FRONTLINE on PBS
The Monster That Ate Hollywood
Program #2007
Original Airdate: November 22, 2001 
  

NARRATOR: It's another opening of another show in 
Hollywood, a science fiction comedy called Evolution. 
It has a famous star, David Duchovny of The X-Files. 

INTERVIEWER: So what- what should we look for in the 
movie? 

DAVID DUCHOVNY: Well, that it's very funny, I think 
is one. And my ass, for another. 

INTERVIEWER: We get a chance to see your ass? 

NARRATOR: There's a famous director, Ivan Reitman of 
Ghostbusters. 

INTERVIEWER: How excited are you about this movie? 

IVAN REITMAN: I'm very excited. I'm proud of it. I 
think, you know, good work was done, and I think- I'm 
really looking forward to see how the audience, you 
know, across America and the world responds to it. 

NARRATOR: A big studio, Dreamworks, is bankrolling the 
film with nearly $100 million. A major chunk of that 
money will be spent on marketing. 

IVAN REITMAN: It's always a tense time, you know, 
because there's always lots of competition and things 
like that. But I think- I think it'll be fine. 

NARRATOR: "Fine" means it'll make lots of money. All 
it has to do is stay in the theaters for at least two 
weeks. 

1st MOVIEGOER: I rarely go to movies anymore. 

2nd MOVIEGOER: Big production house movies are getting 
worse. 

3rd MOVIEGOER: You've got these blockbuster films 
coming out, $100 million films, and yet you don't 
see the quality. 

4th MOVIEGOER: A lot of them are over-hyped. 

5th MOVIEGOER: They're more repetitive now. Like, it's 
pretty much the same plot. 

6th MOVIEGOER: I wish they wouldn't recycle old themes. 
You know, if a movie's been done- you don't need Dennis 
the Menace Take Three. 

7th MOVIEGOER: They have, like, no plots, and they're 
really not funny. It's basically toilet humor. 

8th MOVIEGOER: It seems like movies just play to what 
they can sell. 

RICHARD NATALE, Entertainment Journalist: What's 
interesting about the business is that it's no longer 
the movie business. People don't make movies anymore, 
they make spectaculars. 

["Casablanca"] 

HUMPHREY BOGART: Of all the gin joints in all the towns 
in all the world, she walks into mine. 

NARRATOR: Richard Natale grew up watching the movies. 
Today he writes about them for papers like The Los 
Angeles Times. 

RICHARD NATALE: The reason that we went to see movies, 
the reason we went to see Casablanca, was because the 
story was really fascinating. The characters were 
compelling. We sat and ate our popcorn. We sat on the 
edge of our seats. We cried. We tore our hair out. We 
laughed hysterically. We don't do that anymore at 
movies. It happens less and less. 

PETER GUBER, Chairman, Mandalay Pictures: There's 
something in the magic of the lights that is 
inextricably true for all human beings- the shaman, the 
storyteller in front of the flickering images of the 
campfire that forever in our species have wowed us, I 
mean, from the very, very beginning. 

["Casablanca"] 

INGRID BERGMAN: If you knew how much I loved you, how 
much I still love you. 

PETER GUBER: It was a cottage industry. It really was. 
When I came to Columbia, Warner Brothers was a $400 
million company. That was the cost of Titanic with some 
prints and advertising worldwide. The whole company was 

$400 million. And films were the business of the 
business. There wasn't really much of a television 
business. Yes, there was some series business. 

There was nowhere else that the features went after 
their theatrical run, a little bit with network 
television and some syndication packages. And 
international was called "foreign" then. It was foreign 
to most of the people in this business, and it was that 
place across the ocean where the films played after 
nobody here was really interested in it. 

NARRATOR: If anybody knows what happened to the movies, 
it's probably Peter Guber. Listen to this story: Once 
he made good, profitable low-budget movies. 

["Midnight Express" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: He was a 20-year old American boy up against 
a system he didn't understand, spoken in a language he 
couldn't speak. Midnight Express. 

NARRATOR: Then one day he made Batman. It cost a 
fortune, and it made a fortune. They said he had a 
Midas touch, so they gave him a studio, Columbia. And 
then a big Japanese company, Sony, wanted to be in the 
movie business. So they bought Columbia and paid Guber 
many, many millions of dollars. 

["Batman"] 

JACK NICHOLSON: Nice outfit. 

NARRATOR: And then Guber made a lot of flops. That's 
Hollywood. 

["Tango and Cash"] 

SYLVESTER STALLONE: Glad you could drop in. 

NARRATOR: But something had changed. 

PETER GUBER: The whole business went through this 
incredible transition, and suddenly the world changed 
in an instant. 

PETER BART, Editor-in-Chief, "Variety": It's become a 
corporate town, a very corporate town. It was a not a 
corporate town 10, 15 years ago. 

NARRATOR: Peter Bart saw the change in Hollywood. As a 
studio executive at Paramount, Bart backed what many 
considered one of the last great Hollywood movies, 
Chinatown. But then, after he went to work at Variety, 
Hollywood's hometown paper, he watched an invasion of 
Hollywood. 

PETER BART: There are tensions growing from the fact 
that you're dealing with these immense and very hard to 
define companies which have mind-bending resources. I 
mean, they're not even companies, they're sort of 
nation states. AOL/Time Warner is a nation state. So 
is Vivendi. 

And these companies are so new that they haven't even 
really come together yet. 

[newsreel] 

ANNOUNCER: For this is fabulous Hollywood- 

NARRATOR: Once Hollywood liked to think of itself as 
just another small-time American city. 

ANNOUNCER: With its grandiose Graumann's Chinese 
Theater- 

LIONEL CHETWYND, Screenwriter/Director: It used to be 
that the people we worked for, we knew. We were all in 
the same boat together. It was a huge business, but a 
pretty small community. We all ate pretty much in the 
same restaurants, and we all lived together in the same 
mix. 

ANNOUNCER: Colorful, exotic playtime nightclubs of the 
stars- 

LIONEL CHETWYND: And so in a curious way, we were all 
interdependent. 

ANNOUNCER: World-famous motion picture studios- 

LIONEL CHETWYND: Our fates were all intertwined. 

ANNOUNCER: Beautiful, glamorous femininity- 

LIONEL CHETWYND: We had a common destiny, whether we 
wanted it or not. Now, what's changed with the 
concentration of ownership is, is that these guys, who 
are at the head of the studios, are basically 
divisional managers in huge conglomerates. Sometimes 
that's only a middle-management position. They're not 
in the same business we are. 

PETER GUBER, Chairman, Mandalay Pictures: What is the 
attraction to a French water company to buying a movie 
studio in Hollywood? What is the attraction of a 
multi-national consumer electronics company - two of 
them, Panasonic and Sony - to buying companies in 
Hollywood? What is the attraction of a Canadian spirits 
company, Seagrams, to buying a company in Hollywood? 

There's something that is so powerful in that medium 
that I think companies see that as an enduring legacy 
of the human race. So to own a piece of that territory 
is a very compelling element. Now, when it's also 
economically sound - and it can be - it becomes a very 
powerful magnet for these companies. 

NARRATOR: And what drew those companies to this 
business was what happened back 25 years ago, when 
Hollywood created its very own monster. 

["Jaws" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: It will attack and devour anything. It is as 
if God created the devil and gave him jaws. 

ROBERT LEVIN, Pres., MGM Worldwide Mrkt. & Distr.: The 
movie that everyone always references as the big change 
in how movies were distributed and marketed was Jaws. 

["Jaws"] 

ACTOR: You yell "Barracuda!" everybody says, "Huh? 
What?" You yell "Shark!" we've got a panic on our hands 
on the 4th of July. 

NARRATOR: Bob Levin knows how to get people into a 
theater, and he learned how to do it from the way Jaws 
was sold- wide. 

ROBERT LEVIN: Jaws was, like, the first thousand-screen 
release, a big release using media to really support it. 

["Jaws" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: None of man's fantasies of evil can compare 
with the reality of Jaws. 

ROBERT LEVIN: Instead of going out in a few number of 
theaters in a city and then expanding more and more and 
more, that with- if you went and advertised a movie on 
network television and successfully interest an audience 
in that movie, you could open everywhere at the same 
time. 

PETER GUBER, Chairman, Mandalay Pictures: Jaws was 
significant as a watershed film, and it's almost 
ironical. The four words that start the book, "And so 
it began," are the same four words that you could use 
for the business, the change in the business. And so 
it began, these wide releases. 

["Jaws 2" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: When the movie Jaws first opened, it created 
a sensation. 

PETER GUBER: They would create this enormous swell of 
momentum- 

["Jaws 2" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: -and shark sightings increased by the 
thousands. 

PETER GUBER: -that would create gargantuan box office 
from the beginning. 

["Jaws 2" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: How could there have been only one? 

NARRATOR: And so Hollywood's own monster, the movie as spectacle, began to 
consume the business itself. 

["Jaws 2" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: See it before you go back in the water. 

NARRATOR: Two years after Jaws, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader created 
white-hot box office, and something new: ancillary profits, toys and dolls 
and other doo-dads. By then the monster was out of control. 

["The Empire Strikes Back"] 

JAMES EARL JONES: You are beaten. It is useless to resist! Don't let 
yourself be destroyed, as Obi Wan did! 

NARRATOR: The sequel was born. Yoda and Jabba the Hut. Rocky lost- 

["Rocky"] 

ACTOR: You'll go back to being a two-bit nothing! 

NARRATOR: -and then he won. And then there were three more Rockys. A guy 
with a chainsaw killed people, and then he killed more people. The money was 
unbelievable. 

MICHAEL CIEPLY, Film Journalist: Beginning in about 1978, the movie industry 
went through a 21-year period when it showed compound annual revenue growth 
of 12.5 percent. Now, that's almost unheard of. I mean, that's a level of 
growth year after year, compound in double digits, very serious double 
digits, that really supported kind of a gold rush mentality. 

["Rambo II" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: Rambo. What most people call hell, he called home. 

NARRATOR: Michael Ciepley says that once Hollywood created the 
blockbusters- 

["Rambo II" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: Rambo, First Blood: Part II. 

NARRATOR: -the blockbusters then created, well, Blockbusters, the video 
chain. Now, with the invention of VCRs, the movies could go home. And did 
they ever. 

MICHAEL CIEPLY: Very rich guys, very big bankers, suddenly realized that 
there was enormous value in the libraries that'd been created. So what was 
a very tiny business was now a business that they could fund. They could 
loan money against it because they could project out the impact of cable 
and video and say, "Hey, we can resell every movie that's ever been made." 
So there's huge hidden value here. 

["Wall Street"] 

MICHAEL DOUGLAS: Greed is good. Greed works. 

NARRATOR: Hollywood has always had a weakness for greedy villains. They're 
good box office. And sometimes they're also good business partners. 

["Wall Street"] 

MICHAEL DOUGLAS: The richest 1 percent of our country owns half our 
country's wealth, $5 trillion. 

MICHAEL CIEPLY: Money flowed like a tidal wave into this business. That's 
when the takeover wave hit. That tidal wave of money completely transformed 
what the movie industry is. 

["Jerry Maguire"] 

TOM CRUISE: Show me the money. 

CUBA GOODING, Jr.: Yes! Louder! 

TOM CRUISE: Show me the money! 

CUBA GOODING, Jr.: That's it, brother! But you got to yell! 

NARRATOR: As the movies prospered, mocking the '90s lust for money- 

["Jerry Maguire"] 

CUBA GOODING, Jr.: I need to hear you, Jerry! 

TOM CRUISE: Show me the money! 

NARRATOR: -voracious multi-national companies were licking their chops. 
Hollywood companies were ripe and devoured. They quickly organized their 
movie business to look a lot like all their other businesses. 

["Jerry Maguire"] 

CUBA GOODING, Jr.: I love black people! 

TOM CRUISE: I love black people! 

CUBA GOODING, Jr.: What're you going to do, Jerry? 

TOM CRUISE: Show me the money! 

CUBA GOODING, Jr.: Congratulations. You're still my agent. 

LARRY GERBRANDT, COO & Sr. Analyst, Kagan World Media: The goal is to cut 
out as many of the middlemen as possible and maximize the revenue of the 
film. Viacom is as good an example as any of vertical integration. Paramount 
produces the movie. They also own Blockbuster. It then goes to Showtime, 
its pay window. The next window after that is a network window. And then 
it could go into syndication. 

So in theory, a hit Paramount film can actually play on virtually every 
one of its windows on a Viacom property. 

[www.pbs.org: More on the new business model] 

ELVIS MITCHELL, Film Critic, "New York Times" and NPR: Newscorp- they've 
got a studio. They've got a network, the Fox Network. They've got two cable 
outlets. So you know, they've got all these different arms to sell this 
stuff. Then they've got Sky Channel and they've got a satellite overseas 
and they own TV Guide. 

I mean, vertical integration is now- it's like Doctor Evil from the Austin 
Powers movies. You know, it's these tentacles that encircle the world. 

NARRATOR: Elvis Mitchell is a movie critic for The New York Times and 
National Public Radio. His devastating review of The Replacements certainly 
stung the producer, the director and the actors. But it didn't hurt the box 
office. AOL owns the studio, Warner Brothers. It also owns a number of 
outlets that helped sell the movie. 

ELVIS MITCHELL: When you've got Time Warner/AOL, Entertainment Weekly and 
CNN and Time Magazine and People and In Style, they get to flog movies in 
five or six different ways before the picture even comes out. And they're 
often pictures made by companies that they're in business with. 

NARRATOR: That's show business today, and there are those who see an even 
more profitable future. 

HOWARD STRINGER, Chairman & CEO, Sony Corp. USA: You could make the case 
that the movie is the most fundamentally symbolic piece of content that any 
media company develops. It drives all your content. It's the most visible. 
It's the most conspicuous. It's the most dangerous. It's the most exciting. 

As the world becomes ever more aware of content, movies will go wider and 
wider. When the digital world is really here, movies can be disseminated 
from satellite direct to homes and direct to small theaters in Mongolia and 
northern Russia and obscure places that the market for movies is going to 
grow and grow and grow. And it's really the flagship of your content. 

["Lost World"] 

JEFF GOLDBLUM: Let's get this movable feast underway. 

PETE POSTLETHWAITE: Don't move! 

HOWARD STRINGER: It drives everything else that you do. 

["Lost World"] 

JULIANNE MOORE: What is it? 

JEFF GOLDBLUM: Mommy's very angry. 

HOWARD STRINGER: And it lives forever. 

RICHARD NATALE, Entertainment Journalist: They can create everything from 
soundtracks to theme park attractions. 

[Universal Studios promotional video] 

ANNOUNCER: This phenomenal interactive adventure thrusts guests into the 
living, breathing, three-dimensional world of Jurassic Park. 

STEVEN SPIELBERG: This really is a chance to, you know, three-dimensionally 
live the movie and ride the movie. 

RICHARD NATALE: It can be never-ending. It's what's called a franchise. And 
studios are very eager to be in the franchise business, and they are always 
looking to try to create a new franchise and to create an entire business 
around a single movie. 

LARRY GERBRANDT, COO & Sr. Analyst, Kagan World Media: The exciting thing 
about the movie business is the same thing that's exciting about investing 
in Broadway plays. You never know when you're going to invest in the next 
Titanic or the next Cats. And you know, the rewards on those are so 
extraordinary. I mean, it's like- it's like- it's better than hitting the 
Powerball lottery. 

NARRATOR: If there's story Hollywood loves to tell, it's the big gamble, 
from Cagney to Casino, and maybe that's because that's the kind of business 
they're in. 

["Indecent Proposal"] 

WOODY HARRELSON: Oh, yeah! 

DEMI MOORE: Oh, my god! 

WOODY HARRELSON: Oh, honey! That's the spirit! [inaudible] $50,000! That's 
what we want! we're winners! 

PETER GUBER, Chairman, Mandalay Pictures: The importance of marketing, in 
terms of the success of a film, is like air to all of us. It is a crucial 
resource, and you must be breathing from the beginning. The minute you 
start the process of deciding to make a film and you're communicating that 
vision to anyone, you're in the process of selling. If you don't understand 
that, you're not in show business. You're just not. 

HOWARD STRINGER, Chairman & CEO, Sony Corp. USA: If you don't spend a lot 
of money on marketing, you don't generate big box office, which is 
translated in so many eyes as one of the criteria of hits. So that if- if 
I was to- if I had a $100 million picture and I spent- only spent $10 
million marketing it, for instance, I haven't really saved $10 million 
because people will start saying, "Well if you didn't have a big opening 
weekend, you weren't a success." 

And if I'm not a success, I can't sell it to television or cable, and I 
threaten my video sales and DVD sales, and so forth and so on. So there 
is a- there is a sort of spiral of pressure. 

["Charlie's Angels"] 

ACTOR: Good morning, Angels. 

ACTRESSES: Good morning, Charlie! 

LARRY GERBRANDT: The studios have gotten so sophisticated, so good at 
cutting the trailers, marketing the films, creating that buzz - it's not 
word of mouth, but it's buzz, it's that "want to see" buzz - that they can- 
they can put butts in seats on that opening weekend. 

ROBERT LEVIN, Pres., MGM Worldwide Mrkt. & Distr.: All of the studios get 
reports that start three weeks out that tell them how their movie and all 
the other movies that are releasing into the same timeframe are doing in 
consumer awareness, moviegoer awareness, how well do people know about it, 
and it's across all segments. It's broken down in total and against young, 
old, small town, big town, regular moviegoers, non-moviegoers, lots of 
banner points across the top. How aware are they of it? How interested are 
they? Compared to the other movies, where does this exist in choice? 

So for the last three weeks, you're playing sort of this open poker hand, 
where I know everything, they know everything, and it starts to leave this 
intensity of "Maybe we got to spend more." You know, "We're falling a little 
bit behind. Maybe we got to spend more. Maybe we got to step it up." So it's 
hyper- I would say hyper-competitive. 

PETER GUBER: And when these companies all put out $70 million, $80 million, 
$90 million, $100 million films, they have to support them. They have to 
open them. 

A picture we recently made, they spent $40 million just marketing the 
picture in North America alone- not the cost of the picture, not 
international, 

just U.S., North America, Canada alone, $40 million in prints, advertising, 
releasing costs, costs through the first two weeks. So if that film doesn't 
work on Friday night, every executive in the business in that company gets 
sphincter arrest because there's nowhere to go. 

NARRATOR: And that brings us back to Evolution, that David Duchovny/Ivan 
Reitman science fiction comedy. In order to make it look like the movie - 
which critics say was lousy, by the way - was a huge box office success, 
Dreamworks opened it on as many screens as possible- 2,600. 

RICHARD NATALE, Entertainment Journalist: If you're opening a movie, you 
have to spend a great deal of money to make sure that you fill those 
theaters because you have to- because there's another movie coming up right 
behind you. And if you don't fill those theaters, you're going to start to 
lose screens, like that, and your movie- you know, your movie's dead in the 
water. So you have to open very big. 

LUCY FISHER, Red Wagon Entertainment: The pressure of opening weekend is 
so strong now that by Friday night at midnight, you already know whether 
the two years or the five years that you spent working on a movie were 
basically for naught. 

["Men in Black" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: We are the men In black. 

WILL SMITH: Know what the difference is between you and me? I make this 
look good. 

NARRATOR: When Men in Black hit the screen, Lucy Fisher probably knew by 
Friday night that her studio had a hit. 

["Men in Black"] 

TOMMY LEE JONES: I'm going to count to three. 

WILL SMITH: He'll do it, Jeeves. 

TOMMY LEE JONES: One- 

WILL SMITH: I'm telling you, that man does not look stable. 

TOMMY LEE JONES: -two- 

ACTOR: He's always crazy. Why don't you get a massage and think of- do you 
have any idea how much that stings? 

NARRATOR: But in her time, she's seen some movies die, and she knows how 
studios can beat the odds. 

["Men in Black"] 

WILL SMITH: You know how to use these things? 

TOMMY LEE JONES: No idea whatsoever. 

LUCY FISHER: If you have a hit in America, even though if it's a 
hit - i.e., you spent so much money that you've got the people to come the 
first weekend, even though they, they didn't like it and they won't tell 
their friends - if it's opening in a bunch of other territories very soon 
afterwards, you'll get a little buzz from the fact that it had big numbers 
in America, and the exhibitors in the other countries will respect that. So 
it- that opening weekend now has a ridiculous amount of authority over the 
fate of a movie. 

NARRATOR: And Evolution opened a disappointing fourth. The box office 
dropped 75 percent over the next two weeks. This is the worst thing a 
multi-national media conglomerate can see in a movie theater. 

MICHAEL CIEPLY, Film Journalist: What corporations need to do is sell 
predictability. I mean, their greatest fear is an unpredictable cycle. 
You know, the ideal life cycle for a corporate entity is 15 percent profit 
increase every year. You know, they love earnings management. They love to 
know where they're going. And in the movie business, the only way you can 
begin to manage earnings that way is to trade on what's already worked. 

["Armageddon" trailer] 

BRUCE WILLIS: The United States government has just asked us to save the 
world. 

1st ACTOR: We're talking about space, right, outer space? 

2nd ACTOR: This is like deep, blue hero stuff. 

3rd ACTOR: I'm there. 

4th ACTOR: I'm with you. 

5th ACTOR: Beam me up, Scotty. 

PETER BART, Editor-in-Chief, "Variety": What big corporations want most is 

risk-averse pictures. So you have corporate suits trying to make projects 
that don't entail risk. You can see why the manpower turnover is very high 
in the upper reaches of the studios now. 

["The Player" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: From director Robert Altman comes a story of Hollywood. 

1st ACTOR: I got a writer in here who's got a pitch I think you ought to 
hear. I think it's hot. 

2nd ACTOR: We open outside San Quentin. 

3rd ACTOR: The Graduate, Part II, and Mrs. Robinson had a stroke, so she 
can't talk. 

TIM ROBBINS: This is going to be funny? 

3rd ACTOR: Yeah, it'll be funny. 

NARRATOR: In L.A., where the traffic jam is a way of life, approving a movie 
project is called the"green light." 

PETER BART: A "green light meeting" is when the decision is made, finally, 
whether or not to make a given picture. Now, the green light meeting, when 
I first started at Paramount, would consist of maybe three or four of us 
in a room. Perhaps two or three of us would have read the script under 
discussion. And people said stupid things like, "I kind of like this movie" 
or "I'd look forward to seeing this movie," inane things like that. 

The green light decision process today consists maybe of 30 or 40 people. 
There's one group there to discuss the marketing tie-ins. How much will 
McDonald's or Burger King put up? And there's somebody else there to discuss 
merchandising, toy companies, and so forth. Someone else is there to discuss 
what the foreign co-financiers might be willing to put up. 

So everyone is discussing the business aspects of this film, and it's 
sometimes unusual for someone actually to circle back and talk about the 
script, the cast, the package, whether the whole damn thing makes any sense 
to begin with. 

[www.pbs.org: Read the extended interview] 

HOWARD STRINGER, Chairman & CEO, Sony Corp. USA: Well, I think if you 
gamble on the expensive movie, and once you get into the $100 million 
category, you do start hedging your bets. You're going to rely on sound 
and spectacle, whether it's- whether it's digital effects, computer 
graphics or whatever, in order to embrace a bigger and bigger audience 
and to go after kids that are the core of your audience. And you can't 
afford to do many of those because the risks are fairly substantial. 

But they also tend to be the movies that, because they don't have as much 
dialogue as you might imagine, they're easily translatable to foreign 
countries and foreign languages. 

RICHARD NATALE, Entertainment Journalist: What most people forget is that 
movies are no longer made just for the U.S. It's important that a movie 
be a success in the U.S. because it helps it become a success overseas. 
But the number of theaters is shrinking in the U.S., and the amount of 
overall business that a movie does in the U.S. versus the rest of the 
world is shrinking. 

A big action movie like Armageddon can do almost twice as much overseas as 
it did in the U.S. And that's going to continue to grow. So more and more, 
movies are made to satisfy a foreign audience, which doesn't understand 
English. So if you don't really understand it, it doesn't really make much 
difference because it delivers on a certain action level. And even if the 
plot doesn't make a great deal of sense because people are watching it in 
subtitles or dubbed, they don't really care. 

PETER GUBER, Chairman, Mandalay Pictures: There's 300 million people in 
the United States, and there's 5.7 billion people in the rest of the world! 
It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out if you can tap into that market, 
there's a lot of money to be made and a lot of eyes to be attended to. 

["Die Hard 2"] 

ACTOR: You're the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time! 

NARRATOR: So that's why, with lots of action and no dialogue, there's got 
to be one other ingredient. The whole world loves a movie star. 

["Die Hard 2"] 

BRUCE WILLIS: This is just the beginning. 

MICHAEL CIEPLY, Film Journalist: The great lie of the movie business, and 
one that you'll hear all the time, is "the material is everything." The 
material is actually nothing, OK? The material doesn't matter. You can- 
you can show up with the greatest script on Earth and flop it down in front 
of a studio executive, and they can come back with the greatest reasons on 
Earth not to become involved with it. And you realize that what really 
drives the entire business is attachment, star power. 

["What Lies Beneath"] 

HARRISON FORD: You're not yourself today, are you. 

MICHAEL CIEPLY: In order to pre-sell a movie- 

["What Lies Beneath"] 

MICHELLE PFEIFFER: No, I'm not. 

MICHAEL CIEPLY: -in order to convince somebody in Germany that they should 
put enormous amounts of money on the line to bet on a script, they could 
bet on a star. 

["What Lies Beneath"] 

MICHELLE PFEIFFER: I think she's starting to suspect something. 

HARRISON FORD: Who? 

MICHELLE PFEIFFER: Your wife. 

RICHARD NATALE: A bad movie with Bruce Willis will make more money than a 
bad movie without Bruce Willis. And a good movie with Bruce Willis will 
make a lot more money than a good movie without Bruce Willis. 

["Armageddon"] 

BRUCE WILLIS: They'll do it. They've made a few requests, though. 

BILLY BOB THORNTON: Such as? 

BRUCE WILLIS: Oscar here has got some outstanding parking tickets. Max 
would like you to bring back eight-track tapes. Not sure if that's going 
to work. Yeah, one more thing. None of them want to pay taxes again. Ever. 

RICHARD NATALE: As part of creating an event, you want to anchor that 
around a large personality. And those personalities are few - as always, 
are few and far between. Even back in the old studio days, there were 
basically 5 to 10 stars who were very big. And so everybody wants those 
very big stars. 

["Mission: Impossible 2"] 

ACTOR: Good morning, Mr. Hunt. Sorry I barged in on your vacation. This 
is your mission, should you choose to accept it. 

ELVIS MITCHELL, Film Critic, "New York Times" and NPR: There's so much 
about the business that's ruled by fear. What they seem to want is to be 
relieved of the necessity of making a decision, which goes like this: If 
Tom Cruise is in the movie, well, it's going to be a hit. And if it's not 
a hit with Tom Cruise, well, it's not our fault because the last five Tom 
Cruise pictures were hits. 

["Mission: Impossible 2"] 

TOM CRUISE: You got to be kidding me! 

ROGER EBERT, Film Critic, "Chicago Sun Times": What the studios are doing 
is they're throwing out the adult audience. I mean, if you're an intelligent 
adult and you don't live in a big city that has an art cinema or a selection 
of films, there's often no movie for you to go to see that weekend at the 
theater. 

NARRATOR: Roger Ebert's thumb is arguably the most important piece of any 
movie critic's anatomy, and lately it's been pointing down more often than 
not. 

ROGER EBERT: Let's say you're 30 years old, you're a college graduate, and 
you're fairly literate. Are you going to go see The Mummy Returns? Are you 
going to go see Gone in 60 Seconds? Are you going to go see Coyote Ugly? 
Are you going to go see Evolution? Are you going to go see all these movies 
with Pauly and Adam and all the other goofball dumb comedians? No. Those 
movies are made for 13-year-old boys, they're not made for you. 

ELVIS MITCHELL: The target is becoming more and more specific. What used 
to be thought of as being the target audience from 12 to 24 is now a target 
audience from 12 to 19. The audience that repeats, that- you know, for 
them, a movie experience is like watching a movie on videotape, where you 
just want to see the stuff you like over and over and over again. 

["Big Daddy"] 

ANNOUNCER: This summer- 

ADAM SANDLER: Do that thing I taught you the other day. 

ELVIS MITCHELL: Now what multiplexes have become is sort of like "The Night 
of the Living Dumb." They kind of march from one movie to the next to the 
next, week after week after week. 

PETER GUBER: What was the design going in? Were you aiming at that lowest 
common denominator, that cheapest possible audience, that basest possible 
value? Is that the target of choice? And that's a very honest question and 
it deserves an honest answer, and I think the answer is yes. If they believe 
they can make more money at that, that's where they'll aim, in the main, 
because they're, after all, public companies. The shareholders don't want 
to know what the product was, they want to know what the profits are. 

[www.pbs.org: Read the extended interview] 

NARRATOR: Then came the summer of 2001, the first signs that the monster, 
the spectacular, the sequel and the spinoff, that marketing-driven strategy 
was weakening. 

HOWARD STRINGER, Chairman & CEO, Sony Corp. USA: Something is happening 
this year which I find slightly troubling, and that is that we used to say 
that your ultimate box office was probably three-and-a-half times your 
opening weekend. And it seems to have dropped to two-and-a-half. 

["Pearl Harbor" trailer] 

Pres. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: December 7th, 1941, a date which will live 
in infamy. 

HOWARD STRINGER: And you've seen how these big-budget pictures open quite 
wide and drop quite suddenly, losing half their audience by the following 
weekend. And one doesn't really know whether that's because there are too 
many pictures and therefore the theaters are crowded, with movies stacked 
up like planes over an airport, or because there's too high a level of 
expectations for the movies that we're marketing. 

LARRY GERBRANDT, COO & Sr. Analyst, Kagan World Media: You can market a 
bad film. You can drag people, virtually, into the theater in that opening 
weekend. You can't make them go back and tell their friends to go see a 
bad film, no matter how well you market it. That's what's led to all this 
pressure on the opening weekend. 

LUCY FISHER, Red Wagon Entertainment: People sort of almost can smell a 
stinker before it comes out, before the reviews come out. They just know. 
And they might go opening weekend because they got sold it and they like 
the premise, but then they won't- which is what happened this summer a lot. 
There was a lot of movies that people had high expectations for because the 
idea sounded good. And then they weren't as happy with the actual movie. 

ELVIS MITCHELL: If the formula still is that a movie has to make twice what 
it costs to break even because of marketing and stuff, that means on the 
average, every other movie this summer needs to make $200 million to break 
even. And that doesn't happen too often. I don't care how big the grosses 
are, and that this is a record year, as compared to last year, which is 
also a record year. You know, movies kind of stall out about $90 million 
or so, which still sounds like a lot of money to me. It's still a lot of 
people, but it's just not the kind of big hit people are looking for 
anymore. 

BILL MECHANIC, Pandemonium Pictures: And if you're being honest about it, 
you'd say, "I'm in a lousy business. I'm making no money. I don't know why 
I'm doing what I'm doing. I have to change it. I have to fundamentally 
start to say one word - no." And nobody will do that. 

NARRATOR: Bill Mechanic used to run Fox. He green-lighted Braveheart and 
Titanic. 

["Titanic"] 

LEONARDO DiCAPRIO: I'm the king of the world! 

NARRATOR: And still they got rid of him. Now he's off the lot, an 
independent producer. 

BILL MECHANIC: Everything you do that makes your job safer makes it less 
profitable. It's just a one-for-one kind of thing that happens. So now 
you're making movies that can gross- you know, like, the biggest-grossing 
movie last year probably didn't make any money for the studio, so now your 
hit doesn't pay for your losses. 

RICHARD NATALE, Entertainment Journalist: The big financial stories are 
the fact that movies are not that profitable, ultimately, that the amount 
of expenditure that goes into them does not make a movie very profitable 
anymore. 

And if you look at a movie like Pearl Harbor, they spent a $140 million to 
make it. They spent another $100 million to market it. And they will come 
away with probably $400 million to $500 million at the box office, half of 
which is returned to the studio. 

So what's left to them is going to really carry them for a great deal of - 
you know, a great deal of time. And the reason to create a movie like that 
is that it's going to take you through some lean months. 

LUCY FISHER, Red Wagon Entertainment: You have to have other things besides 
the ability to make just the movies in order for it to work. You have to 
have some of the other ancillary things, or there is no way. 

[video commercial] 

ANNOUNCER: If you want action, we got it! Last Action Hero. Now, the year's 
most action-packed movie is today's hottest video game for your Super 
Nintendo and Sega Genesis systems. And it's available only at your video 
store. So when you're returning this cassette, pick up the game and live 
the action! 

LUCY FISHER: The same thing that you paid for once, you can sell a whole 
bunch of different ways. That's crucial. Just selling it through a movie 
theater is not ever going to be a viable way to make money back on a movie 
anymore. Unfortunately, boo-hoo, but it's not- it's going to be a bigger 
business from now on. 

NARRATOR: But what about people who just want to make movies, movies like 
Sex, Lies and Videotape? In the '80s and '90s, they were called 
"independents," and movies like this could live on the fringes of the 
multiplex. Now they're- well, they have a hard time getting in anywhere. 

ROGER EBERT, Film Critic, "Chicago Sun Times": There's an enormous dynamic 
going on in the American independent film community right now. Good films 
are being made, and when you go to Sundance, you see them. But the problem 
is, they're not being distributed because the distributors have been totally 
overcome by the Friday night "Who's going to win the weekend" syndrome. 

["Sex, Lies and Videotape"] 

ACTOR: How are things with John? 

ANDIE McDOWELL: Oh, they're fine. I mean, they're fine. Except for I'm kind 
of going through this thing where I don't want him to touch me. 

NARRATOR: No one wanted to touch Sex, Lies and Videotape when it first came 
out. 

["Sex, Lies and Videotape"] 

PETER GALLAGHER: In fact, I'm going to tell you a little secret. As soon as 
you've got a ring on your finger, you start getting the most spectacular 
attention from the opposite gender. 

NARRATOR: But it got some buzz. And in those days, it could also find some 
screens. 

ROGER EBERT: And unless we find a way to distribute films without feeling 
that they have to have this enormous push behind them and this expensive 
advertising campaign, we'll never be able to appreciate this generation of 
filmmakers. 

ALLISON ANDERS, Film Director: Used to be that a critic would write 
something wonderful about your movie. That would get people out to the 
movie theaters to see your film. And the movie theaters themselves were 
not so corporately owned that they- they had to- you know, they could let 
you have time. 

NARRATOR: Allison Anders directed Gas, Food, Lodging. She says movies like 
this are no longer given a chance. 

ALLISON ANDERS: You know, once they stopped letting us have the screens to 
build word of mouth, we were really sunk because most films that make you 
think about anything are going to take people a while to get to see them. 
It used to be that our little successes were just fine. 

["Gas, Food, Lodging"] 

1st ACTRESS: Don't worry about it. Soon as I'm out of here, you can do 
whatever you want. 

2nd ACTRESS: Oooh! Promises, promises! 

3rd ACTRESS: Hello, girls. 

ALLISON ANDERS: I've never not made my money back for distributors. So you 
know, they made their money back, and that was fine. They made back what 
they put in, and maybe a little bit more. They were happy with that. But 
I don't think they're- they're obviously not happy with that anymore. 

NARRATOR: There used to be a company that was a sort of sugar daddy to 
independents, Miramax. 

["Clerks"] 

1st ACTOR: You should hear the barrage of stupid questions I get. 

2nd ACTOR: What do you mean there's no ice? You mean I got to drink this 
coffee hot? 

3rd ACTOR: You'd feel a hell of a lot better if you'd just rip into the 
occasional customer. 

NARRATOR: Cool, rough-around-the-edges movies got shown, thanks to them. 

["Clerks" trailer] 

4th ACTOR: Hey, you open? 

5th ACTOR: No! 

ANNOUNCER: Clerks: Just because they serve you doesn't mean they like you. 

2nd ACTOR: You hate people! 

1st ACTOR: But I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic? 

NARRATOR: Then even Miramax decided to go for the brass ring. 

["Shakespeare In Love" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: Miramax Films and Universal Pictures present a truly romantic 
comedy of errors. 

ACTOR: That woman is a woman! 

NARRATOR: They bankrolled Shakespeare in Love. 

["Shakespeare In Love" trailer] 

GWYNETH PALTROW: This is a new world. 

ANNOUNCER: Shakespeare in Love. 

NARRATOR: They won some Oscars. And of course, they were making a lot of 
money. So the next thing you know, Miramax is a division of the Walt Disney 
Company. 

["Shakespeare In Love"] 

ACTOR: Romeo and Juliet- just a suggestion. 

JOSEPH FIENNES: Good title. 

ELVIS MITCHELL, Film Critic, "New York Times" and NPR: Miramax put 
themselves in the position where they were thought of as being the 
alternative. But now they're as much a studio as New Line, which started 
off as kind of a mini-major, too, or any of these other places. 

It's almost like now Miramax needs to have a Miramax Classics Division, 
where they make the kind of movies we think as being Miramax pictures 
because, you know, when you think of a picture like Shakespeare in Love, 
that's a pretty expensive movie. That's not an art house movie or what we 
think of as being art house pictures now. What Miramax does really are 
mainstream movies with big movie stars in them. 

[www.pbs.org: More on the state of indie film] 

LARRY GERBRANDT, COO & Sr. Analyst, Kagan World Media: The problem is, in 
success, you want to keep reaching for a higher brass ring, so the budgets 
start going up. You actually start making safer bets, and- or at least what 
you think are safer bets, because the budgets are higher. You may take fewer 
shots and the- you actually begin to look very much like a major studio. 
And finding those little gems and taking those chances, which is really 
where they made their bones, doesn't look like as good a business. 

ELVIS MITCHELL: Miramax is to, you know, independent film as Godiva is to, 
you know, designer chocolate. It's owned by Campbell's. You know, it 
doesn't mean anything anymore. 

LARRY GERBRANDT: Once you're part of a major studio, there's the pressure 
to constantly generate profits, and that's tough to do as an indie. And 
you know, that's sort of the history of Miramax. 

["Big Night"] 

ACTRESS: Is this what I ordered? 

STANLEY TUCCI: Yes, that is a risotto. 

NARRATOR: Then there's the story of Big Night. It's a story that might 
appeal to any independent producer. 

["Big Night"] 

STANLEY TUCCI: She likes starch. I don't know. Come on! 

ACTRESS: There are no meatballs with the spaghetti? 

DAVID KIRKPATRICK, Original Voices Productions: About five years ago, 
there was still a feeling in the air that you could go and make a small 
little gem of a movie and feel comfortable that you might be able to make 
a few ducats off of it and sleep well at home at night. 

["Big Night" trailer] 

ACTOR: To eat good food is to be close to God. 

ANNOUNCER: It's a story about people who love what they do and just want 
to share it. 

STANLEY TUCCI: No, wait! Cut it at the table. 

ANNOUNCER: Now, all they need- 

ACTOR: If you give people time, they learn. 

STANLEY TUCCI: This is a restaurant, not a cooking school. 

ANNOUNCER: -is a recipe for success. 

ACTOR: If we don't receive your payment by the end of the month, we will 
foreclose. 

STANLEY TUCCI: What do you mean? 

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: For a movie that we made for under $4 million- and in 
the sweep of things today, when pictures open to $50 million or $60 million, 
but for us to make a picture at $4 million and do just in North America $12 
million was a very significant number because it drove all our other 
ancillaries up to a significant level. 

["Big Night" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: Their only chance- 

STANLEY TUCCI: How much does that leave? 

ACTRESS: Sixty-two dollars and forty-seven cents. 

ANNOUNCER: -is a feast. 

ACTRESS: Say "formaggio!" 

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: I think our cable number was about $2 million dollars, 
our free television window was $3 million. Our airline deal was about $1.5 
million. We did a Big Night cookbook, which brought us in close to a 
million dollars. So all these other ancillary trickles, you know, were 
really helpful in terms of making the picture profitable. 

["Big Night" trailer] 

ANNOUNCER: Your table is waiting. 

STANLEY TUCCI: Let's eat! 

DAVID KIRKPATRICK: I think it's a terrible thing for me to say, but I think 
it's virtually impossible to make Big Night today. 

MICHAEL DOUGLAS: If you like to make quirky pictures or, you know, a little 
off center, like I do, there is no time for an audience to find a movie. 

["One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest] 

JACK NICHOLSON: Wake up, boys. Wake up. It's medication time. 

NARRATOR: Before Michael Douglas was a movie star, he was an independent 
producer. He made a classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 

["One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest] 

ACTRESS: -gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life 
is but a dream. 

MICHAEL DOUGLAS: A picture like Cuckoo's Nest, which could play for week 
after week with only maybe a 7 percent drop, as opposed to some of the 
dramatic drops that are now- there's no time now for a movie to breathe 
because by the next weekend, there's three, four, five other pictures 
coming in, each maybe who's spent an average of maybe $25 million for their 
marketing alone. So you don't have a chance to- to find your legs. 

["Bonnie and Clyde"] 

FAYE DUNAWAY: Hey, what's your name anyhow? 

WARREN BEATTY: Clyde Barrow. 

FAYE DUNAWAY: Hi. I'm Bonnie Parker. Pleased to meet you. 

ELVIS MITCHELL, Film Critic, "New York Times" and NPR: I think of the 
example of Bonnie and Clyde which, when it came out in 1967, was a failure, 
was a flop. People didn't go. And what Warren Beatty did was he persisted. 
He cajoled. He begged. "Well, let's re-release this. Let's put these 
newspaper ads up. Let's keep buying time." And by the end of the year, 
Bonnie and Clyde was a big hit, and people wanted to go. 

That didn't happen over the first weekend, and it took time to build that 
audience up. And because it played for six months, it became a big Oscar 
contender. Doesn't happen anymore. You know, a movie comes out now, if it 
isn't a big hit in its first weekend, then it's finished. 

NARRATOR: So all of that's why some people say movies are, well, 
disappointing. But movies, even documentaries about movies, are supposed 
to have happy endings. So we'll try. 

PETER GUBER, Chairman, Mandalay Pictures: One thing that I think has the 
greatest advantage to both change the financial underpinnings of the 
business and create a wider circle or a wider orbit of audience, and a 
differentiated audience, and a wider orbit of talent that can feed that 
audience is World Wide Web broadband. The idea that it'll collapse the 
distance between the "Eureka" of the artists and the "Wow" of the audience, 
collapse it all and get them much closer together and allow those two 
forces to come together with a greater frequency and greater selectivity, 
to my mind has enormous potential. 

PETER BART, Editor-in-Chief, "Variety": When you consider the fact that 
the basic process of shooting a movie was exactly the same between 1920 
and 1998, you know, that nothing changed, then all of a sudden, everything 
is changed- I mean, that is, in many ways, the biggest story. Now, in 
Hollywood, change for the better? Who knows. That remains to be seen. But 
it could change a lot for the better. It could- it could- the changes in 
technology could loosen the chokehold of the major companies on the pop 
culture. That's what could happen. 

ELVIS MITCHELL: Because what it's saying is there's a new technology that 
is making this democratic. I mean, in the end, it's still the same thing. 
You've got to go to a studio to get the picture released. But if you make 
a movie like that, you can get it on the broadband, you don't need the 
studio anymore. If you make a movie for $200 - and eventually you'll be 
able to do that - the technology that bankrupted Francis Ford Coppola with 
One From the Heart everybody has access to now. 

HOWARD STRINGER, Chairman & CEO, Sony Corp. USA: The more bandwidth there 
is, the more you can disseminate movies. If you're carrying a tiny PDA, 
the first thing you can do with it after you've got sports scores, if you're 
a kid, is watch a movie on a bus or a train or, hopefully, in the back of 
a car, not the front, if your computer screen will be able to show movies. 
You'll be able to show on the back of a wristwatch. 

I imagine wireless-based products will mean that you can sit almost 
anywhere, in the garden or in an airplane or in a train, as I say, anywhere 
you go and watch something or play something, play with a video game. And 
the movie is- the movie is fundamentally at the heart of all that because 
the movie brings- it still brings everybody together. 

LARRY GERBRANDT, COO & Sr. Analyst, Kagan World Media: There was a time 
when I thought that some of the new technologies might actually take 
something away from the theatrical experience. And I think I've now come 
to realize that we're going to have theaters. Now, in the future, it may 
be digital theaters, or the- instead of the film prints, it'll be 
electronic prints. But I think we're going to have theaters for a very 
long time because it's the key. 

How that movie performs on that opening weekend very often determines how 
successful it is for the rest of its economic life. And there's a magic 
that occurs in that exhibition environment that you could not create any 
other way. 

PETER GUBER: Whether we call it cinema in the future or digitized or if 
it's played, you know, on your eyeballs injected with electrodes into 
your head, whatever the means are, we're going to start with somebody 
wanting to tell a story to somebody else, a lot of somebody elses. I don't 
think there's anything in the technology or the financing that can screw 
that up. 

The question becomes, can they maximize its value? Can they make stories 
and compelling dramas that are entertaining, charming, inventive, romantic, 
funny, that somehow move forward the human spirit and support the best of 
who and what we are as individuals? 

Can we do that and still have it be a good business? That's the real 
challenge and the question. 

The Monster That Ate Hollywood 

WRITTEN BY
Alan Smithee 

PRODUCED BY
Vince DiPersio
Adam Bardach 

CO-PRODUCED BY
Susan Smiley 

SENIOR PRODUCER
Michael Kirk 

EDITED BY
Michael Bloecher
Steve Audette
Michael H. Amundson 

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Dana Reinhardt 

NARRATOR
Tony Kahn 

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
William Hooke 

SOUND
Albie Gordon
Jenny Hanson
Joe Hettinger
Peter Kitinski
Janet Urban
James Williams 

ONLINE EDITOR
Michael H. Amundson 

SOUND MIX
Jim Sullivan 

ADDITIONAL CAMERA
Brian Hoodenpyle
David McMahon
Peter Nelson
Kimmer Olesack 

ASSISTANT EDITORS
Jackson Anderer
Claire Didier
Tiffany Hope 

PRODUCTION ASSOCIATE
Morgan Locke 

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT
Cara DiLizia
Kate Guiney 

ARCHIVAL MATERIALS
Sekani
THE WPA Film Library
Universal Studios, Hollywood 

SPECIAL THANKS
American Cinematheque
Exhibitor Relations Company
Corinna Gordon
HollywoodOnSet.com
Bob Laemmle
Patricia Marshall
Beshira Muttalib
Lisa Onodera
Susie Ugland 

FOR FRONTLINE 

PRODUCTION MANAGER
Tim Mangini 

ON-AIR PROMOTION
PRODUCER
M.G. Rabinow 

SENIOR EDITOR
Steve Audette 

AVID EDITORS
Michael H. Amundson
John MacGibbon 

POST PRODUCTION
COORDINATOR
Patricia Giles 

POST PRODUCTION
ASSISTANT
David McMahon 

SERIES MUSIC 
Mason Daring
Martin Brody 

COMMUNICATIONS
MANAGER
Erin Martin Kane 

SENIOR PUBLICIST
Christopher Kelly 

PUBLICIST
Jessica Smith 

PROMOTIONS ASSISTANT
Jenna Lowe 

SENIOR STAFF ASSOCIATE 
Lee Ann Donner 

SECRETARY
Mary Sullivan 

COMPLIANCE MANAGER
Lisa Palone-Clarke 

PARALEGAL
Adrienne Armor 

UNIT MANAGER
Douglas D. Milton 

BUSINESS MANAGER
Tobee Phipps 

WEBSITE PRODUCTION
ASSISTANT
Todd Goldstein 

WEBSITE ASSOCIATE
PRODUCERS
Sarah Moughty
Kimberly Tabor 

WEBSITE COORDINATING
PRODUCER
Stephanie Ault 

WEBSITE PRODUCER/
DESIGNER
Sam Bailey 

WEBSITE MANAGING EDITOR
Wen Stephenson 

EDITORIAL RESEARCHER
Catherine Wright 

REPORTER
Dana Reinhardt 

COORDINATING PRODUCER
Robin Parmelee 

STORY EDITOR
Ken Dornstein 

SERIES EDITOR
Karen O'Connor 

SENIOR PRODUCER
SPECIAL PROJECTS
Sharon Tiller 

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR 
Marrie Campbell 

SERIES MANAGER
Jim Bracciale 

EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Louis Wiley Jr. 

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
David Fanning 

A FRONTLINE coproduction with Riot Pictures, Inc. 

© 2001
WGBH EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION


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