Three movies and one nail-biting
weekend; Open Wide How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing Miramax
Books: 432 pp., $23.95; [HOME EDITION]
By Lynda Obst
Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.:
Nov 28, 2004. pg. R.2
Full Text (955 words)
REPORTERS Jonathan Bing and Dade
Hayes had a nifty idea: Pick a summer weekend and watch the movies
selected for release by the major studios duke it out. Looking for "a bruising one with a clear winner
and loser," they selected July 4, 2003, the long weekend opener for "Terminator
3," "Legally Blonde 2" and "Sinbad," and tracked all the hard-working directors,
producers, marketing execs and stars -- all, that is, but the ones hiding a
flop, who refused to participate.
The resulting book, "Open Wide: How Hollywood Box
Office Became a National Obsession," captures the dizzying frenzy of releasing
a major motion picture, from the creation of marketing materials through the
terrifying preview process to the opening weekend. We see the creators and studio
executives of "LB2" try to position their "product" and then, after the first
preview, question why they picked that marketing scheme in the first place and
choose another. We see dubious fans at a comic-book convention hiss the "T3" movie
trailer's debut and "T3" team members arguing and nail-biting as they glean
the first reactions to the film they have nurtured all year, and then watch
how it fares through the summer.
This book is unique for its emphasis on the less
glamorous post- production phase of the game. We see our soon-to-be Governator
pushing his product to theater owners at the film-marketing extravaganza ShoWest,
vouching for the credibility of the third installment of the "Terminator" series
to die-hard Arnold Schwarzenegger fans at Comix conventions and realizing how
critical it is to his (hard as it now is to believe) then-flagging career. "LB2" star
and producer Reese Witherspoon appears at trailer meetings, previews and in
broom closet meetings at the back of movie theaters.
The writing by Hayes and Bing, both reporters
for Variety, soars way over the trade-periodical bar, though it occasionally
drifts into technical insider lingo that can feel like an eternal afternoon at
an airless marketing seminar. They also have unearthed a remarkable amount of
insight into the history of the modern blockbuster that will illuminate even
the most jaded studio maven. The book is a must for the novice director or studio
exec and is likely to fascinate even the most jaded Hollywood junkie.
For those who believe that the wide-release formula sprang full- blown
from the "Jaws" of Steven Spielberg, the authors write that the pernicious "wide
opening" of their title, in which a movie opens in more than 2,000 theaters
in one weekend, was first discussed in a Variety column circa 1954.
The chronicled weekend belonged to three
movies, two of which were sequels. And both looked fail-safe 10 months earlier
when their release dates were scheduled. It turns out that all the sequels
of mid-summer 2003 were on a collision course with audience exhaustion for
sequels. But these three movies in particular also were on a collision course
with a lot of family barbecues. "It's a myth that July Fourth is a powerful weekend" for
movies, says "Terminator 3" director Jonathan Mostow. "The decision to go on
that date was about ego.... If I knew then what I know now I would have pushed
for another date." Hindsight is the gift studio chiefs never get for Christmas
or any other release date.
The chapter on the weekend's box office grosses
is priceless. With unprecedented access, the authors reveal the spin, the pain,
the exultation at the first day's numbers, the despair as the second- day numbers
collapse. For the creators of the films, the hype, the expectations and the
disappointments are at times unbearable. It is all the more astonishing to
realize that this is a weekly event for marketing execs. "It is not for the faint of heart," Peter
Adee of MGM says upon the arrival of initial grosses of "Legally Blonde 2."
The book is chock-full of delicious gems:
There is the fight over "LB2's" teaser trailer -- more bitter than any argument
over the cut of the film -- when the marketing team discovers that their target
audience rejected the Washington, D.C., premise of the movie. Or this quote from
director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld: "I get from everyone that I'm supposed to
feel burned by MGM .... I just feel like they're a studio and I never expected
them to not act like a business."
By far the most insightful chapter, full
of original ideas and value judgments about the influence of the creeping,
sweeping effect of the blockbuster on world culture, is the one on "The Matrix Revolutions." The
authors argue that the biggest global release of all time was less "a forceful
salvo in the war against copyright theft" than a preemptive blow against negative
word of mouth. Hayes and Bing are at their most controversial and eloquent when
they call the second Matrix sequel "an inside joke -- a commercial blockbuster
that was also an indictment of the blockbuster culture that sustained it."
Given that insight, the book's parting sentiment is disappointing. They
leave us with this final thought from the late movie mogul Joseph E. Levine: "You
can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget
is big enough."
If this were true, studio heads wouldn't
be running around like headless chickens nursing ulcers. If this were true,
the flops of the summer of 2003 wouldn't have happened. No, the audience is
too smart, all the money thrown at them not withstanding. And "Open Wide" is
too smart a book for such a facile conclusion. *
Credit: Lynda Obst, a producer at Paramount
Pictures, is the author of "Hello, He Lied: And Other Truths From the Hollywood
Trenches."
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