Agreed. Confessions was brilliant; I was amazed at some of Clooney’s extended tracking shots and the way he was able to get so much out of his actors. Plus the cinematography was gorgeous; he’d obviously taken some lessons from Steven Soderbergh.
[hijack continues] And I was so relieved that for once Julia Roberts’s face wasn’t so pumped up with, uh, whatever they inject into lips and such to make them “fuller.” In Ocean’s 11 the lower half of her face looked more like a proboscis than a mouth. In this one she was allowed to show some signs of her age and I thought it was sexy as hell.
All this being a way of pointing out that Hollywood movies don’t all suck, not to mention that Miramax has to do the Kate & Leopolds if it wants to be able to take chances on the Confessions of a Dangerous Minds.
Interesting choice of film to illustrate how Hollywood can screw up.
“Confessions . . .” cost a fraction of what the average major Hollywood production does.
It features a first time director (Even if he is a major star.) and a leading man who is a virtual unknown.
It doesn’t adhere to any of Hollywood’s time honored hit-making formulas.
Making this movie was a chance. No one connected to it could have possibly considered it a sure-fire hit.
The simple fact is, whether you liked it or not, “Confessions . . .” is the kind of movie Hollywood should make more of, movies that take a chance, instead of playing it safe. Niche movies that not everyone is going to or supposed to like instead of Blockbusters and Would-Be Blockbusters market-tested to appeal to as many people as possible.
Like vibrotronica said, look to movies like “Pluto Nash” to see the true Hollywood screwups. Movies that follow all the rules and suck not only because of it, but also in spite of it.
Me: Shut up! I may not be a big fan of the President, but when it comes to important issues of national concern I’ll listen to him before I listen to you. Just like I wouldn’t ask him about your next crappy project. You’re an actor, go act. But hey, if you do speak up about national affairs, at least do us all a favor and get your facts straight before spouting off. You’re embarrassing liberals everywhere with your ill-informed blabber.
This is maybe the biggest myth about Hollywood. The simple fact is the the film industry gets a crap return on investment and has for a long time. Some movies are very profitable, My Big Fat Greek Wedding comes to mind. Most are not. Movies cost so much to make today and they disappear so fast that it is very hard to get a decent return on them. The film studios have become vanity projects for companies like Seagrams and Sony.
I wouldn’t fault the actors for their politcal views. I’m of the belief they’re not even their views. There’s a leftist establishment in Hollywood whose creation was in part a reaction to McCarthyism, and the establishment can kill the career of whoever doesn’t agree with them. If a star doesn’t go on record as hating Republicans and loving dolphins every now and then, they can become a pariah in that community.
At least that’s how I see it. Then again, I’m known to theorize shadowy conspiracies for why the Drive Thru is taking so long.
Oh yes, the leftist Hollywood media thing. Let’s see, there’s been Rep. Sonny Bono ®, Rep. Fred Grandy ® and, if I remember correctly, Pres. Ronald Reagan ®. Arnold Schwarzenegger will probably run for Gov. of California in the next election, as a Republican.
Every Hollywood studio except Dreamworks contributed to the Republican party and the Bush campaign in 2000.
I DON’T fault them for their views. They are as entitled to their views as any other random stranger walking the street.
What I DO fault them for is using their celebrity as a person who can sing, act, dance or perform some other feat of entertainment as a means for informing the masses (Cecil love their unwashed feet) and thereby influencing the opinion of the weaker minded of the group.
You’re an ACTOR! Read your freakin’ lines and then sit down and STFU! Have a political view. Believe in it strongly. But stop making commercials that trade on the fact that your face is familiar! You’re of no more importance than any other citizen, and less-well informed than a lot of them!
This disingenuous line makes it clear you’re more interested in grinding your axe than responding to the OP. George Clooney left ER four years ago, and has been on the big screen in O Brother, Where Art Thou?,Ocean’s Eleven,The Perfect Storm and Spy Kids, among other projects, since then.
Whether you liked or disliked Confessions’ or thought Clooney was a good or a bad director, it is simply deceptive to think anyone would consider him “a former TV actor” when considering him to act in or direct a movie.
Why don’t actors have as much right to express their political opinion as anybody else? A reporter asks them what they think of the current political situation and they tell them. The fact that they are famous merely means their political views will be disseminated among a larger group of people than just their circle of friends, much like the SDMB allows you to disseminate your political views beyond your circle of friends.
That would be aiming a little low. Let other people use the obvious targets (such as “Battlefield Earth”), I’ll go after ones that personally annoy me.
Changing the subject, something I’ve thought of as a personal annoyance are “actors that keep getting hired despite poor performance”. My sister’s a big “Phantom of the Opera” fan, and wasn’t pleased to hear the news that Antonio Banderas might be cast. This was, we heard, for box-office reasons. However, when we went to IMDB.com, it turned out that, in the last few years, the only Banderas films to make back money were the “Spy Kids” films, in which he’s a supporting actor.
Anyone else thought of actors who keep getting hired for no known reason?
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. Hollywood attempting to make a profit is a myth? Does this mean that in actuality they’re all trying to drive their businesses into the ground?
You can argue about whether they ARE making a profit (and for that I suppose one would need charts, figures, and a number or two), but I think it’s somewhat illogical to state that movie studios aren’t trying to make a profit.
One: Studios use various creative accounting tricks to make their apparent profit seem lower than it is.
To name just one of dozens of techniques, they artificially divide the overall operation into sub-companies, which can then charge the division “actually” responsible for the film high rates for internal services, such as soundstage rentals or equipment leasing or security or whatever. Talent (actors, designers, etc.) signs its contract with the production sub-company, and never sees a dime from the other divisions. An exception is made for the very biggest names, who have the clout to demand a share of the gross; this off-the-top cut is then used to further reduce the film’s stated profitability. Men in Black, for example, despite being one of the biggest moneymakers of 1997, is still ludicrously in the red according to the official books.
For more information on the subject, see Pierce O’Donnell’s book Fatal Subtraction, which describes Art Buchwald’s lawsuit against Paramount Pictures to get his share of the profits of a film, and how the studio’s attempt to show the film had no profits backfired in court after, in effect, a detailed and objective audit. It’s a great and informative read, though its technical detail (author O’Donnell was Buchwald’s attorney) makes it more interesting to students of the business rather than to people looking for a trashy celebrity tell-all. It’s long out of print and fairly hard to find, but is well worth the effort of locating it.
This general principle is, incidentally, the source of the Hollywood maxim, “There is no net,” which is to say anybody who signs a contract promising a percentage of the net profit is a sucker. That’s not to say there isn’t actual operating revenue when everything is summed up at the parent company’s bottom line; it’s just that Hollywood accounting makes it impossible to find.
Two: The vertical integration of the entertainment conglomerates gives them a long-term source of income from multiple streams, and even more opportunities for creative accounting.
AOL Time/Warner, for example, doesn’t just own the Warner Bros. film studio; they also own HBO and control a major cable TV division. In other words, they make money on their movies at every single stage, from cinema to home video to pay-per-view to premium cable. It even goes to broadcast for some outlets; notice how many movies produced by Disney and its children (Dimension, Miramax, Hollywood Pictures [now almost defunct], Touchstone) end up on ABC, which is owned by Disney.
For another example of creative accounting, consider the recent lawsuit by Steven Bochco, creator of “NYPD Blue,” over the sale of syndication rights to the show. The show is produced by Fox and sold to ABC for its initial broadcast run; for syndication, Fox sold it to the F/X Network, which is to say, sold it to itself, basically. Bochco sued because he strongly believed (and, in fact, was able to show in court) that this transaction was made at an on-paper sale price much less than what the show would have drawn in the open market, which reduces his percentage — and, on the bottom line, means the parent corporation (News Corp., which controls dozens of interrelated companies, including, interestingly, TV Guide) gets to artificially inflate its profit margin.
Three: While the film itself may be considered a “loss leader,” net profits on ancillary efforts more than make up the difference.
The Harry Potter movies, for example, are expensive to make, and even more expensive to market. A couple of years ago, the average Hollywood film cost around $90 million, with the marketing campaign sitting at around $60 million. The Harry Potters top both these figures for a variety of reasons: big casts, lots of effects, accelerated production schedules (three movies in four years), saturation advertising, and so on. After you figure in DVD sales, the movies will end up in the black, though it’ll be a tough, long-term slog.
But then you factor in revenue from t-shirts, video games, lunch boxes, board games, soundtrack recordings, breakfast cereal tie-ins, bedsheets, ad nauseum, which AOL Time/Warner splits with the book publisher Scholastic on a sliding scale, and the movie as a general property rather than an independent entity is profitable before it even premieres in your local multiplex.
Three-B: Movies make money in all sorts of novel ways these days, not just by selling tickets and toys.
A single example will show how this works. The previous Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough, had an on-paper budget of about $150 million. Sounds like a lot, but nearly two-thirds of that amount was paid to the studio by various manufacturers for in-film product placement: the cars, the clothes, the cell phones, and so on. This is all before the movie even opens.
So. Taking all of this into account, I guarantee — guarantee — that even a perceived debacle like Kevin Costner’s Waterworld will be, in a net parent-corporation sense, profitable after ten years. It takes a major, major dog, something like The Avengers without any TV replay interest or home-video draw or ancillary leveragability, to lose money for its producer.
Virtually every major film studio is part of a publicly-owned conglomerate. Shareholders, to put it bluntly, have no patience for vanity labels that lose money.