August 8 , 2005

I really didn't have anything I wanted to write about when I sat down to write this column. The ongoing changes of DreamWorks are just not fun, the Oscar thing is already going too fast, and writing about The Dukes of Hazzard in any depth really seemed like a waste of time.

And to my rescue… the New York Times…

Oy. It's like reading lemmings moving towards the edge of the cliff, but that legend, like so many others, isn't even true. Irony.

David Carr is the newest one to try to sum up Hollywood and his abject failure is not a happy discovery. He clearly read a book or two and so he must have real insight, right?

But I can't blame Mr. Carr exclusively. He seems to be under the same sad delusion that many movie loving journalists have fallen prey to… the notion that Hollywood was that great and glorious "from the gut" kind of town that is now - specifically in the new millennium - different.

Well, it is different from 1973. That is true. And why? Because the studio system as we knew it was going out of business. They were not suffering a 10% drop in business in light of the biggest year in history and a 40% increase in revenues for filmed entertainment in the last five year and having the hogs, so fat from the upside of the last five years that they can barely walk on their legs, whine about how horrible business is. God forbid one of their clients who opens movies to $8 million or $9 million only gets $7 million, or one that doesn't affect box office at all only gets $2 million. The old system was on the way out, never to be seen again. Goodbye, Zanuck… hello, something else altogether.

Do I need to point out that a New York based corporation that had nothing to do with the movie business, Gulf & Western (as Mel Brooks tagged them, Engulf & Devour), was the company that rolled the dice on Robert Evans, which led to The Godfather, Chinatown, etc, etc.?

Shall I allow myself the memory that Steve Ross married into hearses and parking lots on his way to be the swashbuckler on the Warner seas?

Lew Wasserman was a music agent who became an actor's agent whose company eventually took over Carl Laemmle's broken down studio.

Eisner and Diller were television guys at Paramount before moving to film before moving on to other studios.

Carr writes: "They and the rest of us thought they would run not only the Hollywood studios but also the giant media companies, like Viacom, Time Warner and Sony, that owned the studios."

Speak for yourself, Dave!

Who did Carr think was going to run Viacom? (And how is Tom Freston not of the mold that Carr claims is dead?) Who really thought that Semel & Daly would run Time Warner after that merger? Who in God's name could have ever predicted that Howard Stringer would, indeed, end up running Sony?

No one.

This is the most bizarre kind of legend creation I have read in quite a while.

Guber? Is Carr kidding? I admire Peter Guber, but he and his conveniently forgotten maniac sidekick, Jon Peters, were given the keys to Columbia based on the success of Batman and prior highpoints and almost destroyed the studio. Who did they replace? A real from-the-hip voice, David Puttnam, whose vision was too strong for Hollywood to choke down.

Katzenberg? A very smart man and an incredibly hard worker, but when did anyone who is actually in the business think for a moment that he was ever going to be the dominant player of the S, the K, and the G?

I think that David Thomson is one of the very finest writers on film in the world. But as an analyst of the business, he's just another critic with a personal grudge. Carr quotes him as saying, "Filmmakers have lost their passion." And may I be the first to say, on behalf of the many studio execs and filmmakers I personally know who bleed for their work every day, "Fuck you, Mr. Thomson." (D.T. will, I hope, understand the context of that comment. If pressed to discuss specific filmmakers, I imagine that he would acknowledge that passion himself. The big picture makes big mouth louts out of most of us.)

"It is a long walk from the current vanguard to the Eisner-Ovitz-Diller crowd, with their cowboy tactics and outsize ways."

Someone's been drinking a little too much of the Sun Valley Kool-Aid.

Peter Chernin is a lot of things, but he's not a boring suit. Tom Freston and Brad Grey at his side are trying to bring forth the first truly integrated multi-media studio. They may succeed or they may fail, but it is nothing if not a big ball "cowboy" effort. And so far, Bob Iger is playing Disney like Phil Jackson coming in to coach an overly talented team that can't seem to get out of its own way… and so far, it's win, win, win.

"That is part of the reason that DreamWorks is on the block. With a roster of eight or so movies a year, the demi-studio does not have the muscle to fight its way into theaters."

I hate to call anyone out here, but it's not really possible that Michael Cieply read this and let it pass, is it? It is so stunningly stupid and undeniably false a statement that I can barely believe it was printed in The Star, much less The New York Times.

Just last year, DreamWorks delivered the second highest grossing domestic film of all time!!!! The Island may have bombed, but it opened on nearly 10% of all screens in the United States! Madagascar opened in a 1000 more theaters than that!

There is no one I know of who works at the NY Times in movies that couldn't pick that out as a false statement. Who floated this notion? At what bar after shooting how many holes? And even then, I have to assume that Carr misheard.

If Carr wants to talk about a studio shuttering because of exhibition problems, there is one… Newmarket. Bob Berney couldn't get a significant percentage of the rentals on The Passion of The Christ and without some muscle behind him, he never was going to be able to just do his job. Enter New Line. (There are other reasons, but this was a big one.)

But DreamWorks on the block because they couldn't get screens? Huh?

What exactly is the heyday of this era of current boldfaced names with "golden guts?" 1990? The Top Ten - Kindergarten Cop, Dick Tracy, Die Hard 2, Total Recall, The Hunt For Red October, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pretty Woman, Dances With Wolves, Ghost Home Alone. Proud, renegade cinema, huh? (Dances with Wolves actually was… and accordingly was released by indie Orion.) By the way, only four of those films opened in the summer. And this "down year" has already outgrossed the entirety of that year.

1995? The Top Ten - Die Hard 3, Se7en. Casper, Jumanji, Bond 17, Ace Ventura 2, Pocahontas, Apollo 13, Batman 3, Toy Story. Are we 'renegades" yet? Se7en was special… and made by New Line on a budget. The overall domestic gross through today was $2 billion behind this year's.

2000? What Lies Beneath, Scary Movie, X-Men, Meet The Parents, What Women Want, Gladiator, The Perfect Storm, Mission:Impossible II, Cast Away, How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Probably the best quality of the lists… but the closest thing to a renegade title is Cast Away, which did $234 million domestic in spite of long silent stretches, but did star the world's biggest movie star of the time… no Best Picture nod at Oscar time. That year was only $800 million behind 2005 to date.

I'm happy that Mr. Carr was able to find it in his heart to embrace Schindler's List and Terms of Endearment as virtually the only modern classics. But its too bad that he has chosen to write off Disney's sponsorship of Miramax that made it possible for the renegade Weinsteins to build the empire of quality they built. It's too bad that Time-Warner's funding of renegade New Line is somehow irrelevant. Searchlight, WIP, Focus… all studio owned and paid-for arms run by renegades.

When Viacom bought Blockbuster, did that mean that the Home Entertainment business no longer existed… or just that ownership changed?

"The people who built the current version of Hollywood did so by coming up with movies that people felt compelled to see - not as a matter of marketing, but as a matter of taste."

Uh…. Bullshit!

Disney was rebuilt by Eisner and Katzenberg on cheap talent and high concept ideas. Barry Diller brought a similar sensibility to Fox. Warner Bros was always the big-spending machine, not interested in Clint Eastwood's arty films but respectful of his muscle, unconcerned about Stanley Kubrick's bottom line, but thrilled to garner respect for supporting his genius. (Note: Terry Malick had the choice of two films to make this last year… the beat goes on.) Guber made Batman (and most of his other hits at WB). Ovitz made the price of talent skyrocket in his best Gordon Gekko. David Geffen is one of the true quality renegades… but he has not been a major film player at DreamWorks and in the best tradition now taken up by Pixar, never had many films going at once in the Geffen Films era.

This notion that quality was the standard by which "the good old days" occurred is delusional. Money… money… money… money… money… money… money…

Why is Easy Rider remembered and The Trip all but forgotten? Because Easy Rider made a lot of money, hippie boy!

I would never argue that the business hasn't become more and more obsessed with the bottom line. But part of that is that revenue has been maximized beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Why is Sony & Associates willing to pay an insane amount for MGM? Because they are still chasing a higher value for the library in the next five years.

Batman broke records by opening to $40 million in 1989… 20 years later, we can expect to see an actor paid that amount upfront for appearing in a movie. There already have been actors paid more than that based on back end deals.

You want to go further back… back to when actors were indentured servants to megalomaniac studio owners? Is that what we want? Do Carr and other finger waggers realize that individual demands by actors, directors, and others changed the entire dynamic of the system, as much if not more as studio leadership? Does Carr think that Mike Ovitz packaged talent at CAA with an eye to quality over cash flow?

"The tent pole, which Mr. Spielberg all but erected with "Jaws" and "E.T.," creating huge movies that preoccupied the cultural conversation, has grown into a thicket, a forest of big-budget projects that makes it problematic for any one, no matter how expensively marketed, to stick out."

Does he mean Wedding Crashers or The Pacifier or Sin City? Maybe he means Star Wars or Shrek 2 or Mr & Mrs Smith or The Passion of The Christ or Meet The Fockers… how could they hope to survive?

Why not just write about how global warming has destroyed the film business because it's too hot to think and the makes everyone want to have sex, which is so distracting.

Or maybe the theory should be that Joel Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer couldn't happen without Larry Gordon hitting a wall or Don Simpson dying, fueling the new renegades.

Arrrrrrrrrrr….

And let me say this…. David Carr is one of my favorite media reporters in the business. I will read a story that I don't expect to be interested in because I see his byline. But he knows almost nothing about the film business. And I resent being put in a position where an article like this demands my commentary. I resent the editors at the New York Times for forcing me to defend truth in one industry I really do understand from some writers who just don't get it.

I guess I could just shut up. But if I understand anything about the media after more than a decade in it, it is that what is printed in the big papers gets repeated as truth without any regard to whether it is accurate. Hell, WENN, the worst perpetrator of false news in the mainstream, syndicated by IMDb, is quoted as gospel by some.

There is a story somewhere in the idea that the mini-major can no longer make it as a standalone entity. In fact, I've written it. But the idea that it's a style issue… it just couldn't be more wrong. And I just wish it would stop.

E-ME.