), and a huge budget. What could go wrong?

15

I thought Battlefield Earth was great. I seem to be a minority of one on the subject.

Ditto for Godzilla, although I went in with low expectations. I was there to see a giant lizard invade a major metropolitan area and do a lot of property damage. I expected mindless fluff. I got mindless fluff Mom also liked it, mostly because the movie on some level knew it was lame, and therefore refused to take itself seriously. I regard movies like Godzilla as junk food for the brain. Not something I’d want to make a regular diet of, but I enjoy them for what they’re worth.
I loved The Princess Bride. Mom thought it was stupid. Ditto for The Blair Witch Project. So before knocking a movie as being bad, you should consider whether it is truly bad, or if you just didn’t like it.

However, nobody has satisfactoily explained the box office success of Independence Day to me. I can see going to see it for the explosions (Thea like explosions), but I choked on the three weeks of lame dialog between them. If Mom and I had been watching it on video insted of PPV (they were having one of those free weekend promo things) I would have fast forwarded the tape to the next explosion.
Then there are a lot of movies that get ruined by some idiot’s need to throw in lame throwaway jokes. Reference The Mummy and The Mark of Zorro (or was it the mask of zorro? I forget) Both had great plots, storylines, intelligent dialog. Both sucked rocks, largely due to some studio scmuck trying to gear the films to a mass audience, rather than trying to make a good movie.

Then there was The Postman, which a lot of people cite as the ultimate in lame-o movies. I thought it was good. However, if they had gotten a real actor for the title role instead of Kevin Costner (who also made Dances With Wolves less great than it could have been), it could have been awesome.

I think a lot of movies get classified as "bad’’ simply because the wrong actors get chosen for a given part, because they are known box-office draws, or because other forms of tinkering have gone on in order to get bodies through the door. Not so much the movie was bad, but it could have been a lot better.

I agree with those who say it comes down to money. The formula never changess, only the title and the actors. Studio honchos regard the average crowd of movie-goers as cattle (and, judging by my experience working in a theater, I’m inclined to agree). What sold tickets before will sell tickets again. Moviegoers don’t want to be asked to think. [Spike quoting Nirvana]Here we are now, entertain us [/Spike quoting Nirvana]. Hell, most of them can’t comprehend “Turn left/blue sign”, let alone the intellectual subtleties of (insert title of really good film.) Most people don’t know what a good movie is. Fast pacing+eye candy+Brad Pitt with no shirt+occasional yuks= a good afternoon’s entertainment.

Not that I have any objections to Brad Pitt with no shirt…

16

Probably the biggest reason is the tug of war among producers, stars and the writers, who change the concept, not because they thought it would improve the script, but because they get some lame-ass idea in their heads, or they want to buck up their image (or they’re so fearful of failure that they don’t want to take chances, so they boil the movie down to the lowest common denominator).

For another opinion, check out John Gregory Dunne’s “Monster” about he and his wife’s work turning the life of Jessica Savitch (the TV reporter who died in a drug-related auto accident) into “Tune In Tomorrow.” It took 27 rewrites to change the script from an honest look at an ambitious, brittle reporter to a Robert Redford / Michaelle Pfeiffer vehicle.

17

I got suckered to see the Sony remake of Godzilla by a die-hard Toho Godzilla fanatic (my brother). He figured it’d be a fun campy movie, albeit with better special effects.

When we left the theater, we both felt ripped off, but I had to restrain him from getting a rifle and finding a water tower outside the Sony studios. :wink:

(Nowadays, I’d check Rotten Tomatoes before I hit the theater, but that’s a different topic)

18

uh, money?

19

I fins it interesting that you’re all ruling out The Power of Satan.

<----- just got done watching Thirteen Ghosts

20

It’s very likely the cast and crew in the midst of making the movie don’t realize they’re making a stinker. To give an example, if you heard any of the rumors circulating during the production of Charlie’s Angels, you would have been sure it was a bomb waiting to happen; a cheesy premise, an action thriller with no male lead, money problems, script problems, extremely complicated shooting schedule, a first time director losing control of his movie, an inexperienced producer in over her head, bitter feuding among the cast, etc. And what happened? They somehow pulled it together and the final product sold millions of tickets and even gathered some critical praise.