Is George Clooney the last movie star?
The only one we have. Wow. There's one teensy-weensy problem, though, that nobody seems to have noticed. One tiny little thing missing from the George Clooney is the World's Biggest Movie Star storyline...nobody watches his movies.
On the other hand, Will Smith gets Oscar noms and gets people into the theater.
An amazingly dense infographic of box office revenues for all movies since 1986. It's a little confusing at first because the vertical scale is basically irrelevant, but once you get the hang of things, it's fun to just scroll through the years. Interesting stuff to look out for:
1. The gross receipts have obviously gone up in the past 11 years.
2. The summers get much more blockbustery.
3. As time goes on, movies open bigger but don't last nearly as long in the theater as they used to. There are also more movies to choose from in 2007 than in 1986.
4. For some exceptions to the normal pattern, check out My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Juno, Dances With Wolves, Platoon, and Million Dollar Baby. (via big picture)
Usually the combination of "Hollywood" and "Oscars" is enough to scare me off a story, but this short examination of how good actors become movie stars was pretty interesting. Of his sudden stardom, Jack Nicholson said:
I remember when that happened to me. I'd been working for 12 years, and then the part in "Easy Rider" changed my life. Very few people have ever had the experience where they sit back and say, "I am a movie star." I knew it at the first showing of "Easy Rider" at the Cannes Film Festival by how the audience reacted to the movie. A lot of people would say, "I know I'm a movie star, but, oh, I wonder what's going to happen..." I knew it then: I was a movie star. And it was great.
The story is part of the recent NY Times Magazine package on the breakthrough movie stars of 2008. The photographs of the chosen stars by Ryan McGinley are notable as well for "their attempt to wrestle the Hollywood photoshoot beast away from its recent hyper-produced overwrought incarnation".
I've turned my T.V. on just one time in 2008. I rarely miss it at all, except for a very few moments when it's like missing heroin. (Some relief coming: eight episodes of "Lost," beginning January 31; ten episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" coming in March.) Yesterday for a job I was talking with two bigwigs, an actor and an actor-director; they said they were both in a weird state of both crunch and inactivity because of both the Writer's Guild strike and the maybe-upcoming Screen Actor's Guild strike, which I had totally forgotten about. (That 120,000+ member union may strike in June, over the same issues—profit from new media—that sent the Writers Guild out more than two months ago.) That's when I realized: I can't take a world without actors! Sure, they're not as useful as deli owners or baristas to my life. But I like looking at them! Maybe it'll be averted: The Directors Guild is close-ish to a settlement, which might be a template for the writers, which might be sort of a template for the actors. In any event, I asked the nice Oscar-winning lady what sort of things she liked about working: "I have health insurance, that's enough," she said. Mm, I should get a union then! Some health insurance sounds good right about now.
With its latest film, Pixar manages to achieve something that few other big Hollywood films do these days: a convincing reality. The body language & emotions of the characters, the machinations of the kitchen, the sights and sounds of Paris, and the dice of the celery, Ratatouille gets it all right, down to the seemingly insignificant details. As we walked out of the movie, my wife, who has spent time cooking in restaurants (with Daniel Boulud, even), couldn't stop talking about how well the movie captured the workings of the kitchen. To be sure, a G-rated kitchen but a true kitchen nonetheless.
I'm not quite sure how this is possible, but the people in Ratatouille acted more like real people than the actors in many recent live action movies (especially the rats), like they had realistic histories and motivations that governed their actions instead of feeling scripted and fake. The world of the movie felt as though it had existed before the opening credits and would continue after the curtain fell. Systems that have arisen through years, decades, centuries, millennia of careful evolution and interplay with one another were represented accurately and with care. In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander writes of the quality without a name:
There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of a person, and the crux of any individual person's story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
Pixar's search for this quality in the making of Ratatouille is impressive. And in a way, necessary. In order to draw the audience into the film and make them forget that they're watching animated characters in an animated world, the filmmakers need to get everything right. Motions too exaggerated, motivations glossed over, plot too uncoordinated, and the whole thing loses its sense of authenticity. People need to act like people, omelettes need to sag off of spatulas like omelettes, and the only woman chef in a haute cuisine French kitchen needs to behave accordingly.
This is an interesting state of affairs. In comparison, the live action movies have become the cartoons. Not all of them, but certainly many Hollywood movies have. Spidey 3, Transformers (I'm guessing), Die Hard 4 (guessing again), anything Eddie Murphy has made since the mid-80s, Wild Hogs, Blades of Glory, RV, etc. etc. I could go on and on. So what are we to make of a cartoon that seems more real than most live action movies? How about we stop thinking of them as cartoons or kids movies or animated films and start considering them as just plain movies? I'd put Pixar's five best films -- Toy Story 2, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and let's throw Brad Bird's The Iron Giant in for good measure -- among the best big budget films made in the last 10 years, no caveats required.
Oh, and I don't want to give away the ending, but I will say that Ratatouille also has something to say about critics and criticism, a topic that's currently under debate in foodie circles and has been discussed many times in different areas of the blogosphere. It almost seems as though the film's message is aimed partially at bloggers, and for those that care to listen, that message is both encouraging and enlightening.
Is Spiderman 3 the most expensive movie ever made? "With marketing and promotion factored in, the total price tag will approach half a billion dollars -- positioning Spider-Man 3 as the most expensive movie of all time."
The long-term success of films isn't always determined by how they did at the box office. Traffic made $124 million at the box office in 2000 while Requiem for a Dream made only $3.6 million ($9.50 of which was mine), but Requiem gets rented 33 percent more from Netflix than Traffic. 'It's almost impossible to go onto someone's MySpace page now and not find a reference to [the Coen brothers'] "The Big Lebowski" or [Terry Gilliam's] "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"' - two movies that caused barely a ripple in the theaters."
Quentin Tarantino talks about his success in the movie business. The bit about just doing something and not having to ask permission is great: "Here's the thing: they can write a mean letter, they can write a mean memo, but these guys don't have any real fight in them. If you're an artist, as opposed to a careerist, and your movie is more important to you than a career in this town, they can never beat you. You have a loaded gun, and you know you've got what it takes to put it in their faces and blow their heads off."
David Denby had a great piece in the New Yorker last week about the present and future of movies. I was surprised to learn that Hollywood hates the movie theater-going experience as much or more than the rest of us:
Consider the mall or the urban multiplex. The steady rain of contempt that I heard Hollywood executives direct at the theatres has been amplified, a dozen times over, by friends and strangers alike. The concession stands were wrathfully noted, with their "small" Cokes in which you could drown a rabbit, their candy bars the size of cow patties; add to that the pre-movie purgatory padded out to thirty minutes with ads, coming attractions, public-service announcements, theatre-chain logos, enticements for kitty-kat clubs and Ukrainian bakeries-anything to delay the movie and send you back to the concession stand, where the theatres make forty per cent of their profits. If you go to a thriller, you may sit through coming attractions for five or six action movies, with bodies bursting out of windows and flaming cars flipping through the air-a long stretch of convulsive imagery from what seems like a single terrible movie that you've seen before. At poorly run multiplexes, projector bulbs go dim, the prints develop scratches or turn yellow, the soles of your shoes stick to the floor, people jabber on cell phones, and rumbles and blasts bleed through the walls.
If we want to see something badly enough, we go, of course, and once everyone settles down we can still enjoy ourselves. But we go amid murmurs of discontent, and the discontent will only get louder as the theatre complexes age. Many of them were randomly and cheaply built in response to what George Lucas conclusively demonstrated with "Star Wars," in 1977: that a pop movie heavily advertised on national television could open simultaneously in theatres across the country and attract enormous opening-weekend audiences. As these theatres age, the gold leaf doesn't slowly peel off fluted columns. They rot, like disused industrial spaces. They have become the detritus of what seems, on a bad day, like a dying culture.
Denby also considers what happens to movies when the primary target audience (12-30 year-olds make up 50% of the movie-going population) may prefer to watch movies on DVD, their computers, or on iPods.
No exhibition method is innocent of aesthetic qualities. Platform agnosticism may flourish among kids, but platform neutrality doesn't exist. Fifty years ago, the length of a pop single was influenced by what would fit on a forty-five-r.p.m. seven-inch disk. The length and the episodic structure of the Victorian novel -- Dickens's novels, especially -- were at least partly created by writers and editors working on deadline for monthly periodicals. Television, for a variety of commercial and spatial reasons, developed the single-set or two-set sitcom. Format always affects form, and the exhibition space changes what's exhibited.
As a fan of watching movies on the big screen of a theater, I hope that sort of movie making doesn't go away anytime soon.
David Lynch, in an effort last month to promote Laura Dern's performance in his film, Inland Empire, for consideration by the Academy, set up shop on Hollywood Blvd. with a huge sign and a cow.
How would Shakespeare do in Hollywood today? He'd be raking in the dough on royalties, but because most of his stories were based on previous work, he might not have been able to write them in the first place without being sued for copyright infringement.
For the next fours years, any film released by Weinstein Co. will only be available for rental at Blockbuster (and especially not Netflix). What a stupid deal. I wonder what the filmmakers think of this, which will effectively limit the reach of their films (despite the positive spin Blockbuster and the Weinsteins want to put on this).
Malcolm Gladwell writes about a group of people trying to predict movie hits. As Andy notes, "the problem with their technique is coming up with every possible meaningful variable".
Disney panicked when they saw Johnny Depp's approach to playing Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, even though it eventually made the film a huge success. "'Look, you hired me to do the gig. If you can't trust me, you can fire me. But I can't change it.' It was a hard thing to say, but fuck it." Didn't work so well for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory though... (via mike)
Hollywood studios are increasingly not showing their movies to critics before the official release. "The media world is changing, and the people they want to reach are the kids who are looking at MySpace.com and exchanging instant messages about pictures aimed at them. Conventional critics don't matter."
The fashion industry doesn't try to control its creativity the way that the music and film industries do. "The fashion world recognizes that creativity cannot be bridled and controlled and that obsessive quests to do so will only diminish its vitality. Other content industries would do well to heed this wisdom."
Blockbuster films are getting more expensive and accounting for less of Hollywood's box office take...is Hollywood's emphasis on big movies nearing its end? I've always thought it was dumb that the movie industry put so many of its eggs in so few baskets. (ps. Chris Anderson's Long Tail book is available for preorder on Amazon.)
Matt calculates the cost of a la carte television, i.e. ordering TV shows from iTunes. His yearly cable bill is $648 but the cost of watching all hs favorite shows from iTunes would be $800. I bet the networks love this math, especially since it cuts the cable companies out of the loop. But in an a la carte-only world, how would you discover shows in the first place?
The delicate marketing of Brokeback Mountain. In Manhattan for example, analysis of the city's various social microclimates was used to select the opening theaters to de-emphasize the art-house aspect of the film. (via dj)
Edward Jay Epstein examines where it all went wrong for Blockbuster Video. Blockbuster had an opportunity to have rental pricing for DVDs like they did with video, but they turned the deal down and the studios priced DVDs for retail instead and have been minting money with that scheme ever since.
What business are movie theaters in? The fast-food business, the advertising business, or the movie exhibition business? All three, but they take the movie exhibition business the least seriously.
King Kong gets a slow start at the box office. This is kind of amazing to me...except for the length, Kong is almost a perfect movie for audiences to go see in the theater.
Gelf Magazine says "a new study uses shoddy stats to hold the movie industry responsible for society's poor health choice". "But even if we disregard the fact that people don't necessarily take their public-health cues from films like Scary Movie and Rambo: First Blood Part II, the study has serious flaws that undermine even its tenuous claim on our attention".
Edward Jay Epstein on why Pixar should make nice with Disney again. Bottom line: Disney owns the sequel rights to all of Pixar's films and Pixar can't afford to do battle against Toy Story 3 or The Incredibles 2 in future summers.
With attendance up in September, the movie studios are beginning to admit that, gosh, maybe crappy movies are to blame for this summer's poor box office performance.
When estimating losses due to piracy in the media, movie studios are fond of using the full purchase price of the pirated DVD or movie ticket. So if I download a copy of Bewitched off of the internet, Sony (and associated companies, the theater, distributors, etc.) feels like they've lost $10.50[1], even if I had no plans to ever see the movie in the theatre.
So why is it when Sony defrauds their customers by fabricating movie reviews to promote the theatrical releases of some of their films, they're only refunding $5 of the total ticket price for those that actually saw those films? Why not the full price? Or better yet, how about a refund for transportation costs, the price of any concessions purchased, estimated loss of wages for time spent watching the film, and compensation for any emotional trauma suffered as a result of thinking the movie was going to be great when it in fact sucked? That sounds about fair.
[1] Well, $10.50 if you live in Manhattan. If you live in rural Wisconsin, you're only cheating Sony out of $8.00 or so. Well, until the movie comes out on pay-per-view and it costs $3.95. But then when the DVD comes out, Sony's loss will shoot back to $26.99. Twelve months after the DVD release, when Bewitched is available in a value two-pack with Anchorman, Sony will only be losing $6. Whew, must be hard to keep all those losses straight.
How the DVD is changing Hollywood and the movie business. "Most important, the new DVD audience is so diverse that companies can target niche markets and still sell millions of disks. Because specialized markets are more predictable, the risk of failure is much lower, and so small-to-mid-budget movies can be very profitable indeed."
Another in Edward Jay Epstein's series on the business of Hollywood. This one's about the secret industry reports done by the MPAA that reveal hard-to-come-by statistics about how much Hollywood is making from which businesses.
Another take on why movie theater revenues are declining. The ads suck, the movies suck, ringing cell phones suck, and you can watch your Netflix at home on your widescreen TV. Again, no mention of piracy.
Here's a list of reasons that Hollywood is in trouble, with nary a mention of the piracy bogeyman. "These trends do not appear reversible in the short run. It is not just that this year's movies mostly stink."
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