Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business

by Lynda Obst

  Now all those scripts are coming in, and the heads of marketing are saying, “Who are these characters? I’ve never heard of them.” The story has to be good on its own in order to succeed, as it had to have been from the outset. You can fool a development executive with pretend marketing, but you can’t fool marketing. And you can’t fool the audience. The same goes for the new nutty subgenre, the mash-up: Cowboys and Aliens (Seriously, Tonto, there’s someone sucking your blood!); Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

  They may make fun books, but when you have to look at the mash-up on a huge screen, I contend that it looks silly. Hey, what is that giant-squid alien doing with that cowboy? There’s our president, Abe Lincoln, who emancipated the slaves, chasing down vampires. It sounds like a huge idea in a pitch room because it sounds fresh; people haven’t heard it before. But there is a reason no one has heard of it: It’s ridiculous. (And it flopped, all around the world.)

  I think this faux-IP/mash-up madness expresses the height of the delirium of post-Contraction preawareness terror on the part of producers and execs. It is not about the doughnut—i.e., the story; it is about the hole—i.e., trying to invent awareness of the idea. These products are not to be confused with original movies, as they are one-sheet-based efforts. Awareness is either intrinsic—for example, with Kleenex, Snow White, Jell-O, Spider-Man, Superman, Batman; you grew up with it—or marketing creates it. It’s not the job of the writer-producer. Our job is the story.

  WHAT’S NEXT, PAPA HEGEL?

  When I was an undergraduate, I fell under the thrall of nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who thought that the cycle of history was driven by what he called the dialectic. Most people who fall under Hegel’s spell abandon this grand system shortly thereafter, as it is widely thought to be incoherent (he’s a horrible writer) by academics other than Marxists, but I see the dialectic stubbornly at work in the movie business.

  In dialectical movement, a thesis/antithesis situation occurs. For example, Thesis A: The DVD market collapses due to piracy, and our profit cushion collapses. In reaction, there is Antithesis B: We pursue international markets and revenue with mad vigor, making bigger and bigger movies (including movies based on undeserving properties), driving up costs beyond reason and squeezing other domestically oriented and original movies out of the market, creating occasional hits but many more expensive flops and movies that barely break even because of the costs of production and marketing. Then synthesis of A and B occurs, equaling C: The failures create more careful discernment as to what should and should not be made; a new fiscal model is born that may allow for more originals; new ideas about what works in both domestic and international markets emerge.

  We are now seeing producers, writers and studios figure out the synthesis of the wild reactions to the Great Contraction. Some promising signs are emerging, like lichens after a forest fire. Green Lantern producer Donald De Line returned to Paramount (from whence he had been fired) to make an edgy $27 million heist movie called Pain & Gain with Transformers director Michael Bay, starring Mark Wahlberg. This move is very post–New Abnormal. Trust me when I say that all of the studio heads had seen the overseas grosses on The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ($110 million) before it opened wide here with an Oscar campaign. They noted that it was not geared to Mud Pies but to the upper, upper, upper quadrant, who are alive, actually, and going out to the theater. There are movies that can be made by studios for the domestic audience that will appeal to the international audience as well, and that aren’t sequels or based on games or previously known characters.

  I was simultaneously wild with jealousy and inspired when I read of Peter Chernin’s new comedy about two female cops, created by hilarious Parks and Recreation writer Katie Dippold, starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. It’s an original script, written by a TV writer. Sandy is huge overseas, and Melissa has that big Bridesmaids bump. All of the lessons about making a female comedy that can play here and abroad are assembled in this package. That’s thinking. It’s not brain surgery, it’s not Jules and Jim, but it’s using what we’ve learned to create comedy, which at the beginning of the cycle looked endangered. That’s why the business is not cyclical but dialectical. Because as new movies open up new territories to new genres and stars that hadn’t performed internationally before, the path is cleared for more new stars and movies to open overseas. Comedies like The Hangover and Bridesmaids and now Family Guy auteur Seth MacFarlane’s Ted—the phenomenally popular 2012 comedy about a man, his girlfriend and his foul-mouthed talking teddy bear that surpassed half a billion dollars gross worldwide—are opening doors for a multitude of stars who are now known internationally. Our dumb jokes are starting to travel.

  The studios’ notion of preawareness is starting to evolve as well. Classic tales from the Bible, an old Hollywood staple, are being pursued as if the Bible were a recently discovered trove of Marvel comic books. Spielberg is flirting with a Moses epic, Warner is doing Pontius Pilate, Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan) is directing Noah and Showgirls and Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven is attempting another Jesus epic, written by Pulp Fiction scripter Roger Avary. Recognizable titles are single-named things, be they caped crusaders or real ones. At least some grown-ups will want to see these heroes take on the Bible’s built-in bad guys. And it should play in Peoria.

  Maybe it means there is a glimmer of possibility that an aperture is opening that was once thought permanently closed. In October 2011, more speculative scripts were sold to the studios than in the previous five years. Competitive pitches sold this year more than twice! (This used to happen every week.) This is either a Really Big Thing, the start of another pendulum swing, or an anomaly. Let’s see how many of these scripts get made. It is still too early to tell. There are female franchises. But female comedies? One gauge will be when I try to package my next chick flick and pretend it’s not a romantic comedy, a genre that is temporarily dormant or dead. We will see. So much has changed in a year that the actresses agents used to want for the project will be off their list, and they will go after Jennifer Lawrence, whom the studios never would have considered a year ago. She will be unavailable.

  Right now, as I finish this book, my life seems more cyclical than dialectical. Have I moved forward from where I was when I finished my last book, more than ten years ago? Or have I made a gigantic loop? Kierkegaard said that trying to live your life by Hegel was like trying to get around Copenhagen with a map of Denmark. So it’s hard to tell.

  At the time, in 1998, I was uncertain about the fate of Contact and was considering a directing debut. Now, here I am, again looking into a black box when it comes to the fate of my most important features, and again considering a directing debut. How is that possible? It seems like it all took place in another universe—far, far away, as Luke Skywalker would say. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

  A painful drama was playing out as I finished that book, which I’d wanted to resolve for the ending, as well as for my general state of mind. I had been working on Contact for twelve years on and off, and was close to being able to announce that George Miller would direct and give out our long-delayed start date. But then my beloved director got himself summarily removed from the picture by refusing to pick a release date. Before you could say Christmas, 1999 (the date Warner Bros. wanted him to commit to), Bob Zemeckis was at the helm, and I was in despair. Yes, it would eventually be made brilliantly; and yes, I would be executive producer, and all my hard work on the script would be preserved; but that all came long after.

  As for my directing, that went nowhere. No one optioned the wonderful Meg Wolitzer novel Friends for Life that I wanted to direct. It was by the same author whose first novel, This Is Your Life, had been adapted by Nora Ephron for her feature debut, which I had produced. I had Nora’s full support; she would executive produce. But the movie world was much less friendly toward female comedies then than it is now, to say nothing of female directing debuts. I just dropped
the whole idea and concentrated on producing movies.

  • • •

  I am currently developing a romantic comedy, the now moribund genre that was my former bread and butter, with my two favorite tadpole producers, Tatiana Kelly and Jim Young—the producers who made five movies in 2011 and got one into Sundance and bought by CBS Films. They’ve optioned a popular British novel and want to make a traditional, if offbeat, romantic comedy on a microbudget. I was their girl. Oly introduced us. The script had potential; the idea was charming.

  Now, every time I read a new draft, I hear Nora from over my shoulder: “It doesn’t matter if it’s commercial. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hit. It has to be good. You have to be proud of it.” We were so in love with This Is My Life. It didn’t matter that it made about $4.98 at the box office; we can watch it now and still be happy with it. Nora could have cast a big star, but she chose Julie Kavner—of Marge Simpson fame—because she was funny, and because she wouldn’t have to spend her whole debut worrying about a diva’s demands as she learned to direct, even if it might have opened the movie to bigger numbers.

  This Is My Life was about being a career mom—a story we both lived, with our sons on set and in the film (trees 1, 2 and 3 in a school play scene). Nothing in the movie I am going to direct yet has the kind of essential truths that movie had. And the one thing I am sensing from the dialectic in the market zeitgeist is that women’s movies have to change. They have to get messier—no auto-resolves in the third act, as this one currently has—and realer, as Nora’s was twenty-five years ago. I can’t do this movie until it registers in the right key for this next generation of romantic comedies. I am going to have to persuade my indie producers, who hired me because I was mainstream, to make this movie more indie.

  As in 1998, my biggest feature is still in flux. Who knows when it will be resolved? Thank heaven for television, where there’s always action, or about to be action. Suddenly I realized that my evolution into a television producer, having learned a new part of the business at the wobbliest moment of my feature career, is exactly what makes my life not cynical but dialectical. I moved into a new medium, which is sending Rachel and me to Montreal with just enough money to eat poutine and make a potentially terrifying and really cool science-fiction series. Series breed series, and action breeds action. So who knows where we go from here. All we know is that box Rachel keeps packed for location, full of outerware and extra skin product, is finally going somewhere! We are scouting, casting, perhaps not the movie we meant to be making, but a very long series of little movies nonetheless. Recognizing that the movie business was the entertainment business that wasn’t moving fast enough to fill my creative and financial coffers was an impetus to grow, and that has taken me and so many of my colleagues into a larger world. Denmark, not Copenhagen.

  So I may not have a third-act movie victory to report right now. But the great news about series television is there is no third-act resolve. There’s always another episode, a shot for another season. I have found the escape velocity from the doom of the $100 million start-up machine. There are things to do between tentpoles. I must say I’ve seen some intrepid, human, nonfranchise-controlling feature producers keep it going during the New Abnormal, and hats off to them. But not this control freak. This one has had to learn patience, ingenuity, cordiality and to take on multiple tasks in other media in order to keep her from utterly losing her mind during the wait for the big moments to happen. The same thing goes for picking a director; one cannot rush the moments of decision, because they only come when they come.

  But as I finish this book there is something that feels very different from ten years ago, and it’s not just the hard truths of the New Abnormal. I have gotten a strong sense of what is going on in this mad, mad, mad, mad world. All the time I have been writing, I have also been working my “buck slip”—a piece of rectangular stationery that lists all of the projects that a producer has in inventory. I’ve been keeping alive the ideas and scripts I thought could survive through the rough patches of the New Abnormal, and trying to drive those films forward. It was starting to look like maybe one or two might get made, now that the market was taking a positive turn. Hopefully it will happen in my lifetime, as I like to say. Maybe next year it will be a feature. Two are close. The box packed at the office with our essentials is now stamped canada.

  Woman plans and God laughs. But things look good. Somehow next year feels like the one I’ve been planning for (though I say this every year). Frankly, Crazy Pollyanna is the only tenable posture you can maintain in this business, otherwise you just give up or give in. I always say attrition kills more producers, directors, writers and agents than combat.

  When Oscar Season 2012 came along, it was a 180-degree turn to the studios from the indie-driven year before. There was a fancy offering from almost every studio that fit the Venn diagram of potential commercial plus Academy Award quality. Sony had Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty; Warner Bros. had Ben Affleck’s Argo and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises; Universal had the adaptation of the evergreen theatrical musical Les Misérables; MGM had Sam Mendes’s smash James Bond offering, Skyfall; Paramount had Robert Zemeckis’s redemptive Flight; Fox had Ang Lee’s adaptation of Life of Pi; and Disney/DreamWorks had Spielberg’s Lincoln. That’s literally one for each. Amazing.

  That’s a lot of quick reaction to a market that is indicating its desire for more original and adult fare. I think the studios are responding to the unexpectedly successful runs of the hit Academy Award winners of recent years (The King’s Speech, The Social Network, Moneyball, The Help). What they are doing is very smart: They are exploiting their best assets—director relationships and access to good material—in service of both the audience and the bottom line. The good news about attention-deficit-disorder executives with bouncing knees is that they don’t sit still very long in the face of compelling counterevidence. Will they act on the right principles this year? The studios had a lousy summer in 2012, but a great spring and fall, and the biggest Christmas ever. Is this rebound the reaction to the great mistakes made after the Great Contraction? What will that mean for 2013’s summer tentpoles?

  Ah, Hamlet, that is the question. We cannot judge the business by what happens during Oscar Season. It’s like judging your own work behavior only by the times your boss is in the room.

  THE FUTURE OF THE BIZ

  Is God laughing at the movie business? With all our bad karma and bad-faith deals, comparing what we do to brain surgery and war, is it possible we have so disgusted God that He decided to test us like Job? To make all of the money grabbers suddenly find they were in a business that couldn’t make money? Or in which, as my grandmother used to say, “you couldn’t make a living, you could only get rich”? Is there still a business in the business, as Oly would say, or a future in the business that we have traditionally, and now horribly, drawn our children into?

  I wanted to talk with Michael Lynton, chairman of Sony Pictures. I knew he would have fascinating insights into where we were headed. A politically and culturally active member of the L.A. community, Lynton, like Peter Chernin, came out of publishing in New York, and his intellectual reach is wide and rich. I sat down with him, a very modest man with a bare yet elegant office in the Irving Thalberg Building, where he and his partner, Amy Pascal, work.

  “Are the glory days gone?” I asked him. “The days when we had a cushion that allowed us to make movies in the middle, that weren’t either tentpoles or tadpoles?”

  He was quick to reply. “There was so much money swilling around in the system in 2006 and 2007, when you could afford to make enormous mistakes because of the safety net of the DVD business. That gave the false illusion that you could get by.”

  The good old days as false illusion, I thought sadly.

  “I’m a little reminded,” he went on, “in a funny sort of way, of the Netherlands.” Lynton was born in Holland. “In the seventies
, when we had offshore oil, we had eighteen percent unemployment. But we didn’t have to fix what was structurally wrong with the economy, because we had so much money coming in from something that cost so little to produce, we could afford all these social services.”

  I said, “Like Norway.”

  “Norway is a good case in point,” he continued. “You didn’t really have to have underneath it all an economy that was actually functioning. In a funny sort of way, I don’t think this is an unhealthy thing. I think it’s going to get everybody’s head straight as to what things probably should cost. You’re more experienced than I am at making movies, at how much it should cost to produce a movie.”

  Less than they are making them for, that’s for sure, I thought.

  “I’m Jewish,” he said. “But I come from a Calvinist Dutch background, and my basic feeling about things is that people perform better when there’s less. I’m saying something that’s not new, but we see it in our everyday life. The one thing human beings do not do well with is abundance.”

  “They go cuckoo,” I said.

  “It’s self-destructive,” he added. “We eat too much when there’s too much food in front of us, we drink too much when there’s too much liquor in front of us, we spend too much when there’s too much money in front of us. Abundance is simply something that we are not genetically geared for.” He was bringing this around to a philosophy for his studio. “But there’s incredible ingenuity and innovation available to people when all of a sudden you say to them, ‘Here’s a number. What can you do?’ ”