I Heart Huckabees = Collective Soul?
So we already sort of talked about this, and I talked a little more with Beth about it, but I thought I'd try spelling this out again. The point isn't to be snarky, but to try and figure out exactly why so many of the "indie" movies I've seen lately basically suck.
In going with the title of this post, I was thinking that we're at a moment now with movies where we were with music in 1995. So, a brief history for the music end: after the American and British punk bands of the late 1970's (which were on major labels) were dropped by those labels, the majors turned punk into new wave and then what you typically think of at eighties music. This in turn forced bands who really wanted to build on the punk legacy to find ways to put out their own music- forming their own labels, working out their own tours, etc. This music scene grew until the labels started noticing again and they started signing bands. Eventually Nirvana had a huge hit in 1991, and then everyone was signed (pretty much.) So that by 1995, there were tons of bands with hit singles. Some bands were legit and either had made great music in the past, or were to go on to more success (the Meat Puppets, Flaming Lips, Ween, Radiohead (more or less)), but many many more were third or fourth generation rip-offs of Nirvana or Pearl Jam (Collective Soul, Better than Ezra, Bush, Candlebox, etc.)
I remember being swept up in the hype (MTV, local radio stations) around all this new music and couldn't really make heads or tails of it until around 1995-96, to be able to figure out which bands did suck, and why, and to recognize it early on. So that brings me to movies now- I don't think there is quite the same history, though in a loose metaphor, Pulp Fiction could be the Nevermind- a flashpoint that made movie studios decide to look more closely at indie film directors. I don't know much about the history of this, but at some point Miramax was bought up by a Disney company, and then other companies started having their own "indie" subsudiaries- Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, Lions Gate, Warner Independent.
So I don't know how guilty the studios are in this, but it seems we're at a point where there are a lot of movies coming out marketed as indie, but not really being influenced in a good way- like they're being made to fit that "Middle-Sized Movie" niche (I this the ny times A.O. Scott coined that term, as the movies aren't really indie.) So they kind of force a little bit of the quirky humor that seems as silly and ingeniune as bands wearing flannel and long johns.
I think the movie that sparked this idea in me was Sideways, a pretty terrible and average buddy flick, but wrapped up in it's own pretentions so badly. I kind of wish the director had done the commentary, perhaps he would have tipped his hand and revealed how insightful he thought his movie was... Or, perhaps it really should have been cast with Adam Sandler and Owen Wilson and kept the jokes funny instead of "witty."
I could go on, but I think I should just start a basic list here, for 1995-2005, at least stand ground with some of these movies I do like, and more I don't, and we can discuss this more. (My hope being to perhaps figure out what is working in the movies I like vs. what is missing in what I don't- possibly a way to also talk about music, art, lit, etc. One off the top of my head is the rewatchability of the good ones- American Beauty is just unwatchable after the first time. Or maybe it would seem terrible to watch now, with more, better movies I've seen.) Anyway...
Good
Rushmore/Royal Tenenbaums
Lost in Translation
Before Sunrise/Sunset, Slacker, Waking Life
Broken Flowers
American Splendor/Ghost World
Big Lebowski, Barton Fink
Bad
Virgin Suicides
The Life Aquatic
I Heart Huckabees
Sideways
American Beauty
Being John Malkovich, Adaptation
The Opposite of Sex
Magnolia/Punch-Drunk Love/Boogie Nights
No decision yet
Most David Lynch stuff
recent John Waters
Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind
Memento
American History X
Happiness
posted by Lou @ 11:03 PM
1 Comments:
Here's an article at backstage.com, it sort of puts this in a different light. Maybe the music metaphor still works- by 1995 bands were no longer signed, and I think that's when the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, etc came around, along with the third wave of hip-hop (Tupac, Biggy, etc)
Hung Up on Tentpoles, Studios Think Too Big
November 22, 2005
By Anne Thompson
Because the studios are trying to respond to a clear audience demand for more material that's fresh and unpredictable, they are greenlighting riskier fare. The results this fall were disastrous. A spate of fall movies crashed and burned, movies that if they had been produced and marketed at the independent level might have worked.
Twentieth Century Fox released Curtis Hanson's family drama "In Her Shoes," starring Cameron Diaz, and the twisted Marc Forster thriller "Stay," starring Ewan McGregor; Warner Bros. Pictures failed with Niki Caro's feminist drama "North Country," starring Charlize Theron, and Shane Black's well-reviewed "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang"; Paramount Pictures released Cameron Crowe's $54 million "Elizabethtown," starring Orlando Bloom, and "The Weather Man," starring Nicolas Cage. None are working at the boxoffice.
These films were all worth making. But they were too expensive for what they were. And the studios don't know how to market them. "They can get away with marketing tentpoles," says one marketing maven, "but with the smaller pictures, they don't have a clue."
Personal filmmakers such as Crowe, Wes Anderson ("The Royal Tenenbaums") and Paul Thomas Anderson ("Punch Drunk Love") shouldn't be making movies at the studio level. (And even a proven commercial writer-director like James L. Brooks shouldn't spend $80 million on a movie like "Spanglish.") They should be doing it the hard way on the indie side, with the right cast and shooting schedule. They're spoiled. No filmmaker in his right mind wants to give up the fat studio gravy train. But the studios need to wake up and recognize what business they're in.
What makes 2005 a watershed year is that the message of the marketplace, where the boxoffice is down some 8% over last year, rang loud and clear. And the smartest people in Hollywood are scrambling for answers. (The others are insisting that nothing is wrong.) "Fundamentally, this is an industry in transition," ICM chairman Jeff Berg says. "Every studio has to rethink itself. Change is hard when existing systems are in place that are used to doing business a certain way."
The heads of the studios are paid to figure out where the market is going and what audiences want to see two years in advance. Each studio has $1 billion allocated, more or less, to plunk down on producing about 20 movies a year. They bet their stacks of chips on the movies that will go forward.
The heart of the problem is that the studios do one thing really well. They know how to throw their enormous resources at making and marketing event movies. Their primary job is to find tentpoles. These are the powerful drivers for the rest of their slate. Warners has Harry Potter, Batman and Superman. Universal Pictures has "The Bourne Identity." Paramount has the "Mission: Impossible" series. Sony Pictures has Spider-Man and now MGM's James Bond. Fox has its X-Men. Disney has its animated family features like "Chicken Little."
It is justifiable for a studio to spend hundreds of millions on a real potential revenue generator, banking that it will surely satisfy the masses of moviegoers around the world. The trick, though, is to launch the tentpole in the first place: a movie that is so satisfying to all four audience quadrants (men and women, old and young) that it generates a franchise. In order to get that movie, the studios will put the best writers, directors, stars, effects and creative teams on board. And they will shower the marketplace with advertising, promotion and hype to get people to see it. The problem now is that, as one agent puts it, "a generation of viewers is not buying the dog food."
Once a studio actually launches a tentpole -- which is a bitch to do -- they can ride it for a few films assuming they don't mess it up. For example, if Sony wanted to turn the sequel to a sexy romp like "The Mask of Zorro" into the PG family film "The Legend of Zorro," they should have telegraphed that to the audience instead of selling Catherine Zeta-Jones busting out of her bodice. Audiences were confused. The studio also should have recognized that selling "Zathura" as a sequel to the 10-year-old "Jumanji" was a mistake. Whoever argued in favor of changing the title and selling the movie as an original was right. But it's always much harder to start from scratch. The trouble with such would-be blockbusters as Sony's "Stealth" and DreamWorks' "The Island" is that they don't always work.
So many movies try to be tentpoles -- and fail. It's the equivalent of striking out when you're trying to hit a home run. You can't afford to do that every time at bat. Tom Pollock, the ex-chairman of Universal Pictures (who now runs Montecito Pictures with Ivan Reitman), tells his students at the University of California at Santa Barbara that the studios invest too much in one-shot movies that never will yield any sequels.
That's because the studios have become so accustomed to throwing money at the movies they want to score with that it's impossible for them to give up their free-spending ways. They also rely on foreign boxoffice and DVD sales to pull them out of the red. And instead of cutting back on costs and banking on what they really believe in, they bring in partners to cut their risk.
Sony justifies spending $85 million on "Memoirs of a Geisha" -- which could well be an Oscar contender but is an unlikely cash cow or sequel generator -- by bringing in Spyglass Entertainment as a partner.
To follow Pollock's argument, only tentpoles justify outlays of serious studio cash. Everything else should be cheap genre fare: comedies, thrillers and horror movies. Basically, that's the business that the wildly successful Lions Gate and Dimension are in. But these indies do what they do for a price. They and the studio "indie" subsidiaries, such as Fox Searchlight and Focus Features, are equipped to pay less for everything.
As Paramount reconfigures its specialty film division, which John Lesher is taking over, it should be able to take a movie like "Elizabethtown" and shrink its budget in half.
In Hollywood, there's a studio price and an indie price. There's a two-tiered system in place. On the studio side, the top movie stars cost $20 million against a share of the gross, and the top directors command $10 million (unless you're Peter Jackson coming off "The Lord of the Rings").
Movie stars know the rules today: Sucker the studios into paying your price and go to the indies for the quality parts that will sustain your career. If you're George Clooney, you recognize the value of putting yourself in quality work that will stand the test of time.
No studio is going to admit the obvious: They can't afford to make all their movies at top-tier prices. And if they only make a few tentpoles a year, what are they going to do with the rest of their slate? None of the studios is willing to slash the fat from their motion picture divisions. When Warners instituted job cuts, they got rid of two top people from Warner Independent Pictures, the one division they should be beefing up.
The best way for the studios to make the tricky one-shot movies in the "middle" that are neither tentpoles nor genre flicks is to beef up their acquisitions departments and let the indies make those movies for a price. They can pick up movies from studio suppliers like Mandate Pictures ("The Grudge," starring Sarah Michelle Gellar) or Sidney Kimmel Entertainment (the upcoming "Trust the Man," starring Julianne Moore), which can produce commercial movies at far less than studio rates. For the studios, indie producers who can consistently deliver low-cost commercial movies, such as Mandate's Joe Drake, SKE's Bill Horberg and Michael London ("Sideways"), are worth their weight in gold.
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Anne Thompson writes for The Hollywood Reporter.
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