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

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1985 by Timothy Noah

I though I'd found a rebel against this mind-set in Craig Zadan, a former writer for New York magazine who produced Footloose. I met with Zadan in his office at Tri-Star Pictures, where he has a deal, and listened to him go through a list of derivative movies released in the last few years that, he argued, showed that cynicism doesn't always pay off in the movie business. He'd known that these movies would fail, and they had. Zadan has a reputation for being a hot young producer, and as I listened to him I began to think perhaps it had something to do with the idealism he was showing. But then a thought occurred to me, which I uttered out loud: with 20/20 hindsight, wouldn't he have predicted that Rambo, sequel to First Blood and obviously derivative of the Chuck Norris Vietnam-vet-as-lonesome-warrior pictures, also would have failed? Instead, Rambo is an enormous hit (and, more to the point, was released by Tri-Star, though Zadan had nothing to do with it). Since Zadan had agreed to be critical if he was off the record, I expected him to offer at least a slight roll-of-the-eyes in acknowledgement that, yes, sometimes exploitation will pay off in a big way. Instead, in all apparent sincerity, Zadan said, "Oh, no. Rambo is a quality picture.'

Even those on the creative side--actors, writers, directors--can succumb to a cynicism that chills the heart. A journalist friend who's dabbled in screenwriting told me that the process of selling out with a safe project before you can hope to make a film you care about has its own ritual phrase: "buying the pool.' And once you've bought the pool, of course, you have to keep it filled.

Too much entrepreneurship

Clearly, entrepreneurship thrives in Hollywood. Yet Hollywood makes fewer movies than it used to, and fewer good ones. This becomes less puzzling when one considers that Hollywood might be that rare industry that suffers from an overdose of entrepreneurship. This creates a variety of problems. Above all is a culture of insecurity. Security, we all know, tends to breed laziness; when America's steel industry led the world, management ignored many crucial innovations, labor jacked up demands, and resourceful (and hungry) foreign competitors moved in for the kill. Security is still probably the chief disease of American industry and entrepreneurship the best cure. But in Hollywood, entrepreneurship has brought too much insecurity.

Why is Hollywood so insecure? The most important reason is that people do not work for companies. Even a very entrepreneurial industry like the computer business usually breaks down into identifiable organizations rather than individuals. Hollywood, however, is a place where nearly everybody works for himself or for a production company that is the invention of the moment. Instead of a job, one has a "deal' to work on a particular film.

This wouldn't be such a problem if most films turned a profit, as they did under the studio system. Unfortunately, now most do not. Studios make profits, and people receive more than adequate compensation in Hollywood. But individual films usually do not earn much back on the investment. Producers must wait their turn until both the exhibitors and the studio have taken their share. Theater owners keep about half what they take in. Next comes the studio's turn. That's only fair, of course, since the studio usually puts up the money and maintains the international network of distributors that gets films into the theaters. (In addition, studios must be reimbursed for the cost of making prints and all TV and print advertising--another hefty chunk.) After the studio gets its share, the producer must pay off investors, actors (who may have guarantees for a piece of the profits, or even the overall take), and everybody else involved in making a film.