Populist Internet Infuriates Hollywood Fatcats

NewsMax.com ^ | 7/24/03 | Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff

[xzins]

Now you've done it. And I was looking forward to "The Return of the King."

What'd Gandalf do between sets?

[gnarledmaw]

"I work in Hollywood...",
Well, I dont and dont really have a dog in this fight so Im not seriously interested in getting into a real arguement.

"There are actors with liberal stances..."
True but they arent the ones fronting the money to buy the story and make the movie. If the movie was made by someone else and then purchased by a big company, the actors arent the ones offering to buy it. Its not the idiot actors in the film causing the agenda problem, its the writers and those further up the corporate chain who buy the stories/movies that cause the agenda problem.

"it all comes down to profit"
Lets be blunt. Profit: As CEO I see that liberal agenda/titty movies are failing and "conservative"/historical based/family movies are soaring. I shut off the money spigot to the first and open the second. Now I can retire.

"and the mass market"
Even the biggest idiot wandering the street, though they may not be able to express it clearly, is leery after having been "Blair-Witched". The more hype there is by a studio, the worse the movie probably is. Stop trying to make the money through "mass marketing" and start with that old fashioned concept of quality.

"The failed blockbusters listed in the article didn't fail because of their agenda"
Maybe youre right. Maybe many of us just recognized over-hyped crap with no story line.

"Legally Blonde II is a big hit"
Is it a big hit compared to box office sale blockbusters or is it just the best of the crap that some people are still paying for?

[TontoKowalski]

You know, the flip side to this is that hopefully-good movies are getting excellent publicity through the 'net.

In addition to Seabiscuit, mentioned in the article, there's an incredible buzz regarding The Passion.

There's a new thread on FR about this movie nearly every day, and it won't release until Easter. There are general movie fan sites, neither conservative nor liberal, neither Christian on non-... just movie lovers... where the excitement about The Passion is at the same level you see on the FR threads.

[Houmatt]

Dude, I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but there was an obvious price to be paid for the LOTR funding as far as Harry Knowles and company is concerned.

For one thing, you may have noticed at least during the past year the banners on his site have been devoted exclusively to New Line releases. And as TheFacer.net pointed out, every single review of a New Line film written by Harry has been positive.

So his assertion of not being bought and paid for my movie studios as many other gurus of sites like his are is just flat ludicrous.

[gnarledmaw]

#39

But was HW trying to sell movies to Russians or Americans? It seems to me that I remember hearing that Americans generally had more disposable income?

[Space Wrangler]

The Hollywood fatcats are severely discounting the fact that many of these stars outrageous political leanings and total hyprocisy is tuning out much of mainstream America. Actors loudly voicing their disdain of the president, condemning out national policies, and borderline treasonous statement is a much larger factor than they realize. The first movie I went to at the theatre in 5 yrs was 'Finding Nemo', and that was to take my 2 yr old to see. I refuse to pad the pockets of my political enemies, and apparantly, I'm not the only one.

[LIBERATENJ]

Red Dawn was the only movie I ever walked out of the theater on before it was done. Dreadfully bad movie.

[weegee]

If things keep going this way, I'm afraid Hollywood may be forced to start producing a quality product.

Hollywood won't "produce" better films but they may follow the trail of internet buzz to locate some good foreign or independent films to they could give wider distribution.

Unfortunately, some it just leads them to produce an American "remake" which may or may not capture the spirit of the original (but why even remake a recent movie???).

Some recent imports/remakes include Ring, Spirited Away , Bend It Like Beckham, 28 Days Later, and the upcoming Shaolin Soccer.

They may not all be "big" films, but they can compete against Hollywood's product in the non-art theaters. They at least offer some change of pace from the Hollywood formula.

[PsyOp]

Unfortunately Red Dawn was a huge flop,... If only it had been a good movie...

Red Dawn was a great movie. Unfortunately, you had to know a little history and understand the implications of current events in order to realize how good it was. It was trashed before it hit the screens as "red-baiting" tripe by the usual suspects, though it was nothing of the sort.

The movie suffered from a well organized effort to convince people not to see it. The same thing happened to "The Beast", a very well-made, well-acted and authentic movie about the Soviets in Afghanistan. They were both anti-Soviet, and in the 80's, the left couldn't allow that, especially at the movies.

[spoiler2]

"The worst is when they make crap movies"

.....and word about it gets around on the internet the first weekend, assuring it goes to video stores the next!

In these new days, a movie doesn't have to be seen by a few million people, before public opinion overrides the ad-hype.

The no-talent hacks HATE it when that happens!

[twigs]

You might want to see Nemo anyway. We went to see it weeks ago and my husband and daughter (older teenager) are still laughing over some of the lines. The humor was definitely directed toward adults. Extremely well written and visually lovely. I'm beginning to enjoy some of the PBS programs. Competition from the History Channel, etc. hasn't hurt them at all.

[MrNatural]

Yeah, I know there were some that didn't like it; I just wanted to chip in that some people did -

[Nick5]

I was close to people who made Red DAwn and believe me, MGM did everything they could to get people to see that movie -- there was no "well organized" effort to keep poeple from seeing it -- HOllywood read what they thought was the conservative temperature of the public at the time and made that movie in order to capitalize on that. It had a huge ad campaign. Believe me, Hollywood doens't make movies and then try not to sell them. The Beast was a different matter, and much simpler, really: it was put into production by the head of Columbia, DAvid Puttnam, who had been fired (for a series of huge flops) by the time he was replaced by a new head of production, Dawn Steel. DAwn Steel didn't want to put any promotional money into a movie whose success would only have brought glory to the previous guy in her job -- she wanted to save that money for her own projects. Take it from me, becuase I work here: it's ONLY ABOUT MONEY.

[jimt]

What'd Gandalf do between sets?

I'm sure neither of us want to know.

The knothead blathered on and on about how this (LOTR) was proof that gay men could be good in dramatic roles, yada, yada, as if no gay men had ever done so before ! Had someone mentioned as an aside that he was homosexual, my response would have been "so what". But when he shoves it in our faces on television and in print, it becomes an issue. "So what" becomes "yuck".

Similarly the political issues. When I hear the name Barbara Streisand, I don't think "actress" or "singer", I think "hypocritical communist radical".

[justlurking]

Unfortunately Red Dawn was a huge flop, one of the biggest box office flubs of the 80's, so you'll wait a long time.

Red Dawn grossed nearly $36M in the US:

http://us.imdb.com/Business?0087985

I wasn't able to find an authorative reference to the cost of production, but several reports put it at 8.5M. From what I remember, it wasn't exactly a high-cost production.

That's hardly a flop.

[weegee]

There "could" be a movie there (especially in this climate), where some apathetic high schoolers realize they were sold a false bill of goods by their liberal teachers and have to come to grips with a genuine threat to the American way of life (invasion/chaos created by those seeking to topple our government and interrupt our daily business).

It could be an action film or a suspense film.

After "Columbine" I don't think that the studios are anxious to make a movie about high school kids using firearms (especially in a positive manner).

There is a different type of movie about youth violence from Japan called Battle Royale (it is an alternate present-near future piece of fiction). It's played the rest of the world but may be a long time before it gets released in America (again Columbine would seem to be the reason). That the film would be "outside" of the age range of most high school students does not matter, Hollywood knows that minors see R rated films all the time (and NC-17 films probably aren't hard to acquire either).

[Nick5]

Yes, I was wrong on this -- as I said above, my sense that it was a flop came from the producers, who were friends of mine, and were hugely disappointed at the time, relative to what they had hoped for.

[Sloth]

Take it from me, becuase I work here: it's ONLY ABOUT MONEY.

So the question remains -- why do they persist in producing unprofitable crap?

[Nick5]

Another thought, about The Beast: it was directed by the screewriter of Red Dawn. It was a GREAT movie and it's very sad that more people didn't see it. You should know that by the mid 80's, following the Soviet invasion of AFghanistan, the left in Hollywood no longer embraced the Soviet Union. They saw the Soviet Union as just another oppressor. Local leftist causes had long since eclipsed affection for Moscow, as evidenced by the fact that two big anti-Soviet movies were put into production at that time by powerful heads of big studios, and one big anti-Soviet TV miniseries, Amerika.