<\/p>\n
What has this to do with Hollywood and the movies?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the past\u2026<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u2026nothing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Today\u2026<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u2026everything.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the past, the studios were run by entrepreneurs.\u00a0 Cohn, Fox, Mayer, Zukor, Laemmle, Goldwyn, the Warners\u2014they knew<\/em> movies.\u00a0 After all, as Neal Gabler has so brilliantly observed, they invented<\/em> Hollywood.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n They knew movies.\u00a0 They knew story.\u00a0 They knew the stars and how to handle them.\u00a0 Above all, they knew the business.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n They knew the business and they knew it was a business of risk.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sam Goldwyn risked everything he had, including his home, every time he made a film.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Harry Cohn worked by hunch, by impulse, by the seat of his pants.\u00a0 Instinct (informed by years of experience) told him when to take a chance on a story, a star, a director.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And that is what all of them did.\u00a0 They took chances.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It was this roll-of-the-dice, go-with-your-gut stance that got them through the great watersheds in Hollywood history\u2014the coming of sound, the rise of the unions, the consent decrees that stripped them of ownership of the theatres, the competition from television, even the appearance of the auteur director.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then, in the late seventies and early eighties, came the corporations.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TransAmerica swallowed UA.\u00a0 Gulf and Western devoured Paramount.\u00a0 Kinney Parking consumed Warner Bros. Tracinda bought, stripped, and sold MGM many times, nearly extinguishing what had once been the brightest of all the Hollywood lights.\u00a0 And so it went until, at last, General Electric, the world\u2019s largest corporation, absorbed Universal.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So what?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What difference did it make?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Well, first of all, ignorance replaced experience.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I used to complain to my producing partner, Donna Dubrow, that the guys running the studios could just as easily be manufacturing Universal Widgets or automobiles from Detroit.\u00a0 Her response?\u00a0 \u201cNo, Dan.\u00a0 These guys couldn\u2019t sell used<\/em> cars let alone make new ones.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The corporate heads, in their wisdom, hired former agents, show biz attorneys, and Harvard MBA\u2019s to run the studios\u2014all of them afraid of losing their jobs, all of them seeking security in the most insecure of all businesses.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Risk-averse like the corporations themselves, they embraced the star system.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Stars, in theory at least, guaranteed their films would open.\u00a0 Put a star in your movie, and, they were convinced, you\u2019d get an audience for it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Put Dustin Hoffman together with Warren Beatty, and you get Ishtar<\/em>\u2014one of the most expensive disasters in film history.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Put John Travolta in his personal tribute to Scientology, and you get Battlefield Earth<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Put Eddie Murphy in one of his pet projects, and you get Pluto Nash<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Put\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Well, you get the picture.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The corporate parents and their studio-head drones did not.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n They so believed in the star system that there were willing to pay the stars anything they wanted.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n They wanted a lot.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Five, ten, fifteen million and more\u2026up front.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then you had to add thirty percent \u201cfor the shit,\u201d as production manager Tom Joyner once described the perks that come with being a star.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You leased John Travolta\u2019s private aircraft to carry him back and forth to the set.\u00a0 You hired Bruce Willis\u2019 brother as a producer.\u00a0 You put Arnold Schwarzenegger\u2019s gym equipment in a thirty or forty foot container and sent it off to the location shoot in Mexico.\u00a0 You gave Demi (fondly known to production managers as \u201cGimme\u201d) Moore the sun, the moon and the stars.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then, of course, there was the back end.\u00a0 You wanted the job security that supposedly came with the presence of a star, you offered that star a percentage of the gross!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not the net.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is no net.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Because according to studio bookkeepers, no movie in the history of Hollywood ever made a profit.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Even lowly writers like me got percentages of the net.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But the stars got part of the gross\u2026with the result that they made money, big money, even when the studios lost their corporate shirts.\u00a0 In fact, some of the stars got such a large hunk of the gross that the studios often lost money on what should have been big successes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The more the stars cost, the more movies cost.\u00a0 Under corporate leadership, the budgets of movies bloated to unprecedented levels.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The higher the budget, the bigger the risk.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So those risk-averse corporate captains eventually turned to their marketing experts for salvation, and the marketing people quickly became more powerful than the production people.\u00a0 Their research told them that their target audience was fifteen year-olds here in the States and uneducated peasants in third-world countries.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What kind of movies appeal to that target audience?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Teen sex comedies.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bloated action films based on \u201cgraphic novels\u201d or young adult fiction and directed like video games.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And of course, those old standbys of cinematic art, horror films.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Oh, wait!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019m forgetting the safest bets of all\u2014remakes and sequels.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As for character-driven dramas\u2026or, for that matter, any kind of adult-oriented fare, fugeddaboudit!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Forget about new classics in the vein of Vertigo<\/em>, Citizen Kane<\/em>, The Grapes of <\/em>Wrath, The Godfather<\/em>, or Chinatown<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The corporate studios just aren\u2019t going to give us this kind of fare.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The only hope for the future of film lies in cable and the Internet.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You doubt what I\u2019m saying?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Take a quick glance at last summer\u2019s movie list.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Better yet, go see the umpteenth remake of Superman<\/em> or the second sequel to The Hangover<\/em>.\u00a0 You\u2019ll be risking premature brain death, but as I said earlier, the movies are\u2014or at least should be\u2014a business of risk.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Of late, the studios have found a way to reduce the risk even more.\u00a0 They\u2019ve discovered that the kids today\u2014that treasured target audience\u2014don\u2019t care about stars.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As a result of this revelation, they no longer pay the salaries and percentages they once did.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One would think that film budgets have, as a result, declined precipitously.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Think again.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The kids don\u2019t care about stars.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But they do care about special effects.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And guess what?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Special effects cost even more money than stars.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hollywood today reminds me of a fifties horror film called The Monster That Challenged the World<\/em>.\u00a0 In it, a giant slug threatens to destroy earth as we know it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I probably should have entitled this piece The Corporations That Challenged Hollywood<\/em>.\u00a0 It is, after all, an account of the way the giant slugs of the corporate boardroom have, in their ignorance and fear, wrought havoc on the only world I\u2019ve ever cared about\u2014the world created by those risk-taking European Jews who made the movies I\u2019ve loved from childhood to this day.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And that, my friends, is the story of how \u201ccorporation\u201d came to be the filthiest word in film.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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