Hollywood Babble On & On 1215: Hollywood's Model Trap

I've discussed the basics of movies and money before, but I'm going to expand on them a little here and talk about a trap that lies deep within the current Hollywood business model. I've talked, frequently about how Hollywood's self-fulfilling idiocy is causing an inflation in film production costs not seen outside of Weimar Germany, and that most major studio films need to break records to just break even, and that's including the precious international market.

And yet, the people running Hollywood don't seem to be worried about this situation.

Why?

Artist's conception of a studio executive.

Well, it might be because they expect to be fired with a golden handshake before everything goes tits up, but I suspect that it's because the Ivy League educated industry brain trust think they have it covered.

They don't see the fact that it's next to impossible for a film to turn a profit in theatres as a problem.

That's because they think their profit margins come from 2 things.

MERCHANDISE: This covers everything from toys to t-shirts, and everything in between. This works by licensing the name and imagery associated with a film to the manufacturers of the merchandise for either a flat up-front fee, a piece of the profits, or both.

HOME VIEWING: This includes broadcast and cable television airings, streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, purchases & rentals on iTunes, and sales of DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Now let's look at the problems inherent in these methods and how they can potentially crash the major Hollywood studios.

MERCHANDISE: Manufacturers of movie-related merchandise would prefer to license projects with a track record rather than risk their money on things they know nothing about. Things like comic book characters, old movies and TV shows. Basically superheroes and remakes.

These come with multiple problems:

1. Franchises can burn out, and most remakes fail to win a new audience leaving the manufacturers with a bunch of merchandise they can't move because everyone is sick of the sight of their subject.

2. It's next to impossible to develop new wholly original projects & franchises, even ones with great merchandise potential.

3. Pre-existing properties often come with pre-existing hands out. Creators, publishers, lawyers, are all looking for their piece of the pie, and if they don't get it, then the expensive litigation starts.

HOME VIEWING: The problems of profiting from home viewing revenue are three fold.

1. SYNERGY: Most of the broadcast and cable television outlets are owned by the parent companies of the major studios. They call this "synergy" and was sold to the brain trust as a way to keep profits in house. In theory the movie division makes the movies and sells them in theatres, then the broadcast/cable division sells them on TV, and the money rolls in.

What happens in reality is that the studio's films don't get the same prices for the broadcast licenses that they would have landed if they were in a competitive bidding environment. Plus, outside of a handful of family films and holiday fare, when was the last time you saw a major network air a previously theatrically released movie in prime time. It just doesn't happen very often anymore.

Most movies end up running on cable channels, which don't pay as much as the networks, and their licensing agreements usual involve rerunning them until the tapes wear out for decreasing amounts of money.

Even then, an increasing number of channels are producing their own content because in many cases it's cheaper than paying the licensing fees the studios are asking for.

2. STREAMING OUTLETS: The model for streaming outlets like Netflix and Amazon is to pay out a huge chunk of cash to license films in bulk from the studios.

That means that each individual film don't make that much money. The studios think that's great, because it allows for them to still claim losses on the films and get out of paying profit shares. But that means that people with clout who get profit shares will demand more cash up front, and the self-fulfilling idiocy will only grow.

The studios think that since streaming revenue is skyrocketing that the good times will never end. Well, all good things come to a crashing halt. The streaming services will reach a point where they will say: "We're not going to pay that much for these movies" and that revenue will plummet.

Amazon and Netflix are already having some success with producing and releasing their own content. Soon there will be a tipping point where they will see that it's much more profitable to just make and sell their own shows and movies, just like the cable channels.

Then what?

3. REPEAT VIEWINGS: DVD & Blu-Ray rentals have pretty much completely disappeared, and sales have been in a decline for so long folks don't remember the times when they sold well. Also ratings for airings of recent movies don't exactly burn up the Nielsen ratings, especially when they were theatrical blockbusters.

Why?

Because most big blockbusters don't really inspire a desire to see them again.

I can watch The Thin Man pretty much any time TCM decides to air it, and I can watch most of the Bond films on an annual basis. But the majority of recent movies don't spark a desire to see them again and again and again. 

Spectacle might sell tickets in the theatre, but its quality in story, characters, and filmmaking that make the most spectacle filled blockbuster bearable to be seen more than twice.

All these problems will eventually converge, and the major studios will be forced to rethink their business model, or go the way of the dinosaur.

Maybe they might want to turn a profit in theatres as a good way to start?

Hollywood Babble On & On #1212: The Diversity Conundrum

There's a word that you can't escape from, especially if you spend any time hearing about the business behind media and show business.

That word is "diversity."

According to just about everyone there's not enough of it, especially in Hollywood, and super-especially at the Academy Awards, which is offering up its first all-Caucasian acting nomination slate since 1998. This development is considered especially shocking since Selma, a film about Martin Luther King jr. and the historic March on Selma, was expected to at least repeat, if not beat, the awards performance by last year's 12 Years A Slave, which had 9 Oscar nominations and 3 wins*.

When Selma was seemingly shut out, Hollywood was immediately declared irredeemably racist, the Academy an irredeemably racist institution, and every snub, nomination, win, or loss, is evidence of that racism. 

The truth, is probably far more complex.

Academy voting and counting procedures and statistics are kept secret, and for a reason, because they don't want producers and distributors trying to game the system even more than they already do. So we don't really know exactly why Selma was mostly shut out.

It could all boil down to a mathematical where the film, and the people involved were just 1 vote short of what it took to get a nomination in each category. Or it could all boil down to Academy voters donning white hoods and burning crosses in Beverly Hills. 

We don't know. 

Here's what we do know:

1. The film appears to be perfect Oscar bait. Stories about race, racism, civil rights, and the social-political upheavals of the 1960s really appeal to Academy voters. It should have got more nominations than it did.

2. Sadly, that obvious appeal may have made the producers and the distributor think that they didn't need to burn many calories on the Oscar Campaign. Many Hollywood insiders are saying that the campaign was badly run, chiefly with screeners arriving too late to affect the voting. Screeners are essential to getting Academy members to see your movie because they NEVER pay to see movies in theatres.

3. Many didn't like the film's negative portrayal of President Lyndon Johnson. This may have affected its votes since many Academy members not only voted for, but campaigned for Johnson back in the 1960s. 

Of course what caused the near-total-shutout will remain a mystery, but as you can see it's a little more complicated than many think, or would want you to think.

So, am I saying that Hollywood's diversity problem's a myth?

HELL NO!

Hollywood DOES have a problem with diversity. 

Is it straight up racism and sexism?

I doubt Hollywood executives and filmmakers are dripping with hatred of women and minorities. I suspect the root of Hollywood's diversity problem is that they can't achieve what I call natural diversity, and try to fake their way through it through what I call unnatural diversity.

"What is natural diversity?" you ask, furrowing your brow in a feeble attempt to understand.

Natural diversity is when the make-up people working in front of and behind the camera reflects the make-up of the population at large, and no one really gets too worked up about it.

"All right," you say, your brow still furrowed, "but what's 'unnatural diversity?'"

Unnatural diversity is basically tokenism. Empty gestures meant to make the people making the gesture feel better about themselves, and maybe get some pats on the back for their "open-mindedness."

So why can't Hollywood achieve natural diversity?

1. PRE-SOLD PROPERTIES: Right now Hollywood is obsessed with blockbusters. Big expensive movies that can make hundreds of millions at the box office, and spend the next few decades being repeatedly licensed to TV and home viewing for big profits.

But those blockbusters are mostly based on properties that were created in an age when minorities were not only a smaller part of the population, they were considered even less by filmmakers and publishers. I'm talking about decades old superheroes, super-spies, and remakes out the wazoo, designed or re-designed to appeal to kids and teens.

This leads to talk that the next version of some long-existing franchise character must be changed to be black, a woman, or a black woman. When it is done,  usually in comics, which is comparatively rare, it's usually pawned off as an "alternate universe" version of the franchise, or as a minority character temporarily filling in for the white hero. 

One case where such a racial change seemed perfectly natural was when Denzel Washington stepped in the role made famous by Edward Woodward in the movie version of The Equalizer. That's because Denzel Washington is one of the few actors in Hollywood who could pull off the character of a mature heroic bad-ass and not look ridiculous or cartoony.

Usually, race and gender swapping already existing characters cheat everyone of the chance to develop new and original female and minority characters that might be able to stand on their own two feet with audiences. Which would make them examples of unnatural diversity.

2. NARROW WORLD VIEW: The executive suites of most Hollywood studios are predominantly upper-class white and male. This isn't the product of racism, but of inbreeding.

Look at the life stories of Hollywood's top management and many of them would sound so much alike. Upper echelon suburbs, elite universities, then a job in Hollywood. That's because to get in on the ground floor of Hollywood, you need to be already heavily wired into Hollywood. That might get you the job, but if you don't have a trust fund, or wealthy parents to keep you in vittles and fashionable business attire, forget it.

That's a long way from the old days. During the Golden Age the upper management was about 100% male and about 98% Jewish. But that didn't mean that the people they hired for management jobs had to be just like them. They were mostly self-made people who were looking for smart self-starters who could make them money. One of the top men at MGM was Eddie Mannix, who ran what you would call the "plant" aspect of the studio. He made sure the stages, the equipment, the budgets and the schedules, were running. He wasn't Jewish, and he also wasn't college educated. He was a fairground bouncer that MGM's owners realized was smarter than he looked, and they recruited him for management.

Lou Wasserman, the last of the classic-style moguls, was talent spotted by mega-agency MCA when he was a high school kid in Chicago and came in to book band for his school dance and showed he was already a tough negotiator. That led to a job in the MCA mailroom, that paid crap but enough to live on, to inspire him to work his way up the ladder. He did and ended up running the whole show.

Nowadays, neither Mannix or Wasserman would be even looked at by a modern studio. They didn't go to the right schools, belonged to the right clubs and fraternities, and they sure as hell didn't have the right social and familial connections to even be considered for a spot.

Such a narrow world view can lead to believing that the next cause is better than doing anything concrete.

3. THE PURCHASE OF INDULGENCES: One of the causes of the Protestant Reformation was the practise of the the "selling of indulgences." This was a way of buying forgiveness of sins in advance by giving money to the Catholic Church.

While the Church ended the practice centuries go, the practice thrives in Hollywood in a secular form.

Basically the people in Hollywood can deny opportunities to women and minorities, violate the environment with wild abandon, and commit other politically correct heresies and blasphemies without blowback. That is as long as they vote for the correct candidates, voice support for the correct causes, donate to the correct organizations and campaigns, and make the correct  gestures, whether these gestures achieve anything concrete or not.

I'm sure many in Hollywood are looking at all the complaints about their lack of diversity and saying: "They can't be talking about me, because I bought a 'This Is What A Feminist Looks Like' t-shirt, and I told MSNBC that they were doing a great job with Al Sharpton's show, even though I've never actually seen it."

This inability to see that they're part of the problem can lead to an extreme case of...

4. BLAME IT ON THE OTHER GUY: In the old days the folks running Hollywood could get away with a lot of racist and sexist shit by putting the blame on someone else. The most common stooge was the Southern United States. Wanted a black leading man? Can't do it, blame the South. Want to discuss racism or sexism in a serious way? Can't do it, blame the South.

Nowadays the blame has shifted to the "foreign markets" and they'll say things like: "Can't have a black lead, or a woman director, the Chinese won't buy it."

But is that right about foreign markets?

Was it even right about the Old South?

That's just it, we don't really know the truth, because all we have to go on are the people who complain the loudest. The people who scream and yell, and flood an office with letters of complaint that someone they don't like is doing something they don't like on the basis of their race or gender are most likely few in number. The great silent majority probably doesn't give a flying fuck as long as they're entertained. They have lives to live and don't have time to waste harassing people on the other side of the country.

That means the outraged, vocal, and occasionally violent can usually get their way regardless of whether or not they actually represent the majority of people they claim to speak for.

All these things pile up in the collective consciousness of Hollywood, giving it a case of nuclear level cognitive dissonance. They see the complaints, but can't conceive of any real way to fix the problem, because they can't see that they're part of the problem.

That's what I think, what do you think.

________________________

*In total 12 Years A Slave won 213 awards from various bodies out of 398 nominations, including the Oscars.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1209: What It Takes To Make Movie Studio

Reading The Genius Of The System by Thomas Schatz is an eye opening experience, letting you know exactly what it takes to make movies and to build a company that makes and releases movies on a professional level.

Making a movie is relatively easy when you boil it down to the basic elements: Money & Time.

Anyone with the money and the time to make a movie can do it.

Whether or not they make a good movie is totally up to the talent of the filmmakers.

But what does it take to make and release movies on a consistent professional basis?

Well, that takes, not just an army, as Orson Welles said, but an organization, perhaps a company or what we have come to call a "studio" whether they actually own real physical studios or not.

Let's have a little thought experiment.

Let's say that Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and the Sultan of Brunei all drop dead, and the shocker is that they have left their combined fortunes to you. You, as a movie fan, decide you're going to make movies, but without buying a major studio, you're going to start your own.

What will you need?

Well, it's not so much what you need, but who you will need.

Your intention is not to make a bunch of movies no one will see, you want to make movies that people see, and build a self-sustaining business. Now let's look at who you will need.

Let's start at the top, titles may vary, depending on the structure and nature of the company, so I made up some vague descriptions.

Artist's conception of a movie studio's executive board.

BUSINESS ADMINISTRATOR: Every business needs someone to run it. Someone to handle the money, negotiate contracts, and oversee the business aspects of the company as a whole.

PRODUCTION CHIEF: This is the person who decides what to do in the creative realm. They're the one who picks and develops projects, forges relationships with other producers and talent, and oversees the creation of the company's output from script to screen.

Then we move onto the departments:

PRODUCTION DEPARTMENT: This answers to the Production Chief and can consist of producers or production supervisors who each oversee individual productions and do what they can to see they come in on time and on budget.

DISTRIBUTION: This department oversees the how, when, and where the movies will be released in theatres. 

MARKETING: This department oversees the selling of the movies to the general public.

HOME VIDEO: This department handles release and marketing of DVDs/Blu-Rays, and licensing to television broadcasters, and video-streaming services.

FINANCIAL: This is the department of accountants and bookkeepers who monitor spending, revenue, and all the other financial doodads and report directly to the business administrator.

That's the core people and departments that a film company needs.

Now what sort of intangible qualities does a film company need?

INSPIRATION: Despite what the Harvard MBAs say, a movie studio is in the business of selling stories. Stories that people will pay money to see, and hopefully inspire merchandise, theme park rides and other money-making ventures.

DISCIPLINE: Inspiration is one thing, but to build a company that's viable requires intense self control on the part of the filmmaker and the studio. This goes beyond staying within budgets and on schedule, it's also important to practice creative discipline. That means not letting ego make decisions that your creativity should be doing, which I will be getting to in just a second.

What qualities should a film company avoid?

As I said just a couple of lines ago, the ego, when out of control, can overwhelm creativity and lead to these two destructive tendencies:

INDULGENCE: We've seen it with filmmakers, where a director with clout spends over a hundred and fifty million dollars to turn what should have been a simple romantic comedy into an overlong, self-important mess. But it can also happen to producers and studio executives who think that bloating a project will improve their own importance. It's an all too common problem, especially with blockbusters, where the solution to every problem is to just overdo everything.

INTERFERENCE: This is a tendency among studio executives and certain producers to meddle needlessly in a production. This differs from enforcing discipline because discipline in needed. Interference is unnecessary.

Legendary super producer David O. Selznick burnt himself out while just in his 40s because he lost the ability to tell the difference between discipline and interference.

After the gruelling creation of his monster-hit Gone With The Wind, he began to believe that he was more than just indispensable and that everyone, regardless of talent, could not do the simplest, smallest job without his intricately detailed instructions. His meddling had gone from above-the-ordinary to downright nuclear proportions and it alienated his talented staff until they all left for other companies as soon as their contracts allowed. This forced Selznick to expend immense amounts of unnecessary energy and money out of ego and fear. During the making of his last big mega-epic Duel In The Sun, he burned through 8 directors, countless writers, and several million dollars because every single camera angle of every scene had to pre-approved by Selznick.

His output dwindled, and so did his once legendary stature within the industry, and he was pretty well spent and out of the business at an age when most studio heads would be hitting their peaks.

Those are the basics of what you need, and what you need to avoid when you're starting a movie company.

The Basics: The Flavours of Fame

We live in the age of fame.

It's all over the place, it's being treated like it's a solid commodity, like gold, or pork bellies, and there's a generation of children who when asked what they want to be when they grow up just say: "Famous."

THIS IS FAME.

However, fame is a not all that concrete. It's more like a no-name gelatine desert with too much water in the mix, it's mushy, it's wobbly, it can fall apart at any minute, and it comes in many flavours. All those flavours can seem sweet at the start, but some have a bitter aftertaste, and a lot can go totally sour very early.

So let's look at some of these flavours....

1. HYSTERICAL FAME: This kind of fame hits when you're very young. It's super intense, causing floods of money, hype, and the adoration of millions of young girls. But there's a catch. Adoration can turn to revulsion as quickly as flipping a switch. And since the people who have this sort of fame tend to be very young and at the mercy of managers, agents, parents, media executives, and accountants, they usually end up broke and working at a dry cleaners, only appearing as a curiosity on some sort of "where are they now" special on deep cable.

2. MEDIA FAME: This kind of fame occurs when you're the darling of other famous people. If you have this sort of fame you may find yourself in the middle of a great schism between the amount of attention/adoration you get in the media, and your ability to generate revenue from the audience.

George Clooney is the classic example of this. To be considered a commercially viable movie star you have to show an ability to get people in the general audience to pay money to see you in movies to the tune of at least $100 million.

Now if you go only by the coverage Clooney gets in the media you would assume that his movies rake in the big money.

Not so.

Clooney's actual box office record is pretty weak, showing that over the past ten years he's been unable to crack the $100 million target without a large group of big name actors backing him up, like in the Ocean's 11 movies. Even then, they got so expensive to make, due to cast salaries, they became economically untenable.

Now Clooney's the lucky one in that Hollywood keeps tossing him big roles in big movies. Sometimes you can be media famous, and while it goes great at first, with TV/movie deals, big money book deals, and the adoration of the critics and award voters, it's a double edged sword. When you have that sort of fame, and are subject to fawning coverage almost every day, the audience can get sick of the sight of you without seeing anything you've done, and the well of money and adoration eventually runs dry.

3. TYPE FAME: This is where someone becomes famous for doing a specific type of thing. Like playing a certain kind of character, or performing a certain style of music.

Mary Pickford, America's Canadian born sweetheart, became rich and famous playing the young ingenue. The problem was that the audience actively refused to accept her playing any other role. Even when she was in her 30s, the audience would only accept her playing young girls. It was insane and it ultimately destroyed her career because she wasn't allowed to break from that "type."

The flip-side of this is when a performer decides that he or she achieved some state of perfection doing a certain type of thing a certain way, or in conjunction with a specific image. Then they start to do everything to polish or promote that image even though it's long past its "Best Before" date and the audience might like to see them do something different.

4. QUALITY FAME: This kind of fame where the audience associates the performer with a certain quality of entertainment. This is for good or ill. Some performers get associated with good movies, music, or TV shows, and some get associated with bad movies, music and TV shows, making this both the best and worst flavour of fame you can get.

5. CULT FAME: Imagine you're a performer, and your performance in a certain project has won you the love and loyalty of a niche audience. Now this can take your career in two ways. One way it can pigeonhole you in the type of role that won you your cult in the first place, which is not good. The other way, which is better, is that your niche audience will follow you into more mainstream projects, giving you some a certain number of guaranteed bums on seats no matter what you do.

6. TRASH FAME: This is the sort of fame one associates with either scandal, reality TV, or both. It's similar in flavour to Media Fame, because the sweetness lingers within the media world long after it's turned bitter to the wider world. This can't last long because inevitably people will ask: "Why is this person famous?" and then expect an answer.

The Basics: Making A TV Series...

The networks are picking up pilots all over the place for the next TV season, and since I explained the Basics of TV Pilots a while back, I'll take a moment to hop us to the next level.

Let's put on our imagination hats and imagine that you just sold a pilot to a major network, and now have the greenlight to take it to series.

What next?

That's a pretty big question, and the short answer is "a hell of a lot!" but I'll go into a little more detail here, so let's get started in no particular order...

1. CASTING: Most of the casting of the series regulars is done during the making of the pilot. However, when you're going to series, you have to make any changes that are necessary, and lock down the ones you want to keep with standard seven season network TV contracts.

2. STAFFING: It literally takes an army to put together a television series. In the technical department it's usually the department heads that hire their own crews, but when you're the executive producer/show-runner you have to hire the writers.

TV is a writer-dominant medium. In television directors are more or less disposable, since they usually have to imitate the visual and dramatic style established in the pilot*. However, it's the writers who give the show its voice, and narrative style. Since the show-runner also acts as the show's head-writer this part has to be very carefully done to get the best people for the type and style of show they're working on.

3. PLOTTING: While most new shows fail, some do succeed, and the networks fully expect your show to last at least seven years whether it does or not.

That means you need to know what the hell will be happening so that you don't fire all your best shots in season one. Having a great first season, followed by a formless, aimless, second season that drives viewers away. Remember, the key to success in television is to get enough seasons under your belt to have residuals coming in from the reruns into infinity.

This also goes hand in hand with a lot of...

4. PLANNING: As I've explained before being a producer is essentially a job planning and coordinating dozens, if not hundreds of factors. Budgets need to be  calculated, schedules worked out, actors, extras, facilities and equipment all have to be booked. Of course, all the planning in the world won't save you from lots of...

5. FIGHTING: Networks are large, bureaucratic institutions where there are only a handful of real decision makers, but dozens of people who think they know your vision better than you do, and they can make your life a living hell.

You have to do battle with them, or watch your hard-boiled procedural detective series get reworked into a sitcom about a sass talking robot living in suburbia. However, you need some strategy. You need to know who not only pulls the strings at the network, but who can cut them as well. You need to make allies in positions of influence, and you need the knowledge to pick your battles.

Not even success can protect you, just ask the show-runners for The Walking Dead.

You see, television is inherently risky. Every year the networks spend hundreds of millions of dollars on pilots, the bulk of which go nowhere. That means they need the shows that do make it to air, to really connect with an audience, and even that's a crap-shoot. Gold can sink, and shit can float, despite what the marketing people say.

And that optimistic note ends the basics of starting a TV series.

*If you direct the pilot of a successful & long running show, you get royalties & residuals from that show for as long as it's on the air somewhere.

The Basics: Star Salaries.

It's that time of year again, the time when Forbes magazine puts out their list of Hollywood's most overpaid stars, and this year's most overpaid star was Eddie Murphy for delivering the least for the huge salary he gets paid. (I'm not sure if they count the costs of his on-set perks and entourage which is reportedly substantial even by Hollywood standards.)

Now stars exist for one reason, to sell movies to audiences. 

In a world ruled by the logic and reason of a free market the bigger the audience a star can attract, the bigger the paycheck that star will get.

However, logic, reason, and free market principles don't really apply in Hollywood since it works very hard to exist in a universe entirely within itself.  Which is why Eddie Murphy, whose non-Shrek movie output for the last decade has dropped more bombs than Curtis LeMay, is still able to cash multimillion dollar payoffs.

I'm going to use this post, and Murphy and others as examples, to try to explain why stars get paid what they're paid, and then explain why it keeps happening long past their sell-by date.

There are two main causes for the size of star salaries. There is economic, which is fairly simple, and political, which is, like most things having to do with Hollywood and money, needlessly complicated. 

ECONOMIC: Basically this means that an actor has been in more than one hit movie. This means that in the eyes of the Hollywood decision makers, these actors can put bums in seats and cash in the Swiss bank account. They want someone who can attract ticket buyers to keep working, and be happy, so they get a boost in pay, usually ranging in the millions of dollars per picture.

But no one has a 100% hit record, and all good things must come to an end, so there must be a reason why so many stars keep getting the big bucks.

That's when things get...

POLITICAL:  No, I'm not talking about who people vote for. This goes along a definition David Mamet once said that I'll bastardize paraphrase: "Politics is all the nonsense that gets in the way of accomplishing the task at hand."

The Axis of Ego is a hotbed of those kinds of politics, and they have more to do with determining star salaries than simple economics. These factors include:

Track Record: You see when the decision makers of Hollywood look at the track record of an actor, there's a strange case of willful blindness. They treat every film as if it was a starring vehicle for that actor and that audiences paid money to see them. A good example is Eddie Murphy's role in the Shrek movies. The Shrek movies did extremely well, and critics cited Murphy's performance as the Donkey for praise. However, was the presence of Murphy and co-stars Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz the biggest cause of the success of the franchise?

Probably not. Remember, it was an animated film for kids, and the odds that its target audience knew, cared, or were willing to pay money to see those actors do other things, are pretty long.

You didn't see Shrek fans flocking to see Mike Myers' Love Guru, so why expect them to flock to see Meet Dave. 

This is loosely connected to...

Name/Face Recognition: This is the idea that if people know who someone is, they are willing to pay money to see their movies.

It's not true, but I'll get to that in a second.

Now you might think that the factors I just gave you are economic, but they fall prey to the political machinations of...

Agents/Managers: Remember that agents and managers earn their living from collecting a percentage from the paychecks they negotiate for their clients. It is in their best interest to try to maximize what their client can get, because they too have bills to pay. (And remember, they can't rely on the 'profit sharing' Hollywood studios promise their clients, thanks to the industry's ongoing self-fulfilling idiocy.)

So they play up the positives of the track record, downplay the negatives, and if their client has a cameo in movie that does well they're going to play it as if their client's charisma was solely responsible  for its success.


The studio bosses either don't know the full story when they go into negotiations, or they just don't want to create static in their relationships with the agents. It's better to just pay too much for someone who doesn't really deserve it, to make sure things run more smoothly when they're negotiating with that same agent for a client that is worth the money.

It's not their money, so why should they care.


Then there are the...

Publicists: These are the people who handle the publicity for their movie star clients. They're the ones who get people on magazine covers, and book the multiple "exclusive" interviews where their clients whine about all the media attention they get.

The media outlets generally go along with whatever the publicists want. They need a steady stream material to fill their publishing/broadcast/posting schedules and will pretty much take anything, especially if it means getting first crack at the really juicy story with the real star who can drive sales/ratings/and page views.

This means that publicists can manufacture name recognition for their newer clients, or maintain it for someone with great success in their past. 

Take Jennifer Aniston as the example of the power of publicists. She and her handlers are masters of generating media exposure for absolutely no reason. These bursts of media dominance pretty much guarantees that she's going to get at least $10+ million per picture even though she couldn't sell tickets to the last bomb shelter in the world during a nuclear war.

Then there is...

Peer Pressure: Remember that the Axis of Ego is a comparably small and isolated community. This isolation makes it a hell of a lot like high school with money. The "cool kids" dominate the social scene, and if you, as a studio executive, don't pay the proper obeisance to the cool kids, you might not get invited to the right parties to hang out with the right people. If you don't hang out with the right people, you might not be able to make the right deals with those right people.

That might cost you your job, and your expense account.

So, it's better to just give in and let the cool kids get their way, because it's not your money anyway.


Now there have been attempts to correct the erratically upward nature of star salaries, but I don't really expect them to go too far. There's just too much interference.

Those are the basics of star salaries.

The Basics: Movie Titles.

Recently I wrote about a trend where studios are trying to do away with titles and replace with the name of the lead character in the desperate belief that it will somehow create a "brand." 

So far it's not doing that well since they only one I've heard of that's did well was Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr.  (But I think old Sherlock's a rather unique case being an already successful brand for over 100 years.)

The title is important.  It's the first sales pitch for the movie that is supposed to attract the interest of the audience. It is supposed to tell people that they really should spend their hard earned money to see this movie.

However coming up with good titles are hard. The temptation to slip into cliche is strong. While it is the easy way out, a cliched title tells the audience that it's going to be a cliched movie, which is not healthy.

So what makes a good title?

Well there is no hard and fast set of rules for what makes a good title. But there are some questions you should ask yourself when you're furrowing your brow in an attempt to compose the perfect title...

1. Does it fit the genre or style of the movie's story?

You don't want to title your romantic comedy about a quirky manic pixie dream-girl teaching the stuffy executive to loosen his tie "The Murder-Death Killer Massacre." It just doesn't fit.

 

You need to fine tune your title to the emotional style or setting of your story.

2. If you're going obscure, is your title a little too obscure?

Titles can be obvious, like "The Adventures of the Hero in the Land of Perilous Stuff," or you could be really obscure and just call your film "Pudding" even though it is a horror film that has nothing to do with pudding.

You see the act of making up titles is like turning a dial between obviousness on one side and obscurity on the other. 

If you go too obvious your title is just going to be an announcement of everything that happens in the movie. However, if you go too obscure the audience will think the movie will be just confusing pretentious nonsense.

What a good title does is pose a question that will make the audience want to see the movie to find the answer.

3.  Is your title just like the title of another movie?

No one likes a copycat.

It's tacky. 

I'm looking at you Paul Haggis.

Crash?

Come on. 

4. Does your title reek of cliche?

If it looks like it could be the title of a Lifetime original movie, you're title is probably cliched. 

I hope this helps.