John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

by Sellers, Michael D.

  For his part, Ross felt that much of what he had learned in building a hugely successful global TV operation could be applied to the studio division, and this was part of it. He set out to find someone who could think strategically and globally, and who could look at the marketing of a movie not just from the perspective of its theatrical release--but from the larger perspective of its entire lifespan as an entertainment product. He wanted someone who was savvy when it came to optimizing social networking and making good use of emerging technologies to promote products, in the process diminishing the heavy reliance on the traditional types of advertising -- TV spots, billboards, print ads, and the like.

  Ross did not go it alone in his search; rather in the early part of the process he worked with ML Search, a top executive search outfit, and as finalists were identified, each went before a committee of Disney executives and top producer clients like Jerry Bruckheimer, and Dreamworks CEO Stacey Snider. Although they were not part of the panel, Ross also sought inputs from Steven Spielberg, Pixar’s Jon Lasseter, and Marvel’s Kevin Feige.

  Scottish born MT Carney was a candidate who stood out in terms of the search criteria. She had been worldwide planning director at Ogilvy & Mather before moving on to become founding partner of Naked Communications. Naked was a communications strategy company who motto was “The Agency Model Stripped Naked” and the company had developed a reputation for brand building that relied less on traditional advertising, and more on emerging technologies. Clients included Coca-cola, Nokia, and tissue giant Kimberly Clark.

  Carney had coined phrases like “Mapping the Customer’s Journey,” “Fleet of Foot, Pure of Heart,” and “Four dimensional storytelling,” and “it’s time to re-think how products, services, and brands are connected to their consumers.”86 She had become a highly regarded proponent of the view that many traditional ad agencies were faltering when it came to adapting to the changing landscape of marketing and communications, and that new, fresh approaches were essential.

  The announcement of Carney’s hiring came on April 20, 2010, as JCOM was in its 53rd day of principal photography. In an internal memorandum Ross told studio execs: "the film business is changing before our very eyes, and we must all rise to the occasion to meet our consumers' changing needs."

  A few months later Brooks Barnes wrote of the changes at Disney in the New York Times:87

  The overhaul reflects the Walt Disney Company’s belief that the blueprint for running a movie studio needs to be redrawn to reflect a landscape where DVD sales are sputtering, social media is changing film marketing and consumers are demanding to watch films when and where they want.

  “We’re not saying that everything is going to change, like we’re no longer going to do TV ads or something,” Ms. Carney said. “But we are also not afraid to try new things, to try daring things.”

  Even the kinds of movies Disney makes has changed. Mr. Ross is no longer interested in developing projects, big or small, that cannot be squarely branded under one of three banners — Disney (family), Pixar (animation) or Marvel (superheroes) — the better to cut through the marketplace clutter.

  Avatar Shakes Up the Marketing Equation

  On December 18, 2009, as JCOM was in the final stages of pre-production, James Cameron’s Avatar was released and quickly was on its way to becoming the all-time top box office performer in history. In a variety of interviews Cameron freely admitted to being inspired by Burroughs and John Carter of Mars:88

  With ‘Avatar,’ I thought, Forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys’ adventure movie, something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of Mars—a soldier goes to Mars.

  That wasn't the only time he said it -- in at least five interviews Cameron openly identified Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter of Mars not only as inspiration for Avatar, but as an overall model for it.

  Avatar struck a responsive chord with audiences from it’s first day in theaters, and digital word of mouth was phenomenal. For its first weekend it was initially reported to have grossed $72M, a figure released on Sunday morning that, in line with standard studio practice, included an estimate for Sunday. That estimate had to be revised upward when actuals came in on Monday to $77M -- an indication of exceptionally strong word of mouth. Still, by “normal” patterns and standards, a $77M opening weekend would typically, even for a blockbuster with good word of mouth, project to a domestic total of $220M to $240M, so few were prepared for what happened next. On its second weekend, instead of dropping 35-40%, it dropped just 1.8% and logged $75.6M en route to a lifetime domestic gross of $760.5M and global gross of $2.8M, landing it in the Number 1 All Time spot.

  For JCOM, the implications were significant. On the one hand, Avatar showed the potential that existed for a film with the same general outlines as JCOM -- as Cameron had said, a soldier goes to Mars (or in this case, Pandora) and makes his adventurous way there.

  But while it highlighted the possibility, it also illustrated and heightened the potential problem of perception. Now it was no longer Star Wars that would be cited as coming first before John Carter of Mars; it was Avatar as well, and Avatar would be extremely fresh in the minds of viewers who were observing the rollout of JCOM.

  What were the similarities?

  The Basic Setup: Burroughs was the master of the story of a man--a warrior--dropped into a foreign and typically very dangerous culture, who must survive on his wits and skills, and who through the use of his wits and skills wins the love of a worthy woman and rises to a position of greatness in the society. This aspect of Avatar resonates completely with Burroughs.

  The World Created: With Avatar, the vividness with which Burroughs created Barsoom, Amtor, Caspak, Pellucidar, and Tarzan's jungle has been captured for the first time cinematically. This meant that the experience of viewing Avatar was, arguably, as immersive as was the experience of reading Burroughs tales and getting lost in the worlds he created--made more vivid by the execution.

  The Creatures: The six-legged horselike "Pa'li" controlled by thought (with the help of a plug-in) seemed to be almost a direct lift of Burroughs' Barsoomian thoats -- even down to the fact that they were guided by telepathy. The Thanotaur that chases Jack Sully at the beginning, and aids Neytiri at the end, reminded of the Barsoomian banth.

  Neytiri: There was no doubt that the beautiful Neytiri fills the bill as a love interest with as pivotal a role as Dejah Thoris, and creates the romantic drive that was central to virtually every Burroughs novel, or at least to all the novels that were a "first" novel about a given character.

  The Level of Action: Complete, over-the-top action was a hallmark of Burroughs stories and from the moment Jake Sully and company exit their helicopter in the jungle of the Na'Vi, the action is every bit as exhilarating as that written by Burroughs.

  The differences?

  Aspects of the Setup: No Burroughs sci-fi novel included a setup wherein large numbers of humans were present on the planet the hero visits -- and certainly none in which the conflict between the humans and the natives is a central facet of the story.

  Jake Sully: Jake's status as a paraplegic ex-marine is a bit different than any Burroughs hero. Burroughs heroes were always, without exception, exceptional physical specimens. The closest parallel would be Mastermind of Mars in which the hero, Ulysses Paxton, lies dying (and possibly maimed with legs destroyed) in a trench in World War I when he looks into the sky, sees Mars, and finds himself transported to Barsoom.

  A Human, Quatrich, as the Main Antagonist: This is definitely different from the Burroughs setup for 'planetary romances' -- and resonates more with other sci-fi authors.

  Avatar, released in 2009, represented the last of the “strip-mining” of Burroughs, and whether this would be an asset or liability to John Carter of Mars remained to be seen.

  A $250M Production Experiment?

  As the start date of Principal Photography approached, Stanton knew that he was in for as grueling an experience as he had ever had
in his life. Live action, location film-making would be completely unlike the work Stanton was used to at Pixar. He would be on his feet, and need to be on his game, for 12-14 hours a day, no down time, no opportunities for mistakes.

  As filming began, he found that apart from the pressure to get the shot and move on, the experience was familiar. “A lot of people think that when you’re on an animated CG movie, you’re working with computers. I have to keep telling people, 'No, I work with human beings.' I work with 200 human beings. I have conversations with at least 50 human beings a day about the art form, about why a character would do this or what a set should look like. Why we should use the color red or the motivation or the plot. The conversations I’m having here are absolutely no different. It’s just real and you can actually touch it. That’s probably the biggest difference. But the intellectual, artistic and even practical conversations on a lot of things hasn’t been as huge a transition as I had thought. Which is good. I don’t feel as out of my element as I thought I might be.”89

  The issue of Stanton’s ability to adapt from animation to live action filming would become one of the major focuses in the controversy that would eventually envelope the project.

  Traditionally, the Hollywood approach to live action film-making emphasizes a lengthy pre-production that yields a “blueprint” for the film, followed by a single period of “principal photography” whose objective is to get everything “in the can”, followed by editing and post-production. Under the traditional model, reshoots in excess of a “pickup day” or two are considered remedial and are an indication that something was missed the first time around. Under the conventional system, the existence of reshoots is perceived to signify that something went wrong during the principal photography and “costly reshoots” are necessary as a remedial and unplanned exercise.

  But while this traditional view is understood to be the norm, most directors acknowledge that a period of reshoots (which are more properly thought of as “additional shooting” since the object is often not to reshoot what you already shot, but rather is to get additional shots and scenes that clarify and enhance the story) can be invaluable because, at the point where the film has been assembled, instead of shooting 10 times what will actually show up in the film, the shots that are executed can be very carefully calibrated to fit within the actual edited film. Director Bill Condon, explaining re-shoots for Breaking Dawn, said: “A film is a lot like a puzzle, with each piece – each shot, no matter how brief – needing to fit exactly with the ones around it. Our Part Two puzzle is finally coming into full view, and in a few weeks we’ll be heading back north to pick up some additional shots – the last tiny missing pieces.”90 Red Tails Director Bill Hemingway, describing re-shoots for his film about Tuskegee Airmen, said: “We all knew there was going to be additional photography. It wasn’t a surprise.” He described the reshoots as “little character moments and effects-driven scenes that were needed to “make things clear; to strengthen individual characters.”91

  Stanton went on record as being more passionately committed to re-shoots than almost any other live-action director, so much so that he viewed his approach as revolutionary for live action, yet grounded in what has been termed the “Pixar process”:92

  You know, I planned reshoots for after I got an assembly, so I had real objectivity about what it needed.

  That’s all we do at Pixar. The truth is, we rip down and put up our movies a minimum of four times over four years. How I learned to make a movie by shooting it four times. That’s how we make them. People wonder what the magic elixir of Pixar is. It’s this: we shoot the movie four times!

  To me, that’s just how art is formed….It’s like me saying to you, you can all go and write a piece about what we talked about today, but you only get to write it once. You don’t get to change a word once it’s set down. And that’s how movies are made, and it’s fucked up. It should be that you should somehow be able to balance economics and let the artist be an artist, and not be afraid of failure or trial and error.

  In an interview just before the release of the film, Stanton’s producer Lindsey Collins says: “It’s the way we’ve always worked and certainly at Pixar that’s how we work – we get it all up there and put it up and we watch it and go, ‘That’s not working, let’s move that over here.....So it doesn’t surprise me at all that that’s how Andrew worked on this one.”93

  The 100 days of principal photography went off smoothly and were accomplished on schedule and within budget, with no studio representative on the set. Back at Disney, new chief of Production Sean Bailey started his tenure at about the same time the production launched, and left Stanton and the production team to their own devices.94

  The hands off nature of the studio’s involvement was unusual given Stanton’s status as a first time live action director, and the huge risk that the budget of $250M represented. But Stanton’s own comments shed some light on what Disney would have faced had the studio decided to tangle with him:95

  I was pretty hardball. To be honest nobody ever fought me, but it was the fan in me that gave me the guts. That, and I have a day job [as Head of Story at Pixar]. I just felt like if anybody had a chance of making this without it being fucked up by the studio, it might be me. They’re too afraid of me – they want me happy at Pixar. So I thought I should use this for good, and make the movie the way I always thought it should be made. If at any one of these points if they were going to push back, I would have pulled out. It’s the best way to buy a car – I don’t mind walking away. So it pretty much got me through to the end. I never saw a studio person on the set until the reshoots.

  “Make your mistakes early,” Stanton would repeatedly tell his team, echoing the Pixar philosophy that it is only through “getting it up there” and seeing its flaws, that the character and story will be revealed. There is no doubt whatsoever that Stanton came into John Carter of Mars with a production philosophy grounded in the “Pixar Process” of film-making, a process which emphasizes trial and error.

  But while Stanton would repeatedly sing the praises of the Pixar process–would the film-making team in fact have the latitude to execute the film according to such a process? Objective reality would seem to say no — at least not in a very complete way. The production plan that Stanton and company agreed to called for 100 days of principal photography and only six days of reshoots — hardly comparable to the “reshoot it four times” system that applied at Pixar for Wall-E and Finding Nemo. Even with the reshoots expanded to 18 days, the production scenario still falls far short of the kind of repeated “reshoots” that a Pixar film goes through. To even come close to the “Pixar process”, the plan would have to called for several extended reshoot periods as the film gradually revealed itself through successive renderings. Recognizing the impossibility of such an approach in live action film-making, Stanton never suggested anything of that sort, and Disney surely would never approved such a plan which would have driven the costs of production even more into the stratosphere.

  And so the production was mounted with a general commitment to the philosophy of the Pixar process, but without the actual structure that such process required. It would be a hybrid production whose 100 day main shoot, 6 day reshoot arrangement was 90% “old school” but whose spirit of collaboration and “building on errors” would be 90% Pixar.

  Did the expansion of the reshoot schedule from 6 to 18 days materially affect the budget? The answer would appear to be no. The reshoots were for the most part accomplished as local “green screen” days in Los Angeles at the Playa Vista stage, and were inexpensive enough to be covered by the contingency allocation within the approved budget.

  How did the creative team respond to the approach? “Stanton was amazing to work for,” one top creative participant in the production said in a private interview. “His interpersonal skills are among the best. He has a way of making you feel you’re on his level even if it’s unlikely that you really are. He encourages you to try things
and constantly reassures you that no ideas are bad ideas, and that the process is an open, collaborative one–guided by Stanton’s overall vision to be sure, but really empowered by the rest of us.” Another put it this way: “It felt a little ‘scrambled’ at times, not as button downed as I’ve experienced with other director, but there was an underlying confidence that if there was a sense of things being slightly unfocused — that sense was on the surface, and underneath the surface there were processes at work that would yield something more profound than our usual way of working was likely to. So we bought into it.”

  While the question of reshoots has for the most part been a “part of the conversation” about John Carter as it pertains to the effect the reshoots had on the budget, a more relevant question is, did Stanton get enough reshoots and re-tweaking of the film in post production to complete his own creative process?

  Stated differently -- did Stanton actually get to pursue the film to the end result that he would normally have been able to achieve had it been a Pixar film -- or did the end result represent something closer to film that had still had several Pixar iterations to go?

  Was the marriage of the Pixar process to live action film-making a success, a failure, or a mixed bag?

  Time would tell, but one thing was clear, and that was that the price tag of $250M did not come from an out-of-control production. The production itself adhered to the plan that was approved with the exception of 12 extra reshoot days which were not a major factor in the production investment being as high as it was.