The
Big Picture
by Jonathan Yardley
Edward Jay Epstein is here to tell us that when it comes
to Hollywood these days, we've got it all wrong. Each week
the box-office grosses rung up by the big new movies are
published, and each week it is near universally assumed,
reflexively and reverentially, that they represent not merely
an accurate ranking of current films but also an accurate
record of how much they are making for the studios that
produced them. Tommyrot, says Epstein. These seemingly huge
earnings are wildly misleading, as the cost of making, distributing
and showing new movies almost always far exceeds what they
earn in theaters. Hollywood's highly imaginative accounting
practices disguise this reality, but more to the point,
theaters aren't where movies make money any more.
"The massive moviegoing audience that had nurtured
the [old] studio system simply no longer exists," Epstein
writes. "In contrast to the 4.7 billion movie tickets
sold in America in 1947, there were only 1.57 billion tickets
sold in 2003. So, even though the population had almost
doubled, movie theaters sold 3.1 billion fewer tickets than
they had in 1947." In the years immediately after World
War II, theatrical releases accounted for 100 percent of
the studios' worldwide revenues; in 2003 they accounted
for a mere 18 percent. Where do the movie companies make
their money now? From what lawyers call "intellectual
properties" -- "licensing their filmed entertainment
for home viewing" on DVDs, videotapes, broadcast and
cable television programs, and selling spin-offs (dolls,
games, books and the like) from movies aimed primarily at
children, such as the Disney animated films and the "Lord
of the Rings" trilogy.
Epstein
argues, and most persuasively, that we persist in thinking
about Hollywood in terms that no longer exist: the "dream
factories" that were the old studios -- MGM, RKO, Paramount,
Columbia, Fox, Universal and Warner Bros -- where movies
were the only products, stars and lesser actors were bound
to studios by rigid contracts, and theaters were owned by
the studios that supplied them. Now, he says, the old Big
Seven have been replaced by the new Big Six: Time Warner,
Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, "global
entertainment companies . . . that collude and cooperate
at different levels to dominate filmed entertainment."
Movies earn a very small percentage of their total revenue,
but are "their principal source of prestige and satisfaction
in Hollywood."
The grasp of the Big Six is astonishing. They "own
all six broadcast networks in America," as well as
"64 cable networks whose reach accounts for most of
the remainder of the prime-time television audience,"
a combination that enables them to "control over 96
percent of the programs that carry commercial advertising
during prime time." They "control the television
networks depended on by advertisers to reach children under
12 . . . and those designed for younger teens." They
"dominate the worldwide distribution of movies, a studio
business [the late] Steve Ross once described, with considerable
justification, as a 'money machine,' " and they "control
a large part of the entertainment media, including magazines
. . . TV and radio interview shows . . . and cable channels
that publicize movies." All of which is to say that
they control "one of the largest consumer-based industries
in America: home entertainment," and they bear only
glancing resemblance to the studios of old:
"The main task of today's studio is to collect fees
for the use of the intellectual properties they control
in one form or another and then to allocate those fees among
the parties -- including themselves -- who create, develop,
and finance the properties. It is now essentially a service
organization, a dream clearinghouse rather than a dream
factory. As clearinghouses, they are very different creatures
from their predecessors, and this difference is as apparent
from looking at their financial reporting as it is from
looking at their products."
At this point Epstein launches into a detailed examination
of their accounting practices, the essence of which is that
"what is central to the clearinghouse is not the art
of the film but the art of the deal." Filmmaking now
divides essentially into two broad categories: blockbusters
(no, I didn't know that the word is "a term coined
in the 1920s to denote a movie whose long line of customers
could not be contained on a single city block") or
would-be blockbusters, and more serious films made by "independent
subsidiaries" to earn Big Six corporations and their
ranking executives "the awards, media recognition,
artistic bragging rights and other non-economic rewards
they sought in Hollywood."
The blockbusters are aimed at children and teenagers and
are scripted according to "the Midas formula,"
the ingredients of which include "a child or adolescent
protagonist," a "fairy-tale plot in which a weak
or ineffectual youth is transformed into a powerful and
purposeful hero," "bizarre-looking and eccentric
supporting characters that are appropriate for toy and game
licensing," a happy ending "with the hero prevailing
over powerful villains and supernatural forces" and
"conventional or digital animation to artificially
create action sequences, supernatural forces . . . and elaborate
settings." In two words: "Harry Potter."
In four: "Lord of the Rings."
The blockbusters do well enough in American theaters --
the first "Harry Potter" pulled in more than $317
million -- but ticket sales are a drop in the bucket: That
film's total earnings as of last year were $1,249 billion,
the biggest chunk of which ($436 million) came from worldwide
DVD sales. In effect, as Epstein persistently argues, theatrical
release now exists not to make money but to open the way
for "intellectual property" income to be earned
over the long term from other sources. As the "Midas
formula" makes plain, these movies are strictly product;
they may win the occasional award, since Hollywood reveres
success, but they have little if anything to do with cinematic
art.
Such art as does still emerge from Hollywood can be found
in the comparatively modest productions from the "specialty
film units -- Miramax Pictures, Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight,
Paramount Classics and Warner Independent Pictures,"
which are a return "not so much to the studio system
as to the art-house system, which had at one time coexisted
alongside the Hollywood studios." These movies are
modest only by Hollywood standards: Their average cost was
"an astounding $61.6 million in 2003, nearly two thirds
that of studio movies," and "since many of the
more adult films produced by the independent subsidiaries
did not appeal to the youth-oriented toy, game, and other
ancillary markets, they often resulted in huge losses for
the studios."
The Big Six swallow these losses not because they're suicidal
but because "studio executives seek, along with strictly
commercial projects, projects that are likely to attract
the sort of actors, directors, awards and media response
that will help them maintain both their standing in the
community and their own morale." As Epstein says, "as
persuasive as the [Midas] formula is from a moneymaking
standpoint, it doesn't satisfy the community members' appetite
for prestige, recognition, and creative expression. These
are among the needs that drive the less visible but surprisingly
powerful non-economic logic of Hollywood."
Epstein laments much of what comes out of Hollywood these
days and fears for its future as computerized imaging assumes
an ever more central role, but he does Hollywood the courtesy
-- as too many of us here in the effete East do not -- of
taking it seriously. He points out that the "celebritized
star" whose face we see in the supermarket checkout
line is likely to be a man or woman who rose from unprepossessing
roots, worked hard to get to the top and works hard to stay
there. To wit, "Reese Witherspoon, who began her acting
career when she was 15, prided herself on arriving on the
set of 'Legally Blonde' at 6 a.m. to give makeup crews two
and a half hours to prepare her look and remaining, if necessary,
late into the night."
As the phrase "celebritized star" suggests, Epstein
isn't always the most felicitous of prose stylists, and
at times reading The Big Picture can be a bit of a slog;
it doesn't help that he seems to be almost completely humor-challenged.
But he's a bulldog researcher, he's brought a great deal
of interesting material together and he has interesting
things to say about it. His account of the grueling, amazingly
expensive and time-consuming process by which movies are
now made is an eye-opener; for an actor, who has "a
more distant relationship to his product than his counterpart
on the stage," it can be "frustrating, unsatisfactory
and exhausting." It is remarkable, in fact, that so
many good performances get onto film -- I think, for example,
of "Mystic River" and "Lost in Translation"
-- in such circumstances.
How much longer this will last is in doubt. Epstein worries
that "Hollywood's traditional culture will . . . find
itself replaced by the computer culture," and he has
good reason to. Much evidence suggests that the geeks are
taking over. Whatever their considerable skills and expertise,
they're technicians, not moviemakers. The respect of the
Hollywood community almost certainly means nothing to them,
and they almost certainly have little or no interest in
serious filmmaking. No one who loves movies can regard the
potential implications of this with pleasure. •
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