Recipe for a Box Office Bomb

I am always amazed at the entertainment industry which tries to break movie-making down to a science. Perhaps it is trying to imagine studio execs looking over scripts and trying to "figure" a budget for a final chase scene involving three Ferraris, dozens of stuntmen, ten fire engines, and the collapse of the Golden Gate Bridge (hypothetically speaking). Wouldn't that be a sweet job! Just imagine the bravado and stupidity you'd have to have to venture into that conversation.

Then, on top of all that, there's the extremely nebulous, yet incredibly important fees celebrities command for the mere appearance of their name on the titles - let alone their acting skills. Who in the world determines that Tom Cruise was once worth $20 million dollars a movie? Do all actors have standard fees - like dj's that play at middle school dances and quincieneras? What does William H. Macy command? Or Bruce Campbell? Do execs have cards of every star complete with information about how their last three movies performed? I'm sure they do; I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they have something comparable to a baseball card: picture, stats, best year, etc.

One thing we can know. Hollywood, movie "forecasting" is about as accurate as any other type of forecasting: pretty crappy. I chuckled through this article in the LA Times about the flop that is Sahara, a movie I helped send into the red because there was no way in hades that I would put this cheese-puff in my Netflix queue, let alone pay money at the box office.

Sahara is a classic example where people in the arts industry - for the love of all things holy - simply refuse to be creative. Instead, they take a classic movie - in this case, Sahara - and hope to resurrect it by throwing money at a star who is no where near as cool as the original (Bogart vs. McConaughey ... please!) with some extra flesh, fire and effects. Such efforts are nothing more than processed art. For shame, for shame.

And I normally love what Penelope Cruz does! I don't even know how to reconcile Vanilla Sky and Sahara?

I know people who work for and within this media machine. And for four years, I regularly ran or walked by plenty of crews doing a shoot somewhere just south of our apartment. I have to believe that 90% of the people within the system are artistic and imaginative, but I also know that all the money floating around the process of making movies draws plenty of less-desirables. Did you see how much they spent on catered meals ($1.4 million) and bottled water ($105 k). How absurd is that? Why wouldn't you want to grow fat on that excess - even if it meant hanging around the fringe.

And somehow $9 tickets, promotional ties, television replays, DVD's and foreign markets are more than enough to cover all this extravagance. With plenty left over. Clearly. Los Angeles now includes something like 250,000+ millionaires in the county. That's freakin' amazing. Especially considering that a good chunk of that 250k comes from a medium of entertainment and art that wasn't even present two hundred years ago.

Do you think any of this stuff gets recycled? Like, say, the walkie-talkies that cost over $100k ... do they sell those at the close of filming, or do they go to some wharehouse in Burbank?

I love movies. Don't get me wrong. But, I would be naive and hypocritical if I didn't stare into the obscene abyss that generates all of this. To do that, though - to critique the movie machine - is to bite the hand that feeds you. Besides, it's not like you needed another reminder that the world isn't very just or fair.

What you really want is an escape - another world. Thankfully, someone is always working their tail off and throwing money at another project that will do just that. Coming soon ... an escape from reality.

Wes

p.s. - if you're up for exploring this issue more deeply, check out Wikipedia's piece on "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.