Thursday 14 January 2010
Thursday
David Mamet has half-confirmed my fears about the Hollywood system: that no one watches films any more. He suggests that very few people read scripts, especially those with the higher positions in the production companies. The reason for this, he argues, is that 'script reader' is one of the basic jobs in such a company: trawling through the hundreds of scripts that get sent to them. These junior members of the company do then read, but they only read in order to please those higher up the chain. They don't look for what is good, but for what their superiors are looking for - that is, to make money. When these 'script readers' are elevated up in the company, they look with disdain (and perhaps boredom, horror) on script reading, leaving it to those below them, and their concerns become more directly 'how can a film make money?'. This, you might say, is only for scripts that get sent in, what happens to work from established writers? It's more than possible that this work is green-lighted without anyone reading it. More worryingly, such scripts will be reduced to a 'pitch', and this is what gets the film made, or not. Likewise with a director, with or without a script. He is either agreed to based on his reputation, or his pitch. So if no one reads scripts, does anyone bother watching the films?
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2 comments:
It's a real problem... However several good writers have said that this is a problem that you HAVE to embrace, why? Because answer one question, "why do you want to make a film in Hollywood?"
You could make an arthouse low budget film with your friends with no money. But if you want somebody to spend money on making your film for you, then they need to be able to make money. And how do they make money? They make money by getting people to come and see your movie. How do people go and see movies? They essentially read the movie pitch in the listings magazine: "Josh Hartnett and Ermintrude Votfostrundle star in a daring heist movie with a twist... They are stealing each other".
I hadn't ever thought of the pitch as the listings paragraph but in many ways it is. And I guess that's why "the money" as they are called, rely on it.
I was going to write a whole extra post continuing this (about how no one watches films), but might just leave it to the comments.
It is a vicious circle, of sorts: a movie makes money, so people try to recreate that movie, or use the same actors in similar roles, over and over again. But we all know people will soon get tired of this. You need new ideas, and these seem to happen despite the Hollywood system, not because of it.
The other thing I was going to say was about distribution. I believe the major production companies also control a lot of the distribution, and in this way they control what we see.
An interesting story from the making of 'Che': Soderbergh was getting interest from the big players in Hollywood, but as soon as he told them it was going to be in Spanish, they all refused to be involved. Eventually, he had to get his money from Europe to make the film.
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