Hollywood Babble On & On #1250: Deserving Better Than A Remake?

Here's a great video about Remakes from Good Bad Flicks (h/t Nate Winchester):

Which is a good segue to today's topic, which is the news that MMA fighter Ronda Rousey will star in a "re-imagining" of the 1989 Patrick Swayze vehicle Roadhouse for MGM.

When I heard the news my first thought was that she should beat up her agent.

Why?

Because if she's serious about a movie career would remaking a movie that marked the death knell of the 80s action movie golden age that started with The Terminator.

You see, by 1989 Hollywood was worried that action movies about cops, soldiers, and secret agents were passé and tried to reinvent any occupation that might throw a punch as some sort of ninja-combat master.

Which is how we ended up with a movie about a ninja-bouncer taking on a small town gangster whose whole operation looked like it came from a rejected script from the A-Team.

The film fizzled at the box-office, but gained a cult following on home-video and cable by those who watch cheesy movies to enjoy them ironically. It also marked the beginning of the end of mainstream street-level action movies that went on to become more and more dominated by special effects and eventually superheroes.

This has given MGM the delusion that the general audience is hungry for more Roadhouse, ignoring that they already had a 2006 sequel that came and went on DVD without even the studio noticing.

I think shoving her into an over-priced un-imagining of a film that left most of the audience cold when was first released is a big mistake when it would be so easy to come up with a catchy original premise for her to star in, that would be hers and could mark the beginning of a new franchise.

She's young, attractive, and can kick ass with extreme prejudice. Coming up with starring vehicles she can call her own would be the easiest thing to whip up.

To show you how easy it is I will pull some out of my ass right here, right now:

THE LONG DROP: Rousey's a rookie detective sent to pick up a witness working in a half-completed skyscraper. The witness is the only one who knows where a fortune in laundered money is hidden. When she arrives the place is crawling with hired killers, gangsters, and thieves, all out to find the missing money, including her own partner.

Ass-kicking, rescuing, and dangling from great heights ensues.

There, you got everything you want to kick off a good two-fisted action franchise without the baggage and nonsense associated with a remake.

THE STARLET: This is more of an action comedy premise which would depend heavily on her comic talents. Rousey plays a seemingly harmless and slightly klutzy actress who is targeted by crooks either to be kidnapped for ransom or because she has or knows something they want. What the crooks don't know is that, despite appearances, she has a devastating punch and a knack for foiling their schemes even unintentionally.

Naturally, lots of slapstick insanity ensues.

See, two very different and lively original premises that are guaranteed to work better than remaking some old nonsense.

Plus, my premises are for sale. 

Cash up front please.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1207: Random Sick Thoughts

Welcome to my first blog post of 2015.

Sorry, it's so late, first came the holidays, which were really busy and frantic, then came gastroenteritis. I will spare you the awful details, let's just say it was nasty.

Anyway, I'm feeling better and ready to pass off some random thoughts…

*

While I was sick a cable channel ran a Portlandia marathon. I had only caught snippets and individual sketches before, and found what I had seen funny, and since I wasn't going anywhere I decided to dive into the show head first.

First thing I thought was that Carrie Brownstein's work was well worth the hype, the second thought was that she and co-creator Fred Armisen had the most purely natural comedic chemistry I've seen in a team in ages, and the last thought was that this was the gentlest satire I had seen since the days of SCTV.

Too many satirical comedy vehicles see themselves as a battle tank, crashing through barriers, destroying, obliterating, and decimating their targets. That's because too many comedians, especially on television, see themselves not so much as performers, but as advocates. They cannot have fun with the foibles of the people they like, they must use comedy to crush those they hate, see them driven before them, and hear the lamentations of their women.

Portlandia reminds me of SCTV in that it while SCTV made fun of television, movies, and show biz, there was a lot of affection for their subject matter. The creative core of Portlandia, Armisen and Brownstein, have a lot of fondness for Portland, its people, and its place as a perpetually quirky 1990s never-never-land. There's no attempt to make a point, or to destroy anyone, they just want you to laugh.

You don't really see much of that these days. Maybe because to do it, the bit must be about the performance and not about the performer.

*

While I was ill I was also doing a lot of reading. One book is Thomas Schatz's The Genius of the System, about filmmaking in the golden age of the Hollywood studios. One story about MGM stuck with me as an illustration of what I call keeping the eyes on the prize.

MGM was created in the mid-1920s when theatre conglomerate Loew's Inc. merged the large, but struggling, Metropolitan Pictures, with the powerhouse Goldwyn Pictures, and upstart Louis B. Mayer Productions. Mayer's company was purchased not because of its big library, or physical assets like studios and theatres, but because of the men who ran it: the titular Louis B. Mayer, his New York based deputy Robert Rubin, and the boy-wonder producer Irving Thalberg who had started as a senior executive at Universal almost right out of high school.

Mayer handled all business negotiations, as well as distribution, marketing, and corporate administration, Rubin handled relations with the theatres, the banks, and their parent company, while Thalberg found the material, and put everyone and everything together to turn it into a movie. To keep these three as happy employees of Loew's Inc. their contract dictated that they split 20% of MGM's profits between them. Mayer got 53%, Rubin got 27% and Thalberg got 20%. 

This unprecedented deal came about because the trio were running a tiny company that was making top grade product for the coveted "first run" market, successfully competing with exponentially larger studios. The folks running Loew's thought was that if this trio had bigger resources to work with, they'd do even bigger things.

They were right. MGM very quickly became a juggernaut fighting off competition and even the Great Depression. Everyone recognized that a key player in the studio's success was young Thalberg, since it was his skill at picking material and nurturing talent was essential to keep the hits rolling out. This was when Louis B. Mayer made what many today would call a crazy move.

He cut down on his own share of the MGM profit package by 10% and gave it to Thalberg. Essentially giving the youngster a raise of at least $250,000 a year, a king's ransom in the early 1930s.

Now at the surface it seems crazy generous, and it was.

It was also the smart move.

Thalberg was the key reason their profit share package grew. If the boy wonder had a bigger stake in it, then he would be more inclined to keep it growing even bigger. There was an element of risk to the move, but Mayer didn't reach the top of the movie business without being a risk taker. He saw talent, and made the right move to nurture it for the good of the company, its stakeholders, and yes even himself.

It's enlightened self-interest at its best.

Ironically it's exactly the sort of thing you would never see a modern studio executive even contemplate. They have no stake, even emotional, in the companies they run, they're just functionaries picked more for their backgrounds from elite schools, and their ability to spout corporate jargon, than their abilities as administrators and filmmakers. If a young whippersnapper turns out to be a hit machine, the first instinct of the modern executive is to oust them for fear of losing their own position to the wunderkind. 

Crying shame, it might solve a few of the problems that currently plague the industry.

That's what I thought of while I was off sick.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1204: Dear Sony

Dear Sony Pictures.

I have to say that I've tried really hard to avoid reading your e-mails that were recently stolen and released by hackers. But sometimes I've been asked to comment on them, and they've become so ever present, they're just plain hard to avoid without cutting myself off entirely from the outside world.

I admire the gumption of studio CEO Michael Lynton in declaring that the hack won't take you down. That's very sweet. Also I noticed that the MPAA, the movie business's drunk uncle, has also expressed their support for you. That's also sweeter than honey dipped in sugar, but it's not stopping those same studio-related media outlets CNN (Warner Bros.), Fox News (Fox/Newscorp), ABC News (Disney), MSNBC/NBC News (Universal/Comcast), and CBS News (Viacom) from feasting on the fat and gristle of your corporate humiliation no matter how loudly you ask them to stop.

The one unescapable truth is that Sony Pictures and its subsidiaries, Columbia, Tri-Star, etc… are in a state of profound dysfunction.

The grey eminences at Sony's head office in Japan might accept Hollywood dysfunction when it's a  part of being in the movie business spoken only in whispers only by the people in the movie business. However, when it's very public and very embarrassing, then it's not acceptable at all, because it makes them look bad.

Which is why I'd like to offer a suggestion for a replacement to run Sony Pictures:

FURIOUS D FOR BOSS OF SONY PICTURES

Hey, you've tried the best, why not try the rest.

I even have a plan.

1. LET MARVEL HAVE SPIDER-MAN.

Why? Well, there are good reasons. The Spider-Man movies released by Sony/Columbia have been suffering from rising costs and diminishing returns. Sure the box office scores look good, but they cost so damn much you end up losing in the long run. 

Plus you're ideas to keep the franchise out of Marvel's hands are getting kind of embarrassing.

Let Marvel have Spider-Man. Take a token payment, or some percentage of the first two Marvel Spider-Man projects and you'll be fine.

And then don't panic over losing it when you…

2. ADMIT YOU DON'T NEED SPIDER-MAN.

That's right, you don't need Spider-Man because you have:

James Bond is literally the grand-daddy of the action-adventure movie franchise. On the plus side he's hotter than ever, with both hard-core fans and casual movie-goers literally excited to see the next one.

You don't need anyone else right now. So ditch Spider-Man, Men In Black, and all the other properties that are more hassle than they're worth.

3. DON'T RELY ONLY ON BOND.

I know, I sound like I'm contradicting myself, but stick with me.

Bond is a great tent-pole picture franchise that you release every two to three years, and having one is nice, but it makes you ask yourself: What do you in the meantime?

Well, Universal turned out to have a real whopper of a year profit-wise by foregoing blockbusters in favour of smaller films with wider margins and reduced risk. Something I'd been preaching about on this blog for years.

4. PUT STORY OVER STARS

The days of the star system is over. It's been over for a very long time. So called "stars" don't sell tickets and home-viewings the way they used to. They are a hell of a way to kill off what could have been a decent profit margin and turn it into a loss.

Audiences want stories featuring characters that are worth their money and time. They don't have to be likeable, but they absolutely must be interesting.

And the beauty of it all is that story isn't expensive.

5. DON'T SCREW OVER THE PEOPLE YOU WORK WITH.

Hollywood lives in a conundrum.

Technology has made the physical process of making professional looking films cheaper than ever before. However, Hollywood's production costs have an inflation rate not seen outside of Zimbabwe.

There's a reason for this, and it's because everyone expects to be screwed. 

This means that everyone tries to get as much as they can up front, and those that have the tiniest smidgen of clout within the industry, go hog wild. So you get romantic comedies that cost over $150 million. Seriously, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS FOR A ROMANTIC COMEDY.

That should be an impossibility.

If a studio set a new practice of not screwing people, they might actually see costs go down. Then it might spread to the rest of the industry.

Sure, hiring an inexperienced unknown is a crazy idea, but at least I know enough to NOT put embarrassing stuff in a business e-mail.

-Sincerely

Furious D.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1201: Villains, Super-villains, and Superstars

Lots of big villain news this week, so let's jump in headfirst…

BOND 24 HAS A TITLE & A VILLAIN

Here's a video revealing the title for the next Bond movie…

The film will be shot in London, Rome, Mexico City, Tangier, Erfoud and the Austrian Alps, but that's not the big news.

The big news is confirmation that 2 time Oscar winning German character actor Christoph Waltz will be playing "Franz Oberhauser," who turns out to be notorious Bond baddie Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

You may recall that the Bond franchise had to give up using Blofeld because of a legal fight with the mysterious Kevin McClory that had been recently settled.

Personally, I hope they follow the great story arc the Bond/Blofeld relationship followed in the Bond novels. Starting out as a standard hero vs villain and becoming more violent and way more personal as it goes along, leaving both men physical and emotional wrecks. Only a handful of actors can pull off Blofeld, and Waltz is on the top of the list.

SUICIDE SQUAD IS GO!

DC/Warner Brothers have announced the cast list for the Suicide Squad movie, and it only took them five years to pull it together. If you live in a cave and don't know who the Suicide Squad is, I'll give you a rough summary.

In the DC Comics Universe the Suicide Squad or Task Force X is where the government drafts super villains for certain death missions where at least one of them will not survive, in exchange for time off their sentences.

So, it's The Dirty Dozen in tights.

The cast is:

Tom Hardy as Rick Flagg the non-villain military man who leads the team.

Will Smith as Deadshot, a master sniper/assassin who has taken on Batman, the Green Arrow, and other DC heroes.

Jared Leto as The Joker.

Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Joker's former psychiatrist turned psychotic lover and partner in crime.

Cara Delevigne as The Enchantress, an artist turned sorceress who started out as a hero, but either a lust for power, or a split personality caused her turn to villainy.

Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang, a Flash rogue and boomerang tossing hitman.

And they're looking for a middle-aged African-American woman to play Amanda Waller, the bureaucrat who sends the team on their missions. One rumour said Oprah was taking the part, but I doubt she'd want to play a character whose callousness creeps out even professional killers.

Now I have an iffy feeling about this cast or the movie making it all the way to the premier in the originally intended form.

That iffiness lies with Will Smith.

Remember Smith passed on Django Unchained because he didn't want to be upstaged by Christoph Waltz.

I don't see him willingly be upstaged by the heroics of Flagg, or the psychotic scene-stealing of Joker and Harley, unless…he's pulling a Janet Leigh.

That means he's signed on to get killed off and shock the audience into realizing that this franchise is unlike the others, and will kill off major characters with the mad glee of The Walking Dead.

But that's a slim chance for someone who passed on a hit movie with some of the best people in the business to make After Earth.

Then again, maybe he's learned his lesson and realized that in order to stay a viable movie star he'll have to learn to share the spotlight without having to upstage everyone.

We'll have to see where this ends up.

__________________________

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THEN CLICK HERE AND ASK ME ANYTHING!

Hollywood Babble On & On #1180: MGM's Resurrection Game!

Flush with cash from James Bond and the Hobbit franchises MGM has gone into the business of reviving the dead. First they ran a few million volts through Orion Pictures and this week they announced that United Artist will live again, sort of.

MGM has purchased a 55% controlling stake in Mark Burnett's media empire, including One Three Media, and Lightworker Media his partnerships with Hearst Entertainment, and his wife, the actress and producer, Roma Downey. They will all be part of a new United Artists Media Group, with Burnett as CEO and Downey running Lightworker as a faith/family friendly division of UAMG.

Now I can't shake the feeling that this sounds a hell of a lot like a certain deal MGM made with…

TOM CRUISE

Remember that deal?

United Artists was supposed to redefine the star/studio relationship, and it was one of the biggest fizzles in the history of movies.

My worries over this Burnett situation are similar, yet different. I worry that this too will fizzle out and cast the once legendary United Artists even deeper into moribundity. 

Burnett has been very successful in television. He's one of the key players in making reality TV the time wasting filling institution it is today. He also had some success with scripted TV in the miniseries adaptation of The Bible for the History Channel, while its feature film spin-off Son of God did "meh" business at the box office.

And this is where I start to worry about more fizzle than sizzle.

Burnett knows how to make and market reality TV, but I watched some of their adaptation of The Bible, and I found it somewhat lacking. It possessed ambition, but lacked any coherent narrative vision beyond not intentionally offending anyone.

Will that be their philosophy for developing properties for United Artists?

The Bible was a ratings hit because it, and other faith friendly projects, was a novelty, it stood out amidst reams of other products on movies and TV that are often openly hostile to the religious beliefs and mores of flyover country.

However, novelty can only carry you so far. The recent failure of some films that attempted to cash in on the faith/family audience illustrates that. That's because once the novelty fades the audience demands that the films go beyond just pandering into the realm of entertaining.

Can Burnett's empire expand beyond reality TV and novelty to develop and deliver the goods in the scripted entertainment department?

I'm not sure.

Also, Burnett's a producer, but can he be an executive, because they are very different jobs. Being a producer is all about being up to your neck in the mud and the blood and the beer, solving problems and getting things done to get your project on the screen.

Being an executive requires a different skill set. Instead of being in the trenches, working on a passion project, an executive has to be emotionally detached, overseeing multiple projects, many of them you have no personal interest in, but have to accept that audiences are interested regardless. Producers only care about getting what they're working on done and out, while executives have to weigh every decision on how it effects their shareholders.

Not all successful producers make successful executives, even of a glorified production company, and vice versa.

Which is why I'm worried for United Artists.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1178: Orion's Comeback!

MGM has quietly let slip that they're reviving Orion Pictures with the sequel/remake to The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a 1976 film that was loosely based on the Texarkana Moonlight Murders of 1946.

Now Orion's been moribund for quite some time, so you might need a history lesson, now pay attention, because it gets a little complicated.

It all began with United Artists and American International Pictures.

In the 1970s United Artists had become such a major player in Hollywood it was bought by the financial giant TransAmerica Corporation. UA had even taken over the distribution duties for the majorly downsized MGM Pictures.

UA had become so successful, that the people who owned it, financial giant TransAmerica, felt they didn't need the people who were so successful running it anymore, and that they could get cheaper, more corporate compliant, replacements.

Meanwhile, down the street, the last founder of American International Pictures, Samuel Z. Arkoff was looking to retire. So he sold his company AIP to…

...Filmways, a media company that enjoyed a lot of success making television.

By the late 1970s TransAmerica had successfully nudged out the top people at UA. Not content to sit on their laurels they started the first iteration of Orion Pictures Company, but didn't have distribution, so they inked a distribution deal with Warner Brothers.

By the 1980s the situation had changed.

UA was sinking fast thanks to an overpriced Western called Heaven's Gate, and it was taken over by distribution client MGM to form MGM/UA.

Also in trouble was Filmways. A string of comparatively pricey flops, and failed investments by its parent company had hurt them badly. The guys at Orion Pictures sold the films they made with Warner Brothers to Warner Brothers, got some investors together, bought Filmways and it was reborn as…

Orion Pictures Releasing

Now Orion didn't have the immense success the founders had known at United Artists. Where UA had many home runs Orion would score singles and doubles at best, strike out at worst.

It was a rough time to be the plucky little guy of the movie business who made edgy, daring small scale films like the ones that were hits in the 1970s. The major studios were having a renaissance thanks to the rise of the big budget blockbuster franchise, and the edgy, daring, smaller films that dominated the box office of the 1970s had fallen mostly out of fashion with audiences.

Orion's founders either retired, or moved on to other jobs at other companies, and the company changed hands being purchased by TV and radio station owner Metromedia.

Orion's fortunes floundered into the 1990s, despite the success of some films like The Silence Of The Lambs. Eventually Orion declared bankruptcy, and Metromedia then sold it to…

MGM

Yep, the company whose financial problems had caused it to sign a distribution deal with UA, which convinced TransAmerica that they didn't need UA's managers and sparked their ouster and the creation of Orion Pictures now owned Orion Pictures and its film library, which also includes the AIP/Filmways library.

But the saga hasn't ended yet.

MGM had money trouble, lots of money troubles, which led to Sony/Columbia becoming its biggest shareholder, and then its distributor.

So, MGM, which is now in the position Orion was when it started, it restarting Orion.

Which I actually think is a good idea.

MGM is a brand that's really good at selling old movies, but it doesn't own it's "Golden Age" classics anymore, they belong to Warner Brothers, and the brand struggles to sell new movies outside of the James Bond franchise. Meanwhile Orion is a brand that doesn't have that sort of baggage.

Even at its peak in the 1980s, only hard-core movie buffs really paid attention to it. New moviegoers, like Millennials probably have no idea what it is, or where it came from, and it has the ring of a completely new company without the sort of inane focus group/market research concocted name like the super-lame Fox Atomic.

I wish the new Orion good luck. I missed it when it went belly up, and hope that they can find a successful niche in the fractured media landscape we see today.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1120: My Robocop Confession & Other Stuff.

MY ROBOCOP CONFESSION

There's a Robocop remake coming out and folks are debating whether or not it's sacrilege or just heresy, and my reaction to all that hullaballoo is a big fat "Feh."

You see, I've always felt the original Robocop was overrated.

The film didn't have characters as much as caricatures, the satire was obvious and ham-fisted, saying more about director Paul Verhoven's prejudices than about society in general. Also the violence and sexual content seemed exaggerated or inserted into the story just to get an "R" rating and hence be the cool kid on the action movie block. It did have some good performances from the likes of Peter Weller and Kurtwood Smith, but I was otherwise left cold by the film.

I am of the generation that thought the original Robocop was so bad-ass, but I will admit to be the odd man out about that movie. Folks saw the botched sequels and TV series as aberrations ruining the franchise, but I saw them as the inevitable result of thin source material.

MORE HOLLYWOOD FATISM

This is the DC Comics super villain The Penguin.

This is the actor cast to play The Penguin in the upcoming Gotham TV series.

Notice something?

Another thin actor stealing the role of a portly character.

THIS IS BIGOTRY PURE AND SIMPLE!

Damn Hollywood bastards!

SHIA LABEOUF IS STILL AN IDIOT

Shia LaBeouf is still an idiot.

BBC GOES TO NOTTINGHAM

BBC America has green-lit the series Nottingham, a twist on the Robin Hood legend where Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham are actually THE SAME PERSON.

Meh.

I'd like to see a version where the Sheriff is trying to do real police work but is constantly cop-blocked by the corruption of the greedy Prince John, and the banditry of an obnoxious Robin Hood. Every time he makes a legitimate arrest the Prince either frees them after taking a bribe, or Robin Hood busts them out because he mistakenly thinks they're being oppressed. Then end the series with the Sheriff giving up, stealing the treasury, and fleeing to Italy with Maid Marian.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1114: Random Drippings From My Brain Pan….

TARANTINO TO COURT?

Quentin Tarantino is filing suit against Gawker.com for "copyright infringement" over their spreading of a leaked copy of his script for The Hateful Eight. The Western script was sent out by Tarantino to a select group, someone involved with that group leaked it, Gawker made it worse, and Tarantino's saying he's shelved the project, and has called in the lawyers.

Why?

Let's break down the situation:

1. The script was reportedly an early draft, maybe even a first draft, and no doubt would have been through a lot more polishing. I can understand not wanting anyone outside of a few trusted associates to read a first draft.

2. Gawker went above and beyond the simple reporting of the story, they actively participated in the piracy by making the purloined play available to their readers.

3. The reason Gawker deliberately made an unpleasant situation worse is that their business model seems to built on acting like predictable pseudo-subversive dicks, and spreading the script seemed to be the dickiest move available.

I find it hard to sympathize with Gawker.

SPEAKING OF LAWSUITS:

The Director, Ted Kotcheff, and Writer, Robert Klane, of the 1989 cult-hit comedy Weekend At Bernie's are suing 20th Century Fox and MGM for what they say are millions of dollars in profits that were denied them.

For those who don't know, Weekend At Bernie's was a farcical comedy produced by Gladden Entertainment and released by Fox back in 1989. 

It's about two low level paper pushers at an insurance company who uncover cases of insurance fraud. They take it to their boss Bernie, who pretends to reward them by inviting them to his beach house for the weekend. What our heroes don't know is that Bernie's the one behind the fraud, and is planning on killing them. However the hit man kills Bernie first, and the two goofs then go through various hoops to make it look like Bernie's still alive.

The film was a modest success, pulling in about $30 million at the box office, but did have a whole second life on cable reruns and home video. This second life led to a sequel, which was as dead as its title character, but the first film just kept chugging along.

As the years went by Gladden became part of MGM, which is why they're being sued as well as Fox, and the filmmakers claim that during those years the money piled up, and they saw none of it.

They might have a case, but they will have a hell of a time proving it. Hollywood bookkeeping is a realm of shadows and madness, especially when the bulk of the revenue comes via television and home video.

SPEAKING OF MGM:

Watch this trailer for MGM's 90th anniversary and see if you can spot something most of the films have in common.

Did you see it?

Most of the films featured in that trailer were not made by MGM.

Most of MGM's original film library is now owned by Warner Brothers, leaving MGM more of a repository of the libraries of other companies rather than its own history. These include United Artists, Orion, Gladden, Polygram Filmed Entertainment, Cannon, and literally dozens more.

Says a lot about Hollywood.