July 8, 2006
 
RUTHERFORD ON FILM: Can Hollywood Insiders Predict Which Movies Will be Tent-Pole Sensations…and Which Ones Will Head Straight to Bargain DVD Bin?
 
By Tony Rutherford
Huntington News Network Writer
 

“We Are Marshall” Director McG

Huntington, WV (HNN) -- Will “We Are Marshall” be Number One box office gold or a down and out failure at theatres? For that matter, will “My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” “Lady in the Water,” “Miami Vice” and “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” succeed or flop?
 
According to an article in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, July 2, 2006, studio executives and insiders know just as much as you or I about that possibility. Actually, they may be less knowledgeable. The article suggests many factors control a film's success or lack thereof, so many factors that predictions are worth no more than random guessing and just plain luck.
 
For instance, Sherry Lansing had a hot hand at Paramount boasting such successes as “Forrest Gump,” “Titanic,” and Braveheart.” Lansing lost her exec job at the snowy mountain top studio after under performers like “Timeline” and “Lara Croft the Tomb Raider.” After she departed Paramount, two of the projects she had “green lighted”-- “War of the Worlds” and “The Longest Yard” jumped into tent-pole heaven.
 
In the 70s the legendary 20th Century Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck fired his son, Richard, after a series of expensive dogs, including “Dr. Doolittle” (1967), “Star” (1968) and “Hello, Dolly!” (1969). After his dismissal, two of his projects -- “Patton” and “The French Connection” connected both financially and on Oscar night. Meanwhile, Richard moved over to a new production company and “green lighted” Spielberg’s “Sugarland Express” and “Jaws.”
 
The LA Times article, “Meet Hollywood’s Latest Genius… then again, in six months he could be a loser” advances two filmmaking theories from the minds of economists and mathematicians.
 
The “theories” are as complex as the business itself.
 
Harvard Business School professor, Anita Elberse, postulates that when a studio executive makes a decision to go forward with a project (i.e. “green lighting”), the production team does not know if they can pull off the film as planned. Thus, you can not know the appeal of the film until it’s in the can and/or by showing the finished product to focus groups, their insight first reveals whether you have a hit or a flop.
 
The second theory on “hits” has a more radical reception: It’s all a matter of randomness just like rolling dice or flipping coins. Arthur De Vany, a retired professor of economics and member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at UC Irvine analogize the process to the purchase of breakfast cereal. “If breakfast cereals were like films, each time you visited the store we would find a large selection of new cereals and only a few brands that survived from our last trip.” Bottom line -- people would rush to the popular new brands then within weeks or months move on to the newest product releases.
 
However, neither gamblers nor Hollywood studios, based on these theories, want to admit that they have so little control over the success or failure of the finish line. UC Berkeley professor Daniel Kahnerman researched the so called reasons behind why some people appear to be better at picking random matters. In fact, his research on how people make these financial decisions won him the Nobel Prize in economics.
 
Sociologists and psychologists explain that gamblers tossing dice believe that a gentle throw brings low numbers and a hard throw results in large numbers. Turning random events into games of so-called skill is an “illusion of control.”
 
Neither people nor Hollywood execs like feeling helpless to randomness. To bring a little comfort, boost an ego, and attribute skill, Actually, the old studio and exhibition system favored moguls such as Darryl Zanuck, Walt Disney and Irving Thalberg. These legends of filmmaking were more showmen than corporate executive, which lends credence to the paper’s quote of Richard Zanuck who believes “you have to judge someone by their entire career.”
 
But the three aforementioned showmen worked in a system where they had power over two essentials in the filmmaking world -- a knack for picking good stories and control over product distribution. At one time, the studios owned theatres in most major cities, thus, the ability to “control” the distribution of a film. When the courts ruled this was anti-competitive, the studios had to sell their theatres (that’s why there are so many former Paramount’s, Warner’s and Fox’s across the country). When the studio heads lost complete creative and budgetary control along with control of release patterns, their films became more and more vulnerable to an information cascade. Now, they scramble for good word of mouth -- if moviegoers hear good things, they go and tell others; if they hear bad things, they stay away.
 
Thus, instead of movies playing for weeks while audiences discover jewels, the pictures open everywhere across the country (and world?) on the same day. By Sunday, news media across the nation report the weekend’s Top Five or Top Ten flicks in much the same manner as radio stations divulge the Top 40 CD’s of the week.
 
With those weekly reports, it is next to impossible to nurture a worthy production by slowly letting audiences in large cities generate positive word of mouth, then slowly widening the release to more cities, and continuing that pattern until the smallest towns are yelling at the theatre owner, “When are you showing ‘Blank Blank’ which everyone in New York and Cleveland are talking about?”
 
PART TWO: An egotistical personal analysis of common mistakes executives make in marketing their film, call it a Butterfly Effect or a Tony Rule of Thumb.