Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (35 page)
Read Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business Online
Authors: Lynda Obst
Tags: #Non-Fiction
Kids don’t bring TVs to college anymore; they bring their tablets or a computer. They are watching twenty-two hours of television a week online. They will likely never return to the malls in the numbers that the industry once relied upon for openings. But they are finding new shows on the Web, created for them by one another. YouTube is spending $100 million on programming to reach them digitally via the traditional content providers—i.e., former film producers. The best ones are smart enough to know or have young enough kids to tell them where to go on Twitter or YouTube or
WhoKnowsWhereElse.com
to find the online teen stars and sites like Cheezburger (which began life as a site for funny cat videos) and create programming with them. Amazon,
Hulu, Netflix, Funny or Die, Machinima and dozens of start-ups are trolling different niche demographics to satisfy appetites unmet by traditional programmers. Their aim? To burn brightly enough to break through the cacophony of new voices and establish their venues in the pantheon of premier content providers while making new media stars of them and their servers.
What does Papa Hegel have to say about all this? That it’s all gravity. All that smallness will give way to bigness: The smaller planetoids will crash into each other and merge; larger planets and even stars will consume them until denser, larger clusters of matter coalesce into powerful galaxies—i.e., media conglomerates again. This is called aggregation. Some massive servers will become Amazonian, perhaps eating up media giants, the way AOL once ate Time Warner. Other, smaller providers will be devoured whole and become healthy subdivisions of entertainment corporations. Some will be lost in the Darwinian power struggle for galactic survival. But the synthesis of this wild and woolly narrowcasting universe and our familiar broadcasting one will be very different from what we feared would happen when we all were suffering from the worst effects of Tinseltown’s sequilitis. For the audience, the writers and the producers alike, there will be many more alternatives to watch, write and produce than when the New Abnormal began to resist fresh ideas.
Audience members will suddenly be able to find things so suited to their idiosyncratic tastes that it will be as if they had placed an order on a menu. From country to country, as the Net blurs all boundaries, we will learn each other’s jokes and love stories—without 3D or special effects. Soon Net films and series will be made and made better by a generation that learned the alphabet on an iPad. And this generation, brought up by the best four-quadrant movies ever, movies like
The Lion King, Toy Story, Madagascar, WALL-E
and
Brave
—many made by Pixar, some musicals, all original, requiring years to develop—will have a lot to say
about what they need as teens, weaned as they were on the best of the best.
The industry will not and should not give up on getting this generation into the malls as they did the last one, before losing it to the lure of the Net’s delights. The movie business has a huge job ahead of retooling itself creatively for the new domestic market to come, and the less innocent international market of the future. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that. There is a gigantic market of technologically sophisticated media juniors out there with the means of production and distribution already in their hands. They will be trolling the Web for media-content providers, with each wondering about the other in equal measure, “Whattya got? Whattya got?”
1.
The overall loss number for
TDKR
is estimated to be about $10 to $30 million domestically. In fact, industry-wide nighttime business didn’t recover from the national trauma until the release of
Taken 2
in mid-October of that year.
2.
Shorn of its
of Mars
IP title by marketing.
3.
In 2012, Kristen Stewart was the highest-paid female star in the world, with $34 million earned from May 2011 to May 2012, surpassing Angelina Jolie and Sandra Bullock.
(1) My son, Oly Obst, now a manager at 3Arts and also my confidant and best friend, on the set of
The Invention of Lying
, starring Ricky Gervais and Jen Garner. As a mom, it was a great source of pride and excitement to me that we were producing this together. For Oly, it was working with your mother.
(2) Peter Chernin, a great studio head, beloved by Wall Street, low-key and understated but as savvy with scripts as he was with numbers. Chernin enjoyed a reign that saw him green-light the two biggest grossing films in history—one of which was
Titanic
, for which he was called an idiot by most at the time—and experienced the economic model of the industry transforming beneath him.
(3) Sue Kroll, Warner Bros. Pictures President (Worldwide Marketing), is considered among the most innovative creative marketing executives in Hollywood. She has spearheaded many of the biggest campaigns for original movies in Hollywood by promoting the filmmakers and the concepts. If that strategy keeps succeeding, movies other than sequels can break through.
(4) Kevin Goetz, marketing guru to studios and producers alike, practices his wizardry with test audiences. He asks a focus group what it thinks about what to cut, where the ending goes wrong, what would make them recommend the film to their friends. Their answers can make or break a picture.
(5) Jim Gianopulos (
right
), now Chairman of Fox, then head of International, and James Cameron (
left
), director, surround Leonardo DiCaprio as they enjoy the record-breaking international success of
Titanic
. Gianopulos pushed the frontiers of the emerging markets in Russia by helping Cameron keep an almost impossible promise, and reaching out to some folks he’d worked with on the movie who’d never seen a theater before. That kind of reach helped make
Titanic
the most successful picture of all time until
Avatar
.
(6) The closest thing Hollywood has/had to a queen, Sherry Lansing reigned from 1992 to 2004 with an abundance of class and charm. She made choices with her brain and gut and then cut the budget to a number she’d fought to the bone with her partner, Jon Dolgen. Their strategy worked until the town changed. She was loyal to her friends, didn’t have enemies and never fired someone before Christmas.
(7) The very chic John Goldwyn in front of the very chic Walt Disney Concert Hall. He was Head of Production for Paramount from 1991 to 2003. He brought me in under Sherry’s guidance and was a mentor and friend. Then Paramount became a place of strain for him, as his life began to change.
(8) Donald De Line, then President of Paramount, in the happiest of times. He was my horse in the race for Goldwyn’s job, and I think Sherry picked him because she got that “kick your shoes off” feeling from him. Plus, everyone loved him. But that didn’t keep him from being fired, followed by a bad week of all the execs crying in my bungalow.