Valley of the duds; inside Hollywood's bad movie machine

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1985 by Timothy Noah

Steven Bach, former senior vice president of United Artists, shows in his new book, Final Cut, that those on the creative side can be just as guilty of reaching into the till. The book is an account of the making of Heaven's Gate. Bach writes that Michael Cimino, the film's director, planned a battle scene to be shot in Montana. To prepare for the scene, he ordered the installation of an irrigation system so that he could grow grass on the field. Who, Bach wondered, would see grass in the midst of horses and wagons and smoke? This led Bach to wonder who owned the land. Sure enough, UA's lawyers found out that the owner was Cimino. Another site was quietly chosen. Sometime later Bach discovered that Heaven's Gate's producer, Joann Carelli, had billed the film for "exactly ten times what the documents showed she had paid' for the rights to the film's musical score.

Recently, Universal Studios built a Disneylandish adobe headquarters for the phenomenally successful director and producer, Steven Spielberg, right on the lot. Inside, Spielberg works happily away on a variety of projects, many of them for competing studios. I couldn't get through to anybody who was willing to tell me what the building cost (though I was delighted to note that the phones played a Brandenburg Concerto when I was put on hold), but Time estimated it to be at least $4 million. According to Time, "Spielberg says he doesn't know, and will never ask, the price tag, and [Sid] Sheinberg [president of Universals's parent company, MCA] won't snitch. "It would be like telling how much the birthday present cost,' he says.'

Featherbedding exists within management ranks just as it does within labor. An example is what has happened to the title "producer.' Primarily, it still means what it has always meant: the person who supervises production of the film. But in the age of the independent producer, that title often is also bestowed upon certain parties who need to be bought off before the cameras can roll. Frequently, for example, a key agent will receive the title "executive producer.' In their book, The Movie Business, David Lees and Stan Berkowitz quote Jay Bernstein, the executive producer of Sunburn, on the responsibilities that earned him $50,000: "I didn't really have anything to do.' He just happened to be Farrah Fawcett's manager.

The monopolist of Menlo Park

To understand how Hollywood came to this point, it is useful to review a little history. Our story begins with an inversion of what we all learned in school: Thomas Edison, heroic inventor of the light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture, was, in the development of the film industry, a villain. There is even a substantial body of scholarship that argues that Edison didn't invent the motion picture camera. By the time he turned his attention to moving pictures in the 1890s, the electric light and the phonograph were behind him, and the Wizard of Menlo Park had become an international celebrity. Inventors around the world sent him their ideas in hope of recognition. Among these was the hapless British inventor, William Friese-Greene. Hoping to get a job working in Edison's lab, Friese-Greene sent Edison news of his invention, which film historian Kevin Brownlow and others now contend was the first motion picture camera. Apparently Friese-Greene was under the impression he was protected by a forthcoming patent. He wasn't. Edison helped himself to Friese-Greene's ideas, and Friese-Greene died in obscurity.