The thing that is being competed for is making money, which in turn affects everything further down the food chain.
Read Adventures In The Screen Trade by William Goldman. He explains all the reasons for the various kinds of sucky-ness, and does so in a brilliantly engaging way. His main message is simply that in the movie business Nobody Knows Anything. More specifically, everyone is forced to parade around as if they know something worth knowing (how to produce a hit movie, how to write a hit movie, how to direct a hit movie) but in fact Nobody Knows Anything.
While I’m at it, may I recommend two more simply fantastic books which show what the movie-making process is really like. One is Final Cut, the story of the making of Heaven’s Gate, told by Steven Bach, the only guy who was there from start to finish. The other is Monster by John Gregory Dunne, telling the story of the movie that was eventually made as *Up Close And Personal * (Pfeiffer/Redford).
The documentary is great as well. Sometimes you can see it on the TRIO channel.
I know that it isn’t. I’m just saying that most engineering projects are grounded in proven science and physical laws. A movie, like any creative venture, is subject to people’s tastes and whims. It’s very difficult to quantify what makes a movie a big hit. In fact, (unlike, say, manufacturing rocket engines) repeating a creative process that was successful often results in the opposite - a movie that appears derivitive and cliche.
Take for example Starship Troopers 2. Voorhovens’s original is a deceptively complex statement on war and human nature, disguised as a campy spoof on classic war films. The sequal (which I saw for the first time on Stars or Encore or something last night) basically offers nothing original. I can almost imagine the producers saying “we can make $x with a direct to video sequal to a popular movie (I actually did a business school case on this). Let’s take Starship Troopers, give it a standard Aliens meets The Thing plot. We’ll use all the old props (which are still floating around the backlots since we keep seeing old MI armor in movies like Planet of the Apes and Imposter), we’ll film the whole thing in a deserted cement factory or something, hire some no-name actors (the actress who played the captain of the Roger Young is now recast as a sergeant) and some director who maybe’s done some Red Shoe Diaries episodes or something so it won’t cost much.” The result? A ham-fisted crap-fest.
There was a Starship Troopers 2?
Robert wept.
I’m not Martin Scorsese. If I were Scorsese, I’d expect you to take my words at face value thanks to my demonstrated ability at filmmaking.
I’ve written a lot of reviews, but anyone can do that. And it’s for an audience of specific tastes.
You guys seem to be focusing on the A films. I’m saying if there’s all this depth of talent seeking to get into the biz then B films ought to be pretty solid, too. Yet the only place I see consistently competent writing is in the TV series.
Frex, the Law and Order series and its spinoffs, and the CSI series and their spin-offs seem to be consistently well written. Not that there’s any great depth of characterization, or that the plotting is brilliant (though at times it’s pretty durned good) but that the dramatic essentials are generally well developed. The plots move right along in most cases. It’s more than you can say of most movies.
I guess I will have to use a sporting analogy to convey how badly movies are being made. (And it’s not a matter of writing, or scriptwriting, it’s basic storytelling, stuff a director and a film editor needs to know as well as a writer.)
Missing out on a major opportunity to put sex in a sexploitation movie is like a football team inexplicably missing out on a chance to reach the end zone against an opponent who is off the field. It’s that fundamental. Leaving the timing element out of a suspense theme is like not knowing what the line of scrimmage is.
This is not detailed stuff, this is not nitpicky stuff, this is fundamentals, people, and apparently it’s unknown stuff among people who make movies.
So I guess the advice to a would-be filmmaker would be, “go ahead and learn your craft since otherwise why are you bothering, but don’t expect it to be very important to your success in Hollywood.”
All movie makers start out with grand ideas, to do things right, properly, thoroughly, carefully. And then other people come along and push them around, force them to change things, then they take the idea away and twist it and bend it and remove bits and add bits.
It’s not the creators’ fault that the finished product doesn’t have those fundamentals, it’s the idiot untalented nobody marketing executives who fuck it all up after the fact.
It sounds like you want movies to stick to a formula that supposedly leads to good movies. Personally I like most of the movies that come out - and I find many of the classic “great” movies very boring. And so do many other cinema goers and so Hollywood doesn’t change much.
Another thing that others probably pointed out is that there are often many cooks stirring the pot… I mean some actors mightn’t be very willing to do some things the director tells them to do, or executives might want a lot of script changes for some reason, etc.
I would say that like any business, most of Hollywood doesn’t really know what their doing. How many 9 hour epics did Peter Jackson direct before LOTR? Think about it.
As someone who is unknowledgable, could you (or anyone) explain what the ‘old’ system was, and what the ‘new’ system is?
It was actually directed by Phil Tippett who did the visual effects for (and co-produced) Starship Troopers. And any film with Kelly Carlson is most definitely not a “crap-fest”.
I’m unknowledgeable. Under the old studio system, movie studios didn’t just fund, distribute and market movies as is the case now, they also were responsible for the actual production of the movies. To this end, they would hire up-and-coming young actors and actresses and train them in their craft. They would teach them to ride horses, to fence, to dance, to sing, to pose for publicity photos – all before they appeared in a single film. The studios would also hire a stable of directors and writers who didn’t get the same kind of formal training but did work together to produce scripts.
There’s no equivalent developmental system for talent under the new system, which I think is the point of some of the posts here.
Also, they owned the theatres, which made it really easy to get an anti-trust ruling smacked against them. After the studio system was dismantled, other things fell apart. Many actors worked as employees during the 30’s and 40’s, getting a monthly paycheck and were required to do the studio’s bidding.
When I say that in some ways the old system was better, my reason for that was that many times, the products of a studio were the visions of one man, or a few men (hardly any women around back then, not as execs, anyway). Not the slew of egos that all want a say, that we see today. Of course, there were an awful amount of awful movies, but it didn’t take 2000 guys working on special effects to make a Casablanca or Robin Hood.
so let’s see a rough outline from the decline of the studio system till today:
50’s
Method acting. The threat from tv, which made Hollywood experiment with all those wide screen and extremely expensive, historical epics, trying to lure the audience away from the living room. They couldn’t, of course, because tv took off because people were afraid and stayed home. H-bombs, cold war and sputniks saw to that.
60’s
Historical epics went out with Cleopatra. I also think that we can blame/give credit for a lot that happened in the 60’s on Hitchcock. Psycho and The Birds started a new trend with really ambigous endings and a totally different POV regarding the role of the hero. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, was published in '64 and made the world take a new look on pollution. The Kennedy killing, civil rights, the Vietnam War followed by the hippie movement and all the drugs made the 60’s into a decade were the trend for movies was in a limbo. On one hand, you had psychedelia, on the other John Wayne. James Bond juxtaposed with F. Valli & A. Funicelli movies. The western genre dies this decade, because the old all American hero was out (which in turn opened the market for Sergio Leone and made Eastwoods career). Anti-war movies were in, as were movies about racial issues, young men looking to fit in or not (maybe with Anne Bancroft).
70s
Anti-establishment is in, ambigous is in. Straightforward storytelling is out. I happened to catch “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” on tv the other day. No studio would have greenlighted it today, especially with the ending and the seemingly senseless bursts of casual violence.
Then, it all started going downhill in '75.
Spielberg made Jaws and scared the shit out of the audience who came in droves to the theatres. Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese were all born within a few years in the early 40’s (coppola in ‘39). These were guys who grew up with movies, not books or radio. They were the first generation that grew up with tv. So almost all their work can ultimately be seen as referencing to earlier works, the most blatant being the Indy-franchise of course.
Speilberg’s succes with Jaws and Lucas’ with SW two years later changed the way movies were made, marketed, distributed and how the studios made money.
as a result, today, most studios will release only 10 - 20 films a year. For a major studio, it’s better to pour $50 million into production of one movie and earn 50 mill. With only ten relseases per annum, they can set up marketing campaings, get product placement, do tie ins with McD or BK. Even if two are total clunkers, losing money, and a couple of them only bring in cost and the studio have to rely on forreign and DVD sales, they still make money to all involved.
So, they can spend $500 million a year on ten moives. Dividing it on 50 movies, having only 10 to spend per movie, is bad business. You won’t get an actor who will bring in the crowd. Even with names like Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks, you’re not guranteed a hit, but for marketing purposes, it’s easier to sell a movie “Starring two times Academy Award Winner Tom Hanks,” than “Starring Rhys Ifans” (who dat?).
So no big stars, no cool special effects, no major ad campaing. A movie would then have to have a compelling story, good acting, interesting characters. And while these smaller movies still make money, getting a return of $5M is nowhere as interesting as getting 50. So these movies, which still get made, are destined now for arthouses as indie movies (Warner has a division called Warner Independant (sic!)).
I see a trend in favor of television now. Some academy award winners have no problem working with tv. With fewer productions being made for the big screen, actors turn to tv to work. With better actors, we get better tv productions. When Spielberg or James L. Brooks or Barry Levinson do tv, they realize that they have more time to develop a plot or a character. I didn’t think Taken was all that great, but Spielberg would never have done it as a movie.
With DVD, tv shows are being re-released and finding new audiences, with home electronics getting cheaper, and more and more people geting a home cinema, I think we’re gonna see the end of the big dumb blockbusters. There’s an awful lot of crap on tv, but there’s a surprisingly big amount of good stuff too. Counting hour for hour, I’ve gotten more good or great entertainment from tv productions this year, than from movies.
Of course, I’m not a 17 year old kid with no place to hang out on Saturday nights.
The OP is touching on a point that has been relevant ever since the rise of Miramax, who made millions and conitnue to make millions by turning out film after film that is intelligent and thoughtful for the most part. The rest of Hollywood still turns out action-comedy-romance by the bucketload. Some rakes it in, but more often they flop, especially now that the kids are texting each other on the way out of bad films on Friday night causing Saturday night’s take to plummet on opening weekend.
Why?
The problem lies in the fact that everyone likes movies. An excellent book from about ten years ago, The Encyclopedia of Movie Awards , gives the box office take from every year since the twenties. It’s plainly true in that tome that until Jaws and Star Wars, movies were a comparatively penny-ante game. Now, for the last thirty years, everyone in Hollywood thinks they know the formula for the next megahit, justifying huge expenditures on new films.
Another book, Wannabe, a New York MBA’s journey through Hollywood, reveals that the super-egotistical studio chief executives will make deals for films before checking with the finance people to see if they can logically expect the money their laying out to be recouped under the most likely scenarios.
Then there’s my own experience. When I first got to LA, I wasn’t planning to go into the industry, but my other job prospects fell through, and a friend of mine had been the studio liaison for The Brady Bunch Movie and had some connections.
Right around that time, Robert Zemeckis, still somewhat fresh off of Forrest Gump, had just decided to hook up with very-famous-only-in-Hollywood agent Jack Rapke and form a new production company called ImageMovers. Now, when something new starts in Hollywood, even if it involves people with a successful track record, everyone in town treats it with an “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude as far as whether they can actuallyt get a film out the door (with good reason, as, for example, ImageMovers’ first film, What Lies Beneath, which wasn’t exactly brimming with long-lead-time special effects or far-flung locations, didn’t hit theaters for another three years).
So I land an interview at this brand new company that has done nothing so far. Ah, but what we’ve forgotten in this equation is that EVERYONE in West Los Angeles has a screenplay-in-progress, and some actually finish once in a while. I walk into a modest front office on the Universal lot with a couple of desks in it, and every single square inch of horizontal surface, I kid you not, is three feet deep in scripts.
Obviously a studio exec, busy trying to line up cash flow, is not going to have time to read all these. It will be their assistants’ jobs to get the decision as to what is worth considering made, and they don’t have time either, etc. down the line, until the absolute, bottom-of-the-barrel scum-of-the-earth flunkie does the actual reading of the scripts. This was the job I was going for.
What these folks do is called “script coverage”. They read the incoming scripts (and you can bet that Sturgeon’s Law, “Ninety Percent of Everything is Crap”, holds at least as true here as anywhere else), and provide a summary to their superior as to the details of the plot, and either a recommendation for continued development or a suggestion to pass on it. The superiors hand some of the positive coverage off to their superiors, etc., until just a few scripts are actually read (or maybe not) by the real decision makers. Recommended films also get notes given back to the screenwriter as to what changes would make the film acceptable to the studio. Hollywood still talks about the dark, unpalatable tale of a man who takes over a hooker’s life that, through careful screenwriter notes, got turned into Pretty Woman.
My friend gave me two scripts to do coverage on before my interview, so that I could show that I knew how to do it. One was a rather cool eco-sci-fi-thriller tale set in South America that had a great X-Files sort of creepiness to it, IMO, which I recommended. The other was Deep End of the Ocean, which I recommended passing over, and which Columbia released two years later to a resounding “meh” from the moviegoing public.
Through my friend I found out that I had been in top contention for the job, but it went to someone who had been working around the lot for awhile that they already knew. That’s the way it goes here, there is a hell of a lot of respect for “paying your dues”, as well as going with who you know. Hollywood being what it is, the fact that the other person was a lot younger than me played into it as well. It was OK by me: by the time I had made my way through the process, and also done some extra acting work, I had no interest in working in Hollywood anymore.
But there, my friends, in that anecdote, is the main reason why the studios turn out crap so often. Its not the desire for the next blockbuster. That’s lost more money than it’s made. It’s not the audiences. They have shown themselves smart enough to not like most real crap in the end either.
The trouble is this: The gatekeepers to the whole system are young twenty-somethings, fresh from graduating or dropping out of college, minds pounded into submission by reading scripts day and night, earning next to zero in the process, who have demonstrated all Hollywood ever asks of them: to hang around and suck up long enough to get ahead to a position where they are presumed, based on nothing, to know what will and won’t make a popular film. Eventually they may move up more notches on the ladder until they too run a studio.
In other words, to be a film that gets made, you must first be a script that appeals to a wet-behind-the-ears, mouth-breathing toady. Period.
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I must admit that the idea of taking the writers out of the creative process does have a certain appeal . . .
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And just what point are you trying to make? Ed Wood is the greatest film director in the history of all moviedom! Why shouldn’t his films get made? 
I agree with your post, Exapno, and I would like to add one more aspect to your description. A strong DVD opening is dependent on a strong first-week opening. Production companies have found that they can make the movie’s money in just the first few weeks of theater and DVD releases. The piece that I heard on the radio suggested that this has changed the new movie offerings to be even more focused on the blockbuster movie style.
What I think is really important is just how radically DVDs have changed the movie industry. It is possibly more radical than the proliferation of video tape players. Before DVDs, the people that bought (not rented) VHS tapes were typically mothers buying childrens videos. After DVDs, it became very acceptable to buy and collect DVDs for all demographics - particularily for teens and young men. This change has had a dramatic effect on how movies make money.
I haven’t read the whole thread yet, because from what I did read people are making some good points and I haven’t had enough coffee yet to parse it all. So I’ll just give you my take on it and come back later. Sorry if I’m repeating.
The key is that it’s ‘show business’; not ‘show art’. Movies are expensive,and they have to make a return on the investment. Studios look at what worked before, and produce a variation on a theme. Being original is too risky. (You can tell I haven’t had enough coffee, because I’m writing simple sentences.) There might be a film that would be the greatest thing of all time, and amazingly original; but if you can’t say, ‘It’s like Film X, but with aliens!’ no one wants to hear about it.
Take The Blair Witch Project. I can imagine the pitch being something like this: ‘It’s like The Legend of Boggy Creek, except it’s made from footage actually shot by the missing documentarists!’ The Suit says, ‘The Legend of Boggy What? Wait. You mean you want to fool people into thinking this actually happened? Uh… Right. We’ll call you.’ But the makers of TBWP went out and made their film on a miniscule budget and it was a resounding success. Now, everybody and his wife’s live-in lover wants to copy it. Like it or not, TBWP was pretty original and it made a buttload of money.
So Hollywood would rather bet on something that’s already been done than risk making an original flop.
FWIW, I know two people who want to be screenwriters. One is too focused on his hobby (he wants to make The Greatest Guitar Film Ever Made) and no one is interested. The other keeps coming up with story ideas that are variations on stuff that’s already been done. (‘It’s like Days of Thunder but with CART racing!’) The latter actually had some interest, but for various reasons it never went anywhere.
Speaking of which – although DVD prices are allowed to vary somewhat from one title to the next, why are all theater seats priced the same for each and every movie regardless of production cost? I mean, you don’t see that cost structure in the PC video game industry, where a game like Half Life 2 will be released at $59.95 but a game like Railroad Tycoon 3 will be released with a much lower price. Why don’t theaters charge, say, $3 admission for a movie that cost 5 million dollars to make and $15 admission for a movie that cost 150 million dollars to make?
Interesting question. I’ve often wondered why theaters don’t charge $20 the first night for movies like Star Wars or LOTR where there is a line round the block and then gradually reduce prices. There are second run theaters that charge much less (usually on smaller screens) so I guess that’s kind of similar.