It’s always worth noting when Martin Scorsese produces a film, and his newest one — The Departed — with Jack Nicholson, Leanardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and an outstanding supporting cast opens today. The initial reviews indicate that it’s another Scorsese masterpiece:
NY Times;
Richard Roeper (Chicago Sun-Times);
Joe Morgenstern (WSJ $); and
reviews via Google.
This NY Times story reports on the culture shock that film directors Joel and Ethan Coen (“Raising Arizona,” ìFargo,î ìThe Big Lebowskiî and ìO Brother, Where Art Thou?î) and their Hollywood cast are experiencing in the far west Texas tourist enclave of Marfa while filming the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthyís 2005 novel No Country for Old Men. The Coen Brothers movie is one of two films currently being shot in Marfa, which is not exactly Palm Springs, if you know what I mean. The moviemakers are also discovering that folks in West Texas are not inclined to change their ways to accomodate a couple of film crews:
[I]n some ways Marfaís shrugging attitude baffled the film crews. There are only a handful of restaurants in town, and if youíre hungry past 9 p.m., you have to settle for the local gas stationsí dizzying array of fried food. Both crews asked local restaurants to either open earlier or stay open later, and most declined. ìThatís frustrating,î [one of the producers] acknowledged. ìWeíve been working six-day weeks, and on our one day off ó Sunday ó nothingís open. Everybodyís been very welcoming, but theyíre like, ëWeíre not going to change our ways.í î
Even though both crews brought in hundreds of people, many local business owners found their stay to be prohibitive to their businesses, since Marfaís economy is based on tourism. ìThe movies filled up all the hotels, and they work late and are fed through their caterer,î said Ms. [Maiya] Keck, [a Marfa] restaurateur. ìThis is the first week the hotels havenít been full of movie people, and weíve been so busy. Iím so glad itís back to normal. Now we can go to our coffee shop and not have to wait 45 minutes to get our cappuccino.î
This fascinating Leonard Mlodinow/LA Times special (registration req.) explains why I am utterly incapable of predicting which movies will be successful. In reality, nobody can:
The magic of Hollywood successóhow can one account for it? Were the executives at Fox and Sony who gambled more than $300 million to create the hits “X-Men: The Last Stand” and “The Da Vinci Code” visionaries? Were their peers at Warner Bros. who green-lighted the flop “Poseidon,” which cost $160 million to produce, just boneheads?
The 2006 summer blockbuster season is upon us, one of the two times each year (the other is Christmas) when a film studio’s hopes for black ink are decided by the gods of movie fortuneónamely, you and me. Americans may not scurry with enthusiasm to vote for our presidents, but come summer, we do vote early and often for the films we love, to the tune of about $200 million each weekend. For the people who make the movies, it’s either champagne or Prozac as a river of green flows through Tinseltown, dragging careers with it, sometimes for a happy, wild ride, sometimes directly into a rock.
But are the rewards (and punishments) of the Hollywood game deserved, or does luck play a far more important role in box-office success (and failure) than people imagine?
We all understand that genius doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s seductive to assume that success must come from genius. As a former Hollywood scriptwriter, I understand the comfort in hiring by track record. Yet as a scientist who has taught the mathematics of randomness at Caltech, I also am aware that track records can deceive.
That no one can know whether a film will hit or miss has been an uncomfortable suspicion in Hollywood at least since novelist and screenwriter William Goldman enunciated it in his classic 1983 book “Adventures in the Screen Trade.” If Goldman is right and a future film’s performance is unpredictable, then there is no way studio executives or producers, despite all their swagger, can have a better track record at choosing projects than an ape throwing darts at a dartboard.
That’s a bold statement, but these days it is hardly conjecture: With each passing year the unpredictability of film revenue is supported by more and more academic research.
Read the entire highly entertaining article. The money quote comes from Art DeVany, who really should have been an expert witness for the plaintiffs in Disney-Ovitz:
“Today’s Hollywood executives all act like wimps,” [DeVany] says. “They don’t control their budgets. They give the actors anything they want. They rely on the easy answers, so they try to mimic past successes and cave in to the preposterous demands of stars. My research shows you don’t have to do that. It’s just an easy way out, an illusion.”
“[A] careful study reveals that no strategy the studios devise is going to give them any kind of advantage at all. So any studio executive getting paid more than the salary of a comparable executive at your local dairy is getting paid too much.”
Larry Ribstein, who knows a thing or two about the movie business and the way in which it portrays business, comments on the article here.
Don’t miss this Susan Dominus/NY Sunday Times profile of actor Rip Torn, who was born and raised in the Texas Hill Country and studied acting in the mid-1950’s at the University of Texas under the noted Shakespearean professor B. Iden Payne.
Although Torn is better known these days for his character roles in such mainstream comedy films as Men in Black and Dodgeball, I maintain that his defining role was as the despicable country-western singing star, Maury Dann, in the 1972 cult classic, Payday. In that film — which is not carried by Netflix and is somewhat difficult to find — Torn’s character plumbs the depths of human depravity while being indulged every step of the way by the people who are dependent on him for their livelihood. Marlon Brando won the Academy Award that year for his memorable performance as Don Corleone in The Godfather, but in my view, Torn’s performance as Maury Dann in Payday was even better.
Former Houstonian Randy Quaid, the fine character actor who is a product of Sidney Berger‘s outstanding theatre department at the University of Houston, is making news these days in the courtroom — he is suing the producers of the recent hit movie Brokeback Mountain for $10 million in damages for misleading him to contribute his talent to the film in a supporting role. Here is the Variety article on the lawsuit.
According to Variety, Quaid — the grizzled ranch boss character in the movie who brought the tragic lovers Jack and Ennis together — alleges that the Brokeback producers misled him into thinking that the movie was just an “art” film with little chance of generating any profits:
Defendants were engaging in a ‘movie laundering’ scheme designed to obtain the services of talent such as Randy Quaid on economically unfavorable art film terms for a picture that, in reality, had studio backing and would be exploited using traditional studio marketing and distribution techniques,” the lawsuit states. […]
Quaid is asking to be awarded $10 million, the amount the lawsuit suggests he would have received had Focus been upfront about its intentions for “Brokeback,” which has grossed nearly $160 million worldwide.
“Randy Quaid is an instantly recognizable household name and much-admired actor on the world’s stage with a worldwide box office total of nearly $2 billion. His likeness, talent and name are worth millions of dollars and are solely his property,” the lawsuit states. […]
According to the suit, Lee told Quaid during a meeting that “we can’t pay anything, we have very little money, everyone is making a sacrifice to make this film.
The new movie Glory Road — the story about the 1966 National Championship Texas Western University basketball team — opens this weekend, and the story of that great team reminded me of my late father‘s use of basketball to teach me one of my life’s most valuable lessons.
In 1966, I was a 13 year-old basketball-consumed youngster in the somewhat sheltered existence of Iowa City, Iowa, a lovely midwestern college town where the University of Iowa is located. That season, the NCAA Basketball Tournament’s Mideast Regional was in Iowa City and my father graciously decided to let me tag along with him to the tournament games. Little did I know that part of my father’s purpose in doing so was to expose me to one of the most intimidating examples of racism that I would experience during my youth.
The four teams playing in the Mideast regional that year were Michigan (the Big 10 champ and one of the Iowa Hawkeyes’ arch-rivals), Kentucky, Dayton and Western Kentucky. My father was a native of Louisville, Kentucky, so he had always followed UK basketball, although he was partial to his alma mater Louisville and to Iowa after watching Big 10 sporting events for many years while teaching medicine at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. As a big basketball fan, I knew all about Kentucky basketball and its legendary coach Adolph Rupp, but that did little to prepare me for the sociological experience that was about to take place in the old Iowa Fieldhouse over that weekend in 1966.
You see, each of the teams in that regional except Kentucky was integrated, and it became clear from the moment I set foot in the hot, dusty arena that the antipathy of racism was about ready to boil over at almost any point. As Kentucky defeated Dayton and Michigan beat Western Kentucky in the semi-final games, many of the numerous Kentucky fans openly hurled insults at the black players for the other teams. Moreover, most of the Kentucky fans refused to cheer for the neighboring Western Kentucky team in its semi-final game against Michigan because of the presence of black players on the Western Kentucky squad. Rupp — who was a daunting and imposing figure on the sideline — didn’t even attempt to hide his contempt for the black players of opposing teams. Inasmuch as the Iowa baskeball teams that I had followed had already been integrated with black players, I had never experienced anything close to the seething impulses of racism that were palpable in the Iowa Fieldhouse that Friday evening.
Throughout that entire evening and the following Saturday, my father never mentioned anything to me about the acrimonious atmosphere in the Fieldhouse. However, as Michigan — with its star black players Cazzie Russell and Oliver Darden — took on the all-white Kentucky team in the Mideast Regional final game on Saturday night, there was no doubt that my father and I were pulling for Michigan to pull the upset over Kentucky. Alas, Michigan lost a close game to UK in that regional final, which set up Kentucky’s journey to the Final Four that season and its eventual loss to that special Texas Western team in the National Championship game. My father and I took great pleasure the night of that championship game in seeing the mighty Rupp and his UK team brought to their knees by an unknown underdog from far West Texas, and I have felt an affinity for that Texas Western team ever since.
While golfing together many years later, I asked my father why he had said nothing to me about the open expressions of racism that we saw and heard during that weekend of basketball in 1966. He looked at me and — fully cognizant of my youthful disdain for Michigan — replied with a wry smile:
“There was nothing to say. When I saw that you were pulling for Michigan, I knew you had figured it out.”
You’ve probably heard by now about Brokeback Mountain, the new movie based on the Annie Proulx book about how a secret homosexual relationship between two cowboys plays out over the years. Inasmuch as Larry McMurtry — author of the incomparable Lonesome Dove novel and later mini-series — helped write the screenplay for Brokeback, that fact and the generally strong initial reviews are good enough to prompt me to include the film in my holiday movie-going.
But even if Brokeback does not sound like your cup of tea, don’t miss this clever review of the film by a gay man trying to reassure heterosexual males about the film’s merit, which leads me to believe that this recent overheard conversation is taking place in many other places around the country in addition to New York City.
Movie critic Roger Ebert has posted this “most-hated movies” column on his website, and it’s an entertaining read. Inasmuch as I have been spared the chore of watching most of the films noted, it’s hard to argue with his choices. However, even though it has been overrated generally, isn’t it a bit harsh to include The Usual Suspects on this list?
Everything is not so comfortable these days in the Shire.
Peter Jackson, Oscar-winning director of the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy, is suing Time Warner subsidiary New Line Cinema, the company that financed and distributed the three movies, for at least $100 million in connection New Line Cinema’s handling of revenues from the “Fellowship of the Ring” movie in the trilogy.
In essence, Mr. Jackson is claiming in the lawsuit that New Line did not offer the subsidiary rights to such things as “Lord of the Rings” books, DVD’s and merchandise to the open market and, thus, sold them to affiliated companies for far less than fair market value. And in typical Hollywood style, the gloves are already off in the litigation, as the following quote about the portly Mr. Jackson from one of New Line’s lawyers reflects:
A litigator for New Line, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is working on this lawsuit, said the money paid to Mr. Jackson so far is in line with the contract he signed.
“Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker who did the impossible on ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ” this lawyer said. “But there’s a certain piggishness involved here. New Line already gave him enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it’s still not enough for him.”
Mr. Jackson has received about $200 million to date from the Rings trilogy, which was produced for about $285 million and has produced over $4 billion in retail sales from worldwide film exhibition, home video, soundtracks, merchandise and television showings. New Line has made over $1 billion in net profits from the trilogy.
This NY Times article interviews Bruce A. Williamson, the former Duke Energy executive who the Dynegy, Inc. board brought in to restructure (some would say liquidate) the company following the economic fallout in the energy trading industry resulting from the company’s failed bid for Enron and Enron’s bankruptcy in late 2001. Previous posts are here and here regarding Dynegy’s settlement of claims at least indirectly related to its Enron bid.
The entire interview is mildly interesting and certainly further evidence for the widespread rumors in the business community that Dynegy is for sale. However, Mr. Williamson’s observation about life after Enron is priceless:
Q. Yes. What’s the mood like [in Houston after Enron]?
A. If you’re in the oil upstream exploration and production, there’s a lot of money coming in. The biggest concern the upstream companies have is where to go from there. What do they do with the money? They’re running out of places they want to go to explore.
The power merchants, and that includes ourselves and Reliant, El Paso, Calpine, Duke, are all recovering and have all been inwardly focused for the past two and a half years. I think broadly in the community in Houston, it goes in waves. Enron sort of dies down and then something rears its head up and washes it back in the news.
The Enron movie came out at the River Oaks Theater, literally a few blocks from where Ken Lay lives, and that was quite an event. One person – a board member that I will keep nameless – told me he hadn’t been to a movie like this since he was 12 and went to see “Hopalong Cassidy.” Someone would come on the screen and people would boo and hiss and throw popcorn.