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

by Lynda Obst

  I said, “They do better.”

  I’d lived it with Terry Gilliam on The Fisher King, who, while working under the constraints of a limited budget for the first time, did some of the finest work of his career. Unlimited budgets make for a lack of precise decision-making. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that.

  “So that’s how you and Amy green-light the tough ones like Moneyball?” Amy worked on Moneyball for seven years before it was green-lit. Because baseball is inherently American and the business was becoming increasingly internationally oriented, she had to keep improving the script and modeling the budget downward while holding on to its most important element, its star, Brad Pitt. She had to cut the budget without compromising the quality of the picture or she could lose him, and thus the chance of making the film, a character piece that had to attract more than just baseball fans.

  “One of the things that’s brilliant about Amy is that she has a remarkable ability to want to change who she is and how she does business, and the minute she spotted the change in the world order, she was responsive to that.”

  “It’s not easy to have come into the business when Amy and I did,” I said, “and then have to totally change the way you work. The paradigm shifted in the middle of her reign.”

  “That is what gives Amy longevity,” he said.

  “So is it going to get better, this contraction?” I asked. “Like the bouncing universe, will it contract and then expand again?” I felt like I was asking Stephen Hawking about the fate of it all.

  Michael answered, “Will we look back and say, ‘Oh my goodness, 2006 to 2007 was a glory moment for the movie industry, when there was more money in the industry than there ever was before or after’?”

  “Or will ever be?”

  “Yes, probably,” he answered, not sadly. “Those years may look a little bit in retrospect like the movie industry probably looked in the thirties, when there was no competition, there was no television and you could churn out … God knows how many movies they were churning out in 1930; you could probably tell me thirty-nine. There was always a new double feature in the theaters, and everybody was going to the movies every week. I have no doubt that that time will not be seen again.”

  I felt glum, yet Michael looked fine and went right on. “I think there’s going to be plenty of money in the system from all these new avenues we haven’t yet discovered to keep making movies. If we say we’re currently all making around twenty, then it’s probably going to be closer to fifteen or sixteen, which isn’t a bad thing. It means that the weekends get less crowded and movies get to live longer in the movie theaters. I think everything is going to be more modest in terms of how movies are made. I think we all, executives included, will live a little bit more modestly, which is not a bad thing either. I have every confidence that this is going to get itself figured out.”

  The thought of the movie biz princes living modestly almost made me giggle. Oh, screw it, who cared how everyone else lived as long as good movies got made. So I asked him the big question.

  “And what of all these sequels and superheroes and the like? Will they conquer all?”

  “I think at a certain point,” he laughed, “enough is enough. Throwing fireballs and running around in tights.” And then he added, “Except Spider-Man, of course.” From his mouth to God’s ears.

  Of course in this case, God is the audience, despite what Adorno might say. He didn’t know about the Internet. Marketing may try to tell you what you want to see, but if you hear it’s a stinker, you’ll refuse to go. That has become clear. The audience has made the specialty market flourish like mad this year, going to little tadpoles like Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom—a wonderfully reviewed tadpole about two awkward twelve-year-olds who run away together—and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, about a trip to India gone wonderfully awry, starring Dev Patel (from Slumdog Millionaire), Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson and Maggie Smith. Marigold has made over $117 million worldwide and cost only $10 million pre-Oscars, without any prior awareness and marketing outside of word of mouth. The audience crowned the Oscar winner about the stuttering king, The King’s Speech. It helped The Help—based on a book about black domestic workers in the South in the sixties and their white teen champion—become the fifth most profitable movie vis-à-vis budget to box office of 2011. These successful tadpoles make a case to the studios—and not just to their classics divisions—about their profitability and reinforce the notion of the “audience’s confounding craving for something different.”

  At times like these—when there is some uncertainty as to what movies to make—the industry can be a mirror of the audience’s taste, and the best creative execs are receptive to the wishes of the most fervent moviegoers out there. If we can reduce the costs of marketing these movies, more can be made. Perhaps the Internet, our piratical nemesis, our entrepreneurial enemy in the first round of our failed congressional regulations, ultimately holds the answer to our hard marketing-cost issues. As online campaigns become more and more effective, perhaps they can help not just the movie’s fan base but also the larger general base for opening weekends. And perhaps we can be part of the solution to their unknown advertising capabilities. He that taketh away sometimes giveth back.

  VIOLENT PHASE TRANSITIONS: THE ONLY WAY HOLLYWOOD IS UNLIKE HELL AND MORE LIKE THE HEAVENS

  In astrophysics, there are fascinating phenomena called violent phase transitions, wherein things hardly change at all for eons—literally hundreds of millions of years—and then all of a sudden everything changes at once. Of course, unseen gravitational forces have been building toward that phase change, gases have been swirling faster and faster for ages, dust particles have been condensing, but not in ways anyone would notice (if there were anyone to look). But all that slow swirling movement coalesces in an unexpected moment into a grand celestial catastrophe of creation and destruction. Thus it is in the movie business. Things just go their nutty, merry way for years, unchanging, until we get hit by an asteroid like the DVD collapse, and the dense suck of technological change creates huge gravitational forces that condense and transform and reconstitute all matter in their wake. Gigantic implosions occur, destroying old models. Movie stars open movies! Let’s sell a script this weekend! Chick flicks! Disney buys X in competitive bidding! Pitches are dead. Drama is dead. You can’t sell anything anymore! Spec market over … until nothing familiar is left.

  Seemingly at random, new explosions and implosions create new matter. In the movie business, with our violent phase transitions, old structures and models are destroyed, but it is ever so clear that new models always evolve to take their place. A new structure of the universe is emerging, barely visible in its outlines but presenting itself on the horizon daily and expanding like the universe.

  This new phase of the universe is called “narrowcasting.” Tadpoles are the narrowcasts of the movie business. They have a specific targeted audience, like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, yet they can break out to a wide audience if they work in narrowcast (a tiny release, in a film’s case, that then goes into wider release as word spreads, or after an Oscar campaign, as in The King’s Speech and many others). Anyone can make a movie and get it distributed somewhere online if not in theaters. New theatrical distributors and online distributors are born every day, like stars in a stellar nursery. Distribution and production were the bottlenecks through which the studios used to control moviemaking. Movies were expensive, and only studios had the funds for production. Distribution was limited and controlled by the studios, and nearly impossible for an outsider to penetrate. Digital moviemaking ended this bottleneck in a few milliseconds for both production and now online distribution, where a movie can be discovered by anyone, anywhere.

  Soon people will stop looking to their local mall—like teens already have—and go instead to their computer or home entertainment system to find a new movie or television series they’ve just heard about. With fewer movies, the best of these will eventually make it to
the mall too. Instead of relying on studios to make the “show” pieces of the show-business equation, we will increasingly see programming from brand-new and aggressive content providers, trying to establish themselves by trolling the edges and inlets of pop culture. And they have an audience already.

  Kids don’t bring TVs to college anymore; they bring their tablets or a computer. They are watching twenty-two hours of television a week online. They will likely never return to the malls in the numbers that the industry once relied upon for openings. But they are finding new shows on the Web, created for them by one another. YouTube is spending $100 million on programming to reach them digitally via the traditional content providers—i.e., former film producers. The best ones are smart enough to know or have young enough kids to tell them where to go on Twitter or YouTube or WhoKnowsWhereElse.com to find the online teen stars and sites like Cheezburger (which began life as a site for funny cat videos) and create programming with them. Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Funny or Die, Machinima and dozens of start-ups are trolling different niche demographics to satisfy appetites unmet by traditional programmers. Their aim? To burn brightly enough to break through the cacophony of new voices and establish their venues in the pantheon of premier content providers while making new media stars of them and their servers.

  What does Papa Hegel have to say about all this? That it’s all gravity. All that smallness will give way to bigness: The smaller planetoids will crash into each other and merge; larger planets and even stars will consume them until denser, larger clusters of matter coalesce into powerful galaxies—i.e., media conglomerates again. This is called aggregation. Some massive servers will become Amazonian, perhaps eating up media giants, the way AOL once ate Time Warner. Other, smaller providers will be devoured whole and become healthy subdivisions of entertainment corporations. Some will be lost in the Darwinian power struggle for galactic survival. But the synthesis of this wild and woolly narrowcasting universe and our familiar broadcasting one will be very different from what we feared would happen when we all were suffering from the worst effects of Tinseltown’s sequilitis. For the audience, the writers and the producers alike, there will be many more alternatives to watch, write and produce than when the New Abnormal began to resist fresh ideas.

  Audience members will suddenly be able to find things so suited to their idiosyncratic tastes that it will be as if they had placed an order on a menu. From country to country, as the Net blurs all boundaries, we will learn each other’s jokes and love stories—without 3D or special effects. Soon Net films and series will be made and made better by a generation that learned the alphabet on an iPad. And this generation, brought up by the best four-quadrant movies ever, movies like The Lion King, Toy Story, Madagascar, WALL-E and Brave—many made by Pixar, some musicals, all original, requiring years to develop—will have a lot to say about what they need as teens, weaned as they were on the best of the best.

  The industry will not and should not give up on getting this generation into the malls as they did the last one, before losing it to the lure of the Net’s delights. The movie business has a huge job ahead of retooling itself creatively for the new domestic market to come, and the less innocent international market of the future. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that. There is a gigantic market of technologically sophisticated media juniors out there with the means of production and distribution already in their hands. They will be trolling the Web for media-content providers, with each wondering about the other in equal measure, “Whattya got? Whattya got?”

  *

  1. The overall loss number for TDKR is estimated to be about $10 to $30 million domestically. In fact, industry-wide nighttime business didn’t recover from the national trauma until the release of Taken 2 in mid-October of that year.

  2. Shorn of its of Mars IP title by marketing.

  3. In 2012, Kristen Stewart was the highest-paid female star in the world, with $34 million earned from May 2011 to May 2012, surpassing Angelina Jolie and Sandra Bullock.

  (1) My son, Oly Obst, now a manager at 3Arts and also my confidant and best friend, on the set of The Invention of Lying, starring Ricky Gervais and Jen Garner. As a mom, it was a great source of pride and excitement to me that we were producing this together. For Oly, it was working with your mother.

  (2) Peter Chernin, a great studio head, beloved by Wall Street, low-key and understated but as savvy with scripts as he was with numbers. Chernin enjoyed a reign that saw him green-light the two biggest grossing films in history—one of which was Titanic, for which he was called an idiot by most at the time—and experienced the economic model of the industry transforming beneath him.

  (3) Sue Kroll, Warner Bros. Pictures President (Worldwide Marketing), is considered among the most innovative creative marketing executives in Hollywood. She has spearheaded many of the biggest campaigns for original movies in Hollywood by promoting the filmmakers and the concepts. If that strategy keeps succeeding, movies other than sequels can break through.

  (4) Kevin Goetz, marketing guru to studios and producers alike, practices his wizardry with test audiences. He asks a focus group what it thinks about what to cut, where the ending goes wrong, what would make them recommend the film to their friends. Their answers can make or break a picture.

  (5) Jim Gianopulos (right), now Chairman of Fox, then head of International, and James Cameron (left), director, surround Leonardo DiCaprio as they enjoy the record-breaking international success of Titanic. Gianopulos pushed the frontiers of the emerging markets in Russia by helping Cameron keep an almost impossible promise, and reaching out to some folks he’d worked with on the movie who’d never seen a theater before. That kind of reach helped make Titanic the most successful picture of all time until Avatar.

  (6) The closest thing Hollywood has/had to a queen, Sherry Lansing reigned from 1992 to 2004 with an abundance of class and charm. She made choices with her brain and gut and then cut the budget to a number she’d fought to the bone with her partner, Jon Dolgen. Their strategy worked until the town changed. She was loyal to her friends, didn’t have enemies and never fired someone before Christmas.

  (7) The very chic John Goldwyn in front of the very chic Walt Disney Concert Hall. He was Head of Production for Paramount from 1991 to 2003. He brought me in under Sherry’s guidance and was a mentor and friend. Then Paramount became a place of strain for him, as his life began to change.

  (8) Donald De Line, then President of Paramount, in the happiest of times. He was my horse in the race for Goldwyn’s job, and I think Sherry picked him because she got that “kick your shoes off” feeling from him. Plus, everyone loved him. But that didn’t keep him from being fired, followed by a bad week of all the execs crying in my bungalow.

  (9) Gail Berman, formerly President of Entertainment for Fox Broadcasting Company, was recruited to be President of Paramount Pictures while Donald De Line was in London. She was selected by Brad Grey because of her great American taste (24, Malcolm in the Middle, House, American Idol), but she ultimately found the pace of the picture business too slow, and they ultimately found her wanting.

  (10) Patric Verrone, the fiery, idealistic coleader of the WGA, held his troops in an organized array throughout the painful strike, which was no small feat. He kept the press on his side, kept the soccer moms honking the studios in support and kept the pressure on for four long months as the tough-minded studios played hardball. They vilified him all they could, but he held firm to his principles as many factions battled it out privately while venting on the Internet.

  (11) Chris Keyser, cocreator of Party of Five, was elected as a more moderate candidate in the poststrike 2011 WGA election. He is devising new strategies to get to the promised land of digital revenues.

  (12) Rick Rosen, my brother, head of television and founding partner of WME, with his friend and client Howard Gordon, writer/producer of Homeland, as it won the Emmy, September 23, 2012. The show he found in Israel and repackaged has now won the Golden Globe for bes
t dramatic series twice, as well as the Emmy for its first season.

  (13) Conan O’Brien always makes Rick laugh. That’s one reason he’s a favorite among his clients. Here the two are with Jeff Ross, who runs Conan’s company.

  (14) The Hot In Cleveland gang on the night they were taping an episode with Mary Tyler Moore, who doesn’t remember she was my boss for one terrible year. The beautiful blonde next to Mary is the showrunner, Suzanne Martin, who is responsible for the jokes and the show’s longevity. That’s Valerie Bertinelli, on Mary’s left, Jane Leeves to her left, Betty White, of course, to Suzanne’s right, Wendy Malick to Betty’s left, with my partner, executive producer Todd Milliner, and assorted TV Land executives.

  (15) Jonathan Nolan, successful tentpole and indie screenwriter of the Batman franchise and cowriter of Memento and The Prestige, decided to write for television. A year later, here he is on the set of his new top-rated CBS hit, Person of Interest. He could have done anything he wanted in features, but he chose TV. He wanted to play more.

  (16) Michael Lynton, walking arm in arm with his partner, Amy Pascal. The two are known for their intelligence and good taste. For every Moneyball, Social Network, or Zero Dark Thirty, there is a Spider-Man, Transylvania, or Ghostbusters. They are tight on the budgets of the movies they love and can react quickly to changing demographics and trends.

  (17) With Nora Ephron at an event I made her go to in New York City where I was getting an award for chicks in flix (she was really tired of these). Later she told me she was very happy she came, which was a great relief. And now I have a treasure trove of pictures from what I didn’t know was the last year we’d have together.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are so many people who helped me figure out, write and finish this book, and each helped so much that I feel awards are due.