Excellent description, Sam Stone.
If you want an interesting perspective on screenwriting, may I suggest this book .
I’ve read it, and it’s terrific, with insights into the question asked by the OP.
WOW! Looks like a fabulous and informative read. I’ll be sure to get it.
A fundamental problem is this-
The order of priorities for good filmmaking is:[ol][li]a good story[]good actors[]a decent budget[/ol]IOW, a good story can carry mediocre actors and/or a low budget but not the other way round! You can have the greatest thespians in the world and throw hundreds of millions of dollars at it, but if its a bad story you’re still just polishing a turd.[/li]
Unfortunately, the pecking order in Hollywood goes:[ol][]Bankable actor (talent or no)[]doable budget (needed or not) and, oh yeah, somebody Xerox a script someday[/ol]Thus we get Independence Day, Armegeddon, Godzilla, Pearl Harbor etc.
The trouble is, though, that this process doesn’t work. It results in too many catastrophes. Why haven’t the studios been burned by this often enough to know better?
Well, it may be that it’s just not that easy. It’s like software - companies have been doing software development for decades, and yet an ungodly number of large projects fail and never see commercial release. We just haven’t figured out how to do any better.
Making a big budget movie involves coordinating thousands of people, multiple locations, hundreds of millions of dollars, multiple people with creative control, and the demands of the commercial marketplace. It’s not easy.
Sam Stone’s pretty close to the mark.
The problem with movies is that the making of movies, these days, is a process of COMMITTEE.
A film is not the work of one man, or even the group of people who actually MAKE the movie. It’s not just the actors. It’s not just the director. It’s not just the writer, or writers.
It’s the writer, the director, the actors, the other writers, the other writers called in because the producer has a problem with the first writer, the producer, the associate producer, the other associate producer, the Executive Producer, the studio liason, the studio, the backers…
…all of whom will have varying amounts of power to influence the whole boat.
Given that, I think it’s a wonder commercial studios produce anything watchable at all.
The interesting thing is that even though the current system is admittedly a pathetic loss, nobody out there is eating Hollywood’s lunch at the box office. Au contraire, Hollywood movies tend to displace foreign movies even in their own national markets.
I ascribe that to the fact that the upper middle class “serious film” ethos that dominates other countries’ film industries resonates with no one but film geeks, and that government-sponsored film is one of the very few systems that’s actually worse than Hollywood’s. It’s interesting that they other film industry that’s making inroads in the world market is Hong Kong action flicks.
If Bollywood ever got out of its deeply censored, idiot musical mode it might be dangerous, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen so long as they have such a large captive audience.
Hollywood, bad as it is, rules by default.
Because the studios don’t want to be burned again. So they don’t trust the material. Everyone tinkers, with the idea that, if it’s a hit, they improved it, and if it’s a flop, no one listened to their suggestions.
The bigger the budget, the greater the fear. No one wants others to be able to say, “That was a flop, and you were the only one who thought it was good as is.”
You know, its very, very hard to simply look at a script and tell if its good or bad. What something looks like on paper often seems to bear no resemblence to the later reality, good movie or bad. Many of the best lines ever uttered in film look like crap on the page.
Is this the article you saw, Sam? It’s interesting to see how much control a scriptwriter may lose on a project.
“I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be back”? What kind of a stupid response is that?
I am beginning to believe that we are in for a shift in Hollywood. Movies with small name actors and small budgets, but good scripts, have done very well - and there have been more big budget stinkers than normal. Instead of going for the next “Matrix”, I think Hollywood is going to start looking for the next “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” In my mind, the question is not why do they risk so much money on a poor script, but why do they risk so much money at all - and then, when risking that much money, put in enough “cooks” - ego screenwriters, ego directors, ego stars, ego producers - to make sure that they will spoil the broth. All three LOTR movies were filmed for some piddly amount of money (in the scheme of Hollywood blockbusters), but without spending a lot of money on name actors, they were able to put the money where it did the most good for those films (an overwhelming sense of place). (The singular vision Jackson had in filming helped as well)
More on topic - I’ve seen lousy productions of Hamlet. You can take a good script and come up with utter crap. Likewise, a marginal script (Star Wars springs to mind - Lucas can’t write dialogue to save his life) can be made into something fantastic if it taps into something other than script.
That’s about the marketing, methinks. One thing Hollywood is better at than anybody else is marketing. Sure, MiiB sucked, but look, I just used the abbreviation supplied by their marketing department to refer to it. I submit that the reason Hollywood movies are so successful despite the heavy suck factor is that they control so much “mind share” (marketing speak alert!) that it simply doesn’t occurr to people to look around for alternatives.
I’m late in this thread but I’d like to pick up some sub-point.
It happens I strongly agree with msmith537. I enjoyed Armageddon, Independence Day and even Godzilla as well as Adaptation, The Pianist or A Beautiful Mind. All of them are great movies. All of them do their job.
I don’t care if it’s not possible to drill a comet or if it’s not possible crack an E.T. mothership computer with a Mac. The first three did give me real fun because I want to be excited, not convinced of anything. I qualify them as excellent movies. The second three make me think, laugh or cry. I qualify them as excellent, too.
I’m a moviegoer because I want to have fun, and I also want to be mind-challenged. Not because I’m a critic.
Pirates of the Caribbean is an excellent movie because is a great adventure and excited me. The last Bond movie bored me, because it was not as absurd as other Bond movies.
And yes, MiiB 2 sucked because it wasn’t as funny as the first.
Oh wouldn’t that be great?
I’m doubtful though. You can’t set out to create a cultural phenomenon like My big fat greek chickflick, but you CAN create a formulaic success romantic comedy if you can get the blonde cutie of the month to sign on (meg ryan a few years back, reese witherspoon, kate hutson).
I’d bet anything there were things that Nia V. wanted to do with the film that didn’t happen because of budget. Maybe the CGI whistles and bells would have ruined it, who knows? (I personally think the movie was “my big fat mediocre slightly different formula move” and it’s popularity was largely due to it’s being different from all the war movies at the time, a nice escape, just unique enough, but not offensive. I honestly thought the sitcom was just as good as the movie, it fell flat because people realized then what the movie really was.)
Deadlyaccurate: No, that’s not the article I read. I honestly can’t remember where I read the original article - it wasn’t on the net. But that article looks good, and I’m going to read it over coffee this morning. Thanks.
Doing so by accident is easy. Doing so on purpose is something else. there is a very (oh god very) good reason why 99% of Indep flicks bever see the light of day: they suck.
This isn’t really true. Almost every actor within the LotR movies were certainly very skilled and well-known actors. One can’t exactly say that Christopher Lee isn’t a “name” actor.
Maybe you meant “not relying solely on the actors to sell the movie”?
Christopher Lee had fallen on hard times. His name didn’t put asses in teh seats anymore, if it ever did. Mortensen was the closest to a name actor, and he wasn’t a superstar, at least when he was hired (AND he was a last minute addition).
Elijah Wood had some success as a child actor, but his juvenile star had fallen. Few would go specifically to see him.