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BagelFish Blog
News, thoughts, rants, and raves from the minds and souls of Bagelfish.
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| New Yorker Magazine:Distribution |
1/13/2007 6:07:06 AM |
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In THE NEW YORKER - 12/25/06
BIG PICTURES
Hollywood looks for a future.
by DAVID DENBY - Issue of 2007-01-08
Posted 2006-12-25
The device was as elegant as an old cigarett case and not much larger than a child’s palm. was holding a video iPod, poised at the frontie of a new digital age, a new platform fo movies, a new convenience that will annihilat old paradigms. Last spring and summer, when visited a number of executives and tech guys i big-studio Hollywood, I kept hearing disdai for the mall cinemas and the multiplexes—th theatres in which most Americans see movies And I heard a new mantra: “Content o demand—when you want it, where you wan it, and how you want it.” By the end of th summer, movies were beginning to flow int homes and portable devices through th Internet. In September, Apple began offerin previously released Disney movies through it iTunes Store. I downloaded the first “Pirates o the Caribbean” onto my hard drive, then put i onto a video iPod. The screen was only tw inches across
If you are sitting down, the natural place for an iPod is in your lap; that way, your arms don’t get tired. At that distance, however, I couldn’t focus on the image. So I rested the iPod on my stomach. And there it sat, riding up and down every time I took a breath. I was on the Black Pearl, all right, standing on her foredeck like a drunken sailor as she plowed through heavy seas. The horizon line kept pitching and heaving, and I had trouble seeing much of anything. “Pirates” has lots of wide vistas and noisy tumult—a vast ocean under the dazzling sun and nighttime roughhousing in colonial towns, with deep-cleavaged prostitutes and toothless drunks. What I saw, mainly, was a looming ship the size of a twig, patches of sparkling blue, and a face or a skull flashing by. The interiors were as dark as caves. My ears, fed by headphones, were filled with such details as the chafing of hawsers and feet stomping on straw, but there below me Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom were duelling like two angry mosquitoes in a jar.
In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it. Of course, no one will ever be forced to look at movies on a pipsqueak display—at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen, or they’ll transfer them to a big flat-screen TV. Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces, and they certainly will function that way for kids. According to home-entertainment specialists I spoke to in Hollywood, many kids are “platform agnostic”—that is, they will look at movies on any screen at all, large or small. Most kids don’t have bellies, and they can pretzel their limbs into almost any shape they want, so they can get comfortable with a handheld device; they can also take it onto a school bus, down the street, into bed, cuddling it under the covers after lights-out.
The movies currently offered by Apple and other downloading services are the first trickles of a flood. Soon, new movies will come pouring through the Internet and perhaps through cable franchises as well, and people will look at them on screens of all sizes. For those of us who are not agnostics but fervent believers in the theatrical experience, this latest development in movie distribution is of more than casual interest.
The skeletons danced on shipboard; their bones looked like pieces of string dipped in Elmer’s glue. With a groan, I tried to suppress memories of a camel train making its stately way across a seventy-foot-wide screen in “Lawrence of Arabia.” On the iPod the camels would traverse my thumb. Where, I wondered, were movies going? Were they going any place good?
Talk of distributing movies over the Interne has been around for years, but it has sharpene in recent months as Hollywood has run int financial trouble. In the middle of the summer the studios were clearly undergoing contraction and what some even called a “panic.” They laid off hundreds of employees they made one of their periodic attempts t control runaway star salaries and productio budgets, cancelling, for example, comedie with stars like Jim Carrey and Ben Stille which were budgeted at more than a hundre million dollars. In the future, as writers directors, and actors try to gain a bette percentage of revenue derived from th Internet, labor disputes look inevitable
At first glance, the cause of the problem was a little mysterious: domestic box-office, after a dip in 2005, was up again (and has remained up), and overseas box-office was healthy, too. But theatrical grosses actually account for less than twenty per cent of total movie revenues. Despite the to-do in the media every weekend over what’s No. 1 and what’s No. 2, and how the take for “Crushed Knees 3” compares with that for “Crushed Knees 2,” the theatres bring in much less money than other revenue streams—sales to television in all its forms (free, cable, pay-per-view) and rentals and sales of DVDs, which make up half of total movie revenues. Not that the theatres are financially unimportant: in general, the more noise made about a movie when it opens, the bigger the eventual return from the ancillary markets, which is one reason the studios still contend to be the weekend box-office champ. In crude terms, the theatres can be seen as a branding device and a stimulant to DVD sales. In August, when Tom Cruise’s production deal with Paramount Pictures, Viacom’s film division, ended, Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, mentioned Cruise’s controversial public behavior, which, he said, hurt the box-office for Paramount’s summer release of the third “Mission: Impossible” movie. What Redstone didn’t say, as Edward Jay Epstein reported in the Financial Times, was that Cruise had a deal with Paramount which gave him an enormous share of the DVD revenue on the movie. “M:i:III” cost a hundred and fifty million dollars to make, and its worldwide theatrical gross was almost four hundred million. But Paramount realized that after the theatres took their cut, and the production, promotion, and overhead costs were deducted from what was left, it wasn’t going to make much money—maybe none—while Cruise would walk away with seventy million dollars.
The disappointing performance of “M:i:III” came at a painful moment for the studios. After years of double-digit growth, DVD sales, while still high, have levelled off and cancelled out the recovery at the box office. Furthermore, no one knows if the technology that could juice up sales again—the new high-definition players and high-definition versions of movies—will take off. Consumers may simply tire of the format wars between the two kinds of players (Blu-ray and HD DVD) and stick with what they’ve got. As one executive told me, summing up the panic, “As long as over-all revenue was increasing, people here felt comfortable with rising costs. But if revenue flattens out, the movie business could enter a death spiral.”
What should the studios do? They could cut production costs, or they could reduce the cost of getting movies to the public. Loaded into cans, movies weigh between fifty and eighty pounds; they have to be flown to regional depositories, and then trucked to theatres. If a movie flops, the theatres have to wait for a new one to replace it. But once the theatres convert to digital projection—a change now in its beginning stages—the studios could bounce movies to theatres off satellites or send them on portable hard drives. I spoke to Barry Meyer, the chairman and C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Entertainment, in a wood-panelled conference room adjacent to his office, in Warner’s venerable Burbank headquarters. “Digital distribution is easy, ubiquitous, and inexpensive,” Meyer said. He took a deep breath. “We have to adapt, or we’ll become dinosaurs.”
The seven major studios, with their many divisions, produce or pick up for distribution most of the American “content” that is sent all over the world. Should they continue to shoot on film or switch to digital? Digital technology opens enormous possibilities for filmmakers, and even for exhibitors, but it also offers a radical break with the many ways of watching movies that have given us pleasure in the past. Every kind of screen comes with its own aesthetic, and imposes its own social experience on moviegoers. We’ve all watched hundreds of movies on old TVs, and taken endless pleasure from doing so, but to watch “Citizen Kane” on TV for the first time is a half-fulfilled promise; to see it on a big screen is a revelation. If watching movies at home becomes not just an auxiliary to theatregoing but a replacement of it, a visual art form will decline, and become something else. Kids who get hooked on watching movies on a portable handheld device will be settling for a lesser experience, even if they don’t yet know it—even if they never know it. And their consumer choices could affect the rest of us, just as they have in the music business. If the future of movies as an art form is at stake, we are all in this together.
The old downtown picture palaces have bee gone so long that to think of them at all is t indulge in nostalgia for nostalgia, a faintl remembered dream from childhood of cathedra lobbies and ushers in red uniforms with gol braid. The palaces had names like th Alhambra, the Luxor, the Roxy; th auditoriums were evocative of pagod pavilions or Persian courts or some celestia paradise with flocks of fleecy blond cherubi suspended in blue ether. They were uninhibite American kitsch, the product of a commercia culture dizzied by fantasies of European o Eastern magnificence. The absurdity of th theatres—imperial spaces for democratic man—was reassuring; they were the perfec environment for an art form that was so lovabl precisely because it was devoted to th unending appeal of illusion
The neighborhood theatres that thrived at the same time were easier to deal with. Slipping in and out of them, we avoided the stern white-shoed matrons who patrolled the aisles; sometimes we arrived in the middle of the movie and stayed on until it reached the same point in the next show—we just wanted to go to the movies. Even now, moviegoing is informal and spontaneous. Still, we long to be overwhelmed by that flush of emotion when image, language, movement, and music merge. We have just entered from the impersonal streets, and suddenly we are alone but not alone, the sighing and shifting all around hitting us like the pressures of the weather in an open field. The movie theatre is a public space that encourages private pleasures: as we watch, everything we are—our senses, our past, our unconscious—reaches out to the screen. The experience is the opposite of escape; it is more like absolute engagement.
Such is the ideal. But how often do we find it now? Consider the mall or the urban multiplex. The steady rain of contempt that I heard Hollywood executives direct at the theatres has been amplified, a dozen times over, by friends and strangers alike. The concession stands were wrathfully noted, with their “small” Cokes in which you could drown a rabbit, their candy bars the size of cow patties; add to that the pre-movie purgatory padded out to thirty minutes with ads, coming attractions, public-service announcements, theatre-chain logos, enticements for kitty-kat clubs and Ukrainian bakeries—anything to delay the movie and send you back to the concession stand, where the theatres make forty per cent of their profits. If you go to a thriller, you may sit through coming attractions for five or six action movies, with bodies bursting out of windows and flaming cars flipping through the air—a long stretch of convulsive imagery from what seems like a single terrible movie that you’ve seen before. At poorly run multiplexes, projector bulbs go dim, the prints develop scratches or turn yellow, the soles of your shoes stick to the floor, people jabber on cell phones, and rumbles and blasts bleed through the walls.
If we want to see something badly enough, we go, of course, and once everyone settles down we can still enjoy ourselves. But we go amid murmurs of discontent, and the discontent will only get louder as the theatre complexes age. Many of them were randomly and cheaply built in response to what George Lucas conclusively demonstrated with “Star Wars,” in 1977: that a pop movie heavily advertised on national television could open simultaneously in theatres across the country and attract enormous opening-weekend audiences. As these theatres age, the gold leaf doesn’t slowly peel off fluted columns. They rot, like disused industrial spaces. They have become the detritus of what seems, on a bad day, like a dying culture.
The studio heads and production chiefs wh furnish the multiplexes with movies ar powerful figures in Hollywood. But in th giant conglomerates of which the movi divisions are a part they are no more than high-level managers. Their job, baldly stated, is t keep revenue flowing and to buoy the paren company’s stock price. They work unde enormous pressure. I was just joking when said to Michael Lynton, the chairman an C.E.O. of Sony Pictures Entertainment, in th studio’s creamy executive offices in Culve City, that no actor or director has ever receive a phone call saying, “I have to face stoc analysts in three weeks. What does fourth-quarter revenue look like?” But Lynton quickl retorted, “I’ve had that call.” As a result of th pressure, the executives fashion a good deal o their films for the opening-weekend audiences—mostly families and people aged twelve t twenty-five. That is the simplest reason that th content of so many big-studio movies—fantasy, animation, inspirational sports stories dumb-guy comedies—seems infantile an repetitive through so much of the year
Let’s not allow regret to turn into honeyed glances at a high-minded time that never was. Studio moviemaking has always been a big-money game. According to Forbes, the most expensive movie ever made remains the 1963 “Cleopatra,” which, in 2006 dollars, cost Twentieth Century Fox close to three hundred million. And there never was a golden age in which art or great entertainment poured unremittingly from the studio gates. The majority of movies at any time are junk. From 1953, we remember “From Here to Eternity” and “The Band Wagon” and maybe “The Big Heat,” but not “The Redhead from Wyoming” or “Guerrilla Girl.” For most people, memory itself is a kind of revival house in which only the most vivid things survive. But if there was never a golden age there were a few structures that encouraged superior work—or at least didn’t actively defeat it. One was the contract model of the nineteen-thirties and forties in which, to cite the most obvious miracle, the producer Hal B. Wallis, at Warner Bros., was able to put together “Casablanca” with actors, screenwriters, set designers, and a director who could all be found eating lunch at the commissary on the Warner lot. The contract model, which many actors hated but which often made good use of their talents, fed a system in which most of the stable genres—women’s films, Westerns, sophisticated comedies, period literary adaptations, crime films, psychological dramas, and all the varieties of noir—were aimed at the grownup audience. Another productive structure arose in the fifties, during a period of loosened studio control when directors like Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, and Douglas Sirk did highly idiosyncratic work. Still another was the director-controlled model of the early and mid-seventies, when the studio executives, baffled by the tastes of the new young audience, turned to such recent film-school graduates as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg, as well as Robert Altman (who was a generation older). Operating freely, these directors turned out a series of remarkable movies with complexly motivated characters and startlingly original forms and moods.
The current big-studio model is not only aesthetically depressing but financially bizarre. The familiarity of the numbers makes them no less astonishing. The average cost of making a big-studio movie is sixty million dollars; the average cost of marketing one domestically is around thirty-six million. Would-be blockbusters, or “tent pole” movies, like “King Kong” or “The Da Vinci Code,” which open simultaneously around the world, can run to three hundred million or more in total costs. Any big-studio movie is a bet against long odds. A worldwide theatrical gross of around four hundred million apiece for “M:i:III” and “Superman Returns” does not insure that either movie will be profitable, even though some of the ancillary-market dollar has yet to arrive. The five hundred and fifty million dollars taken in by “King Kong” was also considered disappointing.
How much theatrical gross is enough? Recent editions of Variety have featured an ad for the second “Pirates” movie that shows how much. A skull-and-crossbones motif is positioned over a number one followed by nine zeroes. That death’s-head billionaire, by luring studios to fresh big-budget follies, could hurt the movie business for years. Everyone wants the big kill and the bragging rights that come with it. Despite the flops and the movies that only break even, gambling has always been part of the excitement of working in Hollywood. Yet some gambles are surely worth more than others. Reviving James Bond with acid wit and a sexy new star is fine. But “Superman Returns,” with its underwritten script and its bland hero, was not just boring but superfluous: in the digital years since the 1978 “Superman”—which have also seen five “Batman”s, two “Spider-Man”s, and three “X-Men”s—the airborne crusader has lost his wonder. But Warner, in late October, announced that it would make yet another “Superman” film. Variety earlier summed up the situation as follows: “Many speculate that WB has invested too much time and money to walk away. What’s more, the film fuels a number of Time Warner outlets, including homevid, ancillaries, and merchandising—even subsid DC Comics.”
So there you have it: the business model swallows the studio, which, obliged to supply its conglomerate outlets and subsidiaries, cannot prevent itself from repeating a failure. The studios have been reining in budgets, but Paramount, Disney, Fox, and M-G-M, a moribund studio in renewal mode, have at the same time been ransacking their own libraries as well as comic books and children’s-lit classics for titles they can turn into monster spectacles. These movies, which will tie up billions of dollars in resources, are not necessarily the ones that audiences want but the ones that the conglomerate parent company thinks it can sell. Peter Bart, the editor-in-chief of Variety, who was an executive at Paramount in the seventies, put it to me this way: “During the late sixties and seventies, the studios would look at the box-office results and conclude, ‘Aha, the audience is responding to “Midnight Cowboy” and “The Graduate.” ’ Today, the conglomerates are saying, ‘We have the resources to tell the public what it wants to see.’ ” But for how long? Teen-agers are making their own movies and showing them on YouTube and MySpace. They’re multitasking for fun, with computer games, instant messaging, and television. They may be unwilling to sit in a darkened theatre for two hours, submitting to someone else’s control.
There are, of course, many other kinds of movies besides would-be tent poles and sophomoric comedies, and, in fairness to Warner Bros., it did release “Syriana” in 2005 and “Blood Diamond” and “The Good German” this year, three films that could be called ambitious descendants of “Casablanca.” But the balance is way off, and has been for more than two decades. Young people get many more movies sent their way than are warranted by their numbers—almost half of the audience but only twenty-five per cent of the population is aged between twelve and thirty. After that, the group that goes to the movies most frequently is people in their thirties and forties, who make up about a third of both the population and the audience. People over fifty make up thirty per cent of the population but only twenty per cent of the audience. The trouble is that grownups are less likely than kids to go on opening weekends (they wait for reviews and reports from friends), so, apart from the fall awards season, when most of the serious movies are released, they don’t pull their weight in terms of what gets made. As a result, the studios have conceived grownup moviegoing behavior in such a way that confines it to an enclosed circle. When the adult audience does go to a low- or mid-budget movie released in winter or in spring—say, “Crash” or “Inside Man”—the studios consider the hit an anomaly, a “non-repeatable event.” In the jargon of the trade, such movies are “execution dependent” (they have to be good to succeed), rather than “audience dependent” (the audience will show up regardless of the quality). Some execution-dependent movies, such as “Inside Man,” “The Devil Wears Prada,” and “Sideways,” are hits by any standard. Some, like “The Squid and the Whale” and “Capote,” haven’t made big money but are still counted as successes in relation to their costs. Others, like “Little Children,” are financial failures, although that film, a stubborn and prickly plant, played through the fall to loyal audiences, and may pick up some awards attention and, with it, added box-office. Many more people go to bad movies than go to good ones, but the good small movies that do well, like “Brokeback Mountain” and “Borat,” are, in relation to cost, among the most successful movies ever made.
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