Formula for Blockbuster Movies.

Started by cron, January 13, 2004, 03:36:47 PM

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cron

I remember reading a news article at the IMDB which title was something like "Formula for Blockbusters Unveiled"  .  It was about a study made by a film school class, i think , that literally got a formula for the perfect Holywood movie.    17% screen-time for comedy,  35% for action... things like that.  I've been searching for that article for a while but the compendium of news of the Database is huge. Did anyone saved the article or knows the link?
context, context, context.

MacGuffin

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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MacGuffin

Defending Blockbusters
British journalist Tom Shone got so tired of the general intellectual bias against people like Lucas and Spielberg that he decided to write a book about it.

In the introduction to his brand new book Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, former Talk Magazine and The Sunday Times film critic Tom Shone references two very different top 50 all-time lists: one that accounts only for total dollar amount grosses, and another that is adjusted for inflation.

It is this second list, which multiplies admissions for a given film by the current estimated average ticket price, that perfectly sums up and supports the main thesis of Shone’s treatise. Namely, that Hollywood blockbusters and the people who make them have gotten something of a bad rap.

“When you look at the first list, you kind of go, ‘Oh my God, [author] Peter Biskind is right, we’ve got terrible taste, the masses are deluded,” explains Shone during an interview in Los Angeles with FilmStew earlier this week. “But then, when you look at the second list, the second list has got taste.”

“That list is actually a very good index of these much loved popular classics,” he continues. “It’s rather heartening, as it suggests that the mass audience has a certain amount of discrimination after all.”

Shone’s book, like its 37-year-old author, is breezy, candid and highly entertaining. Although some of the chronological accounts of the Hollywood blockbuster era are based on interviews he once conducted as a journalist, the bulk of the revelations come from six months of recent footwork in Los Angeles.

Of particular note are the extensive and fascinating comments by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, viewed by Shone respectively as the greatest living American film director and a powerful Edison-like agent of technological change. Of course, Shone admits he had a bit of an advantage going in.

“They were quite pleased to hear that I thought they were geniuses,” he says with a laugh. “That angle went down well.”

As far as the differences between the two as interview subjects, they are pretty much what you would expect. “I think Spielberg really likes journalists and the media,” says Shone. “If you look at his movies, you can see the excitement of news stories breaking, with Jaws and Close Encounters both having these subplots. So he kind of understands what the media wants and everything comes with a little bit of topspin on it.”

“Lucas is a little bit more defensive,” Shone continues. “He’s definitely a lot better than he used to be, by all accounts, but he tends to put up a bit of a wall of words. I think because he’s been attacked for so long and so consistently by journalists and writers for having kind of created this thing [the Star Wars franchise] that ruined film, he had a long spiel in his head as to how they have gotten him all wrong.”

“It was sort of like I only asked him one question, and half an hour later, he finished.”

Indeed, Lucas suggests that it was films like Jaws and Star Wars that helped theater owners bankroll the very multiplexes that would later fuel the indie film revolution and emergence of distributors like Miramax. But it is his revelation that he designed Star Wars as basically a silent film that provides the author with one of his most tantalizing springboards.

Shone, who also did six months of research at the British Film Institute library in London for the book, digs up essays from magazines like American Magazine in 1914 and Everybody’s Magazine in 1919, which essentially sound like they are aimed at today's Hollywood malaises rather than the growing pains of the silent film era. For example, in the latter of these two excerpts, writer Harold Coffey bemoans that, ‘the backbone of today’s business is the attendance of young people from seventeen to twenty-three years of age.’

“It was really the Italians who came up with the idea of the international blockbuster, before even the America film industry,” Shone insists. “[D.W.] Griffith would look at things like Quo Vadis? (1912) and sort of patch on into his pictures the stuff he’d seen in these Italian movies. The lack of a language barrier, whereby films opened simultaneously; that was all again a feature of the silent film era.”

“And the complete absence of stars,” he continues. "When Lucas and Spielberg started up, they also dispensed with stars, like the movie was the star. They preferred these lower ranking kind of actors. In both cases, the critics thought they were being dragged over the cliff by a kind of mindless spectacle, and speed, and kind of the rest of it.”

Blockbuster argues that there have been several watershed moments in the modern American mainstream era. The first was around 1993, when on the heels of Jurassic Park, the homegrown qualities of the genre began to get diluted by folks such as Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall) and Roland Emmerich (Independence Day). Then, more recently, after the string of bankruptcies among U.S. theater chain owners, Shone argues that the studios decided to hand back the reins to directors like Sam Raimi (Spider-Man), Ang Lee (Hulk) and Bryan Singer (X2: X-Men United), helping re-invigorate their so-called ‘tent pole’ offerings.

In speaking with so many of the current Hollywood establishment’s leading lights, Shone was most taken on the marketing side of things by current Revolution Studios partner Tom Sherak, who admits to being endlessly dumbstruck by the craziness of the film business. Meanwhile, Shone's most difficult interview was the man responsible for this holiday season’s hot animation topic, The Polar Express.

“Despite being incredibly smart, [Robert] Zemeckis has a very strong suspicion of intellectual takes on his work,” says Shone. “So I found that I would say these things and he’d go, ‘Well, that’s for you guys to decide.’ So that was a little tricky.”

Reaction so far to Shone’s book, which came out in England last month and the U.S. last week, has tended to divide up along what the author calls party lines. While those who identify with the central thesis of the book enthuse, there is also what he refers as ‘the world cinema brigade,’ those Sight and Sound and The Guardian readers in the United Kingdom who are simply astounded that an esteemed former critic turn out to be such a Philistine.

During his years at the Sunday Times (1994-99), Shone would often listen to colleagues complain about the never-ending wave of loudly hyped American studio product. But deep down, he felt like a man with a dirty secret that was about to be exposed at any moment, e.g. that he had seen Star Wars at least 25 times.

“People think that if you’re a film critic, you’ve automatically got to be into independent movies and French cinema,” chuckles Shone. “And I am into all those things, but my first love is Hollywood. And people are still shocked by that. They find it sort of interesting and weird, like, ‘What happened to you?’”

“My tastes in other areas are exactly the same,” he continues. “I’ve always liked McCartney rather than Lennon, and always slightly resented all the Lennon fans who kind of sneer at McCartney and say he’s such a lightweight. It’s certainly the case with Spielberg, and I think that’s the thing that most grates with people like Biskind. Just how upbeat he is.”

Having rested his case on behalf of the Hollywood blockbuster, Shone is now contemplating a second book about the more general topic of optimism, and why it gets such short thrift in the arts and culture pages. He envisions it as sort of a defense of 'feel-good' art.

Whether or not that turns out to be the topic of his follow-up tome, chances are Shone will forever lean more towards the Anthony Lane side of The New Yorker equation than the one embodied by the late Pauline Kael. Indeed, Shone, who knows Lane from the reporter's days at The Independent on Sunday, applauds his somewhat junky tastes.

“He came out in favor of both Speed and Titanic,” Shone recalls. “To me, he seems to be very much like a figure of the times in that regard, as much in a way as Pauline Kael was of hers. With Kael, you would read her stuff and go, ‘Oh, I liked that movie, but for the wrong reasons.’”

“As a teenager, I definitely had a period when I slightly abandoned my tastes and went through kind of a film snob period, where it was Wim Wenders and nothing else,” confesses Shone, whose says his vote for the two most perfectly realized Spielberg films go to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Catch Me If You Can. “For me, that was one of the things that the book did, was to come full circle and devolve again, and come clean about these tastes.”

Not to mention the sheer pleasure of being able to go back to and review movies of his youth such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, with a knowing wink that his thumbs has nothing to do with the fact that the 1981 film's distributor, Paramount, is part of the same Viacom family as that of his American publisher Simon & Schuster.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks