Author:  John Amiel

The Current Hollywood Climate

The history of Hollywood can be described in terms of who has held the power to get films made at any given time. Broadly speaking the key eras have been:

• Studio Heads 1930s - '50s
• Directors late '60s - '70s
• Agencies '80s
• Corporate Heads early '90s
• Stars late '90s - now

Since the success of Titanic, the studios have tended to focus even more on what they perceive to be the taste of an ever-younger audience. The key demographic now seems to be the 14 to 20 year olds. Younger audiences are not too bothered about the intrinsic quality of the film, how it is lit or edited for example. They're not the least bit interested in qualities of what used to be called the "well-made" film. They are almost entirely concerned with star names, style and genre. Most alarmingly for the studios they've proven to be surprisingly discriminating in detecting attempts to pander to what are perceived to be their lowest-common-denominator tastes. And the high-profile failures of several summer sequel movies (hitherto thought to be bullet-proof) have made the denizens of the upper offices even more nervous.

However older audiences do not "open" a movie because they'll wait till the queues subside before they'll go to see a film. They're not the ones who will patiently stand in line to swell the numbers on the all-important opening weekend. Given an increasingly crowded marketplace the opening weekend becomes the crucial indicator for distributors of all widely released films. Fall at the fence of that opening weekend and you're rapidly trampled under the feet of the incoming batch of movies!

A second major shift in recent years has been the growth of the international distribution market, which now accounts for around 60% of a film's theatrical revenues. Foreign sales are almost entirely name driven and the perception of what makes a "name" in the foreign markets is very different from the US. Several stars who are now considered hard to market in America can still open a film internationally and generate buoyant sales in the video market.

Partly as a result of these factors, it is increasingly difficult to get well-written, thoughtful mid-value films (ie. in the $25 - $50 million budget range) made in Hollywood. The kind of movies Amiel originally came here to make (like Sommersby and Copycat) would be incredibly difficult to get made in today's climate. There is a seemingly endless market for movies made around or below the $12m mark for the teen and art-house circuits. The prevailing wisdom is that it's hard to lose money at this budgetary level. Otherwise the studios would prefer to spend $80m+ on high profile, high-concept "tent pole" pictures with bankable stars and a large visual effects budget. So, in the movie industry, as in America itself, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. And a very short list of actors now effectively determines which films get made.

In the current recessionary environment, and especially after a treacherous and disappointing summer season, there is a danger that the studios will become ever more reluctant to take decisions on which projects to greenlight. As the cost of making movies spirals so does the cost of marketing and distributing them. The average cost of a Hollywood movie now stands at a staggering $56m - before marketing. Add a minimum requirement of $30m to open the movie and you can begin to understand the studio's desperation about bringing costs under control. Big stars and big directors mean gross point participants that further erode the profitability of a big film. More and more we're seeing studios co-financing films in an attempt to minimise their downsides. Ultimately, the studios could become simply distribution and marketing entities, acquiring product from outside and from their subsidiary production arms.

The Role of Agents and Managers

In Amiel's experience, agents in the US tend in general to be more proactive and entrepreneurial than their UK counterparts, though there are, of course, exceptions. Well organised agents and agencies will still try to build relationships between their clients where possible and mutually beneficial - for example by pairing up a writer in need of a good director with a director in need of a good script. UK agents tend to believe their principal (and often sole) responsibility is to field offers.

All the studios have "ODA's" (Open Directing Assignments) which are projects in development that have no director attached. Good agents should know what each studio has in development and will let their director clients know of anything that they think is suitable. If the director is interested it becomes the agent's job to get the studio equally interested. However, with fewer movies actually getting made, and fewer quality scripts in play almost any director can expect to find him or herself in a cattle market competition for a project.

An agent in Hollywood gets the same as an agent in the UK (10%) but tends to work a good deal harder for what are admittedly often a lot higher fees. Most actors also have a manager (10% -15%) a lawyer (5%) and a business manager/accountant (5%). Do the maths - is it any wonder star fees are so high?

Developing Projects

Directors get paid a standard fee of $25,000 to develop projects even though the process can take months or even years. The majority of projects will be abandoned at the end of the development process, often simply because the studio's preferred actor is not available (or willing) to take the role. Despite the low success rate in actually getting them into production, developing new projects can still be the most exciting and interesting part of the whole film making process. Pitching a script has however become much harder in this fearful environment. Because of the high mortality rate in script development studios would often rather buy a $2m spec script than a $200,000 pitch. They'll often spend another $1m rewriting that spec but they seem to be happier spending big bucks on a known entity rather than taking the lower-cost, higher risk gamble on the unknown.

Projects from the UK

Amiel says he gets sent increasingly fewer projects from the UK. Partly he fears because fewer films are actually getting made, and partly because of what he thinks may be a mistaken perception that he's "gone Hollywood". For every twenty scripts he is sent only one or two are likely to be UK based - and neither of them are likely to have financing.

Particularly because of the prevailing political and creative climate in the US Amiel would like nothing better than to come home to make movies. The problem he finds, as a material-driven director, is the lack of ambition in most of the projects he gets sent. So many of the British scripts he reads are either worthy costume dramas or manifestations of our seemingly endless fascination with our minor criminal celebrities. What he longs for is a project with scale. Not simply or necessarily budgetary scale - but emotional scale.

Post-Production and Audience Testing

Post-production is often the most difficult period for the director. While shooting is going on, the director is king - but as soon as the film goes into the editing suite, everyone becomes an expert. It is incredibly difficult to judge the quality of the film from the dailies or the first assembly. Everyone thinks they can do it - nobody can, not even the director. At the first assembly stage you have something which looks like a film; which you may try to judge as a film, but which will never be further from the film you want it to be than it is at that point. This is the white-water stage for the production team. You try and steer the fragile craft that is your vision through the rocks and rapids of post-production. If you come out of it all still afloat, and without too much knocked off your boat, you're doing well!

This fight can become more difficult after the film has been subjected to test screenings with a (supposedly) randomly selected audience. Even the process of selecting a notionally normative test audience has become extremely fraught. Half the audience seem to be professional preview-goers who hang around the malls waiting for the guys who hand out free tickets. The other half are generally writing reviews for the alternative movie web sites. It's not uncommon for an extremely influential review of your movie to appear on Ain't It Cool News or IGN based on work that's barely half finished. Studios place a great deal of importance on how films test and may want to interfere in the creative process if elements of the film test badly (for example, on Sommersby test audiences were not happy with the ending and Amiel had to fight to retain his vision under pressure from the studio to change it.)

For the filmmaker the preview process can often be as painful as haemorrhoidal surgery without anaesthetic. The important thing however is to know what questions to ask of the audience and to understand how to sift through the data they provide. In truth simply watching the audience watch your film is the most useful part of the process. Filmmakers often glumly regard the preview as a weapon that's going to be used against them by the studio. Used intelligently and discriminately however, the preview can be a powerful and useful tool that can truly help to hone the final shape of your movie.

Top Tips

• Films are largely made now for a core teenage audience whose decisions over which films to see are driven by the star names attached to them.
• A handful of leading actors effectively control what films are made by the studios.
• In general agents in the US tend to be more entrepreneurial and proactive in bringing projects and people together. In the UK, the agent's role is more about fielding projects for their clients.
• Audience testing of the finished film is a difficult process to go through. The director must be prepared to fight for their vision of their film.