GOLDSTEIN: "SOMETHING HAS GONE HORRIBLY WRONG IN THE SPECIALTY FILM BUSINESS" (LAT)
By Nancy Vialatte
Something has gone horribly wrong in the specialty film business, says today’s LA Times. In what Patrick Goldstein calls, “a real art-house depression," it’s partly the fault of too much dumb money flooding into Hollywood meaning bad choices are easier to make.
Goldstein points out that we’d have to go back to the fall of 2006, when "The Queen" and "Babel" were released, to find a specialty-division drama that made as much as money as a forgettable piece of fluff like "Good Luck Chuck."
It would be unfair to blame the disaster on the movies themselves, which are no better or worse than before. The real problem is that there's too much money pouring into Hollywood, much of it what the industry calls "dumb money," money from equity funds, real estate tycoons and deep-pocketed investors eager to cash in on some of the razzle dazzle of the movie business. Hardly a week goes by when I don't find myself at lunch with someone who's just secured enough loot to make a slate of 20 movies from some hedge fund or equity financier.
Given that many hedge funds have a mandate to spend within a certain time frame, they end up asking “the dumb-money question: ‘Whaddya got?’”
Everyone wants to make a good movie, but when the marketplace is jammed with new movies every weekend -- 14 of them opened in L.A. last Friday -- the bar for what moviegoers consider good is suddenly a lot higher, and it's that much harder to cut through the clutter. That high bar won't hurt a crowd-pleaser full of star power, like "American Gangster," which opened strongly this weekend. But the highbrow specialty movies, especially the ones without big stars or strong entertainment value, are getting plastered.
Picturehouse’s Bob Berney told the LAT, "It's scary out there. Mondays are brutal - nobody wants to even come into work."
For a take on what’s happened – only two years ago the specialty audience was flocking to see such challenging fare as "Crash" and "Brokeback Mountain" – the LAT spoke to Michael Barker, an avowed art-house fan.
"I opened up the New York Times, and the best review in the paper was for 'Friday Night Lights,' so I told my wife, 'Let's stay home and watch it,' " he said. "There's something especially compelling about TV right now. The reviews in the big-city papers have been a lot better for the new TV dramas than for the movies."
Barker isn't alone. When I was at a recent dinner party populated with the kind of people who could handicap the Oscar race in their sleep, no one was talking about movies -- everyone was marveling over the final episode of "Mad Men." In days past, it was HBO that had the spotlight shows for discerning adults. But now virtually every cable network has a cool, critically beloved show with good buzz, whether it's AMC's "Mad Men," TNT's "State of Grace," Lifetime's "Army Wives," FX's "Damages" or Sci Fi's "Battlestar Galactica."
"There's definitely a creative shift going on," Bruce Cohen, who produces "Pushing Daisies," told the paper. "There are a lot of series on TV right now that are breaking the mold. It's absolutely raised the bar for anyone thinking about going out to see a movie on Friday night."
This burst of original programming has been accompanied by a growing popularity of serialized dramas on network TV, shows far more likely to have fans hooked on seeing every episode than the old police procedural shows. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do the math. If a big chunk of educated, upscale consumers are caught up watching "The Closer," that's a big bunch of time subtracted from being out at the multiplex, especially with TiVo and video-on-demand making it easier than ever to watch TV when you want to.
And, that raises the bar for movies at the multiplex. As Barker put it: "There are 16 movies opening every week, but you can't TiVo any of them."
These new series not only have the kind of alternative vibe you get from indie movies, but they also seem more in sync with the mood of the country than the bleak dramas tanking in the theaters, notes the LAT.
"When we did psychographic research into what women 18 to 49 wanted, what we got back was that they're looking for stories that offered hopefulness and relevance in their lives," said Lifetime Network entertainment chief Susanne Daniels. "I haven't seen all the fall movies, but judging from the marketing, those qualities seem in short supply. When you're looking for something hopeful, well, that's not 'Gone Baby Gone.' "
This is not to say that good TV is killing specialty movies, only to say that if something is ailing movies, you can no longer diagnose the problem by looking at movies alone. "The Kingdom," a much-hyped action thriller aimed at young men, had a hugely disappointing debut in late September. Was the problem simply bad marketing? Or did a lot of the movie's core audience stay home to play Halo 3, a wildly popular video game that hit stores three days before "The Kingdom" opened?
What we have now is a specialty business in dire need of reinvention, says the LAT, although the article doesn’t address the fact that with the current writers strike - and by extension a possible dearth of original, scripted programming – folks may find themselves returning to the multiplex if their home theaters are too full of reality.
You don't need a business degree to know that every over-saturated market eventually has a shakeout. All the money pouring into movieland has created a Gold Rush-style environment in which too many films are being made without having a good reason to exist. Sooner or later, the laws of gravity will return. Hollywood has always been a Darwinian business, especially in the sense that whether you're making a high-minded drama or a cheesy comedy, it behooves you to answer the question: Who's the audience for this movie?
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Art-house depression (LAT)
