"Not that I have anything against accountants. Many of them are lovely people."
-- Mathis, Casino Royale (2006)
-- Mathis, Casino Royale (2006)
There is a fundamental problem with the way Hollywood is set up: it designed with the sole intent of making money. More specifically, it is designed to make as much of it as possible. Of the "Big Six" movie studios (Columbia, WB, Disney, Universal, Fox, Paramount) do you know how many of them have someone with a movie background running them? One: Paramount. Since that executive took over, Paramount has ranked first or second in marketshare six out of the past seven years despite releasing significantly fewer movies. Wake up, Hollywood! It isn't a coincidence that once you put one of the producers of The Departed in charge, you started making better movies!
The reason it's helpful to have people who love movies at the top is that that familiarity leads to a better product, which almost inevitably leads to higher profits. Everybody wins! As it stands, executives have to be pitched the blandest, most canned version of a concept possible to be sold on a movie idea. It was even present in the last Saturday Psychic. Combine two movies and let your audience take the best elements of both and imagine the beautiful union. But moviemaking is difficult and disjointed; there is no recipe that you can mix together and heat at 375 for an hour. You need executives who understand and have been through the process, who can envision how the process would go while they're being pitched, and most importantly, are passionate enough to care about the movies themselves and not just their profitability.
The problem with asking studios to have more awards nominations than MBAs at the top is that it would fly in the face of basic business logic. Now Hollywood just needs to realize it is unlike almost any other business. With basic business, once you establish a successful product, you can ride that line for years to come by just tweaking and improving on that same product. You can build a profitable company around something like the George Foreman grill by tailoring your business around it. The Marvel money-printing universe not-withstanding, you can't do that with movies. But rather than realizing Marvel is the exception that proves the rule, the studios are trying to copy it with Fox looking to spin off the X-Men universe into multiple movies and brands. Superhero movies are the flavor of the day, but like everything else, the market will get over-saturated, the studios will have sunk costs into these multimillion dollar ventures, and once again find themselves with franchises like James Bond (MGM's when they went under), yet still going bankrupt because of other poor decisions (and sometimes poor decisions with those tentpole franchises).
More than likely the two people I'm describing, the kind a company would put in charge of a major studio and the kind that could care about more than bottom lines, cannot ever be the same person. There's just too much life experience involved in fulfilling one of those criteria to expect someone to check both boxes. Which is where Hollywood recognizing it's unique comes into play. It doesn't need to necessarily overhaul it's command structure, but the creative side needs to be elevated to match the executive. Ideally, the creative side would get a budget to spend and spread around how they pleased with the executive side just in charge of marketing and distribution. The problem with studio notes is that they're handed down by studio heads who have no business inserting themselves into the creative process, yet the same confidence that led, in part, to their current position is now telling them they have creative merit. Artists will tell you the genuine inspiration is usually not some magical process, it is putting in the time and effort to refine and hone an idea until it is worthy. The studio heads are still stuck on the romantic idea that inspiration comes in "Eureka!" moments of which they are equally capable, without any extra focus or work.
Will that change ever happen? Of course not. A much more likely solution would just be the fracturing of the entire process. Producers become more like investors, buying stake in a movie before it's filmed. The artists see it through to completion, when it is sold to distributors, and none of these processes occur under the same roof. Even then, there's simply too much money involved for those interests to not consolidate back into the unwieldy masses we currently have. It's a shame, because as the auto industry provides an apt analogy, the studios' assembly line movies can get the job done, but there's no comparison to a handcrafted one.
The last option available and the most likely to have a chance (albeit, still slim) would be for theaters to explore variable ticket prices. A packed theater that paid less is still better than a half-empty one paying full price once you factor in concessions, and might encourage people to see independent movies they otherwise would have avoided. Theaters are one of the last industries charging a flat rate, regardless of the service you select, so perhaps they could be talked into modernizing a bit. Still, with all three solutions having slim odds, it's a pretty bleak outlook unless you're a fan of the current game of roulette you play when purchasing your movie ticket.
The reason it's helpful to have people who love movies at the top is that that familiarity leads to a better product, which almost inevitably leads to higher profits. Everybody wins! As it stands, executives have to be pitched the blandest, most canned version of a concept possible to be sold on a movie idea. It was even present in the last Saturday Psychic. Combine two movies and let your audience take the best elements of both and imagine the beautiful union. But moviemaking is difficult and disjointed; there is no recipe that you can mix together and heat at 375 for an hour. You need executives who understand and have been through the process, who can envision how the process would go while they're being pitched, and most importantly, are passionate enough to care about the movies themselves and not just their profitability.
The problem with asking studios to have more awards nominations than MBAs at the top is that it would fly in the face of basic business logic. Now Hollywood just needs to realize it is unlike almost any other business. With basic business, once you establish a successful product, you can ride that line for years to come by just tweaking and improving on that same product. You can build a profitable company around something like the George Foreman grill by tailoring your business around it. The Marvel money-printing universe not-withstanding, you can't do that with movies. But rather than realizing Marvel is the exception that proves the rule, the studios are trying to copy it with Fox looking to spin off the X-Men universe into multiple movies and brands. Superhero movies are the flavor of the day, but like everything else, the market will get over-saturated, the studios will have sunk costs into these multimillion dollar ventures, and once again find themselves with franchises like James Bond (MGM's when they went under), yet still going bankrupt because of other poor decisions (and sometimes poor decisions with those tentpole franchises).
More than likely the two people I'm describing, the kind a company would put in charge of a major studio and the kind that could care about more than bottom lines, cannot ever be the same person. There's just too much life experience involved in fulfilling one of those criteria to expect someone to check both boxes. Which is where Hollywood recognizing it's unique comes into play. It doesn't need to necessarily overhaul it's command structure, but the creative side needs to be elevated to match the executive. Ideally, the creative side would get a budget to spend and spread around how they pleased with the executive side just in charge of marketing and distribution. The problem with studio notes is that they're handed down by studio heads who have no business inserting themselves into the creative process, yet the same confidence that led, in part, to their current position is now telling them they have creative merit. Artists will tell you the genuine inspiration is usually not some magical process, it is putting in the time and effort to refine and hone an idea until it is worthy. The studio heads are still stuck on the romantic idea that inspiration comes in "Eureka!" moments of which they are equally capable, without any extra focus or work.
Will that change ever happen? Of course not. A much more likely solution would just be the fracturing of the entire process. Producers become more like investors, buying stake in a movie before it's filmed. The artists see it through to completion, when it is sold to distributors, and none of these processes occur under the same roof. Even then, there's simply too much money involved for those interests to not consolidate back into the unwieldy masses we currently have. It's a shame, because as the auto industry provides an apt analogy, the studios' assembly line movies can get the job done, but there's no comparison to a handcrafted one.
The last option available and the most likely to have a chance (albeit, still slim) would be for theaters to explore variable ticket prices. A packed theater that paid less is still better than a half-empty one paying full price once you factor in concessions, and might encourage people to see independent movies they otherwise would have avoided. Theaters are one of the last industries charging a flat rate, regardless of the service you select, so perhaps they could be talked into modernizing a bit. Still, with all three solutions having slim odds, it's a pretty bleak outlook unless you're a fan of the current game of roulette you play when purchasing your movie ticket.
RSS Feed