by Ben Fritz
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
A Note on Sources
Introduction
How Hollywood Got Here
The Odd Couple
Reality Bites
Inception
Revenge of the Nerds
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Star Wars
A Star Is Born
Frozen
Trading Places
Where Hollywood is Headed
The Terminator
The Producers
The Shop Around the Corner
Apt Pupil
Field of Dreams
The Last Picture Show?
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Connect with HMH
First Mariner Books edition 2019
Copyright © 2018 by Ben Fritz
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Title: The big picture : the fight for the future of movies / Ben Fritz.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | “An Eamon Dolan Book.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017046230 (print) | LCCN 2018010456 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544789777 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544789760 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781328592743 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture industry—California—Los Angeles—History—21st century. | Motion pictures—United States—History—21st century. | Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc.
Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U65 (ebook) | LCC PN1993.5.U65 F75 2018 (print) | DDC 384/.80973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046230
Cover design by Mark R. Robinson
Cover photograph © Danita Delimont / Getty Images
Author photograph © Charlie Chu
v2.0119
In memory of Riley
A Note on Sources
THIS BOOK IS BASED, in part, on stolen material. I won’t make any bones about it.
The cyber-breach of Sony Pictures Entertainment in November 2014 resulted in the release of tens of thousands of private e-mails and documents, which became available to the public, whether downloaded from a peer-to-peer network or perused on WikiLeaks.
Sony has called the hack a “malicious criminal act,” and that’s correct. Executives at the studio have questioned my ethics (and that of many other journalists) in reporting on the contents of the stolen e-mails and documents, and I can hardly blame them. If e-mails revealing the innermost details of my reporting at the Wall Street Journal were released to the world, I would be horrified. And if bloggers burrowed through personal e-mails involving my family, my finances, and my online shopping history, I would undoubtedly be embarrassed.
Nevertheless, it’s an undeniable fact that much great journalism has used stolen material as its source. While the scale of the theft here was perhaps unprecedented and the import of the material doesn’t exactly compare to the Pentagon Papers, the principle remains the same: interesting information worthy of public scrutiny is fair game for journalists.
Now that anyone with an Internet connection can read these e-mails and documents, the question is simply what to do with them. Already, reporters have pored over many, looking for eyebrow-raising scoops, including new details about movies Sony was planning to make and racially offensive jokes about President Obama made by a movie mogul and a power producer.
Of course, I could have just left the hacked materials alone and moved on. That’s possibly what some Sony Pictures employees, for whom the hack was a painful incident they’d like to just leave in the past, would prefer I do. But as a longtime reporter on the business of Hollywood, I believed the stolen e-mails and internal documents from Sony Pictures could be the core of a much bigger story—one about the changes in Hollywood and why we get the movies we do. I believed I could put these materials to a productive and enlightening purpose. This book is the result.
Whatever your views, I hope you’ll agree that what you’re about to read is not exploitative. In researching this book I read or skimmed nearly every e-mail and document released in the hack. I frequently felt uncomfortable, as I think any compassionate human being would, and at times I felt unethical. That happened when I came upon e-mails of a clearly personal nature, particularly when it involved Sony employees’ families and doubly so their children. I made it a policy to stop reading e-mails once I realized they were personal. You won’t find anything salacious or shocking about anyone’s private life in here.
There are, however, extensive details, financial and otherwise, about Sony Pictures, its films, and its senior executives. Much of it comes from e-mails and documents stolen in the hack. Some comes from interviews with more than fifty current and former Sony employees and people who have worked closely with the company. I also utilized internal documents not released in the hack that sources provided to me.
Wherever possible, I have cited the specific e-mails or people I interviewed from which I gleaned quotes or information used in this book. Unless otherwise noted, I have preserved the original spelling and wording of e-mails I quote, including typos.
Some financial data came from internal documents that have no titles, so I can’t individually cite them. In addition, I granted anonymity to some people I interviewed because they feared that being named would damage their careers in Hollywood.
Introduction
Groundhog Day—How Franchises Killed Originality in Hollywood
It’s easy to become cynical about Hollywood once you’ve spent much time inside it. No business is as sexy and highly scrutinized from the outside, while managing to feel so small and self-important once you’re inside it, as motion pictures.
When everyone around you is constantly assessing the current heat of stars, moguls, and filmmakers and judging movies by their most recent box-office grosses, it’s easy to forget that the products created here are profoundly meaningful to millions of people, whether as timeless art or fun pop-culture ephemera.
There’s an antidote, however. To remember the grandeur, the tradition, and the cultural significance of an industry that has had a greater impact on imaginations than any in American history, one need only walk onto one of the six studio lots that still take up hundreds of acres in Los Angeles and its suburbs.
None is more inspiring than the forty-four-acre, 102-year-old lot in Culver City, California, that was long home to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and is now occupied by Sony Pictures.
The entrance features a giant rainbow that arches ninety-four feet in the air and evokes memories of The Wizard of Oz, which was shot here in the late 1930s. Walking down “Main Street,” into the heart of the lot, you stroll through a faux downtown lined with buildings named after Cary Grant, Frank Capra, Rita Hayworth, and David Lean, the stars and filmmakers who built the legacy of Columbia Pictures, which Sony acquired in 1989.
Walking farther, past posters for unforgettable Columbia movies like Lawrence of Arabia and Spider-Man, you come upon the studio store, with T-shirts, mugs, and DVDs of Sony’s biggest hits from recent years, including 21 Jump Street, Breaking Bad, and the James Bond blockbuster Skyfall. Visit on the right day and you might see Will Smith drive by on a golf cart or Seth Rogen chowing down in the Harry Cohn commissary building, named after the larger-than-life mogul who cofounded Columbia wi
th his brother and their friend in 1918.
All around you, meanwhile, are nearly thirty soundstages where everything from Gone with the Wind to Rocky to Wheel of Fortune has been shot.
Despite appearances, however, studio lots like Sony’s are not what they used to be. Movies are rarely made on soundstages here, as production has fled to places like Georgia and London, in search of big government subsidies. The names of retired actors and directors may appear on the buildings, but the new generation of talent is far less powerful than the world-famous characters they bring to life, like Iron Man and Katniss Everdeen. The moguls who run the studios, meanwhile, have been brought dramatically down to earth and are increasingly indistinguishable from the MBAs who run retail chains and investment banks.
What made the movie business unique in the history of corporate capitalism is captured in the screenwriter William Goldman’s maxim, true for many decades: “nobody knows anything.” No other industry pumped out so many products so frequently with so little foreknowledge of whether they would be any good. The only feasible business strategy, it appeared, was to sign up the best creative talent, trust your strongest hunches about what looked likely to appeal to millions of people, and hope you ended up with Back to the Future instead of Ishtar.
Over the past few years, however, something big has happened: finally, people in Hollywood do know something. What they know is that branded franchises work. People say they want new ideas and fresh concepts, but in reality they most often go to the multiplex for familiar characters and concepts that remind them of what they already know they like. Big name brands like Marvel, Harry Potter, Fast & Furious, and Despicable Me consistently gross more than $1 billion at the global box office, not only raking in huge profits, but justifying studios’ very existence and the jobs of everyone who works on their glamorous lots.
This change has happened slowly over about a decade in Hollywood, making it hard to appreciate its magnitude. But now it is undeniable that the dawn of the franchise film era is the most meaningful revolution in the movie business since the studio system ended, in the 1950s. That shift ended studios’ ability to control creative talent by essentially owning it with long-term contracts. It also increased the quality of movies Hollywood made over the next fifty years because companies had to compete to make the most influential talent happy, rather than the other way around.
The franchise film era is, in many ways, a return to the studio system. Only now the major entertainment companies don’t own the most important talent—they own the most important cinematic brands. Instead of fighting for a deal at MGM or Paramount, actors and filmmakers vie for a chance to make the latest spinoff of Star Wars or X-Men. Many of those movies are satisfying crowd pleasers, but nobody is going to compare the 2010s to a standout era of Hollywood filmmaking like the 1970s.
The studios that adjusted to the implications of the franchise age with speed and a clear vision have been the most successful in recent years. Warner Bros. and Disney long ago reshaped their businesses around big-budget “event” movies that could spawn endless sequels, spinoffs, and product tie-ins. These studios are now consistently at the top of box-office and profit rankings, along with Universal, which successfully followed their lead.
A Fateful Day at Sony
Sony Pictures is a different story. It thrived in the first decade of this century by sticking to a creaky but still workable strategy of focusing on movie stars and original scripts, with the occasional superhero sequel to appeal to teenagers and audiences overseas. The studio’s boss, Amy Pascal, is a larger-than-life character who ran her business on the old-fashioned premise that her job was, every year, to make the best slate of movies she could, with the most talented filmmakers and actors, and trust that profits would follow.
It worked until it didn’t. Like a newspaper that made a great print product but never invested in its website, Sony succeeded in the early part of the twenty-first century, but its fortunes took a decided turn for the worse in the 2010s. As audience tastes changed, it had little to offer in the way of big-budget “events” that were part of long-popular, well-known franchises.
By 2013, it was clear that Sony could no longer close its eyes to the revolution in the movie business. On a fateful day late that year, the leaders of Hollywood’s most talent-friendly studio were finally forced to face the fact that if they were going to have a future, they would have to be more franchise-friendly.
Pascal and her allies would long remember November 21, 2013, as a watershed—the day it became clear that creativity would no longer drive business at Sony Pictures. From now on, it would be the other way around.
On soundstage number eight that morning, no actors or makeup artists or production assistants were preparing to shoot a scene. Instead, dozens of top Sony executives, from Tokyo, New York, and Los Angeles, were preparing to try to impress a gathering audience more important than anyone who bought movie tickets: investors and analysts from Wall Street. The visitors wanted to learn about the studio’s plans to cut costs and deliver the kind of consistently growing profits once deemed impossible in the unpredictable roller coaster that is the entertainment business.
Sony Pictures was coming off a disastrous summer in which its two biggest films, the science-fiction vehicle After Earth, with Will Smith and his son, and the Channing Tatum action dud White House Down, had together lost more than $75 million. Their failure was directly tied to the fact that Sony had almost no popular franchises in its arsenal. To compete with the big summer movies being released by other studios, Sony took a gamble on the type of original, movie-star-driven fare that succeeded in the 2000s but had now fallen out of favor.
For Pascal, who had spent her entire adult life making movies, trying to impress a bunch of Wall Street suits was humiliating. She knew virtually nothing about earnings statements or stock charts and cared even less. As head of Sony’s movie business for more than a decade, she schmoozed with stars, gave notes on scripts, and, as the top “picker,” decided which films her studio would make each year, at an annual cost of nearly $1 billion.
She relied on others, particularly her longtime business partner Michael Lynton, to handle money issues. And Lynton had for many years done just that, confident that the right business strategy in Hollywood was to insulate creative teams from the day-to-day business pressures. But now, with their performance floundering and pressure from shareholders on Wall Street and corporate bosses in Tokyo ratcheting up, the two were forced to defend their strategy to the financial community.
The pair put on a brave face. Lynton boasted of plans to invest more in television, and Pascal laid out a strategy to do better at the box office.
But in reality, she thought the whole thing was a joke. Once she was done putting on a song-and-dance for the Wall Street analysts, Pascal got busy telling friends in the entertainment industry to ignore everything she and Lynton had just said about financial discipline and focusing on television over film. “Oh please, it’s an investor conference,” she said. “U know it’s bs.”
To one close confidant, Pascal admitted what she really thought about the investors, corporate executives, and other suits who didn’t have a creative bone in their body but thought they knew better than she did as to what a movie studio needed: “This is my fucking company,” she declared. “I have outlasted everyone and always will.”
Hollywood Turned Upside Down
Just a few years earlier, the idea that an uber-mogul like Amy Pascal would have to defend her savvy and relevance to anyone would have been laughable.
Films were the dominant cultural force in America and the dominant economic power in Hollywood. Movie studio bosses were the unquestioned queens and kings of the entertainment industry. That’s why Pascal enjoyed the title of co-chairman of Sony Pictures. She was its number two executive, next after Lynton. The head of television, Steve Mosko, was merely a “president” (a title akin to “peon” among show-biz power players) and reported to her, a situation that beca
me increasingly awkward over the years, as his business grew faster than hers.
But that was before Hollywood was turned on its head. It used to be that television, the home of endlessly recycled sitcoms and cop shows, was the medium of the familiar and cinema the medium of originality. Now that axiom has been reversed. We’re living in the “golden age of television.” Shifting economic and technological factors have fueled an explosion of originality and risk taking that makes the “idiot box” home to arguably the best content Hollywood has ever produced. In 2016, networks and streaming services produced 454 original scripted series, more than double the number created in 2010. Some were good, some were bad, but most were interesting, sophisticated, and made for intelligent adults. It was, to borrow a term from the head of the FX cable network, “peak TV.”
Less commented upon was the fact that 2016 was also the year of peak franchise film. Hollywood studios released thirty-seven big-budget sequels, reboots, spinoffs, adaptations, and animated movies. The prior year, it was twenty-four. In 2009, there were eighteen. Some were satisfyingly fun, some were mind-numbingly awful, but it goes without saying that few were substantive and thought-provoking.
The rise of original, risk-taking television is directly tied to the decline of original, risk-taking filmmaking and the dawn of the franchise age of film—one in which studios no longer coddle creative talent, release movies of every type for everyone, or pride themselves for taking risks on quality and new ideas. Instead, movie studios now exist primarily for the purpose of building and supporting branded franchises that continue in sequels, toys, and theme-park attractions.
Of course, “event” movies have been around for more than forty years, since Jaws scared a nation and created the idea of a summer tentpole. But they used to just be one element of a studio’s strategy. Tentpoles got that name because they were supposed to hold up a structure that also contained dramas, romantic comedies, adult thrillers, and even totally original ideas.
