Category: Film

Why I Don’t Really Hate Hollywood

P1180231Once again, I maintained my tradition of not making it through the Oscars.  I haven’t cared much about the show itself in years, and I have even less patience for the pre and post-game buzz about everything that’s right or wrong with Hollywood, with the nominees themselves, with the Academy, and most especially with what anyone is wearing. Okay, I’m  a curmudgeon.  But not really.  Because the truth is a love/hate relationship with Hollywood has been part of the American story since before the L-A-N-D came off the famous sign that gives the town its name. Even the word movies was originally a pejorative adopted by the farming community of Southern California to describe those decadent idolaters who made those damn “flickers.”  I really don’t think it’s possible to have an industry built on so much passion, ego, fear, sex, and money without people finding it alternately alluring and repulsive. I also believe it is never quite possible to love cinema without liking Hollywood at least a little.

For one thing, what many people think of as independent cinema isn’t necessarily independent from Hollywood so much as it is codependent on Hollywood.  Big film and little film are more  symbiotic than they are competitive.  For example, the indie producer who needs to pay lower day rates to actors or skilled technicians is able to hire those folks because big movies pay well enough that they can afford to take on low-budget projects between the larger ones.  But the symbiosis is even more intrinsic than that.  For instance, if the production designer of a low-budget, indie feature has also done massively complex, studio projects, he is going to be a huge asset to that smaller film, as will any other experienced member working in another department.  A novice director can live or die by the experience of the people willing to work for him or her.  Additionally, little film benefits from the technological advancements driven by big film. And then, of course, big film looks to little film for new talent and fresh ideas. So, the line between Hollywood and independent cinema isn’t so much bright red as a kind of fuzzy pink.

How “independent” a film is really depends on how much creative control is maintained by the visionary (or visionaries) who want to make the work in the first place.  Naturally, if a filmmaker needs five-hundred thousand dollars from a small group of private investors, she has a better shot of keeping creative control than if she needs a hundred million dollars from a couple of large, corporate financing companies.  On the other hand, an example I often cite is Steven Spielberg, whom few people would describe as “independent” even though he is certainly a director who has full creative control over his films.  So, independent isn’t necessarily about scale or budget; and it certainly isn’t about the style or content of a film.  Plenty of absolute garbage has been produced independently, and plenty of great movies were produced by the old studio system.  But I suspect that because the golden age of indie (from the late 1980s to the early aughts) lost much of its gleam about the same time the Internet began to blossom, and big studios generally transitioned into franchise fare, this helped calcify the “us” and “them” sensibility that assumes a separation between “the creators” and “the industry.”

Make no mistake — Hollywood studios certainly have executives with MBAs who wouldn’t know which end of a camera to blow into.  Such is the nature of large corporations.  Still, the symbiosis between big film and little film exists, and this remains relevant because there is a persistently naive sentiment floating around in cyberspace that digital technology somehow enables truly visionary creators to “bypass the gatekeepers.”  This sounds idyllic, but as you run beyond the cliff edge and hang there Wile-E-Coyote-like, feet treading air a thousand feet above the desert, you have to ask yourself, “Bypass to go where exactly?”

Simply put, digital technology has only lowered the barriers to entry by putting certain tools of production and distribution into everyone’s hands. And this is unquestionably cool.  But entry implies a portal of some kind — we might even call it, well, a gate.  Maybe it’s the literal, iconic gate of Paramount Pictures, or maybe it’s the metaphorical gate of investors willing to back a second film based on the relative success of a first. By the way, finding a distributor for that first film requires passage through another kind of gate, if you will. But it’s really that next project that is the key.  Technology indisputably helps get a first film done, but any experienced filmmaker will tell you that you can only make a movie on favors and Fluffer-Nutters once.  As a general rule, you have to pay people to work on the second film, which means at least some gatekeepers (i.e. investors) are going to get involved, and they’re going to want a distribution plan that involves at least some return on that investment. And there is nothing about digital technology that overturns this basic business model.

With the approach of the Oscars, piracy of the nominated films spiked, and concurrent with reports of this increase came predictable comments that “the industry” must respond by making films available across all platforms simultaneously. This is supposedly the only answer to piracy because “producers need to understand the way consumers want to watch films.”  Perhaps.  But it is interesting that the prevailing faith in the Internet as an expansive, inclusive, incubator of diversity also ignores just how homogenous this demand for universal distribution actually is.  For one thing, there is no “the industry” in this context because there is no one way to market and distribute the broad range of films. Both films and audience trends will continue to shape one another, and we should not assume there is a single strategy that suits all projects.

No matter what, piracy is universally harmful, especially to the small filmmaker most eager to experiment with new platforms. I just met a writer/director who self-financed a small movie and made it modestly profitable by splitting up the rights and negotiating a fairly complex schedule of distribution windows, licensed to various channels from DVD to VOD to streaming. That’s not a new approach to licensing, but what serves both the filmmaker and the audience is the expansion of legal platforms, giving both producer and consumer more than one way to engage in a viable market.  Meanwhile, that same film was also heavily pirated upon its release, and the plus-or-minus x% on a modest film expecting modest returns will surely be the difference between attracting investors to the next project or not.  Meanwhile, how did this filmmaker self-finance his film?  With money he made working on big, Hollywood movies.  See what I mean?

On Rights and Accuracy in Movies

We all know the common criticism that a film adaptation is never “as good as the book.”  There are a number of reasons, some of them very subtle, why fans of source materials are easily disappointed by films based on them.  Not only is it mandatory that a feature film script leave out a considerable amount of detail from a novel or a biography, for instance, but the medium itself is at a disadvantage when competing with the subconscious, mental activity that occurs while reading.  It isn’t merely that a film has a hard time competing with the act of imagining, which it does; but a movie must also fill in details that very often neither a book author nor the reader ever bothered to imagine in the first place.  For instance, a room we never thoroughly pictured while reading, now that it is on screen, has colors and fabrics and lighting and furnishings that a production designer has chosen in collaboration with a cinematographer and a director. Not only is this image different from what we might have imagined, but it actually contains dozens or hundreds of elements we hadn’t bothered to picture at all.  And because a feature film is composed of thousands of these creative choices, each combining to produce images and sounds that trigger emotional responses, I believe that on a subconscious level, any film based on any expectation is inherently climbing a pretty tough hill.

So, what makes a good film adaptation of fiction or history or biography? In all cases, there is an obvious tendency to assume truth to source material is the basis of this work, but the filmmaker has to admit that cinema is probably the most manipulative and fundamentally untrue of all creative media.  To be clear, I believe all art “lies”in one way or another — and we know that even non-fiction is subject to the whims and imperfections of its authors — but I think cinema’s ability to conjure the illusion of reality makes it the biggest “liar” of them all. Accepting this premise doesn’t mean the filmmaker does not have an obligation to convey any truth in adaptation, but rather that he or she consciously makes choices in the service of some chosen truth, usually a theme, that is a fair portrayal in order to give the audience an experience that justifies whatever liberties have been taken.  It would be wrong, for instance, to make a Civil War film in which the confederates win at Gettysburg; but it would not be wrong to invent fictional scenes dramatizing Lee’s affection for his soldiers and contrast these with fictional scenes dramatizing Grant’s lack of that same affection.

Of course the filmmaker’s challenge in this regard depends a great deal on general awareness of the source material. For instance, it stands to reason that he hurdle of overcoming expectations is far greater for the makers of Selma than for the makers of The Imitation Game because, for many people around the world, The Imitation Game will be their first introduction to Alan Turing. By contrast, Selma must strive to be both a good film and withstand the scrutiny of everyone’s notions about who Martin Luther King, Jr. was.  On the other hand, in the age of social media, criticism often arises well before a film is even completed. As Don Steinberg describes in this article for the Wall Street Journal, producer Teddy Schwartzman had to spend considerable time on social media dispelling rumors that The Imitation Game would gloss over Turing’s homosexuality.  To the contrary, from what I’ve read (and I’m eager to see it), the filmmakers have appropriately used the theme of imitation to link Turing’s early work in artificial intelligence with his deeply painful need to pretend to be someone he was not.  These core truths make rich, dramatic soil, but not everything that grows out of that soil should strive to be a literal truth.

Steinberg writes about the trend in biopics to selectively draw upon the record of a subject’s life in the service of tight, dramatic narrative rather than an encyclopedic life story.  I believe this is the best way to approach a biopic (or an adaptation of fiction for that matter), but it is also inevitable that one invites critics to say, “You got it wrong.”  And with regard to Selma, there have been a number of articles debating the film’s “accuracy,” the most resounding complaints  in regard to the portrayal of LBJ as an antagonist to King. Certainly, this reeks of revisionist history that I would agree is not appropriate license for filmmakers to take. Dramatic narrative needs an antagonist, but where historic record is available, it is not okay to radically alter the motives or actions of real people in order to recast them in needed dramatic roles.  More subtly, however, is the question of “accuracy” with regard to the fact that Dr. King’s verbatim speeches are not used in Selma and were not licensed by the producers from the King estate.  In fact, those licenses were not even sought because they were not available, having already been sold several years ago in a development deal with Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks.

The fact that King’s words remain protected by copyrights owned by the King family has been cause for some emotionally-triggered criticism by those who say that “King’s words belong to the world.”  This may feel instinctively true, but it is not literally true, and neither should we want it to be. Because even if they were made “the property of the world” by entering the public domain, they would be exploited for profit-making ventures regardless of taste or context.  As such, why should any entity other than the family be entitled to control and/or to financially exploit those works?  And certainly, no one can claim with any integrity that King’s words are somehow inaccessible to us because they remain under copyright.

Still, the subject did spark a conversation with friends as to the relevance of the speech accuracy in the case of a film like Selma.  Were it my own patriarch’s legacy to manage, I might be torn.  On the one hand, when motion pictures are popular and award-winning and all that, they do have a tendency to become the history people remember.  As such, I would be inclined to want my father’s or grandfather’s words portrayed accurately. On the other hand, as a filmmaker, I may want to produce a biopic that deals with real aspects of a famous individual’s life that the family may not find comfortable; and I may want to make any number of stylistic creative choices that some may find controversial. In that regard, do I relinquish some creative control for the sake of making a deal on licensing my subject’s works? When assessing the values of the film, which “truth” is the most important?  Selma director Ava DuVernay, as reported by Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post, says of paraphrasing King’s words “…we found a way to do it where we didn’t have to ask for permission, because with those rights came a certain collaboration.”

The copyright critic might say that one should not preclude the other, that the subject’s creative or intellectual property should be free to use and that the copyrights should not stifle the filmmaker’s ability to make a movie that is both “accurate” and that dramatically portrays uncomfortable truths.  But that doesn’t really feel quite right. If a movie gets sold to a big studio and makes a hundred million dollars, the subject’s estate deserves nothing?  Moreover, if the words are free to use, what’s to prevent a filmmaker from “remixing” them just enough until they sound like a bad translation? In many cases, it may best serve both the film and the source material to thoughtfully fictionalize everything in the service of a truth that is more important than the literal.  Too literal, and all one has is a reenactment, which is very dull filmmaking.

Working around a copyright itself usually forces creativity rather than stifles it.  This may sound counterintuitive in context to the first feature film that attempts to portray King the man rather than King the myth, but not to the film artist who is fully aware that her medium is all illusion to begin with and that she is trying to find an emotional truth in the complexities and imperfections of a mortal man who was more than “slain civil rights leader.”  In concluding her article, Hornaday implies that Selma succeeds in attaining this kind of truth when she quotes former U.N. ambassador, and one-time King colleague, Andrew Young telling DuVernay, “Congratulations. You did it.”  The implication is, “You brought the flesh-and-blood man I knew to  life on screen.”

By contrast, the DreamWorks film, with its rights to King’s words, may dramatize any number of literal accuracies and yet fail to convey much truth at all.  It’s not fair to judge a movie before it’s made, of course, but Spielberg himself can be rather sentimental for my taste; and according to Variety, Oliver Stone dropped out of the project last January over conflicts regarding his own script revisions, which sound as though he was trying to humanize the man behind the legend. So, once this other film is finally produced, will it be more true than Selma or will it get to some other truth, equally valid but very different than Selma?  

Going back to the original premise that it is the nature of all movies to lie to us one way or another, I think good adaptation can only succeed in getting to a truth without any reasonable expectation of getting to the truth.  As such, the notion of accuracy in movies should never be used as a rationale for presuming to judge decisions made by rights holders who license their works for this purpose.  There is no guarantee any creator making derivative use of a work will live up to all, or even any, expectations of the audience.  Likewise, there is no guarantee a creator without a license to source materials will not do something better (or more true) than a creator who has those rights.  It’s all a crap shoot frankly.  So, the only fair thing to do is to leave the copyrights in possession of the families and judge each derivative work on its own artistic merits.

Studios Launch WheretoWatch Service

I don’t know about you, but I have more channels and streaming options for filmed entertainment than I can possibly use.  I don’t do a lot of browsing anymore, which is probably best since in 2013 alone, American consumers legally accessed an estimated 5.7 billion motion picture views and 56 billion TV episode views.  Instead of browsing or channel surfing, I search for specific titles, either because I’m in a mood to see a particular work or because I’m doing some sort of research.  But no matter what I’m seeking, I have often found it cumbersome to check my various viewing options, wanting of course to prioritize subscription streaming services where I have accounts, then VOD options and prices, and finally disk purchase if need be.  For instance, I’m working on two screenplays right now, both of which require viewing some older TV and film material; and searching available, legal options even among the handful of services I currently use, takes a bit of time.  And of course a Google search of various titles often yields results of little or no use.

But as of today, the service I’ve personally been waiting for was launched, and it comes to us from those “stiflers of innovation” known as  the motion picture industry.  Still in its first iteration, WheretoWatch is a multi-platform, web service created by the Motion Picture Association of America where viewers can search by title, director, actors, or writers, and then see on a single screen several of the available options for viewing a particular title. So, if you want to check Netflix, for example, before renting from iTunes, this is a handy way to see your options in one place, including pricing information in case Flixster is cheaper, for instance, than Vudu.  And if a film is still in theaters, WheretoWatch aggregates those listings to the site as well, so you don’t have to do a separate search.

I looked up some fairly old and arcane titles, and the database seems to be pretty robust, especially for version 1.0 of the service.  Although WheretoWatch is backed by the six major studios represented by the MPAA, the titles in the database are not limited to those owned by the majors. Naturally, the industry hopes to promote legal viewing of all filmed entertainment and recognizes that having over 100 options for access is all well and good, but not very efficient without a search tool designed to do what this service does.  WheretoWatch is only available in the US at this time, but there are plans to grow into other markets as well as to continue adding titles and more services to the database.  The service is free, is not monetized by advertising, and users are not required to create profiles.

I’ve said before that Americans in particular have no excuse for piracy, but from a broader perspective, I do think the pundits out there who keep saying things like “piracy is just a reaction to the industry’s failure to innovate” should really stop saying that because it rings a more hollow every day.  In fact, the whole notion that creative artists and technologists are fundamentally at odds and that this overhyped schism should produce a conclusion that says “creators’ rights stifle innovation” sounds especially ridiculous to filmmakers.  At least it should to any filmmakers who know their history.

Cinema began as technological experimentation, which led to new forms of creative expression, which then demanded new technological innovation; and this cycle has been in constant motion ever since Muybridge.  There’s a reason, for instance, that both famous and not so famous cinematographers are also inventors of numerous pieces of equipment that have become standard hardware on shoots all over the world. From one end of the supply chain to the other, filmmakers have always worked hand-in-glove with technology innovators.  And as I have said in other posts, the ability to stream high-quality motion pictures seamlessly to a home theater is less than five years old. So, if all one did was watch every legally available title, one-by-one without a break, years would pass, and one would never actually finish because more would be produced. And that’s even with a service like WheretoWatch expediting the search process.  So, the film industry may not be moving “fast enough” according to the over-caffeinated, roulette-wheel economics that drive Silicon Valley, but it’s moving faster than any of us mortals can actually consume.  So, there’s that.