Now, answer me this question: Why Are Really Bad Films Made?
We all know them: stinkers beyond the scope of any sort of hipster smug ironic enjoyment we could possibly glean from them. Son of the Mask, that last Eddie Murphy movie with the big head and the thing, Mr. Magoo with Leslie Nielsen WHY?!!!! Thunderbirds with Bill Paxton--why?!
Why.
Batman and Rob--WHY?! Oh God, why?
I believe this is the culprit:
The Yes Man (or Woman).
When all you surround yourself with are Yes People, you get inbred ideas that suck and which everyone is afraid to assert said suckage of. Case in point: Eddie Murphy. Case in point: whoever is buying up the rights to those Jim Carrey movies.
"Oh, I really think recasting Ace Ventura as a chubby boy with big hair is a bad idea...but my boss is a dick, and I don't want to lose my job. I'll just say it's awesome."
I swear to God, I turned on Alvin and the Chipmunks, saw them sing "Had A Bad Day" while in a tree, and was ready to nuke my TV set. Then there was the scene where Simon ate Theodore's dookie and called it a raisin.
And. Called. It. A. Raisin.
"Ace Ventura Jr - only on DVD!"
ReplyDeleteI hear it has lots of deleted scenes. I heard something about "90 minutes of unseen footage" at any rate.
One wonders if this is also the reason really bad comics are made.
ReplyDeleteWhy? Because in Hollywood, nobdody knows anything.
ReplyDelete(I should buy the land next to the Hollywoodland sign and place that there.)
Alvin & the Chipmunks:
Domestic Total Gross: $217,326,974
Worldwide: $360,468,267
Genius. Take a nostalgic cartoon, update it for kids, add a killer soundtrack, swim naked in the pile of cash.
What money is not made at the box office will be made on DVD. And payperview, and cable, and airplanes, and ... It's easy to calculate the risk, if the budget is under control.
Part of it is this: it will appeal to a specific demographic.
Ace Ventura appeals to boys. A movie about a young version of Ace Ventura is will appeal even more. (That's why we have superhero sidekicks.) Also, it's probably about maintaining trademark or property rights. Look how long it's been since the last movie. With this, they can take a crappy movie for a cheap price, since the main character is a kid, and add some b-list actors for the 'rents to watch (OOPS... just looked at the IMDB listing. NOBODY is in it.) If it makes $30 Million, it pays for itself. Box it with the first two, and make a profit. Sell it to teens and tweens who can afford to drop $20 on the DVD and you're golden.
(Wow, great cast in Mr. Magoo. Probably made so Disney could use it as advertising to move the cartoon DVDs it had. Just like Underdog and Rocky and Bullwinkle.)
Hey! Look! There's gonna be another Night at the Museum movie! Great cast.
I agree with you on the "incestual"-ideas that get past by Yes-(Wo)Men, but, you have to take into account that most are for kids. Rob Schneider movies...I can't answer. Heh. But, also, and it is kind of a given, the studios don't care. They're not trying to make a masterpiece, just a dollar. They'll get those dollars and make more of the same crud because people keep watching them. I would say mostly rentals and dvd sales. But, what can we, the people with taste, gonna do? ...other than weep. Ha!
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a warning to Yes Men, actually: "Son, don't gnaw on my dookie and call it a raisin."
ReplyDeleteAs someone who survived Son Of The Mask -- I had to review it for a site -- I figured the biggest reason such a film even got made was as a trial balloon for reanimating the Mask brand.
ReplyDeleteAs cheap as it looked, it couldn't have cost that much to make, so the risk/reward factor had to have been low, even after it bombed at the box office. And, hey, if it had somehow grossed well, whoever green-lit it would've been laughing all the way to the bank and pushing the brand forward even further.
That said, as someone who survived the trailer for Delta Farce, I can tell you that there's always, always the Lowest Common Denominator audience out there.
To be fair, Yes Man the book is quite good. The source material isn't the problem; letting Jim Carrey play the lead is the problem.
ReplyDeleteI still see the beginning of that horrible trailer when I close my eyes. WHY!!!!
ReplyDeleteYou know, I thought the raisin poop joke made Alvin and the Chipmunks edgy and cool for a new generation. Because those old cartoons were so corny... and yet potentially brand-familiarity lucrative... with nary a poop-eating joke!
ReplyDeleteI believe William Eastlake summed it up pretty well when talking about Harold Robbins and his potboilers. To write like Robbins, and I'm quoting Eastlake now, you've got to "be" stupid. Harold Robbins is doing his best. This is what Harold Robbins believes. You can’t fake it. You cannot say that you’re going to write this book and believe it as long as you write it, because they know it’s phony. They’re brought up on "True Confessions" and you cannot write down to them. They can spot you. So, you’re doomed. You are what you are and most of the people you are interviewing are doomed not to make money. Everyone does the best he can at that time. My friends who are working in Hollywood are doing the best they can when they’re writing for "All in the Family" and driving a Mercedes.
I think it's like that. The money people at the studios go hire who they think can best turn out this material. They seem to approach it from a cynical, bottom-line point of view, but then they give it to people who are the cinematic equivalent of Harold Robbins. They're doing the best they can possibly do, but at the same time they're beholden now to marketing research and mall surveys and test screenings and all these other elements.
Hmm... maybe the analogy doesn't work. A novel is usually one person's voice while a typical studio movie is a cacophony of conflicting voices solely out to drop a product on a marketplace and milk it for all it's worth in a very cynical, exploitative way.
Oh well. It's still a cool Eastlake quote.
Oh MAN.
ReplyDeleteI've seen some bad movies and bad ideas for movies, but that Ace Ventura, Jr. movie looks toxic. Like it shouldn't be handled without a hazmat suit. Yuck.
I think you are being too harsh Val. Really bad films are an integral part of the environment. Just like dung beetles, vultures, and parasites. They are ugly creations that serve a purpose.
ReplyDeleteTo what degree is it the fault of yes men, or of the corporate culture that creates them, by scaring people out of expressing dissenting opinions?
ReplyDeleteFilms are an investment for studios, not just an artistic output. Which is why a cheaply produced Ace Ventura sequel seems less risky than something new.
ReplyDeleteAlso, a lot of things can happen along the way to turn a poor idea into a really bad film.
To my utter shock and amazement, my three little cousins whom I love like the dickens said that they liked the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. Poor kids.
ReplyDeleteThe Ace Ventura, Jr. movie doesn't look TOO bad, it's just a stupid concept. Ah, well, at least I have youtube for the great moments of the original Ace Ventura movie.
*Runs over two cops.* "Pardon me, gentlemen - Pet detective!"
Well, I'll tell you, Val. I've been writing and now producing movies, TV and TV movies since 1991, so I feel pretty strongly about this subject.
ReplyDeleteDuring that time period, I've been involved in perhaps two good projects-- and that's including some of my own original ideas.
There are a couple of major problems, and the "Yes Man/Woman" aspect is only part of it. The biggest issue behind the crap we see on TV and in the theaters is the Invasion of the MBAs. Sometime in the 1980s, early 90s, the movie studios were purchased by big corporations.
Before that, studios were their own entities with their own identities (which also partly explains why the writer's strike of the 80s hurt the studios much worse than the last idiotic one. Today, the studios could hold out with little damage because they were only one part of a much larger company and they could move money around within their corporate structure to weather the storm).
Each studio was being run by men (and later one woman) who, while rich and powerful business tycoons, were at their core storytellers. That didn't mean they always made great movies. But their main intent was to tell a story. As one said to my class at USC, "If all you wanted to do was make money, there are a helluva lot of easier ways to do that than making a movie."
In the early days, you could look at one frame of a Warner Brothers movie or a Fox movie or a Universal movie and know instantly which studio made it-- from the framing, lighting, set design-- everything. And that's because the people spearheading the company that made it had a passion for films.
Once the zombie MBA-ers came in, they treated movies the same way that they treated Coke or Ford or Pez. Movies were just more junk to sell to stupid consumers.
And since these people were trained in business, and since most came from a strictly non-entertainment background, they had no idea whatsoever what a "good" script was and what a "bad" script was. And to be fair, that's all subjective anyway. I mean, my first job out of film school was reading scripts for James Cameron. I was supposed to read 6-12 scripts a day and write up reports to decide which one his company should make out of the hundreds and hundreds that they received every month.
I ultimately got fired because I passed on GRUMPY OLD MEN. I got fired because my notes on it were that it was crass, boring and predictable. It was all fart jokes about two cranky old guys who were trying to have sex with the same woman. I honestly did not see an audience for that at all. And, at the time, everyone in the company agreed with me.
Then, months later, it goes into production with Jack Lemon and Walter Matthew and makes a hundred million dollars. And then I got fired. I didn't see the hit that GRUMPY OLD MEN clearly was (despite the fact that everyone else signed off on my "pass"). But, honestly, I was fine with getting fired, because by that time, I realized I did not want anything to do with that side of the film business. And I still felt the movie sucked (I never got why it was a hit and it certainly doesn't have a shelf life-- I mean, do you see that movie in heavy rotation on Saturday mornings on TBS?).
But the fact is, deciding whether a script has merit or not is tough. Who can tell? And as much as other writers hate it when I say this, a script is actually only a blue print for a movie. Actors, set designers, editors, composers, directors, gaffers, costume designers and hundreds of other artists apply their magic to the (very) bare bones of the written page to create something much, much more fully realized than what the writer ever imagined. That's ultimately why I love movies so much. It's the ultimate collaboration of artists to construct something far more than the sum of its parts.
So, after awhile, the MBA studio execs stopped trying to determine if a script was good or bad and started focusing on making movies they could sell. Because, after all, MBAs are good at selling Americans crap they don't need. (Financial crisis anyone?)
You ever hear people say "The movie wasn't as good as the trailer?" Well, that's because these MBA zombies don't know how to make movies. They know how to package advertisements. They NEED to see numbers on a page and point to them and say, "Actor A averages an gross international gross of X dollars when they star in Y genre released in Z time of year." This is a CYA-attitude. If you can point to a report that says "The numbers show the movie will make $200M" than you have protected your job for the next 3 months.
What they're ultimately doing is forcing logic on a completely illogical and often emotionally driven industry. Every major studio passed on STAR WARS. Two studios passed on the recent TWILIGHT. No one wanted to touch RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK-- and that was AFTER Lucas and Spielberg had made JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, AMERICAN GRAFFITI and STAR WARS.
And do you think anyone reading the script for THE MATRIX would have thought it would've become the phenomenon it hit their desk?
Cultural events like those happen because one person captures an idea and a few hundred artists gather together to make something truly unique. But that is a very, very scary thing to do. And it takes a studio exec with power, skill, vision and courage to pull the trigger and say, "Here's millions of dollars. Go swim against the stream and do this really risky thing."
And think of all the great movies that don't make any money. I mean, CHILDREN OF MEN was perhaps one of the best films I've seen in the past 10 years. But when I saw it opening weekend, there were literally five other people in the theater. FIVE. None of us knew each other, but when we walked out, we all started talking and asking why no one was else was there. We all wanted to stop strangers on the street and beg them to go see the film. How many people saw BEING JOHN MALKOVICH compared to SWEET HOME ALABAMA? Even small movies like the recent MICHAEL CLAYTON or SUPERBAD still cost millions of dollars. MILLIONS.
In the end, it's easier to make bad movies.
And it's not like the MBAs are trying to MAKE bad movies. They're just not trying to make GOOD movies. It's much harder to make a good movie. You have to ask questions that are difficult to answer. You have to figure out if a character arc makes sense. You have to work at the dialogue until it feels real, unique and non-expositional. You have to struggle over theme and plot goals and theme goals and turning points.
Whenever I complain about these things in some crappy movie, my girlfriend (who is not in the entertainment industry) says to me, "You're the only person that cares. The rest of America wants to shut off their brains and zone out when they watch a movie." And as much as I hate to admit it, she's right.
The vast majority of people don't want to be challenged or think when they watch a movie. They have serious crap to deal with each day. Work. School. Finances. Car payments. Kids. Health Care. Everything. And when they watch a movie, they might want to laugh or they might want to cry. But in the end, they just want to be entertained. And they don't watch a movie and ask "did that make sense?" Or, "I don't think that fits into the theme of the piece." Hell, when I work with my editors now, we have to remind ourselves that no one is watching to see if the glass on the table is pointed out in one shot and in on the other. People just don't watch movies that closely.
And the studios know that.
These days bad movies make the same amount of money as good movies. The MBAs have figured out that the old school way of opening a movie small and then letting word of mouth build it doesn't work with the dreck they're putting out. Because, as stupid as they think the public is, they ultimately know a stinker when they see it.
So, now every single studio movie that comes out open on anywhere from 1500-7000 screens. They create slick trailers that create a "you must see this major event or be considered a leper by your community" feel for every movie. They make over 50% of their money in the first week and then it trails off.
Even major, big money makers are gone within 4-6 weeks. The days of movies playing for 6 months (or even 12 months like STAR WARS) are gone, gone, gone. You're in. You're out. You're out on DVD (where the major money is made anyway).
Of course, this means that smaller movies or more challenging movies that need time to build a word of mouth no longer have the chance to do that. Movies like ANNIE HALL or BONNIE AND CLYDE or GOODFELLAS or BLOOD SIMPLE would never have a chance to find an audience. They would simply come out and die and be forgotten. Or worse, be considered "a bomb." And nothing is worse than that in this town.
But today, even if you make a piece of crap like the new Bond film or some crappy rom-com like THE BREAKUP, who cares? With the right ad campaign coupled with buying 70% of all the screens available on opening weekend, you can still manufacture a huge opening weekend. So, the stinker still makes a ton of money. You get to gloat in Variety that you had the number one romantic comedy for a non-holiday weekend staring a former NBC sitcom star released in March. Hell, you'll probably get a promotion.
And in that world, there's very little room for an actual storyteller to get their story across. Because the people making and funding the movies have no interest in telling a story. They want to sell a product.
I'm not being cynical. I understand that movies have always been a weird mixture between art and commerce. It has to be. It's not like painting or poetry. It costs money to make movies. And you have to make it with someone else's money and the artist has a moral responsibility to try to make that other person's money back (and too many douche-bag filmmakers refuse to acknowledge this aspect of the agreement).
The only problem is, in the past, the people funding movies actually wanted to tell stories. And that's simply not the case any more.
Anyway, long answer, I know. But I wanted to share the perspective of someone who has been writing and producing in this world for almost two decades.
I will close by saying if I could give back every TV episode, movie and Movie-of-the-Week in order to write Aquaman or Green Arrow, I'd do it in a heart beat. It's the one world of writing I haven't been able to crack.
Sigh...
Thanks for the site, Val. It's always awesome to read.
T
And by the way ABoyNamedArt, SON OF THE MASK cost upwards to $100M and sank the studio that funded it. Seriously, that one movie brought the entire house down.
ReplyDeleteWhile it looked cheap, it was anything but. And thousands of people were put out of work as a direct result of that bomb.
It stands, with THUNDERBIRDS and PLUTO NASH, as one of the biggest bombs of all time (from a cost to gross perspective).
Frank Capra said that no one sets out to make a bad movie. When he found himself watching something horrible, he would try to find the film they wanted to make.
ReplyDeleteBut what about when the chipmunks land in that basket and Simon is all like, "MUFFINS!" at the very begining of the movie?
ReplyDeleteCutest. Thing. Ever.
Maybe they wanted a version for kids with no she-males.
ReplyDeleteAs far as bad movies, I'll go with the lcd theory. I live in an lcd town. Usually, Oscar-nominated movies don't play in our local theatre. We only get stupid comedies, slasher films, and stuff with explosions.
ReplyDeleteAs far as "yes men" goes, it ain't just Hollywood. The expectation for someone to kiss your ass just because they work for you is as old as civilization. We like to think that in America, the Land of Liberty, that we are above that, but we're not. Unless you are very, very, very lucky, if you want to keep your job -- or at least have a chance of upward movement within your company -- you must be careful of expressing your honest opinion around the higher ups. Of course, every now and then, there is an exception and the brave soul who argues down the bosses' ideas gets recognized for his integrity, or his intelligence, or his foresight... But in my experience, that's an exception.
karterhol should write a book. Seriously, that was one of the most engaging storied I've ever read.
ReplyDeleteBecause these movies make money in rentals or are surprise hits like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
ReplyDeleteAnd there are people like me who love seeing bad movies with friends. Since no one cares, we can talk over it and laugh at the shitiness of it.
Karterhol brings up an interesting point that really bothers me sometimes-- the whole "I just wanna turn off my brain and be entertained sometimes" response people give when they explain why they wasted money on something like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer or similar mindless blockbuster fare.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that it's wrong to enjoy something mindless from time to time. I just wonder when they ever enjoy anything challenging. And I wonder what's wrong with movies that provoke and make people think? Why can't a summer blockbuster also have brains as well as brawn?
And sometimes they do. I know it's not a popular flick around here, but The Dark Knight didn't insult my intelligence and it still thrilled with the action. I haven't seen it yet, but from what I've read and because of the people involved, I have a feeling Iron Man will do the same, albeit with a lighter touch.
It's not comic book stuff, but lately I've been really getting into Zodiac, because it's been on our movie channels so often. That movie is dark, frightening, funny and smart, well-acted and beautifully shot with a kind of Apocalypse Now-era Vittorio Storaro look. I couldn't ask for anything more from one of my entertainment choices be it a movie, a TV show, a novel, non-fiction or even...
... a comic book!
Yeah... when do these people turn ON their minds? Ever?
Thanks Alexa. :)
ReplyDelete