For Hollywood Producers, Is the Glamour Gone?

A great article from the NY Times regarding a job that is getting tougher and tougher. I've noted this previously here.


"Mr. Simpson said one secret to surviving the current business climate was to adopt new ways of financing and distributing pictures — including tweaking the order in which various tiers of investors get paid and embracing streaming and video-on-demand services.

“Some of the most experienced studio producers don’t understand” the new environment, he said by e-mail: “They often have the greatest difficulty adjusting.”
 
... very true, it reminds me of a recent conversation with a client who is just about to graduate from graduate film school. He was discussing a project with his prof. who asked if he could change the setting from Honk Kong to Philadelphia. He felt it didn't work in HK. Well the reason it was set in HK was it was actually a project he was developing with a hot TV producer who could get financing in HK. Adaptation


By Brooks Barnes
LOS ANGELES

FOR decades, movie producers had one of the cushiest gigs in Hollywood. Studios kept stables of them around — all expenses paid — to shepherd movies through their various stages: inception, the nitty gritty of filming, post-production and publicity.

The job was appealing for its variety as studios sought films ranging from teenage blockbusters to arty dramas to dark comedies. Producers also commanded respect because, as powerful middle men, they could help directors stand up to screwball requests from studios, or vice versa.

Today, though, movie producing is in crisis.

Studios, reeling from declines in DVD sales, have sharply reduced the number of producers they keep on retainer. Warner Brothers, for one, has slashed producer deals by 20 percent since 2008, and more reductions are on the way as current deals expire. This has left a generation of producers having to find a new way to pay their development bills.

At the same time, the number of movies being made has shrunk drastically. Half the independent distributors have folded over the last couple of years, and the big studios are cutting back. Paramount Pictures will release 15 films this year, a 32 percent reduction from 2007.

And that leaves fewer jobs for producers.

Many of the jobs that do exist — bloated sequels, bloated remakes — are depressing to this brainy bunch, resulting in a lot of midcareer angst. Yes, everyone wants to make money. But ask five producers why they got into the business and four will pontificate about a desire to create cinematic art. Few would say they came to Hollywood to make a really great “Spy Kids 4.”

On June 4, the Producers Guild of America will host its second “Produced By” conference in Los Angeles. By gathering elite members of the profession together — and inviting the fledgling ranks to mingle with them — the guild hopes to leave all its members smarter and stronger. Among the big names participating are James L. Brooks, Richard D. Zanuck and Brian Grazer.

About 1,200 attendees are expected at the three-day event, with seminars including “Brand New World: Execution of the Deal,” “Where’s the Money?” and “Better, Faster, Cheaper.”

At the very least, said Mark Gordon, whose producing credits include “Saving Private Ryan,” the conference should help give producers an attitude adjustment. “It’s how does one turn lemons into lemonade,” Mr. Gordon said.

Take the renewed focus on sequels and remakes. “It’s frankly a little depressing for everyone because most producers have a passion for storytelling and don’t want to rehash the same thing over and over,” he said.

But Mr. Gordon added: “That’s the reality of the business right now. You can either say ‘This is not interesting for me’ and go play somewhere else. Or you can figure out a way to deliver what studios want while developing passion projects independently.”

Hawk Koch, whose producing credits include the 2000 thriller “Frequency,” noted that there were still producer success stories, like the fellows behind “Paranormal Activity,” the inexpensive horror flick that sold about $193 million at the global box office and has a sequel on the way.

Other success stories include Basil Iwanyk (he hit it big with the recent remake of “Clash of the Titans,” which has made over $463 million at the global box office, and is prepping a sequel) and Judy Cairo and Michael A. Simpson, the producer team largely responsible for the awards-season darling “Crazy Heart.”

Mr. Simpson said one secret to surviving the current business climate was to adopt new ways of financing and distributing pictures — including tweaking the order in which various tiers of investors get paid and embracing streaming and video-on-demand services.

“Some of the most experienced studio producers don’t understand” the new environment, he said by e-mail: “They often have the greatest difficulty adjusting.”

CAN the Producers Guild help? If increased participation in this organization is any indication, a lot of people hope so: membership in the group, which is 60 years old, stands at over 4,200, a 40 percent increase over five years ago. There are an estimated 10,000 working producers in Hollywood.

Mr. Koch and Mr. Gordon want to become co-presidents of the organization; they are running unopposed, with results to be announced June 4. Among their goals are helping members obtain better health care coverage and ensuring that production companies hire guild members.

Most important, they want to persuade studios (and television networks) to formally adopt a system for assigning the producer credits that scroll by at the end of a movie.

There are various levels of producer credit in movies. “Associate producer” is really just a prominent thank you; “executive producer” generally means someone who brought in financing but didn’t play a large creative role.

The heavy lifting is done, counterintuitively, by those labeled simply as “producer,” and Mr. Koch and Mr. Gordon want to make sure this credit has gone to people who actually did the work — which is not always the case now.

Regardless of their success on that front, expect to see more producer names in the end credits as people are forced to team up in greater numbers.

Producers are a problem-solving bunch. It’s their job. They figure out how to fit a budget to a script, how to persuade stars to bite on a project and how to delicately fire a director. So they will undoubtedly figure out how to survive, even if it means following the advice of Bob Gazzale, the chief executive of the American Film Institute.

At a recent event honoring the producer Jerry Bruckheimer in Los Angeles, Mr. Gazzale noted: “What do producers do? Whatever it takes.”

Light vs. Dark

'The Road' versus 'Old Dogs'

Serious films like 'The Lovely Bones' are in a fight with lighter fare like 'Alvin and the Chipmunks' this holiday season. Guess who's expected to win?

By John Horn of the L.A. Times >>>

November 26, 2009

As any husband or wife who has picked the wrong kind of spousal Christmas present knows -- a gym membership, for example, instead of a trip to Maui -- there's a big difference between earnest and enjoyable gifts. The same can be said when selecting a film to see this holiday season: Some moviegoers actually welcome challenging stories, but many more prefer untroubled fun.

It's a critical distinction as Hollywood enters the final weeks of the 2009 movie season. Over the next month, audiences will be offered stark choices between disparate filmmaking styles, with perhaps the most telling choice coming this weekend, as “The Road” premieres opposite “Old Dogs.”

There's no question Disney's family comedy will sell many more tickets than the Weinstein Co. and Dimension Films' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic drama.

The real issue is whether "The Road" is among the last of a dying breed: movies aimed at literate adults -- which literate adults haven't been supporting.
Everywhere you look the movie business is changing, and if you're a serious movie fan, it's been mostly for the worse. The makers and distributors of art house films are failing faster (latest victim: Miramax Films) than toxic banks

, and the makers of "The Road" aren't immune. Financier 2929 Productions, which backed "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "We Own the Night," hasn't made a movie since "The Road" wrapped in early 2008, and

distributors Weinstein and Dimension are now steering their limited resources into genre material like "Piranha 3-D" and "Scream IV."

Audience tracking surveys suggest "The Road" faces an uphill climb: Nothing quite says "Happy Thanksgiving!" like a movie with cannibalism.

Even though McCarthy's book about a father and his son struggling to survive a terrifying, inhospitable world was a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, moviegoer awareness of the film is distressingly low -- less than half of the awareness of "Old Dogs." That's not the only worrying sign: among those who are "definitely interested" in seeing the end-of-the-world story, the only discernible bloc of support comes from older men and women -- the same demographic likely to attend "Old Dogs," but in much larger numbers for the John Travolta-Robin Williams comedy.

"The Road" isn't the only movie that audience surveys suggest has some work to do.

Early polling for writer-director James Cameron's $310-million "Avatar" from Fox isn't as favorable as it is for Warner Bros.' "Sherlock Holmes." The latter film comes out a week after "Avatar" yet still has significantly higher "definite interest." At the same time, young girls -- the fanatical ticket-buyers who pushed Cameron's Oscar-winning "Titanic" into the box-office record books -- are so far showing cool curiosity in Dec. 18's "Avatar," preferring by an almost 2-1 margin Dec. 23's "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel," also from Fox.

The new movie from another Oscar winner -- Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones" (Dec. 11) -- will obviously come nowhere close to doing the same kind of business as the director's "Lord of the Rings" movies. The adaptation of Alice Sebold's dark novel about a serial killer and his young victim will need four-star reviews to overcome its subject matter.

In the same manner, "The Road" will need to attract consistent critical acclaim and positive word-of-mouth to build box-office momentum. One of its earliest reviews was not kind but later notices, while mixed, have been more favorable.

The initial advertisements for the film made "The Road," which was once scheduled to be released a year ago, look more like a "Mad Max" knock-off than a serious adaptation of a critically acclaimed novel, as the first trailer used news footage of global destruction that isn't even in the film. "I wasn't very involved in that," director John Hillcoat says of the opening trailer. "All I will say is it's a tough sell, and I think it's a good strategy." A subsequent spot focused more closely on the against-all-odds survival tale between the Man (Viggo Mortensen) and the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

Director Hillcoat and star Mortensen say it is that hopeful father-son story that ultimately anchors the tale, and what they both believe audiences will take away from a movie filled with horrors (although an infamously grisly scene of infanticide from the book was shot but cut from the finished film) almost too numerous to count.

"It captures something very difficult -- the spirit of the book," Mortensen says. The world may be dying, he says, "but it's luminous. Even though it's gray and it has a terrible bleakness to it, it's still beautiful."

The movie, the actor says, "did not compromise on the bleakness of the book, emotionally or visually. It allowed everything to be naked, raw and visceral. But it was able to capture something uplifting."

It's the same view that is working perfectly with "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire," which has become a breakout hit for Lionsgate. Though "Precious" contains scenes of incest and physical abuse, it, like "The Road," is also a survival story.

Hillcoat says "The Road's" optimism is reflected in the connection between the Man and the Boy: "The movie is really about their relationship, and how one learns from the other." Readers of the book will know that's part of the tale and come see the movie, "but the challenge is to tap into the people who haven't read the book -- the wider audience," the Australian director says.

"My hope is that people see that the film is about human goodness and what makes us special. Just because it's set in a very harrowing world -- that's only to highlight why this relationship is so special."