The sad state of the movie business

To paraphrase Lloyd Bridges in that classic comedy Airplane, "I picked a bad time to give up job security".  This, along with several articles in the LA Times this week about the state of the film business is not good.  And as far as job security, the last time I had that was 1980, working for a TV station so my line should read more like "I picked a bad time to finance a feature film".

No kidding. 

Studios are crying in their bottles of Pellegrino as revenues are down. DVD sales as much as 25% (a note on this later). The Times quotes, "access to outside financing has vanished and production and marketing costs remain skyhigh." They suggest that there's been more change in the last 18 months than in the last 18 years. Sony (formerly Columbia) has put a hold on all screenplay development and purchasing until next year.

So what do they do. Well, what they've always done. 

First fire all the top executives and replace them with people who know even less. 

Where did this all begin, who's to blame?  My theory is this; the film business began going downhill when Entertainment Tonight began. 

Right, Mary Hart. 

She's the one responsible. Okay, maybe not Mary, who's been host for 50 years (okay, it just seems like 50 years).  A lot of people beside me agree with my theory.  Former studio head Bill Mechanic suggests "the world we live in now is so bloody public.  Every decision is blown up on a global basis almost as soon as it happens." 

What I take from that is this;  movies began to lose their lustre, their magic when Mary began reporting the week-end grosses of opening movies. This is the amount of money made on the week-end by a movie that opens and is crucial to studios to figure out how much it will make in the coming weeks. Now the public knew that if a movie didn't make much on it's opening week-end, then it must be no good. And as a result they wouldn't see it.  In  short, the audience knows too much about how movies are made and who makes them and which ones cost too much. The magic is gone and all that's left is CGI effects. 

The movies were wonders to me,  they took me from my little village to the rest of the world in a time when the world was a bigger place.  I guess it would be inevitable that the audience would figure it out but I didn't want to see how a movie was made, I wanted to escape into that world. 

Okay, truth is a lot of the movies today aren't that good, but there still might be an audience who would see it.  And then there's the stories about how a studio is having problems with a movie or a star, and again the public is privy to the battles and the bad word.  Add to that the internet critics who now number probably in the thousands, had their voice, whether good or bad. 

Who the hell is Earl Dittman you might ask.  He's a "film critic", apparently a real person who never gives a bad review.  When you see Earl's name on the ad, it's only because he's guaranteed to give a good review. Then there's the hedge-fund boys and girls, the ones who pumped tons of money into movies around 1999 to a few years ago who used private money to make really expensive movies that often flopped.  A huge amount of private investors got burned on those deals. 

There was also a glut of movies, even now, many with some major stars and these films rest on a shelf somewhere because they are mostly unreleasable.  I know what you're saying, it sounds like the movie business itself is responsible for it's own troubles.  And you're right.

There's nothing wrong with the movie business that a good movie can't fix. 

That sounds good, right? Wish I would have said it, but I didn't. It was a studio head and he said it back in the 1950's when TV was beginning to wipe the smile off feature film makers. It still holds true today. A producer recounts going to Jack Warner years ago, he had a script he wanted to make. Warner asked him who wrote it, who was gonna star in it and how much would it cost. That was it. That's all it took to get a movie made from those old guys.  They had gut feelings, not research.

I've been here for 20 years and when I arrived, it was a lot easier to look for work, to find it and to even get lots of it.  One year alone I worked on 6 movies, 2 were my originals and 4 were rewritten by me. Those days are gone.  You could find an agent without working too hard, one who would take you on and spend a year establishing you. That's gone.  Several big agencies bought out smaller ones and now you have a handful who only want superstars. Sort of like having only 5 TV channels when you had 100. 

And speaking of speaking of stars, it's become evident that they don't really deserve those $20 million paydays when their movies have $10 million dollar earnings the first week-end. Especially if the movie cost $100 million.  Yes, $100 million. And there's been a few of those recently.  But mostly it's young corporate executives who really take no risks anymore, all they want, as The Times quotes " is the tried and true moneymakers, referred to as  "branded entertainment": meaning sequels, movies based on toys, old television shows and other familiar themes." They do research and studies on movies and have drawn-out meetings discussing every aspect of the screenplay,

DVD sales can be as much as the movie made theatrically, or even more although it's usually about half.  Either way that's a lot of money. And that money has gone south, as they say. BlueRay is pretty much a flop as most people would rather buy a DVD of their favorite movie for $5 rather than a BlueRay of the same one for $30.  And the general audience won't really notice a difference in the quality. 

My theory is that we all replaced our VHS movie libraries when DVD came out and when we finished we had all we wanted.  BlueRay came out promising bigger and better but in reality, the quality as I mention above, isn't all that noticeable from regular DVD.  And this time the public didn't fall into the same replace your library trick.  We kept the DVD's we already had.   Sure there's a lot of us who wanted and desperately needed a perceived better quality format like BlueRay.  But most of us were happy with the regular DVDs. 

And so the studios lose out again.  Not to mention a large portion of the public is stealing movies off the internet.  And I don't mean just kids, I went back to my small hometown at the edge of Northern Manitoba and was surprised to find people in their 50's and 60's downloading recently released movies.  The studios don't really even begin to know how to deal with that.

So where does that leave Travel Day?

Well I have this crazy idea that this is the best time for Shirley and I to get the money to make this movie because... well because.


There's nothing wrong with the movie business that a good movie can't fix.  :)

Blog 5: Screenwriting -- The words come first

Before the actors take the stage, before the DP lights the set, even before the donuts are on the table and even before anybody even knows there is a story... 

The writer is there, sitting in front of a blank page, desperately trying to think of something else he or she wants to do than this. As I mentioned, I have written and rewritten a total of 16 produced scripts, both mine and others. I have also around 30 hours of episodic (this number changes depending on the wine I drink).  And a lot of those movies aren't great, some aren't even very good but a few came through pretty good. In almost all the cases, it was due to notes from producers and or development executives. 

And in all cases, the bad movies were from people who knew very little about anything while the good movies were with who knew their stuff and made my work better.  In addition I have worked on around 20 screenplays that made it to development but not to production.  Travel Day was a spec script, and for those readers who aren't familiar with the term, it's a screenplay I decided to write entirely on my own with no guarantee of ever being sold, or maybe even being seen. 

I have 24 of these specs on my shelf now, and I think they all could be made, unfortunately the powers-that-be think differently. And maybe they're right, or at least half right. That's what writers live with, a basket full of ideas nobody else cares about.

I am not great at concept movies, I couldn't write The Hangover if I tried, and I wish I could, I'd have a lot more money than I do. I tended to write good character studies, and it got me work and a reasonable career. One thing someone once pointed out to me was that my endings seem to always be unresolved, ambiguous. I realized they were right. I finally had a style, I thought. But after awhile, I didn't really ever figure out why the endings were the same, be it movie or TV episode. So I left it alone. Meryl Streep doesn't try to figure out why she can become so believeable as any character. Best to leave the muse alone.


I taught screenwriting at UCLA once, and I'll do a blog on that up the road, but I came up with what is being written in Hollywood these days. And it hasn't changed in a hundred years.  If you want to write something that can be sold, consider this, in order;

1. Movies made from novels and books.
2. True life stories
3. Remakes and sequels
4. Original screenplays

You can see where the original screenplay sits in the scheme of things. If you don't believe me, open your newspaper entertainment page.  So naturally I picked # 4 because I don't know how to write those other stories, or maybe I don't like to. Maybe that's why I don't have a Porsche, but I like my 96 Explorer. And it's paid for. Ever seen what a tune-up costs for a Carerra?


And I don't mean the first three "genres" are bad or unwatchable, many of them are great, unless you count Taking of Pelham 1,2,3.  But I learned late in my career to write what I write good, rather than what I would probably write bad.


So now you know more about the odds of ever getting Travel Day made. And you're probably wondering why I want to punish myself by choosing the hardest kind of movie to make. It all goes back to what I said in the first blog, it's never easy. For anybody who tries to get a movie made.  A director named Peter Hyams, I believe, was credited with this:

"Being in the film business is like being married to a beautiful woman who cheats on you, and you know she cheats on you, but every so often she dresses up and you take her out for dinner and look at her and realize...it's all worth it."

What I take out of that is that most of the time this business breaks your heart but every now and then it's worth it.  My ex told me that I was one of the few people she knew who was living his dream, you know, that kid in the picture to the left... that's all he ever wanted.

That's why I'm here.