The
Hollywood Economist
The numbers behind the industry.
The uneasy marriage between Hollywood
and the computer has come a long way since George Lucas
made the original Star Wars in 1977. At that time, computer
generated imagery, or CGI, was so expensive that he could
afford only a single 90-second sequence—a diagram
of the enemy Death Star—which took a battery of computers
3 months to complete. But, with the doubling of computer
power every 18 months, the cost of CGI came down so rapidly
that by 1995, it was possible for Pixar Animation Studios
to profitably make an entire CGI animated feature, Toy Story.
Five years later, with another quadrupling of computer power,
Sony largely erased the distinction between cartoons and
“reality” movies by using CGI to create all
the human-looking actors in Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within.
(The film’s digital heroine, Aki Ross, had enough
sex appeal to earn her a slot on Maxim’s 2001 “Hot
100” list—the first nonexistent person to appear
on that list.)?
Nowadays,
CGI is commonly used to create most, if not all, of the
big action sequences in Hollywood movies. In the “Lord
of the Rings” trilogy, for example, more than seventy-five
percent of the film, including some 200,000 soldiers, was
partly created on computers. Even with advances in computing
power, CGI remains incredibly expensive. In Terminator
III: The Rise of the Machines, for example, the budget
for computer work, including visual effects, creature effects,
and special effects, was $28.2 million, which alone was
more than four times the entire budget of the original Terminator
in 1984. CGI is also such a time-consuming process that
it is almost always outsourced to highly-specialized companies,
many of which are not in Hollywood. (Terminator III
had its digital effects done by 11 different companies.)
To accommodate this digital outsourcing, a movie is split
into what amounts to two different productions: the live-action
movie that’s shot in a studio or on location and the
CGI movie that’s created on computers.
During
the live-action part, the star often works on a so-called
Limbo set, aptly named because the actor in it is in a sort
of limbo stage, standing, for example, in an empty room,
wearing a green spandex jumpsuit, and mouthing lines of
dialogue—which will later be filled in at a looping
session—while holding imaginary objects and reacting
to imaginary dangers. The CGI production will “paint”
elaborate costumes on him, fill in ornate walls and furniture
behind him, insert the object he is holding, and the enemy
that’s threatening him. In the live action phase of
Sum of All Fears, for example, the actor Arnold
McCuller sang the national anthem in a limbo set and, months
later, CGI technicians created a giant football stadium,
thousands of cheering fans, and a sky full of fireworks
all around him.?
The
split in productions is most apparent when directors have
to complete the live shooting, and sometimes even the editing
of the live footage, before they see the missing CGI layers
of the movie. Consider Jonathan Mostow’s situation
when he directed Terminator III, which began shooting
in Los Angeles in July 2002 and had to be delivered to Warner
Brothers eleven months later for a scheduled July 4th, 2003
release. Since the outsourced CGI part of the production
would take subcontractors, such as Industrial Light and
Magic in Silicon Valley, eight months to create on computers,
Mostow had no choice but to have them do much of the CGI
work from storyboards before he had finished shooting the
live action part. The schizoid nature of this feat is eerily
reflected in the dividing of Schwarzenegger’s face:
the right side has conventional makeup, the left side is
bright green. While Mostow directed the right side of Schwarzenegger’s
face in Los Angeles, the digital-animation supervisor in
San Rafael directed the CGI that became the left side of
the face. By the time the CGI was completed, there was no
time (or money) to redo it.
“For
a filmmaker that is the worst thing you can imagine,”
Mostow recalled on the DVD. “In the regular rhythm
of making movies you shoot, you edit, you hone the editing,
and then you add the finishing touches,” he said.
“Computer-graphics turns the normal procedures of
filmmaking upside down.”?
Hollywood
studios would like to believe that digital effects are worth
the cost, if only because they hold the prospect of a licensing
cornucopia for toys and video games. But, alas, the studios
also confront the less happy reality that even state-of-the-art
CGI, if it gets out of synch with the story, does not create
an audience either at the movie houses or on DVD. Sony learned
this lesson recently with the $133 million sci-fi bomb Stealth,
as did Dreamworks with its $120 million sci-fi bomb, The
Island. Despite massive CGI and marketing expenses,
neither studio earned back $18 million from the US box office
on these films. (Sony, at least, was able to give away a
video game of Stealth with its Portable Play Station.)
To be sure, some directors, notably Peter Jackson in the
“Lord of the Rings” trilogy, George Lucas in
the “Star Wars” franchise, and Sam Raimi in
the two Spider-man films, have brilliantly succeeded in
overriding audience-alienating effects that proceed from
the schizoid split of movies. But fewer and fewer directors
have the clout with the studios—or the budget flexibility—to
control, even if it means redoing, the CGI side of the production.
If this new economy of illusion allows the CGI side of a
production to overwhelm the director’s ability to
tell a coherent story in his live action side, digital effects
may prove to be the ruination of movies.
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