Day: August 3, 2010

Hollywood Round-up, 8/4


By Jason Apuzzo. • In the buildup to The Expendables, new clips of the film are being released (see above), and Sly Stallone is talking a little bit more freely about the political situation in Hollywood.  Here’s what he says today, in an interview conducting with Aint It Cool News readers:

[I]t’s a minor miracle the last RAMBO would even be released, but I took a gamble there … [for people who] desire to see an action film unfold that wreaks of pride and manly individualism that has unfortunately fallen out of vogue. I believe that everything is a cycle. And once again America will have its cinematic heroes reflect the incredible honor it is to be defending the most extraordinary country the planet has ever known. Just give it time, everything is a cycle.

I sincerely hope he’s right – that these things proceed in cycles.  Suffice it to say that if he’s right about this, then we’re long overdue for a correction toward more pro-American, pro-freedom material.  We’ll see.  Most of the action on the pro-freedom front seems to be coming from independent filmmakers, not from within the Hollywood system.

"Transformers 3"s Rosie Huntington-Whiteley .

• The debate rages on over the merits of 3D cinema.  Today J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon are more or less weighing in against 3D.  What’s interesting here is that nobody was having this debate right after Avatar.  It’s the recent run of crappy 3D conversions that have been causing doubts.  I continue to say: filmmakers should shoot natively in 3D, or not use the technology at all.

• Communist China is apparently eager to have Inception playing in its theaters. It’s no wonder; the film’s basic subject matter is brainwashing!  It doesn’t surprise me in the least that they would be enthusiastically courting this film, and otherwise banning Salt.  In related news, the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein notes the age-difference in critics who love/hate Inception – with older ones hating it.  I guess I’m breaking the mold here, because I’m under 40 and I hated it, too!

• The Jack Ryan reboot Moscow may have a director: Lost’s Jack Bender. In related Cold War movie news, you may not have known that until his recent meltdown Mel Gibson and Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black were apparently collaborating on a picture called Cold Warrior, which would have featured Gibson as “an ex-Cold War spy who comes out of retirement and teams up with a younger agent to stop a Russian terrorism threat.”  There’s also news today that Joel Silver may be trying to lure Gibson back to revive the Lethal Weapon franchise.  I can’t begin to describe what a bad idea that would be.

• Transformers 3‘s Rosie Huntington-Whiteley appears on the cover of LOVE Magazine today. Yowza.  Where does Michael Bay find these actresses?  Oh, right – from the pages of Victoria’s Secret catalogues.

"Mad Men"'s curvy Christina Hendricks in GQ.

• Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells asks a fascinating question today: “[W]hat about the next generation of Hollywood Republicans? Are there any industry righties from among [the] under-35 set? A movement without young blood is no movement at all.” How true!  Boy would I love to answer this question in detail for Mr. Wells, whom I suspect would be fascinated by the answer.  Let’s just say that it’s to the benefit of certain people’s media careers that you never hear about the younger crowd – or about anyone currently involved in actual filmmaking, for that matter. You’ll always here about them here at Libertas, though, because that’s our entire mission: to promote and support pro-freedom filmmaking.  Plus we have great pin-ups.

• And speaking of which, Tron‘s Olivia Wilde, who is quickly establishing herself as a go-to sci fi babe, apparently just shot a nude scene for Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens in which she stands “naked in front of a bonfire in front of 500 Apache warriors.” Hey, this sounds like my kind of film!  Maybe Favreau read this.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks does an interview and photoshoot for this month’s UK GQ. We’re big fans of Mad Men here at LFM (see here), and are pleased to see this retro-curvy bombshell is popping up (and out) everywhere these days …

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.

Posted on August 3rd, 2010 at 1:42pm.

What Rules Hollywood? Fear

[Editor’s Note: Today we introduce a new contributor to LFM, The Joker.]

By The Joker. I’m a comedy writer who works mostly for studios on mainstream movies.  Trust me when I tell you that you’ve seen some of my films.

Today I want to dispel a major myth about the environment of movie studios, at least when it comes to comedies: that the powers that be are trying to enforce a political agenda.  If you’ve spent any time at all at a studio, you know how ridiculous that sounds. That’s because studio executives are governed by one – and only one – emotion: fear… of losing their jobs.  If Hollywood has one reigning ideology, one overriding “agenda” that governs everything that happens, it’s this fear of being fired.

Fear is the unified field theory of Hollywood.

I have great respect for most executives at the studios, because they do generally have a skill set. They are fairly good with story structure, and give surprisingly well-thought-out notes. But on certain issues, the political ones, the notes tend to gravitate towards the absurd because their Number One Rule of Comedy is: Offend No One.  Why?  Because executives are basically afraid.

So given the mandate of “offending no one,” comedy writers are generally asked to excise all politics from the plot, characters, and themes. When in doubt, go to a cliché – a tried and true device – so the executive can point to the market research if the movie bombs. Since the underlying plot of many comedies is usually irrelevant (e.g., who remembers that Happy Gilmore is trying to save his grandmother’s house?), no executive wants to go out on a limb by depicting something out of the ordinary. Go for the safe bad guy (corporations), the pat ending (the divorced couple gets back together), the inoffensive villain (Russians and Nazis okay, Arabs and African-Americans not so much).

The Joker dispenses advice about Hollywood.

This leads to a haphazard situation in terms of the values that are promoted in a mainstream Hollywood comedy.  Sometimes those values will be liberal, but sometimes conservative.  Instead of realistic behavior befitting the year 2010, for example, we’ll substitute family values straight out of the 1950’s – such as the total ban on characters having abortions in studio movies. But sometimes the dice roll the other way, and the cliché is a modern liberal one.  So real estate developers are the bad guys, and homeless people are always white (unless they’re down-on-their-luck geniuses or violin virtuosos). But no matter what, it’s got to be a cliché – because clichés don’t offend anyone (except for people looking for something original).

This reminds me of a romantic comedy I worked on for a major studio, in which the couple has sex with other people during a break in their relationship, only to get back together in the end. The studio’s one note was: The girl can’t have sex with another guy.  She can almost have sex (whatever that means), but she can’t go through with it.  I asked, “Okay, so they both ‘almost’ have sex with other people?”  But the studio said,  “Oh, no, the guy can have sex with someone else, just the girl can’t.”  And the executive giving the note was a woman.  So was her boss and the head of the studio.  How’s that for progressive Hollywood feminism?

So don’t think that studios are always nefarious cabals with an evil liberal agenda.  It’s more like Office Space, with fearful corporate bureaucrats just trying to keep their jobs – even if it means making comedies dumber and less original.  Because at the end of the day, it’s not that important for an executive’s career advancement to make hit movies. It’s much more important not to make a bomb.  That’s really something to be afraid of.

[Editor’s Note: Special thanks to the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein for posting on this piece.]

Posted on August 3rd, 2010 at 10:38am.