Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business

by Lynda Obst

  “Then we did a little shoot up in the North Atlantic to get the stuff that bookends the movie. Three months before we started principal photography, I was told that someone spiked the soup with LSD. That’s not a normal call to get as head of a studio.”

  “Seriously?” I asked. Oh, God, I thought, how horrible that must have been for everyone. I vaguely remembered news accounts of a bunch of cast and crew members being taken to the hospital with hallucinations.

  “You go through the playbook, LSD in the soup of the crew isn’t in there,” Peter said, nodding his head.

  “No, it certainly is not,” I said. “I’ve never heard of that happening before or since.”

  “Everything that could go wrong went wrong, and yet I kept coming back to, I love this movie. That’s the sense in which you believe your gut. It was a fantastic learning experience for me because first, it made me fearless, like, ‘Bring it on. It can’t get any worse than this.’ And second, it made me say, ‘I really believe in it, go for it!’ It turned out that the reasons I believed in it were the reasons that the movie worked. I found it incredibly interesting, I found it deeply moving, I found it exciting.”

  The picture became the biggest-grossing film of all time. And why? Remember the key thing Peter said.

  “The DVD business is not coming back again,” he told me. “But the international market will still grow.” And grow it has, becoming king of the box office, and its main determinant. The tipping point was Titanic. That boat not only historically crashed into icebergs, but it conquered new lands that had never seen a Hollywood movie before. And this changed everything.

  *

  1. Though now, after the hacking scandal, we shall see.

  2. Three years before his FX comedy show, Louie—my only excuse.

  SCENE THREE

  HAVE YOUR POPCORN WITH SOME CHOPSTICKS

  How the Rest of the World Came to Rule America’s Movie Choices

  WATCH A MARKET EMERGE BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES

  Jim Gianopulos, now chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, opened the two biggest-grossing movies internationally in history, Titanic and Avatar. Referring to James Cameron, he says that’s “just hanging with Jim.” He is a modest, grounded, smiling, Buddha kind of man. He raised a daughter on his own, and when you’re with him, you wish you were her. But don’t mistake kindness for weakness with Jim: He is a brilliant strategist, and Fox’s phenomenal success worldwide is no accident.

  I had no idea that Jim had actually been part of what ultimately amounted to one of the biggest changes our industry had ever seen, if not the biggest. He watched a new market emerge before his eyes. It was of course due to Titanic, the game changer.

  Jim was head of Fox’s international division when I worked there over a decade before. We recently spent a long afternoon discussing how the international market has come to drive the movie business in the New Abnormal, a very different situation from what prevailed when he and I worked together, though Jim’s position as head of the international division was clearly vital even back then. We talked about Fox’s role in spotting and exploiting the international side of things early.

  Star TV, the international satellite television network that Rupert Murdoch started, was like the media equivalent of Seward’s Folly at the time. “What!? You’re buying a what? And it’s a satellite thing?” Jim laughed. “And of course it was an enormous, huge financial success, and it now covers most of the globe in scope. That’s something that has been a mantra here for twenty-odd years.”1

  Jim’s rise has been exciting to watch. He was first promoted to cochairman with Tom Rothman, Fox’s longtime president under Peter Chernin, when Chernin became a producer. But when in September of 2012 it was announced that Rothman’s contract was not being renewed, Fox made Gianopulos the sole chairman and CEO of the studio, overseeing production as well. It is a testament to his talent, his value to Fox and the primacy of the international audience that Jim got the whole enchilada.

  I sat in Jim’s now much bigger office and marveled about how things had changed so much since we had worked together in the Old Abnormal. Back then we never took international into the equation when we decided what we wanted to develop. I asked him about the growing influence of the international market on the selection of the movies we are making now.

  “Those of us who have been in the business for a while see it as a fundamental fact. We [the United States] are five percent of the world market. Ninety-five percent of the ticket buyers are out there. It does not take a lot of math to tell you that’s where the future and the opportunities are. More and more time and focus has been devoted to how we engage these people, how we make sure our product travels.”

  “You guys have had to change the least,” I said.

  “Part of it was my background. But most of it was the parent company. Rupert was always a global adventurer, you know.”

  We smiled.

  Jim first introduced me to the concept of “the rest of the world” being part of the movie business by promising me he was going to sell my Sandra Bullock/Harry Connick, Jr., dramedy Hope Floats “door to door”—from territory to territory around the world—because he loved it so much, despite the “international” turnoff of Connick’s cowboy hat in the poster. It was a rule of thumb that movies with what movie people call “dust”—i.e., westerns, or movies in the dusty hinterlands—never worked abroad. Why this is, we don’t really know. In the old studio days we exported our classic westerns. But in the modern movie business, the mere presence of either “dust” or cowboy hats—or horses, for that matter—is thought to make a picture dead on arrival, even if it isn’t a western. Our movie was a romantic comedy that took place in a small Texas town, in which Sandy’s character returns home to her mom after being dumped on TV by her husband and is then pursued by Harry’s character, who has always loved her. Small-town Texas with a cowboy hat on the poster looked dusty enough to be a bomb overseas.

  But that was before Fox revamped the campaign and repositioned it for the global audience, sans dust. And against all predictions, the movie made some money abroad. Very few movies play well in Tokyo, Berlin and Denver, but not New York and San Francisco! Then and there, Jim became my international guru.

  • • •

  When I started making movies in the Old Abnormal, international counted for 20 percent of the business. By 2008, when I left Fox, it had come to count for 50 percent. In the New Abnormal, for reasons you will see shortly, it has evolved into an astonishing 70/30 ratio, soon to careen to 80/20. The model has turned upside down. It was obvious I needed my guru to explain how this happened, and why so rapidly.

  Jim Cameron had pushed the frontiers, and without knowing it helped create a vital emerging market, as Gianopulos related:

  “I said to Cameron, ‘Here are the cities where everybody wants you to appear on this publicity campaign … are you up for it? You know we have to go to fifteen countries. I will join you for some of them, but not all. You’ve got to do it.’

  “ ‘Okay,’ he said to me. ‘But do you make any money in Russia?’

  “ ‘No’ I said. ‘Why?’ I mean, this was 1997.

  “ ‘Can we go anyway?’

  “ ‘Sure, I guess so. But are we going to do all the other cities on the tour?’ ”

  Gianopulos had to have that commitment first. It was key to the success of the international release. Doing publicity only in Russia was the sound of one hand clapping.

  “ ‘Yeah, oh, yeah, no problem,’ he promised me. ‘But can we go to Russia?’ Cameron kept asking.

  “So, what could I say?” Gianopulos said to me with that you-can’t-say-no-to-a-thousand-pound-gorilla-you-love look. “The real reason he wanted to go was because he is a man of his word, despite Cameron always going over budget …” We laughed in mutual admiration of Cameron’s obsessiveness.

  “He is a man of integrity, and a commitment is a commitment,” Gianopulos continued. “Jim had become very friendly wi
th the Russian sailors on the research vessel on which he went down to the Titanic. And when they completed their shoot, he told them, ‘When this movie is finished, I’m going to bring it here and I’m going to show it to you.’ Well, it turned out the guys weren’t in Moscow, they were in Kaliningrad, and despite all the years that I knew international, I had no idea where the fuck that was. It turns out it’s a little tiny port that gives Russia access to the Baltic Sea. I think it’s actually part of Poland. And I was very worried. Because this is after weeks of having been tortured by Jim about the quality of the theaters, about the quality of the projections; every print had to be pristine, everything had to be impeccable, as he is. This is one of the things that make him such a great and devoted filmmaker. So when we decided to show it in Kaliningrad, I called the London office, which patched us in to Russia. I asked them, ‘Is there a theater in this place?’ ”

  Then Gianopulos continued this conversation first in a funny Russian accent, imitating the man who ran the theater in Kaliningrad, then switching to his own voice.

  “ ‘Yes, there’s a theater, but it’s kind of more like an auditorium.’

  “ ‘Okay, well, is it any good?’

  “ ‘Well, it’s okay, but they are fixing it up.’

  “ ‘Great, great, what are they doing?’

  “ ‘They are painting the seats.’

  “ ‘Okay,’ ” Gianopulos said, thinking, This is bad. It’s not going to work. “They were just these wooden, like, Soviet school auditorium seats, so of course we sent a crew in and they put in Dolby sound, and all of these technicians outfitted this auditorium and made it a gift to Kaliningrad.

  “It was really pretty cool. And of course all of Kaliningrad came, and it was a very wonderful, warm moment to see people who had been living under Soviet oppression and denied access to so many films, now hearing it in Dolby.

  “It was an incredible event—to see these sailors who understood their role in the process but also were just so amazed to see this fantastic presentation. And then we went to Moscow, because as long as we were there, what the hell? In Moscow at the time, there was only one state-of-the-art theater. It was built not because the market demanded it, but because Kodak wanted to build a flagship to enhance their brand and their status.

  “So they built this beautiful state-of-the-art theater that was well ahead of the market and well ahead of the audience, and it became the place to go. In Moscow it was like the equivalent of going to the Metropolitan Opera. People would actually dress up, and it was a very sort of elegant place to go regardless of what movie was playing.

  “From that point, because of Titanic, Russia has become one of the biggest markets in the world, and it took not even a decade—closer to five or six years—for the market to open up. It was one of those moments in time, because of glasnost and all the changes in the Soviet Union and all of the investment and capital that became available—it became, and still is, one of the most lucrative markets. It went from nothing to one of the top five markets in five years.”

  As you can see from Jim’s pivotal anecdote, these new markets were and still are being created in real time as their countries’ economies go through epochal transitions. In these vast, formerly communist territories, theaters are opening where none were before, and yuan and rubles are being spent with abandon by former peasant kids wearing 3D glasses as our state-of-the-art special effects blow up creatures and cars in their happy faces.

  This new reality was created by what the economists call “the emerging markets.” My afternoon with Jim Gianopulos showed me how these new markets emerged so quickly, and the long-term impact that emergence was having on our bottom line. Jim began to explain:

  “Here, people go to the movies roughly four to five times a year. In Europe, the average is about two times per year. In places like Japan, it’s once a year. So you can imagine if you took the eighty to ninety million people of Japan and projected them to the level of U.S. moviegoing, you would have five times the market. That’s what’s happening in various parts of the world. That’s what happened in Russia, that’s what happened in India, that’s what happened in China. All of this massive growth continues. What’s really changed, particularly in the last decade, is that whether you call it globalization or the gradual interaction of cultures all over the world, markets have developed to the point that people are enjoying more frequent moviegoing in places where the infrastructure has been built and is being built. China used to be completely closed off. There was nothing. It grew 30 percent last year, and 400 percent over the past five years.”

  This is what our kings are doing tonight. Thinking chopsticks. And caviar.

  • • •

  Brad Grey, the chairman of Paramount, went to Moscow for the first Russian premiere of an American movie, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third and most successful in the action/sci-fi franchise. It is a complicated saga, which I struggled to understand, involving a JFK cover-up of a crash landing on the moon in ’61, why we really went to the moon in ’69, a plot to build a space bridge from Earth to the moon’s dark side (finally destroyed by something called the Control Pillar) and robots called Decepticons planning to dominate Earth. Russians adored it to the tune of $45.1 million. In his speech there in 2011, Grey declared, “Ten years ago, Russia only had a few dozen screens. Now it is enjoying such enormous growth that we think it’s fitting to have the opening of one of our biggest franchises here. Russia is just one of several new markets opening up that are driving most of the demand for our movies.”

  China is another. It is now the second-largest market in the world, and it is predicted to surpass the United States to be number one by the year 2020. It had 11,000 theaters in 2012, and is expected to have 16,000 by 2015. Take this number in. Most of these new theaters are 3D and IMAX theaters, built to play our blockbusters. This has both transformed and cemented trends in the movie business. But the important thing to note is that these emerging markets are now driving the profit engine of the industry where DVD revenue once did. So have your popcorn with some chopsticks, and let’s figure out what we’re likely to see—and not see.

  SAD NEWS ABOUT COMEDY

  Comedy is often said to be a dead dog abroad. It’s basically not a funny situation. The easy reason for the conundrum is that emerging markets (let alone markets with their own comedy tastes—say, France) and Americans do not have the same sense of humor. Humor is local. People like their hilarious indigenous customs, built around their own private jokes. But I have a ridiculous and stubborn Pollyanna streak and am constantly butting my head against these kinds of obstacles, looking for counterexamples, ways around them, loopholes. And arguably, they’ve arrived.

  The successive successes internationally in the past few years of The Hangover parts I and II ($190,161,409 and $327,000,000 respectively) and Bridesmaids ($119,276,798) have broadened the market for broad high-concept comedies, even those starring broads. It has recently become possible to travel a breakout domestic success if it’s a high-concept comedy, so: (1) Easy to get the idea. (2) Not too heavy on the big words or walk-and-talks. (3) Big bawdy “set pieces,” preferably with Mike Tyson and a tiger and/or pooping in a sink. Comedy that doesn’t travel is, as Jim Gianopulos says, “based on wit.” Or “verbal.” Nicht so gut for clever so-called writers. Jim added, “Someone slipping on a banana peel is funny in every culture.”

  WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU LAUGHING ABOUT?

  In America we laugh at movies based on our customs. They could be college movies, prom movies, high school ritual movies or family vacation movies. But national archetype jokes don’t travel. When independent foreign sales agent Kathy Morgan of KMI tried to sell our huge domestic hit The Wedding Crashers—about two buddies who live off of the joy and food of strangers’ weddings—to Japan, the Japanese buyers were incredulous. “Why crash wedding?!”

  On the other hand, in India, weddings are big business, big culture, big events. Wedding Crashers is being remade in India, where
the idea apparently is funny, because Indians are as obsessed with weddings as we are. Though the specifics of our wedding cultures and senses of humor are wildly different, our obsession with weddings is the same. It is enough to remake this in the vast Indian market somewhere, with its distinct sense of humor. There are pockets of similarities and differences to be exploited and avoided everywhere. For example: Sometimes a movie’s sensibility doesn’t travel twenty-one miles, as in this famous story I heard from Jim Gianopulos and Kathy Morgan and a few others.

  “There was a movie in France a couple of years ago called Welcome to the Sticks. It was a fish-out-of-water story about a guy from Paris who goes to this city in the south of France where he doesn’t understand the local accent. It was hilarious to the French. The movie did a hundred million dollars there!”

  This is an impossibly high number in France—which obviously made everyone think it could travel. So they exported it. First stop: the UK.

  Gianopulos said, “It made ten dollars in the UK, right across the Channel. There was nothing about it they could relate to.”

  WHAT DOESN’T TRAVEL

  • Rule 1: Chemistry on paper does not equal chemistry on-screen.

  Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, two of the very biggest (if not the biggest) international stars, couldn’t save The Tourist, because he looked like a girl and she looked like a boy, though on paper they looked amazing together. The much higher international box office numbers—$210 million, compared to $64 million domestic—couldn’t help the movie break even because it cost so much for its astronomical budget and advertising costs.

  • Rule 2: Sports movies can’t jump—even soccer movies.

  People would rather go to a soccer game than see a movie about one, the better to drink and brawl and riot. Forget baseball, basketball and football; forget the whole thing. This is why it took even a star of the magnitude of Brad Pitt so long to get the movie Moneyball made. Well done, Sony, for not caring and making it anyway!