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scriptwriters individuals who create plays for the movies, with scenes and dialog
talent agent an individual who represents creative personnel (such as actors, directors, authors, and screenwriters) and aims to link them with production firms in exchange for a percentage of the creator’s revenues from the finished product
treatment a detailed outline of an initial pitch to executives of a production or distribution firm; if the executives approve of the treatment, they will probably order a script to be written
on spec writing a script for a film without a contract to do so, with the hope that when the script is passed along to various production firms by the scriptwriter’s agent it will be bid for and purchased
green light a term used to describe production and distribution executives’ approval of the making of a particular film
back-end deal or percentage of the gross a deal in which a production firm convinces a major actor or director to take a lower salary in return for a percentage of the money that the production firm will later receive from the distributor
guild a union established by writers, directors, and/or actors to protect their mutual interests and maintain standards
box office receipts the sum of money taken in for admission at movie theaters around the country
genre film a movie that fits a classic storytelling formula (science fiction, horror, action) and is typically made relatively inexpensively
track record the previous successes or failures of a product, person, or organization
distribution rights the rights to circulate a particular movie to companies in different parts of the world (different territories)
line producer the individual responsible for making sure that the equipment and personnel necessary for a film’s production are available when they are needed
completion bond company an insurance company that, for a large fee, will cover the costs of film production that exceed an agreed-upon amount
In November 2007, the Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 10,000 film and television writers, went on strike over a variety of issues in their negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) supported the writers on the picket lines, including SAG president Alan Rosenberg, shown here (right) with Writers Guild of America president Patric Verrone.
The process by which a movie goes from an idea in someone's head to a film that the distributor can ship to theaters is time-consuming and torturous as well as expensive (see Figure 12.3). Production company executives will also say that overseeing the filming and editing of their movies is only a small part of what their company does. Other important steps involve getting the idea, getting the talent, and getting the money. Only after these steps have been performed can the activities involved in actually making the movie take place. Let's look briefly at each stage in this process.
Getting the stars
Making the movie
Getting the movie
Making the domestic distribution deal
Making the international distribution deal
Making deals for other distribution windows
Deciding whether to carry the movie and (if so) at what theaters and how many weeks it should play
Figure 12.3 Producing a Movie and Releasing it to Theaters
Marketing the movie
Negotiating an exhibition license with the distributor
May work with distributor to market the movie in the exhibition organization's territories
Planning the movie's release strategy
Post-theatrical activities: Distributing movies to other "windows" and coordinating marketing with them
GETTING THE IDEA An idea for a movie can come from virtually anywhere. Producers have gotten ideas for movies from television shows, comic books, toys, short stories, and newspaper articles. Scriptwriters and books have traditionally been the most common sources, however.
Scriptwriters are individuals who create plays for the movies, with scenes and dialog. Plot ideas from them often come to production firms from the writers' talent agents, individuals who represent various creative personnel (such as actors, directors, authors, and screenwriters) and aim to link them with production firms in exchange for a percentage of the creators' revenues from the finished product. An agent's job is to gain a reputation around Hollywood for having good creative and business ideas so that, when he or she knocks on a producer's door with a suggestion, the producer will listen. Agents know what has been popular. They also know what kinds of films certain producers like to make.
An idea for a film from an established writer will sometimes be only a few lines that go to the heart of the plot. ("A small wooden box arrives on the doorstep of a troubled married couple, who open it and become instantly wealthy. Little do they realize that opening the box also kills someone they do not know.'') If the producer likes the idea (this one actually came from an episode of the classic TV series, Twilight Zone)y the writer might be paid to write a detailed outline, which is called a treatment. If the producer likes the treatment, the next step might be payment for a full script. Less-established writers may write an entire script without getting paid, which is called writing a script on spec. The writer's agent will pass around a spec script to various production firms in the hope that they will bid for it. Attractive scripts can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.
The second traditional source for film ideas—books—became especially popular in the late 1990s. Producers had long looked for successful books with stories that fit the types and budgets of films that they expected to make; now they were furiously trying to beat one another to new books, or even books that had not yet been published, with stories that seemed to suggest a cinematic gold mine. The Horse Whisperer was an early example of the stampede. In 1994, while the book was still in manuscript, the writer's agent orchestrated an auction of film rights that netted the author $3 million. The amounts involved can go much higher than that. According to the trade magazine Variety, producer Dino de Laurentiis plunked down $ 10 million in 1999 for film rights to Thomas Harris's sequel to the successful book and movie Silence of the Lambs before the sequel hit the bookstores. It was a shrewd move. The movie that resulted from that investment, Hannibal, was a major hit of 2001. Books are still a healthy source of movie ideas. Think of the hit Twilight vampire series, which started as books; it's handled by an independent distributor, Summit Entertainment.
When top production executives approve the making of a movie, they give it the green light. A project will have the chance of being given a green light only if it fits
Production company heads have ideas about segments of the market that are useful to target with particular types of films. Teens and young adults, for example, are thought to like horror films (Halloween). Women are thought to like romantic comedies (He’s Just Not That Into You), while men are typed as adventure movie (Transformers) or gross-out comedy (The Hangover) oriented. People over forty-five years old are the targets of small films (sometimes British made) that have a subtle comedic or deeply dramatic sensibility. Think of It’s Complicated or Bright Star. Of course, many women and men attend the movies together, so executives often try to leaven movies targeted to one type of audience with some material that another type would like. An adventure film will often have a strong romantic component, for example.
The rising importance of the non-U.S. market to Hollywood has meant that, when executives green light a film, they think about its potential around the world. Historically, most U.S.-made comedies do not “travel” well, so a budget for a comedy will typically have to be low enough to be profitable from U.S. revenues alone. Adventures do travel well, and some action stars—Jackie Chan and Sylvester Stallone are examples—do better outside than inside the United States. As a result, action movies tend to emphasize violence and hair-raising stunts and usually require little knowledge of English to understand. Some of these films have been made in the United States, many elsewhere. Others have been coproductions that blend the investment and production talents of a U.S.-based firm with those of a firm of another country, for example France and India.
Increasingly, U.S. firms are making movies for other parts of the world, with the notion that they may make money even if they don't do well in the United States. Universal Pictures was deeply involved in funding and distributing the latest installment of the British Mr. Bean comedy in 2007 (Mr. Bean’s Holiday); the films traditionally do terrifically in the United Kingdom and very well in parts of Europe, but are weak in the United States.
GETTING THE TALENT When a production firm purchases a script or book, its executives typically have certain actors and directors in mind. Sometimes a major actor may get control of a property with the idea of starring in a film based on it. The actor's agent may even go further in dealing with production firms that are interested in the project: the agent may take a number of people from his or her roster of clients—actors, a well-known director, a highly regarded cinematographer—and tell production firms that the deal comes in a package. To many observers of the film industry, the fact that a number of talent agencies have the power to organize such major film deals with production firms is evidence that talent agencies are among Hollywood's most powerful players.
The money to pay actors and other creative personnel must, of course, come from the overall budget. The salary requirements of the most popular stars (some make more than $20 million a picture) mean that only the major studios and a few other production companies that expect to make extremely expensive movies can afford to hire these stars. Sometimes a production firm will make a deal with a famous actor or director in which the actor or director takes a lower salary but gets a percentage of the money that the production firm receives from the distributor, known as a back-end deal or percentage of the gross. Stars often negotiate variations on such deals to help themselves and help movies get made. For the Warner Brothers' comedy Yes Man, for example, Jim Carrey gave up his upfront salary (usually $22 million) to become a one-third investor in the film. He also agreed to start receiving a back-end percentage until the studio recouped the $53 million Warner said the film cost. The deal paid off handsomely. Yes Man was expected to gross $200 million worldwide. Carrey stood to earn far more than his regular salary.
Some industry insiders have suggested that the high salaries stars are demanding are leading producers to hold off on hiring established, experienced actors in secondary roles in favor of more-affordable relative newcomers. Rules about actors' minimum pay and working conditions have been established through deals between the Screen Actors Guild and the major production firms. Similar arrangements for screenwriters have been made by the Writer's Guild of America. These guilds are unions established by writers, directors, and/or actors to protect their mutual interests and maintain standards.
The guilds provide the less highly paid workers with a collective voice. Sometimes that results in a strike, as in 2007 and 2008, when writers expressed their frustration when the major studios and the Writers Guild of America could not come to terms with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers about how much pay the writers should receive from the major studios for work that appears on the internet. The strike of over 10,000 Writers Guild members crippled Hollywood. It ended production on TV dramas and comedies, caused the Golden Globe Awards to be canceled, and delayed a number of movie productions.
GETTING THE MONEY Getting a well-known actor to agree to play the lead in a movie can help a production firm get the cash it needs to make the film. Getting the money is what makes generating a motion picture so painful. The amount it costs to make a movie varies over a wide range, from way over $ 100 million dollars (Avatar; Spider Man, Pirates of the Caribbean) to between $50 and $100 million (The Simpsons Movie reportedly cost about $75 million) to less than $50 million (Knocked Up cost $40 million to produce). The word in Hollywood is that it is the most expensive movies that tend to become mega-hits. Still, a moderately inexpensive film can also reap great benefits for its production firm. Oncey a 2007 musical romance from Ireland, cost about $150,000 to make. In the United States alone it brought in $7 million in box office returns.4
A film's budget isn't typically created based on the producer's calculations of what is necessary to tell the story. Instead, a story is often chosen and developed to fit the budget that executives of a production firm can manage. Consequently, a production firm's heads decide what kinds of monetary risks they want to take (or can take). They then go about choosing a story, or tailoring it, to fit the budget they have. Take as an example Dimension Films, the company that produced the hit movies Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009). Dimension Films is a division of The Weinstein Company, an independent production and distribution firm. Dimension makes genre films—movies that fit classic storytelling formulas (science fiction, horror, action) and are typically relatively inexpensive to make. Movie industry executives believe that successful genre films can be made with relatively low budgets. If a movie soars beyond its niche, as Halloween did (and the Saw series before that), its success makes up for films that brought the production firm little return.
When millions and millions of dollars are hanging in the balance, giving a film the green light is not easy. Not only must executives believe in the script, the director, and the stars, they also must have the money to make the film and a company to distribute it. If the production firm is part of a major studio, the chief executive officer of the studio typically discusses the proposed film with the production and distribution chiefs. Once the film and its budget are approved, the studio as a whole (encompassing both the production and distribution divisions) provides the money. It is the distribution division, however, that works to make the money back, and more, through a percentage of the box office receipts.
Independent firms have a harder time getting the money to make a film. If the independent firm has had previous successes, it may be fortunate enough to have a multi-picture distribution deal with a major that includes some financing. However, the independent may still have to use its own funds, or funds borrowed from banks, to make up the rest of the film's budget. The banks, of course, are hoping that the movie will make back its costs for the production firm so that they can retrieve their money with interest.
The most consistently successful independent production outfits are so tightly linked to particular distributors that they are virtually extensions of the distribution firm's own studio output. When it was independent, the Pixar animation firm had a distribution deal with Disney. Pixar films became so important to Disney's slate that eventually Disney decided to buy the company. More recently, Morgan Creek Productions has a steady output deal with Universal.
Production companies that don't have long-term deals with distributors have to work a lot harder to find cash and a distributor. Sometimes wealthy investors will put up the money in the hope that they will get lucky and the film will be a hit. (Often these rich people also want to be close to the glamour of Hollywood.) Sometimes an independent production firm with a record of successes (a track record) will be able to convince a major bank to provide a revolving credit agreement for several pictures. When a production firm is seeking a loan for part of a film's budget, the loan will be easier to get if the production firm can show that an established star has been signed for the film, and that an established distribution firm has agreed to take it on and to advance it money.
A popular way for independent producers to get the money for film projects is to sell distribution rights: the rights to circulate a particular movie to companies in different parts of the world (different territories). For example, a production firm's executives might get $2 million from an Asian firm that wants the rights to distribute the film to theaters (and perhaps home video rights) in Southeast Asia. Another distributor may bid $2 million for distribution rights in Australia and New Zealand. A third distributor might buy North American theatrical and home video rights. By accumulating these territory deals, often before the film is fully made, the production firm can show banks that a substantial portion of the film's budget is already in hand. Go to http://www.imdb.com/title/ttll25849/companycredits and check out the many regional distributors involved in circulating (and financing) The Wrestler, a 2008 release produced by Wild Bunch, Protozoa Pictures, and Saturn Films. The film turned out to be a hit in many territories. That kind of financing is, however, a difficult puzzle to put together, and in the late 2000s the economic downturn and the popularity of local films in different regions of the world made it quite difficult for independent production firms to gather substantial parts of their budgets from international presales.
U.S. actor Mickey Rourke attended the Moscow premiere of his movie The Wrestler in March 2009. Central Partnership distributed the movie in Russia.
GETTING TO THE ACTUAL MAKING OF THE MOVIE As you can see, a lot of work has to be done on a movie project before the actual moviemaking even begins. The moviemaking process involves a large number of people with widely different talents. To get an idea of how many, first take a look at Figure 12.4.
Then watch all the credits at the end of the next movie you attend. (Tell the people with you that it's a class assignment.) Alternately, look up any movie on a site such as the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) and look at the cast and crew listings. Pay particular attention to the different jobs that are involved. Experienced personnel scout locations for certain scenes in the movie and try to minimize problems that might occur while filming there; casting directors help the director choose many of the actors; set designers, costume designers, makeup experts, and computer graphics personnel help create the physical shape of the space in which the actors work; stand-ins and stunt people help actors with boring or dangerous parts of the work; the cinematographer and the film crew create the look of the film as it will appear on screen; recording engineers make sure the sounds of the movie are appropriate (much of the dialogue will have to be re-recorded in a studio for clarity); a wide variety of personnel handle the equipment, the sound stage work, the salaries, the food, and all the other duties connected with a large project; and the editor decides (usually with the director) which versions ("shots") of different scenes should end up in the final version of the film.
Because of the large number of resources involved, every extra day of filming can be an enormous drain on the production firm's budget. Keeping the production on schedule is the role of the director, who controls the pace of filming, along with a line producer, who makes sure the equipment and personnel are there when they are needed. Some lenders, worried about spiraling costs, require production firms to hire completion bond companies. These are insurance companies that, for a large fee, will pay any costs of a film that exceed an agreed-upon amount. When a completion bond company signs on to a movie, especially one that is in danger of going over budget, it often sends its own executives to the sites where filming is taking place. By contract, those executives have the right to take control of some of the film's activities to keep it on budget.
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