Tentpoled

Of course, the whole space-cowboy thing was done much better, without aliens, by Firefly.

Of course, the whole space-cowboy thing was done much better, without aliens, by Firefly.

Reavers were alien without being actual aliens.

Highly recommended:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1478964/

well, it has aliens, no cowboys.

the whole space-cowboy thing was done much better, without aliens, by Firefly.

Or Steve Miller. Well, maybe not.

10: absolutely not – I’m sure everyone here can come up with examples of films that had spectacle and a good story. Start from David Lean and work forward from there.

@11, sure, you can have spectacle and a good story. But I imagine at some point you will be facing a choice where, to produce even more spectacle, you have to sacrifice some of the story. Suppose 1 unit of the spectacle, regardless of the story, translates into $1 million, and 1 unit of the story into $700K. Then, as a responsible businessman, you must ditch the story, or all the excess of the story, anyway.

When I look at that top-10, I don’t think I could improve those scripts story-wise without sacrificing at least some spectacle. Though I didn’t see Transformers, the new Pirates or Toy Story. But the rest seems to me not obviously far from pareto-optimal in that respect.

Those lists of highest-grossing films are irrelevant. You need to adjust for population, inflation-adjusted ticket prices, length of cinema run and total number of cinemas before you can do the calculation properly. What’s the inflation-adjusted value of Star Wars or Gone with the Wind? What about when you adjust for the number of cinemas, and the relative cost of a ticket in GDP terms?
And:

I went to see “Cowboys and Aliens” last weekend, so I’m feeling fairly tentpoled myself, and I don’t really like it. Terrible story (as all the critics said. I know, I know. I don’t know why I wanted to see it.)

You went to see it because you knew, just as I do, that you can never, ever trust a cinema critic’s review of a sci-fi or fantasy movie. So you couldn’t judge whether it was good or not by the reviews, and you had a sneaking suspicion that bad reviews meant it was actually a good movie.

I once read, I kid you not, a movie review for Troy which concluded that the movie was spoilt by “the emphasis on big battle scenes,” or some such shite.

The principle is simple: when you go to a video shop, never, ever let the film-studies student/graduate choose your movie. Similarly, when you choose what to watch at the cinema, never, ever listen to the critics.

When I was a college newspaperman, I had a chat with our paper’s movie critic, who asked if I had seen some highly-hyped movie (I forget which). I told him I had been turned off by all the hype about it. He told me never to pay any attention to hype as a signal: the hypsters are whores who will hype a good movie as readily as a bad one, assuming they can even tell the difference. He became a movie critic for some major papers, and I have profited from his advice.

I think Holbo is right — the fact that you can, materially, erase a scene or edit one, creates the illusion that you “can” do this and have the story still work.

Presumably, Cowboys and Aliens began with the title concept, and at some point it occurred to someone that unless Mike Leigh was going to direct, some sort of pre-written script would be necessary. The task was probably presented to the writer with a list of CGI sequences that would have to be incorporated. You treat the story like an afterthought, you get a story that plays like an afterthought.

Give me a day with the “Cowboys and Aliens” script and I could improve it by 50% without making it any less appealing to 13-year olds.

The problem might be that 20 people involved could all think that it’s obvious what needs to be done, but they all disagree.

Presumably, Cowboys and Aliens began with the title concept, and at some point it occurred to someone that unless Mike Leigh was going to direct, some sort of pre-written script would be necessary. The task was probably presented to the writer with a list of CGI sequences that would have to be incorporated

Actually it started as a graphic novel; I am not sure how closely the film follows the book.

@24, of course you can make a film with a great story and spectacle, or, for that matter, a great story and no spectacle at all. This is not my view of the cinema, this is my view of this “tentpole film” phenomenon: mass-marketing, mass-production, quick buck/short turnover. This is exactly what the Disney guy is talking about.

Holbo in the OP: I appreciate that screenwriters aren’t exactly top of the status pole, but – again – it’s not as though the make-up artists are top of the heap, but they still manage to get everyone’s make-up on right, seems like. Why is it so hard for Hollywood to achieve basic competence in screenwriting?

I think this misunderstands how the employment of scriptwriters functions in Hollywood. Even assuming that a given scriptwriter could write a good script, and that they were employed by someone who would recognise that, scriptwriters of movies on this scale rarely stay from start to finish. Just check out the Wikipedia entry on the development and writing of Cowboys and Aliens. A flavour:

In the film’s period as a developing project under several studios, different versions of the screenplay were drafted by numerous screenwriters, beginning with Oedekerk. Other screenwriters involved included David Hayter, Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer, Jeffrey Boam, Thompson Evans, and Chris Hauty.[9] When Universal and DreamWorks re-partnered in 2007, they had hired Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus.[8] In 2009, Ostby and Fergus were replaced by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Damon Lindelof.[23]

My scriptwriter friends – of whom I have a couple – would probably aver that not only can they write good scripts, they have written good scripts; it’s just that unfortunately that’s not usually what ends up on screen.

sg @ 17: Those lists of highest-grossing films are irrelevant. You need to adjust for population, inflation-adjusted ticket prices, length of cinema run and total number of cinemas before you can do the calculation properly. What’s the inflation-adjusted value of Star Wars or Gone with the Wind?

Spot on, I don’t know why people bother with non-adjusted charts, they just show you what’s been popular lately. Box Office Mojo have an inflation-adjusted chart for US box office, and indeed Gone with the Wind and Star Wars are out front.

L2P @ 26: If you spend $5 M on special effects on a scene, but it’s also got lots of dynamic dialog or plot or character development, you’ve wasted your special effects budget. Either people miss the plot and character stuff, or the effects. It’s now literally a distraction.

I’m not really sure I agree with this framing of the problem. For me, the distinction between a gripping action sequence and merely some impressive special effects is whether anything is at stake that I care about. The problem with a lot of action movies (for my sins, I have sat through all three Transformers movies in the cinema, for example) is that you just don’t care what happens in the action scenes – oh, an undistinguishable hunk of metal has ‘died’, whoopdy do. And if you don’t care about the outcome, then it’s impossible to feel that rhythm of tension and release that makes movies exciting to watch. You can still be enthralled by the spectacle but it won’t get your heart rate going and you won’t remember much about it later. In that sense the spectacle has to engage with the plot and characters, even if it doesn’t develop them much (or at all – some great action sequences leave the main characters back where they started, but after putting them in genuine jeopardy).

This isn’t to do with dropping bits of plot or character ‘business’ into the middle of an action sequence, which I agree isn’t usually very helpful.

The Player, both book and movie, remains an indispensable guide to understanding Hollywood.

From the way George R.R. Martin described working on Beauty and the Beast back in Genie days, and as I’ve heard from lots of other accounts, movie executives tend to be deep into Dunning-Kruger territory when it comes to language and story. They are themselves seldom articulate, and they have major cargo-cult thinking going. It’s not always as obvious as a giant spider obsession, but it’s seldom actually any more rational or justifiable.

Executives talk and dictate memos and read, and so think they understand writing. They don’t program computers or make models, and so they mess with effects people but without thinking that it’s the stuff they do themselves.

Scott Rosenberg, the originator of Cowboys and Aliens, literally paid comics stores to stock the graphic novel when it first came out so that it would be #1 on the Diamond distributor’s chart. These are not the actions of a person who genuinely believes in the value of what he’s selling. C&A has never, at any stage of its existence from concept onwards, been anything other than a cynical cash-grab. It never had a soul to sell.

I appreciate that screenwriters aren’t exactly top of the status pole

You’ve heard the joke about the Hollywood starlet who was so dumb she f*&^%d the screenwriter?

It’s interesting to think about Ender’s Game (supposedly it’ll be on the screen someday) in this respect. If they lean heavily on the Buggers (the aliens)- and I equate this with augmenting the spectacle- it’ll turn to crap. If they keep it a Lord of the Flies meets Good Will Hunting type thing and follow the book, it’ll be cool. But you can see the tradeoff:

You can’t have million$ go into a taut psychodrama that happens to require spots of convincing special effects and disappoints the kids.

I do think “spectacle” and “story” are pretty exclusive categories. Spectacle is rather like a good rollercoaster (after watching Avatar, I felt like I had just enjoyed a theme park). It’s the imagination of the primary motor cortex and cerebellum.

You’ve heard the joke about the Hollywood starlet who was so dumb she f*&^%d the screenwriter?

Steve Martin made a movie about her (Bowfinger). Though she worked her way up.

My question, I think, wouldn’t be why action movies have stupid pathos/tearjerker/bonding scenes breaking up the action, my question would be why in American movies they’re almost always about being a good dad (most recent example, Super-8). I suppose the answer could be found in the home lives of studio executives, but I wish they wouldn’t foist their neuroses on the rest of us.

Helen, if you didn’t see the Burton Alice movie I can only congratulate you, but you should know that its story had very little to do with Lewis Carroll’s story (and, to be fair, didn’t pretend to be the same story — it was set up as a sequel). I take the producer’s comment as a confession that his story wasn’t very good — which indeed it wasn’t. It was formulaic you-go-girlism.

sg@17

‘The principle is simple: when you go to a video shop, never, ever let the film-studies student/graduate choose your movie. Similarly, when you choose what to watch at the cinema, never, ever listen to the critics.’

I once wrote a few film reviews myself, though barely published. I will simply point out that if Mr Holbo had ignored your self-evidently daft recommendation, he would have saved himself $15 and 2.5 hours of his life he’ll never get back, instead of spending those precious commodities on a movie that most critics tried hard to tell him was a complete bag of shite.

Some people are great at DIY, and others are great at fixing cars. However, for most people who haven’t studied these areas, it’s good to get advice from people who have studied them extensively on how to proceed, before committing capital to a project willy-nilly, and at least then you’ll have somebody else to blame when the suspension falls off or you drive a nail through a water pipe.

The claim that there are no movie critics out there worth listening to is just nonsense. For sci-fi/fantasy/horror etc, try Kim Newman for example.

Anderson@21

‘at some point it occurred to someone that unless Mike Leigh was going to direct, some sort of pre-written script would be necessary.’

I don’t think this needed to ‘occur’ to anybody at all, any more than it would ‘occur’ to Arm&Hammer to put their toothpaste in a tube before it leaves the factory.

John, you could also say that the comparison between the lists shows that no movie made by somebody not named John Cameron has cracked the top 15 during the last 15 years, despite a bigger population.
They are making tentpoles smaller than they used to be, it seems.

The universal suckiness of tentpole movie stories is a pet peeve of mine but after much thought I’ve discovered the problem. If you see more than two names in the credits for the script, that means the story died a slow death by committee. The reason for this is of course, economic. The suits have so much money invested in this product, they aren’t willing to take any chances with the story offending someone. So they story committee is convened. The first script, the one that was polished by the one or two writers who had the idea and sold to a studio was good enough to get that much money thrown at it. But then the committee took chunks out of it that might offend someone and what you’re left with is holes in the plot. These then get pasted over by hack writers the producer knows. This cycle might repeat two or three times before they begin shooting the movie. So what you have on the screen in the end is some hacked together story that attempts to be interesting to as many people as possible without offending anyone. You know, a movie that sucks.

Give me a day with the “Cowboys and Aliens” script and I could improve it by 50% without making it any less appealing to 13-year olds

Everyone thinks that, including the executives who hired the writers. Your point about stars writing or bringing in their own writers is also true. The point about testing altering what the movie is also also true.

And think of it this way: if you’re an executive, and you let a writer have his/her head, and the movie tanks, the movie tanked because of your unconventional move. Whereas if you bring in 20 writers (and in the days when I was chasing movie work I’d see tons of names on scripts), you did everything you could.

“I appreciate that screenwriters aren’t exactly top of the status pole, but – again – it’s not as though the make-up artists are top of the heap, but they still manage to get everyone’s make-up on right, seems like.”

Costume (particularly of female characters in these kinds of movies) seems to be another area where executives ideas of what they need to sell the film produces some unhappy results.

I think 13 year old boys probably like films that are only 50% rollercoaster just as well, or better, than films that are 100% rollercoaster. And adults mostly like them better.

Of course the question is not what they like, but what they will pay to see in theaters. I suspect business people may also be considering the possibility of downloading and watching it for free, and these roller-coaster things you have to see in a theater, so there’s that too. In any case, we have to assume that all this has been thoroughly analyzed and tested, and the optimal % of roller-coaster has been determined. Otherwise what kind of business would it be, if John Holbo could jump in, spend a day, and make more money than the Walt Disney Company.

Part of the article is wrong. Most of the ticket sales of movies is diverted to the studios in the first few weeks of showing, tapering off to nothing after months. So movies like “The Full Monty” which played in some theaters for over a year made money for the theaters while making zilch for the studios (it didn’t have wide distribution, so most cities had 1 or 2 theaters playing it). Since most modern movies are in the theaters for a couple weeks, all the revenue from ticket sales end up in the studios’ hands with only concession stand sales keeping the theaters open. Movies have to pull huge audiences in the first month of showing to make money for the studios – this is why they’re obsessed with the “tentpoles”. Once the movie goes onto DVD or Netflix, revenue for the studio approaches zero. And to make a movie appeal to all audiences, it gets reduced to “least common denominator” most times. This race-to-the-bottom also reduces the appeal to audiences, so it is a tricky balancing act.

As for the “is Cowboys & Aliens a good movie” question, I suspect that since this was based off a graphic novel (folks of my generation called them “comic books”, and it was uphill both ways), that folks who enjoyed this movie would also have enjoyed “The Fifth Element” (also closely filmed/edited to match the graphic novel). The tempo, cadence and editing of a graphic novel is different from a regular novel. But then, a movie has a different tempo and cadence from a novel, which is why lots of folks complain about movies based on novels.

I liked watching “Cowboys and Aliens”. As someone who rarely goes to the movies (I usually wait until it comes out on DVD), it was enjoyable, and quite a few scenes made me feel like I was playing Red Dead Redemption (a video game).

they are cycled in and out and the results are hash. But you would think at some point someone would say: we’ve got to stop cycling these guys in and out. We risk ending up with hash. Just pick one apparently competent screenwriter out of a hat and let that person finish the job

That’s what everyone tells themselves though – “this guy that we’ve just hired, HE is the competent scriptwriter that is going to finish the job”. At every stage, from initial pitch, from the guy brought in for rewrites, to the guy brought in when the producer changed, to the guy that the lead or director brought in to punch things up, to the guy implementing the notes from early shooting, to the guy called in for last minute revisions after the early screenings, the writer you just brought in is _supposed_ to be the last one that will ever work on the script, and you’re only bringing him in because the previous guy was _obviously_ incapable.

Snow white and gone with the wind are on it with nearly the same gross and year, but wildly differing adjusted values

Not fishy at all. Those are movies that used to get re-released regularly. The inflation adjustments would be far from simple.

Interesting that you mention Sherlock Holmes, which I’ve been thinking about while reading this discussion. I think its a perfect example of a movie killing itself with spectacle.

Robert Downey Jr. gave his Holmes a wonderful combination of genius, arrogance and (social) cluelessness, and he and Jude Law as Watson had great chemistry. I actually enjoyed the re-imagination of the two of them as brawling action heroes. All the elements were in place for an entertaining movie.

But it’s as if someone was standing off camera the whole time shouting, “Bigger! Louder!” Holmes and Watson couldn’t just have a fist-fight with bad guys. They had to fight a French giant, and send a half-finished ship sliding into the Thames in the process. They couldn’t just solve a mystery — they had to save the entire British government from annihilation in the process. There were even big, gasoline-y explosions toward the end.

The movie actually had good writing and acting. But it couldn’t win the war with comic-book-like spectacle.

If you want to see really great cinema, look at the middle section of The Tree of Life, by Terrence Malick, concerning a young boy’s upbringing with Brad Pitt as the father. Malick continues his remarkable cinematic experiments in using abstract structures to determine completely new forms of feeling-shapes for his narratives. I can’t recommend the whole film because the abstract bookends he uses to shape this wonderful middle are a beginning section about the birth of the universe which is pretty but impersonal, and an ending which has been done before: the Felliniesque beach of life with the main characters walking around sort of aimlessly. The reports are that like Kubrick he incorporates improv while he writes and rewrites scenes, but I will guess that he doesn’t know how it will come together until the editing room. When Malick’s method works (i.e., when it connects both aesthetically and emotionally), it is a great thing. Some of the scenes in The Thin Red Line have the same quality. This man has a great movie in him yet. The only filmmakers I can think of who consistently achieved results at this highest plastic level of invention were Ozu, Bresson, and indeed Fellini.

zamfir@60, roac@67: Not fishy at all. Those are movies that used to get re-released regularly. The inflation adjustments would be far from simple.

Yep. In fact there is a sidebar comment at the top of that page which specifically cites Snow White

For example, Snow White has made $118,328,683 of its unadjusted $184,925,486 total since 1983

No one ever went broke…

In all things having to do with the tastes of the general public, I think that PT Barnum has to be your oracle and guide. He recognized that the old raree show needed a veneer of respectability, because lots of people felt some shame at gawking at the often pathetic physical and behavioral (the geek was originally the side-show act who ate lizards and bugs live, fellow geeks) deformities who were its mainstays. So he plundered that same vein of impulse towards “educational” “self-improvement” that less profit-oriented people (and sometimes only slightly less profit-oriented people) at the same time were using to promote Chautauqua. So he opened “museums” where there was plenty of “scientific” labelling on everything, and plenty of non-human exhibits, as a veneer for the same prurient interest in pathetic freaks.

A movie like C&A is going to have faux-emotional scenes because it needs them for veneer. They can be badly done — they will be badly done in a movie like C&A where they are like teats on a boar hog — but they have to be there so that large segments of your potential audience can con themselves into a self-justification for paying good money to see what is essentially mindless spectacle.

The average American, of course, considers him or herself to be way above mere mindless spectacle. This way to the egress. And one such egress is the pretence that this movie is about mushy stuff, too. Sure, the basic appeal is to the 13-year old kid who doesn’t care about the mushy stuff, but you get a much wider demographic if you appeal to the 13-year old who lives in just about everybody, but, in all but the actual 13-year old, needs some rationalization to justify catering to that 13-year old. So you slap on the veneer, and the slapdash offends Holbo and a few dozen CTites, but you’ve bought yourself into the much wider demographic that wants some veneer, any veneer, slapped on its mindless spectacle.

Hey, we’re welcome to use the egress. Plenty of people have gone broke imagining that they could move product in the mass market based on CTite tastes.