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Movies Have Always Been A Business

The movies have always been a business, like any other. Wonder whose salaries you’re paying when you drop nine bucks at the box office? Here’s your guide to the beautiful people who make Hollywood a $45 billion annual industry. Motion pictures take hard work and careful planning, less so if the movie is Supercross. Learn how to speak like a bona fide coke-snortin' hack.

The production designer (Min. pay: $5,507/week) is responsible for the whole look of the movie, making sure that the alien’s poo-green skin doesn’t clash with the set’s wallpaper. He’s also in charge of the art department, from wardrobe to set location, but some details, like whether the rug matches the drapes in the ingénue’s big nude scene, are left to the hairdresser.

Wonder how Christian Slater became a famous actor? Or Meg Ryan? Their moms are casting directors (Min. pay: Varies by project), whose job is to audition actors to find the perfect star for a project. They send the best prospects to the director, who either turns them into golden gods or lets them fall back into the meaningless abyss of clown porn.

Don’t recognize those ass hats accepting the Best Picture award on Oscar night? That’s because they’re producers. Producers (Min. pay: $100,000 to $1 million/movie) find a team they trust, get a budget, and make sure the director doesn’t go over it. The rest of the time they’re worrying their caddy doesn’t know a 7-iron from a goddamn waffle iron.

Bad directors are like fascist dictators who take credit for everyone else’s hard work. Good directors turn mediocre scripts into visual masterpieces by expressing their vision for the project to their crew with words like "action” and "lunch.” The best directors (Min. pay: $13,358/week) do all this by squinting through a square made with their thumbs and forefingers.

Thought Halle Berry looked hot kicking ass in that Catwoman suit? Well, it was a dude in red lipstick and leather. The coordinator (Min. pay: $2,588/week) makes sure a stunt looks real and that there is limited risk: If the man in the fire suit gets fried, so does the coordinator. Despite making flabby actors look like studs, there’s sadly no Oscar for these geniuses.

Best boys (Min. pay: $1,873/week) assist gaffers (electricians) and grips (support-equipment handlers) in their unsung but well-paid gaffing and gripping duties. Despite being better than all the other boys (and because they’re actually grown men who use the word boy in their job title), they never score with the best girl at the production wrap party.

The first assistant director (Min. pay: $3,734/week) relieves the director of all the crap work (like fending off ambitious extras and screaming at the crew) and gives the crap of the crap work (like making sure there isn’t mold on the bagels at the catering table) to the second AD. First ADs almost never become real directors—but chicks looking to break into the business don’t need to know that.

As writers (Min. pay: $97,068 for an original screenplay) like to say, it all starts with the script. Truth is, it usually starts with a boardroom meeting and then a focus group. A script goes through several drafts before it’s shot, and the writing usually continues until the film wraps. Occasionally, a hack like you will sell a script, but only if you’re blowing the right people.

Maxim

Major studios develop hundreds of projects every year, but they only end up making 20 to 25 of them. Even big-dog producers like Ivan Reitman (Animal House) have to haggle with the suits to get good ideas turned into classics. DreamWorks was initially tepid toward Old School, but Reitman and director Todd Phillips persisted, and "with the success of Road Trip behind us,” says Reitman, "they said, ‘What the hell?’” Typically, a flick goes through 12 to 16 weeks of preproduction—hiring a crew, finding a budget, etc. —before the camera even starts rolling. Principal photography takes around 55 days, and then, over a period of around 26 weeks, hundreds of hours of film are cut down to suit your 90-minute attention span. If the studio decides that the film sucks, producers scramble to salvage the project. In Old School’s case, Reitman says, "The ending fizzled,” so they did additional shooting. Reshooting doesn’t always save the project, but it worked for Old School, which made more than triple its production budget, pulling in $75.6 million. But Old School is rare. Most producers are lucky if they get their ideas to the bottom of the $4.99 DVD pile at your supermarket.

Ben Brashares. On The Set. Maxim. November 2005.

Enduring Mysteries

The history of Hollywood is full of enduring mysteries. For example, what possessed Paramount Pictures to back Paint Your Wagon, a $20 million 1969 musical Western starring the non-singers Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood? How did the budget for the 1995 Kevin Costner vehicle Waterworld bloat to more than $200 million? Who thought the 1980 musical Popeye was a good idea?

Hollywood has produced bombs since moviemaking’s beginnings: Witness the director D. W. Griffith’s 1916 debacle, Intolerance, the follow-up to his popular and controversial film The Birth of a Nation. The 197-minute film saga required the building of several massive sets and the hiring of thousands of extras for crowd scenes. Made for a then-astronomical $386,000, it failed to recoup its production costs and hobbled the rest of Griffith’s career. But starting in the 1940s, a combination of factors made possible truly awe-inspiring commercial and artistic failures.

A 1949 federal-government ruling forced the studio giants—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, and Warner Bros. among them—to give up their ownership of movie theaters. The resulting lack of revenue meant that fewer movies could be made. Once television moved onto the pop-culture scene in the 1950s, movie studios pinned their hopes on expensive, heavily promoted spectacles to compete with the small-screen fare. Add to this frequent changes of ownership and leadership at film companies, and the pressure on executives to produce surefire hits became intense.

Soon studio heads were violating the cardinal business rules of moviemaking, tolerating out-of-control budgets racked up by the whims of egomaniacal actors and directors in the hopes of spawning a hit. Sometimes such a risky strategy has worked, as in the case of 1997’s Titanic, which cost more than $200 million to produce and raked in a staggering $1.8 billion worldwide. But when the strategy fails, it really fails. United Artists backed a major film, Heaven’s Gate, that no executive of that studio ever saw before opening night, a film that turned out to be so long (three hours and thirty-nine minutes) and costly (thirty-six million dollars—five times its original budget) that it drove audiences out of theaters and United Artists itself virtually out of business. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the remains in 1981; Ted Turner recently gobbled them both up.)

These cinematic trainwrecks are astonishing at times. In 1963 Cleopatra, in which Twentieth Century-Fox pinned its hopes on a mercurial and unreliable star, Elizabeth Taylor, whose marriage self-destructed during filming and who was constantly rendered immobile by ailments including an infected tooth, meningitis, and severe pneumonia. The final cost of the lumbering 243-minute epic was $42 million, about $260 million in today’s dollars, which, despite Taylor’s star power, the movie did not come close to earning back at the box office.

The 1984 Jazz Age drama The Cotton Club not only was crippled by a spendthrift director (Francis Ford Coppola) and a prima-donna star (Richard Gere); it also had a producer, Robert Evans of Chinatown fame, who was not above becoming involved with drug dealers to get funding for his film. (Indeed, an acquaintance of Evans’s was the victim of a drug-related hit during filming.) And then there’s 2000’s Battlefield Earth, a doomed vanity project of John Travolta’s. The enthusiastic actor went so far as to call the first draft of Schindler’s List of science fiction.” The film, based on a bizarre novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, was extravagantly mounted for some $73 million. Moviegoers stayed away in droves, and the final box-office tally was less than $30 million worldwide.

As tale after tale of moviemaking excess unfolds, you get the idea that the big studios never learn. They keep making the same mistakes, over and over. But there may be hope that they are gaining at least some measure of humility from their long history of fiascoes. “In the old days in Hollywood, they used to brag about how much a movie cost,” wrote the movie critic Roger Ebert in his review of the infamous Waterworld. “Now they apologize.”

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