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Oh how I love this man
Is the depressing marketing tag on the UK posters of CASSANDRAS DREAM, the current Woody Allen movie.
It then goes on to clarify, that this is of course, ‘a Woody Allen Movie’. The depressing thing is that it needed clarification, and that clarification wasn’t:’From the Director of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Deconstructing Harry, Bullets over Broadway, and about 40 other movies, of which at least 10 are works of genius and classics of cinema (and which number would NOT include Match Point), but instead ‘From the Director of Match Point’ - a mediocre thriller with average performances and a completely bullshit understanding of London and England’s social milieu.
Now just to be clear this isn’t a rant about Woody Allen. In my book the man’s allowed the odd off decade. He’s 73 for christ sake and has already given us so much (and early reviews suggest that VICKI CHRISTINA BARCELONA is a return to form) my problem is with a movie marketing industry so craven, and a film audience so ignorant and woefully short on memory, that ‘From the Director of Match Point’ is a considered, no doubt on some good evidence, a better marketing tag line than ‘From Woody Allen’.
I’m reminded of a comment I overheard in the cinema at a screening of ‘MEET THE FOCKERS’ - a young woman, probably in her early 20s asked her boyfriend - who’s that actor, you know the one playing the father with the fake breasts. I paused, captivated and horrified to hear what his answer would be: ‘You know him’ came the quick rejoinder in a tone of disbelief (phew at least the boyfriend knows who Robert De Niro is, I breathed to myself), ‘He’s that funny guy from ANALYZE THAT’
So I didn’t watch the Rugby this weekend. Or rather I did. but not the England-France match. I did catch the last half of South Africa’s rout of the Argentines.
Since I am, more or less, British, and since I have just finished making a movie about British - French rivalry, this decision might strike many as odd.
I was discussing this with a friend, explaining that on the whole I rather watch movies than sport, and in exasperation he said to me “but nobody wins in movies! I mean they are fun, but its a different TYPE of fun. Nobody wins!”
Fair point.
Or is it.
Thinking about it, I come to realise that the reason I prefer the narrative of most fiction to the narrative of sport is PRECISELY BECAUSE in good fiction nobody wins. Because life, unlike sport, is more complex than winning and losing. And so is the business of film-making
But you wouldn’t know that from reading about the business of film-making in the press. According to the press, both trade and national, film-making is entirely about winning. About winning the weekend box office. About topping last weekend, or last years, or last Augusts. The highest three day weekend in box office history, the highest 2nd weekend in September in Box Office History. The biggest opening of a James Bond movie in a leap year since Goldfinger.
Honestly, who cares.
Well, you might think I should. I am after all now a film distributor, and we are supposed to care about such stuff. The studio boss with his finger on the pulse of the box office numbers, staying up late every Friday night to see the opening night figures in from EDI is a figure of movie legend. Surely I should care.
And in one sense, of course I do. Even if I wasn’t a distributor, I have long maintained that all involved in the film business need to be conversant in the fact that it is a business, and should take a healthy interest in the number side of things, since numbers are after all the same thing as audience.
So what’s my beef?
Well I have two, actually.
First I don’t understand why the public should care about the box office of a film. What conceivable difference can it make to their enjoyment of a particular movie to know that it is the 26th highest grossing movie with a title with 4 Rs in it or not?
All the film-going public should care is whether the movie is any good or not, and if they in particular will like it. They can get the first information from a reviewer, or an aggregation of reviewers such as rotten tomato; and they can get the second set of information from asking a friend who knows their taste and has seen it, or from such peer review sites as Flixster. None of that information comes from knowing the opening weekend numbers. When you buy a car, you don’t ask how many other people have the same one - you want to know that it is properly engineered, safe, efficient and sexy looking. When you buy a tooth-paste, you don’t check that it is the best selling tooth-paste; when you choose a new partner, you don’t want to know that they’ve slept with more people than anyone else in the world.
Why should movies be different? How did a discussion of box office somehow escape from the business pages and make it into the culture pages? How did we come to confuse popularity with quality? Oscar Wilde once remarked that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. A book is either well written or badly written, that is all. If you believe the vast majority of our press, there is no longer such a thing as a good movie or a bad movie - a movie is either a block-buster or it is nothing.
My second beef (you remember, I had a pair of them) is about the industry. Now, of course we have to care about the numbers, but here my concern is that we are fixating on the WRONG numbers. Never mind that Box Office itself represents only a small share of a movies ultimate audience; and never mind that the co-relation between Box Office and, for example, DVD sales is far from perfect; the real problem with a fixation on Box Office is that it completely fails to distinguish cost and return. The interesting question is not how many people went to see a particular movie, but how much did it cost to get them there.
To take an extreme example, which would you adjudge more successful, a movie with a production budget of $1m and a marketing budget of $500k that succeeded in a UK Box Office of $1m, or a movie with a production budget of $100m, and a marketing budget of $5m that resulted in a UK box office of $5m?
And in case that seems to leading or unrealistic an example, consider as recent a movie as SUPERMAN RETURNS, which took $30m at the UK Box Office, which sounds pretty damn healthy, till you realise the movie cost $270m to make and had a UK marketing spend of circa $10m. Contrast that with, say RUN FAT BOY RUN which is close to taking $20m at the UK Box Office for a budget of around a 10th of SUPERMAN. Does that mean that Simon Pegg’s flabby jogger is a greater hero than the Man of Steel? Or that David Schwimmer is a greater director than Bryan Synger? No, but on this evidence he’s a more profitable one. Not that the Box Office would have told you than.
We need new better metrics, and headlines less obsessed with Box Office.