Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (9 page)

WHAT THE HELL ARE
YOU
LAUGHING ABOUT?

In America we laugh at movies based on our customs. They could be college movies, prom movies, high school ritual movies or family vacation movies. But national archetype jokes don’t travel. When independent foreign sales agent Kathy Morgan of KMI tried to sell our huge domestic hit
The Wedding Crashers
—about two buddies who live off of the joy and food of strangers’
weddings—to Japan, the Japanese buyers were incredulous. “Why crash wedding?!”

On the other hand, in India, weddings are big business, big culture, big events.
Wedding Crashers
is being remade in India, where the idea apparently
is
funny, because Indians are as obsessed with weddings as we are. Though the specifics of our wedding cultures and senses of humor are wildly different, our obsession with weddings is the same. It is enough to remake this in the vast Indian market somewhere, with its distinct sense of humor. There are pockets of similarities and differences to be exploited and avoided everywhere. For example: Sometimes a movie’s sensibility doesn’t travel twenty-one miles, as in this famous story I heard from Jim Gianopulos and Kathy Morgan and a few others.

“There was a movie in France a couple of years ago called
Welcome to the Sticks
. It was a fish-out-of-water story about a guy from Paris who goes to this city in the south of France where he doesn’t understand the local accent. It was hilarious to the French. The movie did a hundred million dollars there!”

This is an impossibly high number in France—which obviously made everyone think it could travel. So they exported it. First stop: the UK.

Gianopulos said, “It made ten dollars in the UK, right across the Channel. There was nothing about it they could relate to.”

WHAT DOESN’T TRAVEL

• Rule 1: Chemistry on paper does not equal chemistry on-screen.

Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, two of the very biggest (if not
the
biggest) international stars, couldn’t save
The Tourist,
because he looked like a girl and she looked like a boy, though on paper they looked
amazing
together. The much higher international box office numbers—$210 million, compared to
$64 million domestic—couldn’t help the movie break even because it cost so much for its astronomical budget and advertising costs.

• Rule 2: Sports movies can’t jump—even soccer movies.

People would rather go to a soccer game than see a movie about one, the better to drink and brawl and riot. Forget baseball, basketball and football; forget the whole thing. This is why it took even a star of the magnitude of Brad Pitt so long to get the movie
Moneyball
made. Well done, Sony, for not caring and making it anyway!

• Rule 3: Dramas that explore, glorify or otherwise delve into our national history bore everyone but us.

They like their local and national history, not union-organizing stories, Green Beret movies, America in Iraq, name-the-country-where-we-triumph-in-sports-or-war stories, or Lincoln stories (with or without a vampire).

• Rule 4: Minimal awareness is insufficient—for example, second-tier caped crusaders such as Green Lantern and Green Hornet. Maybe green things don’t work.

Universal just canceled
Clue
(which my late, great partner Debra Hill already made once for Uni in the eighties; I was her exec—we flew to Parker Bros. in England to get the rights. Everything old is new again), as well as a number of other movies based on Hasbro games (for instance,
Magic: The Gathering
).
Ouija
went from a tentpole to a tadpole with a budget under $5 million, to be made by the producer of
Paranormal Activity,
the abnormally successful faux-found-footage horror series about a couple who move into a haunted house; the first in the
Paranormal
franchise was made in 2009 for $15 million and grossed $193 million worldwide. Likewise, movies based on video games
have an iffy track record (just as video games based on movies often fail). The two businesses don’t yet understand each other. One reason is that movie people don’t give their game rights to the best game developers, but instead to in-house lackeys. Great game developers who try to work with the studios or savvy filmmakers don’t get access to the film process early enough to make the games cool. When it works well. But video games are not board games, which may be “Old Empire.” Mere awareness may not be sufficient. Awareness means games like
Mortal Kombat, World of Warcraft, Tomb Raider,
etc. We all have to be completely internationally aware, like Jell-O or Kleenex, if Kleenex were a video game being played by thirteen- to seventeen-year-old fan boys all over the world.

• Rule 5: Mixed genres don’t work. Maybe if you’re too many things, you’re nothing at all.

Cowboys & Aliens
.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
. Wash-up ideas that look good on paper, but ridiculous on-screen. All in all, after a rare bidding war for the latter property among studios, the “winner,” Fox, ultimately eked out $101 million worldwide on the picture, with domestic earning less than the movie’s $66 million production budget.

• Rule 6: No cowboys, no hats, no horses, no cattle, and no dust are allowed. With aliens or without.

• New Rule: Apparently the above works with Tarantino only, or there’s a new black/cowboy genre. Guessing Tarantino.

BROADS ABROAD

With Sandra Bullock, we’re in very good shape. Meryl Streep,
mon Dieu, mais oui
. Jennifer Lawrence, due to the magic combo
of franchise (
The Hunger Games
) and Oscar. Angelina is huge. She has big international gazoogies. And the more she sticks her right leg out at the Oscars, the bigger they get. They love our movie stars; they’ve always loved our movie stars, from the silent movies to Marilyn Monroe. Big stars = big bucks. They are a beat behind (one of my international sales-agent pals told me, “We love the stars of the immediate past!”), so the hot young things that the domestic audience loves won’t sell. This makes casting hard, as Sandy and Meryl can make only so many movies, and Julia and Angelina have a lot of babies.

It should be pointed out that one of Sandy’s points of adoration abroad, besides constantly batting her hits out of the ballpark, is that she is fluent in German, does an occasional ad campaign in Germany and does all of her press junkets in perfect German. Her numbers there are astronomical. (Her mom was a German opera singer and spoke German in the house.) So too with Jodie Foster, whose numbers are great internationally, along with her acting choices, which favor action. She is fluent in French, does an occasional advertising campaign in France, does her junkets in witty, jaunty French and lives in Paris part-time. Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem both score high numbers in Spain. Milla Jovovich, not surprisingly, is big in Russia. A little cosmopolitanism goes a long way these days.

Our romantic comedies have often performed well in Europe, particularly in Germany, and also, interestingly, in Japan, despite the studios’ lack of interest in the international market when making them. Gianopulos would say that the successes in this genre are typically star-dependent, and on average this seems true—thus Sandy Bullock’s huge numbers abroad. The success of our syndicated television shows in France, Germany, England, Scandinavia, Australia and elsewhere has made our customs and stars familiar to many territories, and therefore our mating rituals are somewhat adorable. But there is doing well ($110 to $120 million) and there
is doing great ($600 million to $1 billion), and the billion-dollar payday the studios are looking for doesn’t reside in success in “Old Europe,” as the studios say with almost equal disdain as Donald Rumsfeld did. The business there is too small to impress them.

More ominously, Sanford Panitch, of Fox’s new international production division Fox International Productions (FIP), tells me that indigenous romantic comedies are the new rage; they are now being made based on local romantic customs in local languages with local talent for a lesser price. They no longer need our rom-coms for style, trends, etc.—movies have been replaced by the Net as cultural carrier pigeon. Without our biggest brand-name stars, our movies will be dinosaurs, replaced by local ones. This makes sense. As Gianopulos says, you can make a $5 to $10 million romantic comedy in any country in the world, in the local idiom, with local stars. But because of our technical prowess and the enormous costs involved, you can only make
Avatar, Transformers, Inception
and
The Dark Knight
in America.

YOUR MOVIES? WE CAN MAKE THEM! WITH YOU!

We are great imperialists. We are also the best distributors. So call us the running dog of imperialist distributors.

Movies are a vital, critical and growing U.S. export. But increasingly, most countries want a larger share of their own movies to be released locally. Many countries, such as India (which has the most successful indigenous movie industry in the world), Australia, England, Japan, Korea, France, Hong Kong, Mexico, Russia and Spain, have bustling and historic film communities that severely limit imports. One idea to remedy this loss of income is to participate in local production in some way. What way? Finance and distribute! Each studio has distribution offices in each territory
for its own releases, and some of these headquarters are becoming financing sources for local production and/or offering new opportunities for wide-ranging international distribution for local products. Capitalism at work!

Fox is enjoying fast success in indigenous production with its new Fox International Productions (FIP) banner under Sanford Panitch, which as of the date of writing has made more than $300 million in local-language box office. They are not remaking Fox properties.

One of their most recent hits is
My Name is Khan,
about an Indian man with a unique point of view and his great but ultimately ill-fated love for a single mother, which became one of the biggest-ever Bollywood films outside of India. According to Gianopulos, who along with Panitch gave birth to the division, during one weekend in February 2012 Fox International Productions had the biggest movie in China, the most populous country in the world, and the biggest movie in India, the second most populous country in the world. Now Panitch and FIP have planned, made and cofinanced European, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean indigenous productions all around the world. What does he offer that they don’t have? Global reach.

Panitch explained why it worked. “What you’d normally hear is, ‘We don’t need you, we have our own stories, we have money, we can get our films distributed, we’ve managed to do fine without you.’ Bollywood is a perfect example of that. They don’t need anybody. So why do we need you? The only reason we do need you is to get us into the United States and beyond our borders. Well, the answer is usually no, because your movies don’t usually go from India to China.
My Name is Khan
is a love story about an Indian man with a tragicomic way of looking at the world who moves to San Francisco and meets a vivacious single mother. It played around the world. We proved it can work. We provide that.”

They also had an executive with a producerlike mentality who thought up the division and let him run with it. He had a philosophy that worked.

“Let’s study the market, just like you would as a producer,” Panitch explained. He had grown out of the Fox culture before he ran minimajor New Regency Enterprises at Fox. I had known him for years, before he ran the world, when we worked together in the Old Abnormal when he was just starting. He was recommended to me by my great friend Dawn Steel.

Even back then he was the world’s greatest information gatherer; he was the first person I know who kept compulsive files on a computer. It was in the eighties, and I had no idea what he was doing. And now, in a world where information is king, he reigns. “Other companies have tried and failed,” he said as we chatted about the quick success of his division.

I noted that Disney tried, with
High School Musical;
it worked everywhere else in the world, so they made a Chinese version. But it only did $110,000 at the box office. “Why?” I asked him.

“You could say it’s a strangely imperialistic point of view. Exactly the opposite of what we are trying to do. We are trying to figure out what would work in China; for example, what’s the best-selling novel there?”

More and more, U.S. film companies are becoming global financiers and distributors, with coproduction and tax rebate deals (which incentivize local production through tax credits) commingling our limited cash resources and creating genuinely international product. We have built theaters to play our movies and the movies we finance with local filmmakers. If there is product, we should distribute it. Fox has long been doing this in Germany and Russia. Now it is doing it almost everywhere.

I cannot understate the advantage that Fox had with an infrastructure already in place with pay TV (cable and satellite) all over the world. They had offices with well-connected locals all over
Asia, the Middle East, China and Latin America who could hit the ground running and knew who was who in the local movie community. This is invaluable, as connections are vital in any business, especially a preciously gate-guarded one like the movie business.

Panitch told me one of the things he had learned in Bollywood. When we were developing movies together, one of the organizing principles of development was tamping down wild tone changes. In Bollywood they
require
wild tone changes: In their crime and action movies, they want dancing and singing, and in their romances they want action, guns and death!

I was agog. And then I remembered how I adored
Slumdog Millionaire
—Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning movie about a Mumbai teen who grew up in the slums and becomes the winner of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
—and its torture-romance-dancing hybrid, and I suddenly knew just what he meant. (
SM,
by the way, performed less well in India than anywhere else, but they realized their movies could win Oscars!) It’s all getting to
know
you, and Panitch is FIP’s master of the local meet and greet, globalize and monetize.