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

by Lynda Obst

  Twilight opened at $69.6 million, stunning the industry but not its fans or Lionsgate or Nancy Kirkpatrick. They knew they had Definite Interest Intensity of a scale that would drown out other movies in the market that weekend (and many others to come). No one was talking about anything other than Twilight, even if he or she didn’t know what it was.

  It happened to me on a much smaller scale when guys were targeted to go see Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan in Shanghai Knights, a comedy action adventure with kung fu, which came on dead even with the tracking of How to Lose a Guy two weeks before it opened. It turned out that the guys didn’t have to see their movie on the first weekend or the first night. But the AppleBerries and their dates to whom Paramount had targeted our movie had a growing need to see How to Lose a Guy because the buzz and word of mouth were starting to grow. (Believe me, it wasn’t the reviews.) It was a great campaign, and Paramount, knowing how highly we’d tested (95), held a national sneak preview the week before it opened. That sneak carried us to number one, and the girls for that weekend beat the guys. By the way, when that happens, amnesia sweeps the studio nation three weeks later. Can they come up with something to measure that, the nonchanging studio psychographic? Okay, Lynda, enough.

  You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink, as the cliché goes. Good marketing can lead all us equines to water. But if we don’t like the movie, the velocity of opinion travels much faster than marketing’s ability to paper it over. In the Old Abnormal, this wasn’t true. The studios could get a full weekend in before the second-weekend drop from word of mouth kicked in.

  Today, buzz is quantum. A thousand people will each tell a thousand people what they think of a movie opening in three thousand theaters simultaneously. They will BBM it, tweet it, Facebook it, and before you know it, it’s around the world in sixty seconds. No matter how many TV spots feature the three good reviews, word of mouth from your six closest friends always wins. So the efficacy of marketing stops at midnight opening night.

  This is what happened with the collapse of Hulk, directed by Ang Lee, in 2003. He had just directed the phenomenally innovative Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and had directed the critically acclaimed The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility before that. So there was great excitement for a fresh take on this tragic tale of a geneticist who suffers an accident that turns him into a raging green monster whenever he gets angry. Hulk opened huge. Universal’s marketing could not have done better.

  Says Bruzzese, “Its DII was off the charts. It had the highest levels of ‘first choice’ ever. But most everyone who wanted to see the movie saw it between Wednesday and Friday of its first long weekend. On June twentieth, Hulk opened at $62.1 million! The idea of an arty director on a comic-book movie was initially attracting everyone—an exciting idea, not unlike putting Christopher Nolan on Batman.”

  But perhaps it was too arty. Word of mouth rapidly overpowered the drumbeat of marketing, and within milliseconds it seemed that everyone heard that the movie was slow.

  Vinnie said, “It dropped an astonishing seventy-seven percent after its opening weekend, leaving the entire industry slack-jawed.”

  It turned out to be a four-quadrant movie for no one. The studios can aim for a huge bull’s-eye on the target, and the marketing wizards can hit it perfectly. But what the exit polls will tell you as they continue testing on the first weekend is whether the audience will recommend it to their friends.

  These exit polls indicate whether a movie will underperform, overperform or meet the standard model, just like in elections. Some movies are review-proof—the audience loves them even if the reviewers don’t. But what the exit polls ultimately reveal, in the final call-and-response with the audience, is whether the movie has playability: whether the audience likes it and will recommend it to friends. Sometimes that’s about whether the movie is “good”—but really it’s about whether it’s embraced by the audience, good or not. Good is subjective.

  The thing about playability is this: No matter how churchy state has gotten, and how statey church has gotten, production makes the films, not marketing. Production picks the producers, the directors and the writers. Marketing can advise on what film to make, but not on how to make it. If the film doesn’t play, is a stinker or the audience rejects it, marketing looks to production, though marketing historically pays with someone getting fired. That’s because it’s really hard to open a stinker when word of mouth is so far ahead of you that marketing cannot be effective. (Or, as in the case of Hulk, when it is no longer effective.)

  Because production is more powerful, marketing often takes the rap for a flop, and that’s how it goes. In rare circumstances, however, a great marketing whiz can open a lousy movie, and whoa, are these guys suddenly valuable!

  Sony is thrilled with what Jeff Blake has been able to do with Adam Sandler’s minor opuses like Jack and Jill, in which Sandler plays both his character and his character’s incredibly annoying twin sister, Jill. It opened to $23 million in November 2011, despite nobody seeming to like it. (It scored a remarkable 3 on Rotten Tomatoes, an influential review blog, out of a possible 100.)

  There aren’t many people who can do this. He also opened The Social Network with a cutting-edge campaign with an ad line that was almost McLuhanesque in flavor: “We Are the Social Network.” We were all part of the opening; it was an online, around-the-world Event. He took an original filmmaker-driven biopic (David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin) and turned it into an Academy-contending social-networking phenomenon unto itself.

  Then there is Fox Searchlight, Fox’s lean, small and very exciting classics division, run by Nancy Utley, who was first its marketing head and is now president of the whole thing. She made Slumdog Millionaire the belle of the Oscars in 2008, beating the bigger and better-financed Paramount entry, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a David Fincher–directed love story about a boy who ages backward. Searchlight is a perennial Oscar contender, as it proved again in 2011 with The Descendants. Two of the best studio marketeers I know are now working together at Fox: Tony Sella and Oren Aviv, formerly president of marketing, then production, at Disney. Aviv both conceived of Disney’s hit National Treasure and devised its campaign, as well as running the early Pirates of the Caribbean campaigns. Aviv’s successes earned him the more volatile job of president of production at Disney, where he ran into politics and then ended up back in marketing with Sella at Fox. Heads of marketing becoming heads of studios could become a trend, or the marketers are so powerful where they are, they will be encouraged to stay in their jobs and given more and more money, like free agents. With rare exceptions, these talents tend to stay where they are, under lock and key, with escalating salaries and ever bigger offices. They attract producers and directors, who, over time, come to recognize these new moguls as allies in the trenches and as one of the reasons to pick a studio. They would like their movies to be seen as well as made.

  • • •

  I went to see Vinny Bruzzese again. I wanted to know what to make of all the concentration on marketing. Was it a good thing or a bad thing?

  He referred me back to the questions raised by philosopher Theodor Adorno. This was unexpected, but I always forget that Vinny is a lapsed academic. Fortunately, I remembered Adorno a bit from my undergraduate days: Frankfort School, 1930s, a critic of the culture industry.

  “What about Adorno?” I asked.

  “Does industry gauge what the consumer wants?” Vinny asked. “Or does the industry tell the consumer what it wants?”

  “You tell me,” I said. I figure he had insight from spending weekends on the phone with panicked or elated studio heads.

  “I think the industry tells the audience what it wants,” he said. “The good thing about market research is that it’s an opportunity for the audience to tell the industry what it wants back.”

  “I love that,” I said. “That is audience power.”

  He smiled and added, “And Adorno said there would be a breaking point of fo
rmulaic production.”

  “Have we reached that? Did Adorno predict sequel fatigue? Is that what you mean? Sequels tend to be very formulaic.”

  He nodded affirmatively and said, “Adorno also talked about commodity fetishism: being delighted with something because of how much it costs.”

  “Like a wildly expensive Kelly bag!” I said. “Women wait in lines to get them! Will people go see it just because it’s so big? Like size determines value?”

  Vinny was on a roll. “These products, Adorno said, these commodity fetishes, are characterized by standardization.”

  I remembered some Frankfort School too. “Commodity fetishes” are supposed to give us a good cry and let us feel restored, keeping us politically apathetic. Adorno, the neo-Marxist, was criticizing all entertainment as a distraction from the political—anything that gave us a good cry, such as a great movie like Casablanca or Jules and Jim. These movies could temporarily make us forget our oppression and lift us up. I want this, thank you. But these days, our entertainment diversions rarely even give us a good cry. They are momentary diversions, like the proverbial Chinese meal after which you are still hungry. You can’t remember them by the time you get home.

  The smartest studio people are beginning to recognize this sequel fatigue—this “confounding craving for something different.” But in order to select “something different” and have the guts to make it in the Great Contraction, the studios need to have some confidence that this kind of movie will open. They need talented marketers to create campaigns as thrilling as the movies themselves “to make you think you want to see the movie before you know you do.” The audience needs to want to see it enough to get out of their bedrooms, off the Net, off of Facebook, Words With Friends, fantasy baseball, four-player video games and off their butts and into the theater in droves with their besties. Otherwise, it’s too scary to green-light it, and the industry will cater to the only reliable markets that they have in the wake of the collapse of the DVD market: the ones outside our borders. The international market craves our tentpoles and 3D and does not suffer any fatigue. They are eating up our product with “preawareness.” The rest of the world likes things just the way they are.

  This is why we depend on these new marketing stars who are the keys to breaking out movies that thrill with pure delight, not in how big they are, but in where they take us emotionally. Original movies are now an endangered species, under the marketing wizards’ protection. If they make them, we must come.

  Well before all of these critical trends became clear to me, I had the temerity to leave behind my comfortable home at Fox, where I had been for six years. Most of us who were lucky enough to be making movies inside the system thought that things were just abnormal in the way they had been forever in this land of outsized personalities and ambitions. I left Jim Gianopulos, my guru for international, and Fox’s chairman Peter Chernin, the man I so admired and who at our semiregular lunches could break it all down for me, and set off for new horizons with a bigger deal at the studio around the corner from my house. I couldn’t have guessed that the movie world—as well as the real world—was about to change drastically. Only a few bean counters could foretell a problem at that point. Another thing that I could never have anticipated was that my new studio, famous for its stable leadership, was about to undergo an eight-year upheaval that would make working there akin to working in a MASH unit. And those were the good years, when we knew who was who and what was what.

  *

  1 The first weekend is the studios’ most profitable because of the financial split with the theaters. From then on out, the exhibitors make more.

  SCENE FIVE

  FROM PARAMOUNT TO PARANOIA

  A Personal Odyssey Indeed

  With any luck, this will be the only chapter in the book that will get personal, or mushy, like one of my romantic comedies that my son so avidly dislikes. This will be the only part that you will say is not really objective, or where you can hear the sound of axes grinding. But I choose to speak about my almost nine years at Paramount for a few reasons: It’s where I first started to write this book, and it’s where my journey went awry; in the protagonist’s tale, Joseph Campbell and George Lucas tell us, the hero’s journey is the story. It’s also where I went to seek gold: Part of the lure of Paramount was that first-dollar gross points were offered me by its CEO, Sherry Lansing, for the first time in my career. It had been too long that I worked only for upfront fees and the sheer love of making movies and couldn’t make real profits. Sherry’s desire to see me finally get a bigger piece of the pie was very empowering. So I turned down other offers that look far better now. Hindsight is the most worthless of all varieties of vision.

  During my almost nine-year tenure, I had eight bosses, saw almost all of them fired, suffered through most of their departures, got in the middle of some of their fights and cared for their junior execs as they wept on my couch (one of whom, now a senior exec, no longer returns my calls). Early in his reign, Brad Grey, the last of Paramount’s series of chairmen, was under siege from a media and prosecutorial witch hunt. He disentangled himself, Houdini-like, from what looked like a serious mob scandal but morphed into eventual industry-wide amnesia, to the extent that there is now no sense that any scandal existed at all. Someone went to jail somewhere. Nowhere near Melrose Avenue, where Paramount houses its lot.

  I pitched the same movies to all of my many bosses, made a flop with a hot director and a hit with a cold one and spent way too much time along the way smoking on Paramount’s beautiful lawn with the execs, trading rumors about who was going to be fired. I lived through the writers’ strike on its lot, waving to my friends on the other side of the picket line as I pretended to go to work.

  I began at Paramount under the Jon Dolgen/Sherry Lansing/John Goldwyn regime in 1998. In its early days, this regime was the paradigm of the Old Abnormal at its best. Between Lansing/Jaffe and the producing team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, Paramount was the home of the Old Abnormal high-concept model. Simpson, who had risen through the ranks to become the head of production, was made a producer by the studio in the eighties to accommodate his, let’s say, nontraditional lifestyle—he would arrive in the office when he woke up, which was often after lunch. He was brilliant at story and was considered by many to have given birth to the whole high-concept-movie idea (i.e., can you describe it in a “log line” no longer than a TV Guide description?). The studio packaged him with line producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and the dynamic duo—as they first called themselves—was born. Simpson and Bruckheimer made Eddie Murphy’s breakout hit, Beverly Hills Cop (about guess what?), and two Tom Cruise hits, the naval pilot actioner Top Gun and the car racing hit Days of Thunder; the Michael Douglas bad-husband parable Fatal Attraction; and the “what would you do if someone offered you a million dollars to sleep with your wife?”–premised Indecent Proposal. All of these one-off producer-driven movies embodied Paramount and the Old Abnormal at their high-concept zenith. It was what they were good at and what they were known for.

  Paramount’s women-centered thrillers are still called “Sherry movies” in the industry, after those she made during her producing career—Jodie Foster’s powerful rape-victim trial movie The Accused, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal. Those groundbreaking female “refrigerator movies”—movies you would still be debating when you got home and were reaching for leftovers in your refrigerator—were all about female social issues and empowerment, a hallmark of “Sherry movies.” Often they were, or could be, Newsweek cover stories, as they raised issues of social debate. At the end of Lansing’s reign, “Sherry movies” devolved to “women in jeopardy” thrillers like James Patterson’s Kiss the Girls, in which pretty girls are kidnapped and forced to be subservient or be killed by a sadomasochistic psychopath. Thrillers like these, devoid of social issues, lost their “refrigerator” value.

  Now, under Brad Grey, the eventual winner of the eight-year Paramount power derby, Paramount has emerged
as the consummate New Abnormal studio, with the polar-opposite business strategy it had when I arrived. At the nadir of the Dolgen-Lansing regime, it was last in market share (the percentage of total box office vis-à-vis other studios), and striving for a high mark in profitability through its frugal—one could say risk-averse—business model. By 2001, seven years into his reign, it was number one in market share, with Mission: Impossible (started under Lansing and Goldwyn), Star Trek, Transformers, and Iron Man as its crown-jewel franchises, aimed directly at the emerging international markets (though it was the last studio to make franchises a part of its regular diet), a great triumph. But by 2012, Disney was number one in market share due to the phenomenal success of The Avengers—the number-three worldwide hit of all time—and Paramount had gone from number one to number seven, showing how volatile the market is. It also shows how hard it was to put a slate of tentpoles together for the summer of 2012: Two of its planned summer releases, G.I. Joe: Retaliation and World War Z, a zombie movie starring Brad Pitt, had to be delayed because they weren’t ready on time. Missing the summer definitely makes a huge difference in your market share.

  Despite the heaving and hyperventilating of a topsy-turvy box office race between studios every weekend, Grey’s track record has been strong. His contract was extended to 2015, which will make it a ten-year run, only half of which comprised what the Hindu god Shiva would call “creative destruction.”

  When you think of how far Paramount has traveled, perhaps this saga is less a hero’s journey than a close look at a studio undergoing a gigantic transition, a turning of a battleship. Paramount is a studio with a complicated, brilliant octogenarian named Sumner Redstone holding tightly to its helm. Sumner still likes the ladies, and from what I’ve seen and read of his survival skills,1 he may be immortal. (He says he is.) Always remember a lesson about Paramount I repeatedly observed: Whoever has Sumner has Paramount. And Brad Grey, having achieved the prize of number-one market share, has Sumner.