The Big Picture

by Ben Fritz

  Among the lessons he learned was to make the room a safe space designed entirely to juice writers’ creativity. So Goldsman got Hasbro and Paramount to create a “writers’ summer camp” for his team, with toys, pinball machines, limitless food, artists to turn their every idea into a visual design, and even entertainers to throw themed parties for their families. Writers of the caliber of Chabon wouldn’t be attracted just because of the creative challenge of the next G.I. Joe film, but for the chance to “get out of my room and my head and collaborate with gifted, talented people in an environment that was very writer-centric.”

  After getting schooled by Hasbro experts on the history of the toys and TV shows, Goldsman and his ten writers started sketching out a timeline of their cinematic universe, just as he had already done for Transformers. A chronology was drawn along the whiteboards, detailing the roles characters from each of the toy brands played, from pre–World War II history to the present day and future. The ten ideas the team ended up with were certainly not big-screen versions of the 1980s cartoons. There would be a World War II G.I. Joe movie featuring the origins of that team; a present-day M.A.S.K. film featuring multicultural teens in Detroit who come across the spy team’s high-tech gear; and another movie, kept as more of a secret, set in the future. And they would all tie together in a larger story about the conflict between magic and technology.

  By the end of three weeks, each writer was assigned to write a treatment, or story summary, for one film. When those were done a few months later, they were collected into a hardcover book, along with visual designs and fake posters for each film, which were distributed to insiders.

  If the plan succeeded, it pointed to a new paradigm for filmmaking. Ten movies on Paramount’s slate over the next several years would already be planned out. The origins of their shared universe would lie in a combination of corporate imperatives to sell toys and a creative process borrowed from television that put writers and their ideas in charge.

  A Franchise-Funded Home for Creativity

  Dan Lin knows Lego won’t last forever. Marvel Studios aside, most franchises ebb and flow in Hollywood, particularly when inevitable creative missteps happen. Despite the overall dominance of cinematic brands, anyone who hitches their career to a single one may end up like Saudi Arabia in an age of declining oil prices.

  So when Lin in 2015 received what he described as a “huge check” as part of the settlement of his Godzilla lawsuit, he thought and prayed long and hard about what to do with the money. Ultimately, he decided to apply some of the best practices being applied to cinematic universes and try to harness them in support of originality.

  Lin bought an old post office in the Filipinotown neighborhood of Los Angeles, which he intends to turn into a creative hub called Rideback Ranch, named after a cowboy term for riders who support each other. By 2018, it was set to host the offices for Lin Pictures and the Bricksburg Chamber of Commerce, where animators work on the next set of the Lego movies. But it will also have space where writers, directors, and other creative folks are free to work on any idea they want. The producer’s idea is to use the freewheeling and collaborative spirit that brought success to The Lego Movie and Lego Batman to generate new ideas. Some might be one-off films or television shows that when fully developed by the right creative team, would be more likely than an original script written in isolation to get bought by a studio. Others could become the next great franchise.

  Lin Pictures wouldn’t necessarily own the ideas, but since it’s located in-house, it would be part of the process and potentially produce some of them. “It’s harder and harder to make original content, and as the business becomes more corporate, creators need to go the other way,” Lin said of his plan.

  It’s an interesting paradox for the MBA whose film career is currently staked on a toy brand. But Lin realizes, as Goldsman does in his writers’ room and Kinberg when applying his personal pain to his superhero films, that creativity must be intentional because Hollywood is no longer an industry that naturally encourages it. Left alone, the economic forces of the film business will generate only reboots, sequels, and spinoffs with as little originality, risk taking, and interesting ideas as possible.

  Certainly the producer of The Lego Movie 2 and a pair of Sherlock Holmes films doesn’t expect that to fundamentally change. But he knows, as most thoughtful people in Hollywood do, that if taken too far, the cinematic brand strategy could become a self-destructive loop that will leave Hollywood with no new franchises to replace the ones that expire. Some evidence from 2016 suggests that the snake is starting to eat its own tail. Many branded movies, like the Ghostbusters reboot and the Independence Day revival and the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, fizzled at the box office.

  Creativity in Hollywood these days comes in odd forms. It may be a movie about multicultural teens in Detroit wrapped into one meant to revive a 1980s toy brand, or ideas about disappointment and hope snuck into the sixth film in a comic book franchise, or a space for creative collaboration built on the back of a cinematic universe made of toys. But the people who thrive in the movie business today and the near future will be those who can straddle the line between giving studios and global audiences the franchises they demand while cultivating the creativity that cinema needs, in the long run, to survive.

  12

  The Shop Around the Corner

  Amazon Saves the Indie Film Business

  Manchester by the Sea WAS the prototypical Sundance sensation: a heart-wrenching drama about human tragedy and finding the will to move past it. Brilliantly executed by the writer-director Kenneth Lonergan and featuring a gut punch of a lead performance by the future Oscar winner Casey Affleck, it seemed certain to stand as one of the best movies of 2016.

  It was equally certain to be a commercial challenge. Getting audiences to buy tickets for a dark indie drama was difficult in the best of times. Now, in the age of Fast and Furious and The Avengers and an endless supply of great dramas on television, it was near impossible.

  By January 2016, during the thirty-eighth annual Sundance Film Festival, the prospects for indie dramas at the box office were bleak. The two biggest hits from the prior year’s Sundance, the black comedy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and the hip-hop-themed caper Dope, had both bombed at the box office despite the certainty among festival attendees that they brilliantly straddled indie and commercial sensibilities.

  It had been seven years, in fact, since an indie movie bought at a film festival had broken out at the box office and grossed more than $50 million. In the time since 2009’s brutal drama Precious, which won Mo’Nique an Oscar, and 2006’s breakout comedy Little Miss Sunshine starring Steve Carell, the indie business had turned quite grim.

  The genre was strong as late as 2007, when Fox Searchlight’s Juno, which premiered at the Toronto festival, grossed an astounding $143 million. The same year, Miramax’s Oscar winner No Country for Old Men took in $74 million and the romantic war drama Atonement, from Universal’s Focus Features, took in $51 million domestically. These were huge numbers for low-budget movies that tackled weighty topics like abortion, rape, and a grisly murder spree. Perhaps not coincidentally, 2007 was also near the peak of the DVD boom, the beginning of the golden age of television, and one year before Iron Man launched the Marvel cinematic universe.

  Over the next several years, Disney, Warner Bros., and Paramount scrapped their indie divisions and Universal significantly scaled back. Only Fox, whose Searchlight had long been the most successful studio indie unit, and Sony Pictures Classics, which operated with extremely low overhead and kept its ambitions very modest, stayed in the game. Many independent companies shut down or struggled to stay afloat, and those that remained, like the upstart A24, were tiny operations.

  Even the Weinstein brothers started questioning the sanity of the indie film business. After their post-Miramax venture, The Weinstein Company, released just six movies in 2016, down from fourteen the prior year, Harvey Weinstein admitted, “TV a
t this point of my career is more lucrative and a lot easier to do.”

  It was becoming so difficult for art-house films to find audiences in theaters that more and more were released directly in the home, where distributors could save on marketing expenses and try to make their money through video-on-demand rentals on iTunes and cable boxes.

  So when Manchester by the Sea premiered to a standing ovation at the Eccles Theatre in Park City, Utah, there was still reason to be hesitant. So many movies with similarly rapturous responses at Sundance had failed commercially over the past few years. And Manchester didn’t even have the comedy and youth appeal of Dope or Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, both of which featured young multicultural casts. In a year when diversity was a buzzword, due to the #OscarsSoWhite uproar, Manchester was basically a downer about white adults. It seemed a miracle, in fact, when Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics, and other studio players brought bidding for the domestic rights for Manchester by the Sea up past $5 million.

  Then America’s biggest online retailer said it would take the movie for $10 million.

  Amazon.com’s offer for Manchester by the Sea blew the other bidders out of the water. It was a staggering amount of money for such a commercially challenging film. After all, Kenneth Lonergan’s two previous movies had grossed only $9 million combined.

  But Amazon, whose top entertainment executives had vaulted over seats in the Eccles when Manchester ended and sped up a hill in a snowstorm in their SUV to meet with the agents representing the movie, had more than a quick profit in mind. They were building a business. And just as Amazon had done in almost every retail category it had entered and come to dominate over the past twenty-two years, it was prepared to make loud statements and absorb short-term losses in order to do so. For $10 million, Manchester by the Sea was quite likely to do both.

  Although Amazon Studios, already known for such well-regarded television shows as Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle, had first signaled its intention to start making movies a year earlier, its purchase of Manchester was still shocking. Here was arguably the most cold-hearted capitalist company in American history, one that many blamed for gutting and feeding off the carcass of the book industry, riding to the rescue of the most artistic and uncommercial corner of cinema.

  Many Sundance veterans were skeptical of Netflix too, but at least its presence at Sundance made sense. It was a streaming video company, after all, and it had an agenda: to take indie films out of theaters and put them on televisions and iPads, where its chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, thought they rightly belonged. So when Netflix bid $20 million for another Sundance sensation, the slave rebellion drama The Birth of a Nation, few were surprised. And most nodded their heads in approval when the producers went with a lower offer from Fox Searchlight, which promised a robust theatrical release. (Birth eventually fizzled at the box office, but it’s unclear how much of that was simply the challenges facing all indie films versus a specific public relations nightmare involving a past sexual assault allegation against the director, Nate Parker.)

  But Amazon made its money selling books and shoes and Kindles, not video subscriptions. And it didn’t have a digital-first agenda. In fact, it promised Lonergan and his producers that Manchester would enjoy a healthy run in theaters before debuting on its Amazon Prime Video service, which offered an assortment of television shows and films to stream on digital devices along with the unlimited two-day shipping on products that members got for $99 per year.

  They were true to their word. Thanks in part to an aggressive and costly marketing campaign, Manchester ended up grossing $48 million, making it the biggest hit to come out of Sundance in seven years.

  Amazon left the Sundance festival in 2016 with four movies, which together with other acquisitions gave it a lineup of more than a dozen pictures that year alone. Among them was the forty-third movie by Woody Allen, for which it paid $15 million, another staggering price that lured the filmmaker away from Sony Pictures Classics, which had released his prior seven films. Amazon didn’t let up in 2017, when it once again made the biggest acquisition of the festival: $12 million for a dark comedy, The Big Sick.

  Amazon’s slate was entirely art-house cinema: original films from critically beloved but rarely commercially successful directors like Spike Lee, Todd Haynes, and Richard Linklater, along with documentaries and quirky intellectual fare, like a cinematic retelling of the time Richard Nixon met Elvis Presley. They were the 180-degree opposite of what major studios were making now—the kinds of movies that, if traditional Hollywood had anything to do with it, would soon become as extinct as silent cinema.

  Of all the changes the movie business had seen in the past few years, this was easily the least predictable. The best prospects for a vibrant indie movie scene, one that challenged political and cultural norms and connected defiant and unique voices with fans around the world, now rested with a seemingly soulless digital superstore.

  The Accidental Studio

  Despite his platinum Hollywood pedigree as the son of Frank Price, who formerly ran both Columbia Pictures and Universal Pictures, Roy Price did not seem like a budding creative mogul when he joined Amazon in 2004. A lawyer who had worked as a consultant for Allen & Company and McKinsey & Company and as a mid-level development executive for Disney’s television animation unit, he was initially tapped to run Amazon’s video-on-demand business. He didn’t develop or select shows—he simply allowed people to rent or buy digital copies online, as they could already do on Apple’s competing platform, iTunes.

  Six years later, though, Price launched Amazon Studios, a new business initially intended to let anyone submit screenplays or short films and then, through a mix of community feedback and expert judging, turn the best ones into feature films or television series.

  But amid complaints from Hollywood professionals and difficulties in finding gems amid the heaps of mediocrity, little came of the initiative. And eventually Price, who with his spiked gray hair and leather jackets tried to meld Hollywood cool with Silicon Valley smarts, morphed Amazon Studios into something more traditional. He hired experienced development executives, worked with agencies to solicit scripts from experienced writers, and launched a slew of TV shows in 2013.

  The twist was that pilot episodes for a group of finalists were released online for users to watch and rate. Amazon executives, all the way up to Bezos, then used that data to help inform their decisions on the series it decided to make and, as competitor Netflix was already doing, release online all at once for viewers to binge-watch.

  After a few initial duds, like the political comedy Alpha House, Amazon found an identity with Transparent, a groundbreaking show about a transgender woman, played by Jeffrey Tambor, who shocks her family by transitioning late in life. Transparent wasn’t as broadly popular a hit as Netflix’s House of Cards or Orange Is the New Black. But it generated lots of buzz among tastemakers and critics, and it won awards.

  It also gave Amazon Studios an identity as a home for highbrow series aimed squarely at upscale, educated, affluent types. Though it produced kids’ programs and more broadly appealing shows like the cop drama Bosch, Amazon’s standout programs continued to be aimed primarily at college professors and the people who loved them, such as the Golden Globe–winning Mozart in the Jungle, about the cutthroat world of classical music.

  By the time he decided to start making original movies with professionals (and not trying to find ideas from the general public), Price was doubling down on that strategy. You don’t call Ted Hope, after all, if you’re looking for the next superhero flick or even a fun romantic comedy. You call him if you’re looking to create a digital Miramax.

  Old Dogs, Old Tricks, New Home

  The title of the blog post was undeniably direct: “I Am No Longer Going To Produce Films For My Living.” Producing films, Ted Hope wrote in 2013, “requires me to deliver quantity over quality. Or to not contribute as fully as I like since I won’t be fairly compensated. Or to make something that
is virtually guaranteed to not have the cultural impact it warrants.”

  Hope still loved movies, he added, but he believed the system, the film industry, no longer made that possible. “I want to make films that lift the world and our culture higher—and our current way of doing things does just the opposite,” wrote the middle-aged hipster with black-frame glasses and graying hair.

  It was a shot across the bow or an admission of defeat, depending on your perspective, by one of the most respected voices in the world of independent cinema. Over the prior quarter-century, Ted Hope had produced movies and developed close relationships with many of the greatest directors of his time, including Hal Hartley, Ang Lee, Ed Burns, Todd Haynes, Nicole Holofcener, Michel Gondry, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. He was one of the founders of Good Machine, a New York company at the leading edge of the indie film revolution in the 1990s that released movies by those directors and many others and was eventually acquired by Universal and turned into its specialty label Focus Features.

  But by the 2010s, the economic underpinnings of Hope’s industry were collapsing. Audiences seemed to be shifting away from the type of films he made, and studios were increasingly unwilling to subsidize them. As an independent producer, unless he happened to make one of the ever-shrinking number of movies that scored a big sale at Sundance or Toronto, it simply was no longer financially feasible to do his job.

  And so Ted Hope decided to go at it a different way. He ran the San Francisco Film Society, hoping to turn it into “an accelerator, an incubator, for new story forms and new business models around film.” But that didn’t work out, and after a year, he resigned to run Fandor, a Netflix-like subscription video-on-demand service focused on obscure and independent movies for the cinema lover. But even though it was backed by Chris Kelly, the first general counsel for Facebook, Hope quickly found that Fandor didn’t have the resources and organization to build the new digital studio that he believed represented the only possible road forward for independent cinema. “I had completely misconceived what it would take,” he later admitted.