ARTS
The heart of the matter
What are the right ingredients for making a blockbuster film? Michael Harrington investigates
When autumn starts, Hollywood exec- utives examine the tea leaves of summer box-office returns to see once more if they can find the answer to the great scientific question of the age: what is the formula for a commercially successful picture?
Jerry Frankenheimer's end-of-the-world fantasy Armageddon carried everything before it during the high summer weeks, followed on by Steven Spielberg's appar- ently realistic Saving Private Ryan, whereas Jerry Weintraub's long-planned The Avengers went down the plug hole. How so? What is it that makes the difference? It is no use maintaining that one film is in some sense 'good' while another is some- how 'bad' — it is more a question of what works, and what doesn't, and why.
Just for a moment consider the monster film Godzilla, produced by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich. It was not exactly a flop but it was a huge disappointment at the box-office. Devlin and Emmerich previously produced Independence Day in 1996 and it proved to be one of the great commercial successes of the decade. It took more than $300 million in the United States, and more than $740 million world-wide, whereas Godzilla took less than half as much.
One can surmise what went through the minds of Devlin and Emmerich when they were thinking ahead. Audiences had cheered the blowing up of the White House in Independence Day, and in Steven Spielberg's astoundingly popular Jurassic Park everybody had been taken aback by the realistically depicted prehistoric mon- sters. Surely a film which brought together a convincing monster knocking down famous American buildings would be a winner? Only up to a point, unfortunately. Something extra was needed, and they did not provide it.
A commercial blockbuster comes from the fusion of artistry and calculation. James Cameron's Titanic provides the outstanding example of recent years. Again, it is easy to speculate about the thought process behind it. Women, Cameron might have thought, enjoy a love story, whereas men like to watch a disaster such as a plane crash or a ship sinking. Bring these two themes together in one film and you will bring in the punters. As a piece of calculation it works reasonably well, but it does not account for the artistry in Titanic, and artistry is the child of passion. Cameron's passion for the Titanic, indeed his obses- sion with the doomed ship, provided the energy that made the whole thing go. Here we see a contrast with Godzilla and The Avengers which were more or less skilful exercises in contrivance. Neither picture has much heart. Passion is not enough for popularity, however. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1940), for example, is one of the most admired films in the history of the cinema, at least by the critics. Yet it was never a favourite with the public. Kane can be seen clearly now as a New Deal anti-business propaganda film, made with great energy but little subtlety. All the characters seem to be either horrible or pitiful. But to say that one likes Citizen Kane and also that one laments the fate of Orson Welles remains one of the social mantras of the chattering classes.
On the other hand, Casablanca (1942) was loved by everybody because, among other reasons, it was a romantic daydream with attractive stars we would all like to resemble. It is not more or less of a fantasy than Citizen Kane but it is warm and human and in parts funny. It contains propaganda, of course, but of a comfortable anti-Nazi kind. Both films are well established within the repertoire of classic films, but Casablanca continues to work at the popu- lar level whereas Citizen Kane never did.
What about stars, then? Are stars a vital ingredient in the success formula? Certain- `I just can't say yes to people!' ly you would think so for the money they get — around $20 million per film for those in the very top bracket. We should be clear what a star is. A star is not so much an actor as a product. An actor performs a role, a star has a role written or re-written for him. For example, Air Force One was a vehicle for Harrison Ford, who also hap- pens to be a fine actor. Other things being equal, a star helps a film — Armageddon and Mimi Leder's Deep Impact had similar themes — an asteroid heading towards the earth — and if Armageddon did much bet- ter at the box-office it was almost certainly because of the attraction of Bruce Willis in the kind of action role that suits him and which he does better than anyone else.
A star cannot guarantee that people will want to see the picture, however. Look at Kevin Costner. He is one of the leading lights of Hollywood who enjoyed huge suc- cess with Dances with Wolves and before that with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, among others. Yet he got his feet wet in Waterworld, Wyatt Earp proved slow on the draw, and The Postman did not ring even once. It is not that his powers have declined, but he has made some rotten choices. It is not true, by the way, that 'you are only as good as your last picture'. Hol- lywood is not sentimental, but the gambling mentality is very evident there. After one big hit, you are good for quite a few duds, and may even regain popularity — John Travolta is the most famous example of this in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Bruce Reynolds stayed in work making flops for ten years.
Another piece of Hollywood convention- al wisdom is that women stars cannot `carry' big pictures at the box-office, yet the Alien series depends entirely on Sigoumey Weaver, and it was Jodie Foster who made the heavy and rather mysterious Contact into a commercial hit. They should have given her an award for weight-lifting. A romantic comedy will always do better if Meg Ryan is in it. Moreover, if we look at most of the great, universally popular films made from Gone With The Wind (1939) to Dr Zhivago (1967) to Titanic (1997) we can see that the woman's role is pivotal.
Nevertheless, it is broadly true that most of the top stars are male. This reflects the dominant, but not overwhelming, populari- ty of the male-oriented action film which in turn comes from the preponderance of young males in the cinema-going public. Only three women have ever been rated as number one box-office attraction in the United States: Mary Pickford, Doris Day and Julie Andrews. In Britain, Margaret Lockwood and Anna Neagle enjoyed enor- mous popularity in the 1940s. These belonged to the time when there was still a large, family, cinema-gding audience. Women do relatively better on television it is true, but television stars are just not the same thing as film stars.
Neither Jurassic Park and its sequel, nor Independence Day had premier league stars, so it is plain that they are not strictly and always needed if the other factors are strong enough. Are the other factors the special effects? Unquestionably, modern special effects technology has had a large and probably baleful effect on the cinema. It may now be wearing off as the public get used to them. George Lucas inaugurated the modern era with Star Wars in 1977, and we might well come to call it the Age of Fantasy. But there have been enough belly- flops — Judge Dread and Sphere are just two taken away from two dozen or more over the last three years — to undermine any faith in special effects as ends in them- selves. James Cameron, the maestro, knows how to use special effects, namely to give credence to the story. He made us believe we were watching the Titanic go down, but we cared about it only because of the drama which he had set up with hypnotic skill. What unites Titanic to Ben Hur and Rear Window is story value and story-telling skill. A story to 'a film is what a good tune is to an opera or a symphony. It is a sequence of events arranged into a dramat- ic conflict which grips the imagination.
Hollywood has never been short of money or stars or the power to create illu- sions, but it has always been short of stories, which is why they make the same pictures over and over. There are more than 90 film versions of Dracula and over 60 Jekyll and Hyde films, though they are extreme exam- ples. Story is the heart of the matter. It is much harder to make up a good story than it is to show the end of the world.
And it's so much more convenient than going to the cemetery everyday.'
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