The State Of Hollywood
This is a piece written by a good friend. I thought that given recent discussions about the crap that comes out on film, that this was an apt point of view from someone who knows the industry…. enjoy!
Having had some experience on the periphery of edges of Hollywood(film school and multiple unpurchased spec scripts, followed by writers block and an unvarnished hatred for all people incapable of speaking directly), I was asked to comment on
Why has Hollywood not produced any original product lately?
The answer is actually quite simple really: It’s a business. Profit must be made in order to ensure the ability to make new product. All business decisions that come out of the American motion picture industry(hereafter known as Hollywood, even though its technically inaccurate) can all be attributed to profit demands—even (gasp!) independent filmmakers. For those of you who know the business, this answer is self-evident and needs no clarification. For the rest of you, I’ll attempt to clarify how things work.
There are perhaps 200-300 motion pictures made for distribution in a given year in the US–usually less. Most production companies plan to make 2-4 big budget or “tent-pole” movies and 2-4 smaller or “Oscar-bait” movies. There are basically 3 paths by which an idea can get presented to a production company for consideration to be one of these productions (this is called a pitch).
- 1. As an original idea: This would come from somewhere external to the production company.
a. Spec script. You need an agent to go this route. If based on an original idea, a writer will obtain an agent to represent him, who will then attempt to get a reader that represents either a script agency, a Hollywood player, or production company to read it.
An understanding of the 3 act structure applies here. In the first act, the central question or conflict is described and whatever players or forces that will be contesting resolution are introduced. A first act can last anywhere between 1 and 22 pages. Industry standard hovers around 17 pages. Most readers have to process tens of thousands of scripts yearly. If your first act sucks, they will read no further. Granted, if your first act is good they probably won’t read any further either, but maybe they’ll send it to legal to see if they can option your idea before they re-write the life out of it.
b. Treatment. This is a basically a brief version of the story you want to produce. It is usually one to four pages, double spaced, and it may or may not contain actual script. A successful treatment can either tell the full story or the first act. This often serves as a substitute for those individuals who don’t have time to read the whole first act in a sitting. In fact, most agents won’t accept unsolicited scripts at all. Very few will accept unsolicited treatments. Occasionally, a treatment is written at a studios request. This usually happens if you have worked for them before and they want to see how you would approach an idea that either they have or that you have discussed with someone in the company. If they like it, often this will generate a contract to write a spec script based on the ideas presented therein and whatever notes they have.
- As an option. Obtain permission to base a production on someone else’s original idea or work. This would usually apply to books, plays, TV shows, and comic books. Options are done by production companies. An individual can do this, but rarely does that result in a successful production.
- As a sequel. A project has done so well for the production company that they want to attempt to duplicate it and its results. Production companies often do unofficial sequels to other company’s successful products. Witness the plethora of children orientated fantasy movies after the success of Harry Potter as just one example.
Production companies like sequels the best. These represent the least risk. They know that they are guaranteed to get seventy-five percent of the return that the original made. So, they tend to give the film-makers seventy-five percent of the production cost to make the sequel. One way to save production costs on a sequel is to double up: this basically means they shoot both sequels (to make a trilogy) at the same time. This ends up saving the company so much money that production quality doesn’t have to be compromised by very much, as long as the original movie is strong enough to have the investors to cover the production cost. However, unless these movies do phenomenally well, most of the production cost won’t be regained until the release of the third movie, which, with few exceptions, is traditionally the least profitable. If this is a new product, even if it’s written as a trilogy, it only gets “green lit” after the first one does well.
Remember, the sequel category also includes any “clone products” of their competitors. Sometimes, if a product they have is particularly hot, they will flood the market with clones of their own products—each clone having less investment to match its corresponding profit projections. Obviously, this kind of marketing plan ends with market saturation and an inferior product. Then, the product gets shelved for a cooling off period. Witness the excess of the Star Trek (and the assorted product clones)product in the nineties . There was a good 5 year period where no one wanted to touch a big budget space opera.
Optioning another already successful product for film production allows the production company a good chance of translating that success into more money. It guarantees a certain amount of ticket sales. Also, assuming the product itself is still out there, it serves as a built-in advertising tool. All of these seem to guarantee to a production company a high degree of profit with a low degree of risk. The risk here is significantly higher though. There is a strong possibility that the producers and the filmmakers, in the attempt to clone the products success, are unable to translate or duplicate the essence of what made the original product a success.
Using an original idea is the least favorite avenue for a film production company to take. There are many reasons for this. Original ideas usually come from young and untried sources. A movie studio would rather invest money in a bad script from a known scriptwriter than a good script from an unknown. Why? Because the name recognition guarantees a certain amount of investor backing and tickets sold. Also, truly new ideas are notoriously difficult to conceptualize, let alone evaluate as either good or bad. Many ideas that seemed brilliant on paper turn out to be garbage when you attempt to translate them to film.
Filming from an original idea not only has its own weaknesses, it has all the weaknesses of the other categories as well. If you have a brilliant original screenplay, and if it will actually translate to screen as well as it reads on paper, and if you find a production crew that will be able to capture that and do the work of putting it on screen, then you might succeed in making a good movie. But here’s the thing, having done all that, if you truly have an original idea, you now have to educate (advertise) the public to embrace it. The truth is, it doesn’t matter how good the product is. What matter are the ticket sales. Negligible tickets sales means a loss of investment. Many a career in Hollywood has been ruined by a great movie that no one saw.
Because of their built-in risks, for an original concept or story to be produced, it needs a high level champion. This could either be a writer who has written several successful screenplays, an actor with good contacts and a high ticket value, a director who has a consistent track record with original material, or a producer that is willing to gamble on it.
You would think that when our economy enters hard times then smaller budgeted original films would be produced more often. The opposite is true. When there is less money going around, the output of the independent film market, and even the departments of the major film companies that produce these, shrinks to non-existence. Almost all money is sunk into big budget movies with minimal projected loss. Small budget original ideas are considered high risk. Sometimes these pay off. Usually, they don’t. Therefore, most studios will only risk money on original work that is likely to be considered for Oscar nomination.
Something else the studio likes to look at is audience demographics. G- rated allows everyone admittance, and therefore has the greatest potential in ticket sales. R- rated has the lowest direct potential for profit because the lowest percentage of the population can gain entrance. There is some argument about this. Some maintain that the target demo for maximum ticket sales should include only actual ticket buyers. This pushes the demo more toward PG. Average intelligence of the audience is usually considered at an eighth grade level. Other factors to consider are the age demographic and how it applies to the movie content. This sounds elementary, but a family movie about talking dogs simply cannot have sex. Just as a high octane r-rated film should not have a whole lot of family stuff going on.
There are exceptions to every rule, of course. For example, a truly brutal r-rated revenge plot NEEDS to have a strong family component that has been assaulted in some way. But let’s not talk about exceptions. That misses the point. The point is, most producers are looking for the perfect formula. They want to be able to plug in components a, b, and c and have it equal a profit. If you are a producer following a demographic formula, then you will be removing any sex; extreme violence; anything that confuses an eight year old; any scenes that last more than 3 minutes; any scenes that don’t have dialogue; any scenes that don’t have color; and anything else that offends, bores or bothers the audience. Then you do a private screening followed by a survey so that you can rip out anything else you missed.
Most importantly, if you are this kind of producer, and most of you are, you won’t go near an original idea; unless you can rewrite it to clone someone else’s successful idea, and you won’t ever make a film worth remembering for an hour or a week. But hey, it pays the bills doesn’t it?
Greg Tripodi – Aug 09
