Schamus makes his home in one of the academy’s most cloistered corners, where film theorists, cultural critics, and philosophers formulate critiques of cinema and capitalism from the detachment afforded by an elite discourse that’s often impenetrable to nonspecialists. They’re usually as far removed from the actual sausage-making of the film industry as they can get, and mostly prefer it that way. But the combination of intellectual enthusiasm, eclectic taste, extremely high executive function, and a roaring appetite for solving complex problems in stimulating company can take a thinking person to strange places.
When the seminar reconvened after the break, Schamus said, “Let’s dive into the Meno,” a dialogue in which Plato and Socrates consider virtue. “The heart of it is the mathematical proof.” He rose from his seat and went to the whiteboard, where he drew figures and scribbled numbers as he worked through the geometry. “You can only get the proof visually,” he concluded, stepping back and gazing at it. Plato may be skeptical about the category of the visual, he said, but “you are confronted with a visual proof that gets you back to the idea embedded in visuality.”
Hands went up all around. A woman said, “So you can’t get to that higher plane without a nudge from daily existence”—and off they went into the Meno, each speaker calling on the next in turn. They got so involved in the discussion that they ended up skipping the film they were scheduled to watch, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.
“I’m in this weird corner of the business,” Schamus told me, “where the capital’s just low enough that the only way to succeed is to throw out the focus groups and make a compelling case that our stuff is different.”
He rides the subway from his apartment near Columbia to the offices of Focus Features, which occupy multiple floors in a building on Bleecker Street. Focus has branches in Los Angeles and London, but most of its 110 employees are in New York. In Schamus’s sunny, high-ceilinged office there are family pictures—he is married to the novelist Nancy Kricorian, and they have two teenage children—and souvenirs from his movies: a Brokeback Mountain throw pillow inscribed with “Love Is a Force of Nature”; a green plastic Hulk fist.
Focus Features is known as a director’s studio. By controlling budgets and preselling international distribution rights to finance productions, Schamus can position artists to make the movies they really want to make, as long as they want to make movies that don’t cost too much and that he can sell. “What we strive for is a genuine alternative voice, but one that speaks to people,” he told me. “We want to get people who are turned away from the mainstream to turn a bit toward it, and those turned toward it to turn a little away.”
In practice, turning a movie toward the mainstream might mean just a small adjustment to the soundtrack. When I was hanging around his office in April, he said on the phone, “They need something to make it smoother. How about a viola, dude?” Or it can mean cutting to conform more tightly to the demands of a genre. Ang Lee told me that after screening an early cut of Brokeback Mountain, he ran into Schamus in the theater’s bathroom. “It was still too long,” Lee said. “James said, ‘Ang, that was great, but it was three hankies and two bladders. My goal is four hankies and one bladder.’” Schamus, whose personal tastes tend toward the forbiddingly arty—no hankies and five bladders, à la Jean Eustache’s post–nouvelle vague navel-gazer The Mother and the Whore, would be fine by him—sometimes finds himself working hard to ensure that a Focus production doesn’t turn out to be the kind of film he loves best.
But he also nudges filmmakers the other way, a little further from the mainstream. Even the indie-est directors, he said, may internalize the demands of the industry and find themselves trying to make the movie they think a studio would want them to make. “There’s so much pressure now, and they get to a point in the process where they start playing defense, worrying too much about trying to be commercial,” he said. “So I find I’m constantly telling our filmmakers that it’s my pressure, not theirs. Relax, play offense and go make your movie. I have my notes and ideas, and yes, we need movies we can sell, but we need good movies to sell, and fear isn’t conducive to good filmmaking.”
Playing offense artistically often means letting a film violate some Hollywood expectations, letting it be a little slower or more abstract or bookish or otherwise alien-seeming than what’s in the multiplex—in short, weirder. “Weird” is one of his keywords, a crucial element of his business model.
Of course, Focus movies aren’t high-art provocations like Gertrud or the kind of avant-garde films that Schamus shows in class: Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity, Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving. The indie formula, which can be as narrow as the action-movie formula, calls for just enough weirdness to distinguish a movie from standard Hollywood fare but not so much that it slides out of the realm of commercial cinema and into the margins shared by the art film and mutant bottom-feeding forms of pulp cinema too bizarre to reach a mass audience.
David Bordwell, the distinguished film scholar, says of Schamus, “He’s very good at figuring out the sweet spot, that middle range where independent cinema has to be. Ideally you have some stars, strong content, often from good books, and it needs to be offbeat enough to seem fresh, but it has to be still recognizably part of a familiar cinematic tradition, something challenging but not too challenging.”
The moderate weirdness that puts a Focus movie in the sweet spot bespeaks an ethos as well as a bottom-line strategy. “There’s a certain subversiveness at work in Schamus,” Eugene Hernandez, a founder of Indiewire.com, says. “With Brokeback and Milk, for instance, there’s more to it than an acclaimed film that has Oscar potential.” In each case, Focus got the most out of a committed gay audience while marketing the film as a widely accessible story with a universal theme. Schamus scrupulously avoided displays of righteousness, but he clearly enjoyed doing great box office and winning awards while putting homosexual characters center stage in otherwise traditional renditions of the Western and the biopic.
Schamus, who is forthright about his lefty politics, discounts any crude ideological intent in making queer movies, or in, say, distributing a road movie about the young Che Guevara (The Motorcycle Diaries). Rather, he says, he is drawn—and audiences who think of themselves as outside the mainstream are drawn—to stories of outsiders. “The story of America, of Western culture, is often the story of queer culture, of being Jewish”—Schamus is Jewish—“of being outsiders and refugees who find a place that is the not-place.” His personal experience, he says, reinforces his taste for such stories. “I grew up basically covered with psoriasis,” he said, “and I skipped grades, so I do tend to gravitate to the kid in the corner, who, incidentally, is most likely to grow up to be one of our directors.”
But, he insisted, “if I tried to run a studio on the principle of making movies that had certain gender politics, or any politics, that I approved of, we’d go out of business fast. When I’m here,” as CEO, “I’m solving problems in the culture business, cutting trailers and doing promotions and figuring out audiences. I put things together all day. Then, when I go home at night, I can take them apart” as an academic.
There is a middle way; think of it as the moment of perfect overlap at twilight. He said, “If we can make it profitable to use the common language of film, a language that addresses a public, to say something worth saying that was previously unsaid or unsayable, then those things get said.” That such movies have to turn a profit in order to exist, a condition of truly public utterance in a capitalist society, just adds another element to the puzzle, one more rule to the game.
The son of lawyers, Schamus grew up in Southern California and attended Hollywood High School and a couple of colleges before graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, and going on to graduate school in English there. While working on his dissertation, he moved to New York City and drifted into the movie business, starting out, he said, as “the oldest production assistant on earth.”
The disserta
tion fell by the wayside as he teamed up with Ted Hope to form Good Machine. They billed themselves as the no-budget kings of New York; their motto was “The budget is the aesthetic.” Hope, an advocate of radically decentralized media democracy, was the revolutionary; David Linde, who came over in 1997 from Miramax International (and eventually went on to be co-chairman of Universal Pictures), was the business guy; and Schamus was supposed to be the avant-gardist, the intellectual, but his love of solving multifactor problems awakened the manager within.
During his Good Machine period, Schamus also began solving problems for Ang Lee—helping him stretch a grant from the government of Taiwan to make the Chinese-American family drama Pushing Hands, fixing lines of dialogue. Schamus was soon producing and writing Lee’s movies. “I know he thinks a lot about what’s the best for me to do,” Lee told me, “and I keep that in mind, even when we disagree. He only acts as much or as little as I need him to.”
Lee also began to rely on Schamus for fresh inspirations. “After Eat Drink Man Woman, I was out of stories to tell,” Lee said. “With Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, we started taking chances on new things.” Schamus told me, “I have to write a script that scares him enough to make trying to make it worthwhile. They’re very underwritten, and he has to figure them out as he goes along. So he spends the whole time asking me, ‘Why? Why are we making this movie?’”
Schamus also steers his partner through the eternal dance of turning toward and away from the mainstream. Lee recalled, “I was cutting the bamboo sequence,” a celebrated fight scene in Crouching Tiger. “One night I pick up the phone to talk to James; I was thinking a lot about Hamlet, and I was very excited. He said, ‘Remember you’re doing a movie in the same genre as Drunken Master. You’re not doing Drunken Hamlet.’”
There was another writing problem, in an even more formally constrained genre, that Schamus set himself to solve. When Berkeley invited him to give a commencement address eight years ago, he decided that it would be a good opportunity to finish his incomplete PhD. Dusting off his dissertation, he carved out extra research and writing time from his schedule, pulling all-nighters when he had to. “My dissertation committee was really selfless with their time, but they were tough,” Schamus said. He panicked, briefly, when they rejected an entire chapter. “They were right, it was tangential, but my rear end was hanging out. I had set it up so failure was not an option. I had to give the address. My parents were coming. My kids were coming.” He got it done in the end and marched with the other graduates in 2003.
In early September, Schamus spent a weekend at the Toronto Film Festival, where a Focus Features release, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, had its world premiere. “What I want to do while I’m here is go see all the films that almost everybody else despises,” he told me. “But that’s not what my business is.” What he did in Toronto, mostly, was sit for two days in a plush hotel suite and receive small groups of executives in the indie trade, many with European accents.
The meetings were occasions for familiar trading partners to renew connections and extend feelers. They all gushed relentlessly about how brilliant and moving their films were and about the genius of the talent in their employ. This can be hard to take after a while, but the indie-movie sector is an enthusiast’s business, and Schamus isa natural enthusiast. He can get excited about all sorts of things: the aesthetic theory of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, E.T., Scandinavian art cinema (in June he gave a talk in Oslo at a symposium on Liv Ullmann and was relieved when Ullmann laughed at the funny parts), the ultragreen house in upstate New York he built in 2000, good food and fine wine and his studio’s movies.
Schamus let his visitors crow about their recent successes and current projects, and he took his turn to tout his slate of coming releases, among them Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere; Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre; Lone Scherfig’s One Day, a romantic drama starring Anne Hathaway; Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, a Roman frontier adventure starring Channing Tatum; and Joe Wright’s Hanna.
Schamus also talked up a film about Fela Kuti, the Nigerian Afrobeat king, that he has in long-term development. “It’s not a biopic,” he said. “It’s experimental in form,” with long movements based on Fela’s rambling songs. “I don’t do passion projects, but this could be a Battle of Algiers, on that level.” He had lined up the British video artist and director Steve McQueen to direct it, and the Nigerian poet Chris Abani was writing the script while Schamus tried to make the budget work. Filming in Nigeria would give the right look, but Ghana might be easier, and perhaps they could shoot interiors in South Africa. “It’s too expensive,” he said, “but we’ll figure it out.”
Schamus accepted a lot of compliments from fellow executives and filmmakers in Toronto. Focus had come to town on a roll, at a high point of its very good year. Creative promotion of Babies had paid off, and The Kids Are All Right, which Schamus described to his staff as “the third of three sperm-donor movies out there,” had just crossed the $20 million mark, the industry’s most successful limited-platform release of the year. (A platform release, the opposite of a wide release, opens first in a few selected theaters and then gradually expands to more on the strength of word of mouth, reviews, and judiciously adjusted marketing.)
And The American, a coolly meditative spy film directed by the Dutch photographer and music video auteur Anton Corbijn and starring George Clooney, was number one at the domestic box office. “It’s a big deal for us,” Schamus said. “As of today we broke $20 million, going into its second weekend. Even if the film fell off a cliff into an abyss we’d be way ahead, and it’s not doing that.”
Schamus was perversely proud that CinemaScore, which predicts how a film will do at the box office on the basis of exit polls of moviegoers, had given The American a D-minus. “On our wide releases there’s an almost inverse relationship between audience polls and success,” he said. “CinemaScore polls at outlying theaters, and it works very well for movies made for the broadest mainstream audience, but it’s been proven again and again that the metrics become nearly useless if you make something weird. We take the metrics as no more than a hermeneutic puzzle.”
For Schamus, the key to the puzzle was that The American, a rigorously formulaic genre movie composed and paced like an art film, was weird enough to provoke strong reactions. While an A from CinemaScore was always welcome, he said, “a B or B-minus is ‘eh.’ I’d rather have a C-minus or D, knowing that people have strong reactions. It’s OK if a lot of people don’t like it, as long as the people who love it are spreading word of mouth with passion, getting others excited.” Focus can aim to pique the interest of the minority of moviegoers who think of themselves as independent types; big studios like Universal have to please most of the rest or go broke.
The artistic cherry atop the ice cream sundae of happy business news during Schamus’s stay in Toronto came when he got word from Italy that Somewhere, which opens in December as Focus Features’ final release of the year, had won the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival—an honor also won by two Lee-Schamus films, Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution.
The only shadow on the otherwise glorious weekend was that It’s Kind of a Funny Story, an understated tale of a suicidal teenager’s transformative stay in an adult mental ward, seemed too slight to prosper. The premiere was well received, and reviews were kind, but it went on to disappoint at the box office.
In Toronto, I asked Schamus, as I had been asking periodically for months, about the relationship between running a studio and being a scholar. As usual, he resisted combining his vocations into one overarching project. He said, “I don’t want to be saying, ‘My interest in property and privacy informs my work at Focus, and vice versa.’ When I’m at the office, I do the job.” We were in a car at the time, passing bus-stop posters for The American that featured a dark-suited Clooney running with a tasteful little gun in his hand. “The job has to be done under certain conditions, and they’re dynamic, and I have to a
djust.”
It’s true, though, that a main element of the dynamic conditions in which he does business is the relationship between art and commerce, which is also a principal focus of his academic interests. “It is all about intellectual property,” he conceded: he’s all about how ideas circulate in markets. He’s interested in the conditions of possibility in which creative people work—from the mechanics of making a living to the philosophical questions raised by setting aside a category of commodities called Art to the prospects for saying the previously unsaid by using the common vocabulary of word and image (which is where Plato comes in).
Usually Schamus shifts from making culture for profit to analyzing the results of process, but there are times when the two roles flow together. One was when Good Machine pitched Todd Solondz’s black comedy Happiness to studios. As Schamus described the experience, “I would go in there and say, ‘It’s about subjectivity in late capitalism, the overproduction of desire. We spend about one-third of our GDP convincing ourselves to buy what we make. What Todd’s talking about is desire when it’s unmanageable within the system, unattached to something you can buy.’ It was bought by October Films, which had been bought by Universal, which had been bought by Seagram. They ended up freaking out and giving the movie back to us.”
Schamus also employs high theory as equipment for living in a book he is writing, My Wife Is a Terrorist: Lessons in Storytelling from the Department of Homeland Security, which will be published by Harvard University Press. There is a government surveillance file on Nancy Kricorian because she is active in Code Pink, a women’s antiwar group. Using as his primary text a heavily redacted copy of her file, secured after an ACLU suit, Schamus employs speech-act theory, narratology, and other interpretive frameworks to plumb the meanings of an opaque document consisting mostly of blacked-out pages. Along the way he considers how the culture industry and intellectuals might respond to the state’s role as “the most prolific and influential producer of popular narrative.”
Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories Page 6
