Weekend, 16-17 December 2000

NEWS BY HALF THE NUMBERS

5. Cold Fingers, Warm Fest: The first Sundance Online Film Festival will take place this year, with the democracy of the web fully in charge: movies will win awards based on web viewer voting. I can’t say much about the movies, since I haven’t seen them, but I look forward to the whole thing. It will be interesting to see how this event ties in with or competes with Atom Films, which just got bought by Shockwave and which plans to have a strong presence at the festival. For more Sundance info, check out the Sundance site at www.sundance.org. The Online Fest launches January 18.

4. Steadicam Lives!: Thomas Vinterberg, who made the rather remarkable The Celebration a couple of years ago, just got the $10 million in financing for his next film, It’s All About Love. Curiously absent from the trade release is his association with Dogme 95. Can you say, "Hoo-ray!?" I am very happy that Dogme happened, but I am also pleased that the three best directors to be part of that group, Vinterberg, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, and Kristian Levring, are moving on to non-Dogme projects. Very pleased. If ever there was a year to see the value that can come out of exercises in style, this is it. Soderbergh, Van Sant, and Schnabel have all hit new levels by applying the lessons of past films that were a bit more experimental.

3. Thank God for Tom King!: Every week, Tom provides a new look at the lamest form of movie writing from a major newspaper since... well, perhaps ever. If he were writing into Ain’t It Cool as "The King of Movies," I wouldn’t be giving it a second thought. But, as the editors have apparently forgotten, this is the Wall Street Journal. It may be a conservative paper, but it is one of the three best papers on the planet by almost anyone’s standards. And to have a guy from that high altitude covering movies and making pronouncements that are ill-informed and misleading is disgraceful.

Specifically, in Friday’s "Hollywood Journal," King goes on about how effects have degraded dialogue in action movies. And there may be an argument to be made about that. But to do so effectively, one would actually have to understand how we got to where we are today. King clearly does not. He’s smart enough to understand that big effects movies use B-list stars because they want to put the big bucks into effects, not names. But he doesn’t seem to have any idea why or how the phenomenon started. It wasn’t some studio number-cruncher’s evil plot. It was Jurassic Park. Yes, Steven Spielberg dun it. And when did he decide to make Jurassic Park without any stars? Right after he made Hook, a superstar-driven movie that had no chance of making any real profit for the studio because the stars were so expensive and took such a big piece of the gross. Hmmm... that insight might have made more sense of things, huh?

Spielberg followed up with Twister (as exec producer) and The Peacemaker and Deep Impact. Even with Men in Black, Tommy Lee Jones was always the second lead, and ID4 hadn’t come out when Will Smith was signed for MIB. Ironically, MIB2 will be the Spielberg production most like Hook, which, amusingly enough, was also a Columbia/Tri-Star project. Men in Black 2 is the kind of loss leader that Hook was. The studio needs big movies. It will be a big movie... with almost no profit.

Then there is the rather silly idea that action films were ever written by great screenwriters who held some high status in the industry. The screenwriter King credits passingly for Jurassic Park, David Koepp, made the bones that Spielberg picked up on with Apartment Zero and Bad Influence... art films. He was part of the Spielberg stable at the time... which was ingenious of Spielberg, not an industry trend. Graham Yost wrote Speed as a spec. Same with Shane Black and Lethal Weapon. And going back to Die Hard, Steven De Souza, was part of the Gordon/Silver family and wrote nothing but action films, and Die Hard was Jeb Stuart’s first credit. De Souza hasn’t had a hit since 1991, but does that have something to do with artistic aspirations? No. Jeb Stuart wrote and directed the action thriller Switchback. And Shane Black is, like his last movie title, A.W.O.L. What does that have to do with effects?

There is no doubt, as King points out, that development execs can be morons. And the studio always wants a big action movie to have The Money Shot for the trailers and the ads. No doubt. But the best action movie of last year was The Matrix, written by artistically minded action fans, The Wachowskis. The best action movie this year is an art film by Ang Lee. Both have a lot of effects. The former cost more than $80 million; the latter cost under $20 million.

Most boilerplate movies suck. Doesn’t matter whether they’re action, drama, comedy, or porno. Why was Remember the Titans better than Pay It Forward? Lots of reasons. Both went through hard-core development. Both had major stars. Explain. Why will Erin Brockovich make a lot more money than Traffic? Do you think it’s just Julia Roberts? BZZT! Wrong!

People who look for big, sweeping trends like "Effects are killing the art of making action films," are fools. Hollywood follows success. Was this year’s crop of action films a mark in the road for producers who might want to think twice next time before putting the mega-bucks into a film without a movie star to drive business? Yeah. But then, there is Pearl Harbor, the most expensive greenlight in the history of the movies... with no one but Ben Affleck, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Alec Baldwin to drive box office. If it works, financially, the idea of a big movie in which the effects are the commercial driver will be invigorated once again. And if it fails, financially, the trend will go fully to the movie star... at least until Lord of the Rings and The Matrix sequel/prequel and Star Wars come out.

PAGE TWO: More Fighting!