Francis Coppola sees cinema falling apart

[sauronsfinger]

The director of the GODFATHER films is worried about the future of his business and artform.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... bmamDBit14

Is he right?

[axordil]

Given some of his more recent output *insert smiley holding nose here*, is he part of the solution or part of the problem?

You know, back in the 30s, they made a lot of movies in two weeks. "B-movies" flew through theaters, because there was another one just like that one queued up. Nowadays a lot of them look better than the ones at the top of the bill back then...the point being, things change. If you can't adapt, change is bad. If you can, it's just change: maybe good, maybe not.

It sounds like Coppola can't adapt.

[Frelga]

Sounds like what my dad calls "we used to have wetter water in the old days" syndrome.

[Alatar]

I'm sure some of you remember Boormans take on the subject:

Big movies now cost $100m and that figure is going up. How can the studios afford it? They can't. Film-maker John Boorman on an industry facing meltdown

John Boorman
Saturday September 6, 2003
The Guardian

When I was a child in the London blitz, a blockbuster was a massive bomb that could knock out a neighbourhood. The blockbuster movie, now utterly dominant and crushing better films, is set to destroy the Hollywood studios; the monster is turning on its makers. The blockbuster now costs so much to make and market that no one can afford them any more.

The American military, able to crush every opponent, is in danger of bankrupting the US. Is there an inherent flaw in a system whereby everything gets bigger and bigger until it collapses under its own weight?

Until the 1980s, movies opened in a handful of cinemas, one in each major city. There they would sit for a few weeks then roll out gradually as word of mouth created demand. Then they started advertising on national TV. It was so expensive that to make it worthwhile the movie had to be available at "a theatre near everyone". Radically, they opened with 1,000 prints, then 2,000, 3,000 and eventually 4,000. Five million dollars for prints alone. Costs escalate each year. Marketing a picture can run to $30-40m, as they swamp the multiplexes in attempts to squeeze out the opposition. Between 25% and 30% of a blockbuster's box office will be taken in the first weekend.

Certain basic elements are required to manufacture one of these: an A-list star ($20m) who will lend the picture instant recognition; spectacle and action, but no real violence or sexuality since the film has to achieve a PG rating (an R rating cuts the take by 30%); digital effects where the bar is raised with every picture. Industrial Light and Magic needed $40m to make the creature in Hulk.

Dolby stereo and huge amplification in the cinemas give audiences an experience comparable to a rock concert. Typically the music will be almost incessant and costs several million dollars. A hundred million dollars is now the norm for a blockbuster and going up every year.

The studios can no longer afford them but must go on making them. More and more they swallow their pride and split costs with a rival studio. Massive German tax shelter money has kept them afloat for the last several years, but is running out. With stakes this high, they try to buy guarantees: subject matter that the audience can instantly relate to, sequels, films based on TV series that the audience watched as kids, or stars in a storyline that copies last year's big hit.

In my memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, I describe how Deliverance was made. Warners hired me to write a script. I submitted it. They said, OK, if you can cast it and make it for a price, go ahead. How naive that sounds by today's standards.

Today, I would have received pages of detailed notes from a number of studio executives. I would have been obliged to hone the script down to a simple direct storyline that is clear and undemanding, and eradicate any eccentricity or quirkiness.

When the script satisfied their requirements, the studio would send it out to a star. If the star passed, the studio's response would be to hire a new writer. Further rejections by two or three stars and the project would be dropped.

If they found a star who was interested, the title, cast and storyline would then be test-marketed, asking people in the street if they would go to see such a film - four men canoeing a river and one gets buggered. Only with positive results would the studio go forward. Clearly, there is no place for originality in this method. In fact originality is anathema. How can you ask people if they want to see a film that they cannot relate to another film?

To this end, script gurus like Robert McKee have brainwashed a generation of screenwriters into constructing scenarios along rigid lines: introduction of characters, statement of conflict, development of narrative, division into three acts, carefully placed climaxes, conclusion. This contributes to the sameness of movies, and feeds into audience expectations of comfortable patterns and makes them uneasy if a film diverges from that formula. Little by little movies become more and more similar to each other, with marginal variations. One can imagine them evolving like No theatre into a form where only an audience inured to them can discern any differences. "Those Rocky movies," someone asked, "how do you tell them apart?" "It's easy," said his companion "they're numbered."

Ang Lee said of his experience of making Hulk that the blockbuster requires not talent but endurance. The nervous studio executives exert relentless daily pressure over every aspect of their investment. The other day a studio fired the cameraman on a big picture. The director was not consulted.

The studio will insist that every scene is shot in such a way that it can be malleable to editing, because when the picture is put together it will be test-marketed. Audiences will tell the makers what bits they don't like. These will be recut or cut out or reshot. The audience is asked to rate the movie as excellent, very good, good, fair, poor. To be successful, a film must achieve over 80% in the top two categories. If it falls short, recutting and reshooting will continue until it does. During this process, any remaining fragments of originality that have slipped through the net will be ruthlessly expunged.

Putting all their money into blockbusters, the major studios are making fewer films, down from 20-24 to 10-12 per year. Whereas films are traditionally developed by directors who work with writers and designers to shape a project to the point where it can be shot, the blockbuster is built by the studio.

They manufacture the script, decide on cast and budget. Only then will the studio audition directors. With fewer films being made, the competition is intense. More and more, directors will arrive with a visual presentation, often quite elaborate, with scenes from other movies or animated storyboards. With many directors vying for the first Harry Potter movie, Warners elected to assign it to the applicant who had made the most movies that had grossed over $100m. The winner was Chris Columbus, famous for Home Alone.

Those of us excluded from this elite, or lacking the stomach for film-making of this order, are increasingly relegated to the mean streets of the independent film, the arthouse ghetto of low budgets and deferred fees.

The independent film has to squeeze into margins and corners not occupied by the bullying blockbusters. The finance is cobbled together from co-productions, tax shelters, territorial pre-sales and, if you are lucky, as I was with my film Truth, money from the Film Council (I won £2m on the lottery without buying a ticket).

It took 18 lawyers to reconcile the contracts of all the participants. During those long weeks as I waited in South Africa with my cast and crew, the picture teetered on the verge of collapse. A feature of independent films is that most of them fall apart, often days before they are due to start shooting, and, even sadder, sometimes a week or two after they have begun.

Legal fees were one of the biggest items in my budget. Everyone who puts in a bit of money, or introduces you to an investor, demands to be an executive producer. I ended up with 6 producers and 5 executive producers and 2 associate producers. Billy Wilder was once asked: "What is an associate producer?" "Anybody," he replied, "who's prepared to associate with a producer." When it comes to showing the picture to them, their lawyers, accountants and assistants, is there a screening room big enough?

But once the tortuous process of patching the picture together is accomplished, you make the movie without the advice and intercession of studio executives. Here originality is not penalised, an individual vision is allowed, ideas are tolerated, and the final vindication comes at the Academy awards, which have increasingly become an independent film festival. Somehow we stay alive, we limp along as we wait for the blockbuster to reach critical mass and implode. In the rubble and ruins of Hollywood, we will emerge to baffle and bemuse that pre-programmed audience.

· Adventures of a Suburban Boy by John Boorman is published by Faber & Faber
Source : http://film.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858 ... 81,00.html

[axordil]

As I recall, the dominant system for producing films has gone through an expansion/bust cycle before, at least twice that I can think of: the original studio system period, which puttered out after WWII, and the epic bloat of the 50s/60s, which ended when people like Coppola (and Lucas, and Spielberg) started making "smaller" movies.

[Primula Baggins]

I wonder if films are going the same way publishing and probably the music industry seems to be going: whether the big companies' focus will be on profitable, predictable mass entertainment, and yet the Internet and other "new" distribution methods will make it possible for niche artists (and niche craftspeople like me) to find their niche markets far more easily than was ever possible before, and without the need for expensive corporate backing and publicity.

I don't think movie theaters will die anytime soon. The transition to digital will allow them flexibility they've never had before, not just to show concerts and big sports events but to program film festivals (if there's a demand) and run popular oldies, and to show "smaller" films without anyone needing to make the huge investment of making and shipping out a dozen or a hundred 35mm prints.

Art and big publicly traded corporations don't go together very well in any case. Maybe this is one of those divorces that everyone will benefit from.

(I can see why Coppola would be unhappy; he's one of the lucky ones who in the past has been able to get studio backing and distribution for anything he makes. That's obviously an easier and more lucrative path, if it's available to you, and seeing it closing off would be upsetting.)

[MithLuin]

Well...films cost money to make. A writer or a musician can ply their trade with a modest investment, and use the internet for publicity. (I realize computers, instruments and recording studio sessions cost money, but compared to a film? Pocket change.) The internet just helps with the distribution, finding the audience.

While it is true that an independent film doesn't have to cost $100 M, and Boorman points out some of those costs as 'extraneous'...it still costs money to get a crew and equipment and costumes and feed everybody and put them up on location, etc.

Not that I have much knowledge of film making, but Tuck Everlasting (terrible movie, btw) was filmed in my neck of the woods, and they rented out office space at my dad's work as a home base. So, he got to see all the little Chinese ladies sewing period costumes and all of that, but also got some understanding of the scope and just plain expensive decisions that filmmakers make. He's used to planning construction projects, so...it was a bit different and looked very...wasteful.

So I don't see digital media as being quite so revolutionary in this field, because you are still going to have to be a professional to get to some level of 'in the same league' just because of the investment. We might all watch 'The Hunt for Gollum' or 'Born of Hope' because we're LotR fans...but we're not likely to label them 'good movies'. They are well-made fan projects, and quite ambitious/impressive...but they also are weak/amateur.

But that doesn't mean things aren't changing. Just...maybe not so drastically.

[axordil]

It's always been possible to make a decent film for relatively little money, even one that does OK if it gets distributed. You can't make Transformers 2 on a shoestring (well, maybe if you used the actual toys ), but you don't need millions of bucks of CGI and SFX to make something like Casablanca.

[Alatar]

Well, Moon is a Sci-Fi blockbuster and was made for about $5M.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TIiOJMJLCU

[Primula Baggins]

A lot of films on the independent circuit were made for considerably less than that, tens of thousands of dollars. Heck, with digital video and volunteer/student crews and actors, and equipment you can borrow, you can make a short film for a few hundred bucks, which is mostly spent on donuts and coffee.

You can get professional-level video editing software for your Mac for less than $1000, turning your laptop into a more sophisticated editing tool than any filmmaker in the world had 20 years ago.

And recording studios can also be run from home computers now.

As creating and distributing art and entertainment gets cheaper, it also gets into the hands of the artists themselves. I think that's a good thing, for the most part. There will be more dreadful art out there, but what's good will be found and talked about.

[axordil]

Alatar--
I wouldn't call Moon a blockbuster. SF, absolutely, and pretty good SF at that, but it's tonally it's almost an anti-blockbuster: the ratio of content to spectacle is too high.

All--

Here's a fun, scary thought of the near future: cinema on demand, or, the midnight show meets DVR. Get fifty people together--maybe less--and tell a theater owner you want to watch, say, the extended ROTK. They buy a license for a single showing, download it, and Tuesday night at 8 (or some similarly slow night) you have one of the smaller houses to yourself. All the pieces for this are in place as we speak.

[Primula Baggins]

It's coming. And for the home as well. Netflix already offers about 17,000 movies and TV collections that you can stream to your computer or to a TV that's attached to a $99 box and a network. (It comes free with all but their bare-bones rental plan.) As bandwidth improves for more people, the list will get longer and more sources will provide the service.

But I'd love to be able to get a group together as you say, and see some beloved older movie in a theater. Such as the LotR EEs, which I've never had a chance to see that way.

[yovargas]

...or to a TV that's attached to a $99 box and a network.

You don't need that box. You can run a cable (forget what kind; anybody?) from your PC to your TV and have your PC use your TV as a monitor. It's what I do.

[Primula Baggins]

Really? Cool! We only own one computer that is new enough to stream movies from Netflix, and it's a tiny laptop with tinny sound. Maybe I'll give what you say a try.

[yovargas]

The friend who showed me mainly uses his tiny laptop with tinny sound for exactly that purpose.

[Primula Baggins]

I'm going to find out how to do this. The idea of being able to sit down any time I want and order up a great old Masterpiece Theatre episode, or Doctor Who, or even one of those new-fangled HBO shows I never get to see. . . .

[sauronsfinger]

CLOVERFIELD is an example of a film made for a modest amount by todays standards and did well in box office returns. Of course, the entire thing revolved around a gimmick which was there for the main purpose in an attempt to hide its obvious technical limitations but you have to give them credit for innovation and turning lemons into lemonade.

[vison]

I maintain that in a few years, a really dedicated Purist will make a version of LOTR that will have Peter Jackson foaming at the mouth with envy.

[Primula Baggins]

There would probably have to be a lot of purist versions, considering that people are purist about different things and nobody has the same definition of what's the "right" way to put Tolkien on screen.

[elfshadow]

I maintain that in a few years, a really dedicated Purist will make a version of LOTR that will have Peter Jackson foaming at the mouth with envy.

As much as I love the books, putting them on screen exactly as they were written would make a TERRIBLE movie (well, more like eight terrible movies). You can't really compare a book to a film. They're totally different mediums and must be experienced in different ways. You may not have liked PJ's LOTR, but I defy anyone to make a "dedicated purist" movie that would be worth watching. LOTR must be read to be experienced in its original form. Any movie that tried to be uber-purist would fail spectacularly.