In Big Pictures, David Denby looks at Hollywood’s future from a number of angles.
I enjoyed his description of watching a big-screen movie on a small-screen iPod:
My ears, fed by headphones, were filled with such details as the chafing of hawsers and feet stomping on straw, but there below me Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom were duelling like two angry mosquitoes in a jar.
I had a similar experience trying to watch extreme widescreen (CinemaScope or Panavision) movies on a small 4:3 TV before I upgraded.
Why do we see so few intelligent movies for adults? Because teenagers will go see anything bright and shiny, of course:
When the adult audience does go to a low- or mid-budget movie released in winter or in spring — say, “Crash” or “Inside Man” — the studios consider the hit an anomaly, a “non-repeatable event.” In the jargon of the trade, such movies are “execution dependent” (they have to be good to succeed), rather than “audience dependent” (the audience will show up regardless of the quality).
Movie financing may finally mature a bit too:
Steven Soderbergh is one director who is positively evangelical about reform. He has an alternative business plan, which he put into practice with “The Good German,” that goes like this: The A-list talent (actors, directors, writers) work for relatively small up-front payments — not the market-driven “quotes” of five or ten or even twenty million but a “nominal” fee of, say, a million or two. (If the talent doesn’t like this arrangement, they can be paid more up front but they will have to forfeit special arrangements, like “gross points,” which are paid later.) When revenues start coming in, the take is divided according to fixed percentages. If the studio and its financing partners have put up the production budget, they get the biggest piece — say, fifty or sixty cents of every dollar. Star A gets six cents, star B five, writer X two, and so on. If the movie is a bomb theatrically, the ancillary markets will minimize the studio’s loss, as they do now. If the movie is a hit, everyone owns a piece of it forever. And the artistic payoff is a lessening of fear. “If the initial outlay is kept down this way,” Soderbergh said to me, “then there’s a good chance that the studios will make more interesting choices of material.”
At the moment, the smart money may be going small budget. Just recently, wealthy individuals, pooling their money in hedge funds, have begun setting up deals not with studios but with successful producers like Joel Silver and producer-directors like Ivan Reitman. The production money will go to genre films — thrillers and comedies and horror pictures — in the low-budget (about twenty-million-dollar) range. John C. Malone, the chairman of Liberty Media Corporation, is opening his own studio to make movies on a similar scale. Some of these pictures will undoubtedly be routine, but the relatively low stakes could also allow producers to hire writers and directors who are willing to do more daring work, the way B-movie directors, toiling quietly on back lots, did sixty years ago.
Films made fast and cheap in this way would still need studio distribution and marketing, but once the theatres go digital that may no longer be true.