THB #461: Is "Good" Really The Thing?
Bill Mechanic and I have been 90% in sync on a perspective on the industry over the last 25 years. He has offered insight into how parts of the business developed and often, I have come to find that answers which I came to myself matched ones that he held and expressed with passion. So I suggest that you read his Op-Ed in today’s Deadline, Bill Mechanic Argues Against Paramount Global Becoming The Second Fabled Hollywood Studio Stripped Down & Sold For Parts: Guest Column.
I don’t really understand why there is a long editor’s note (longer than Bill’s first 3 paragraphs) explaining recent history from its own perspective before Bill’s editorial… like running an editorial from Mechanic is somehow a controversial choice for a business that still claims to be in the journalism business. But, sigh… whatever.
All that said…
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we're not here to indulge in fantasy, but in entertainment and economic reality. In the days of the limited market, when movies were the clear top entertainment power, there was accountability to the bottom line of a slate of films. The Warners, the Mayers, the men that built this great industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money at stake.
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that good -- for lack of a better word -- is good.
Good is right.
Good works.
Good clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Good, in all of its forms -- good for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind.
And good -- you mark my words -- will not only save the remaining 5 movie studios, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
Thank you very much.
If that sounds really familiar - and you were wondering why it’s in italics - credit Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser and their Oscar-ignored screenplay for Wall Street (1987).
The reason I (mis)quote that Gordon Gekko (Oscar-winning for Michael Douglas… the film’s only nomination) speech is because Bill sounded a lot like that to me in this op-ed today. (He actually references the speech in his piece… differently.)
Bill writes, “what works are good movies. Movies people want to talk about, want to tell others about, want to see with audiences, want to laugh or cry or sit in scared silence surrounded by people. Stop asking why the original pictures work—they work when they are good.”
I, obviously, love good and great movies. But when a guy like Mechanic, who puts his neck on the line to rage against the machine, leans into that principle as his great truth, I find myself aligned with a word that got another person who quoted others (without attribution, it seems) and lost their job recently (no editor’s note needed), CONTEXT.
Even Bill, who has very, very, very strong beliefs - which again, I mostly line up with - ends up explaining what is so blurry about how all of us analyze this industry. “Good” is not an objective measure. “Good” cannot be defined by popularity. “Good” is what every filmmaker and pretty much anyone who works on or around a set wants to be, but simply cannot always achieve… because the ambitions of even the best artists sometimes are not achieved. “Good” is a way of defining how we see art, not something you can define with a Rotten Tomato (or Metacritic) number.
Good box office… I was going to write that we can measure that clearly. But damn it… we can’t. I have been a working box office analyst for more than 30 years. I broke down numbers in the 1970s, when I was a kid in high school in Miami, getting the weekly trades at the newsstand in Coral Gables because the dailies weren’t available. I traveled to whatever city I lived in with a box of annual Variety issues with worldwide and domestic box office numbers.
And “good” was not 100% clear back then. It got even blurrier in the Blockbuster Video era and then the DVD sell-thru era because if you aren’t in a studio’s accounting department, you are missing a lot of relevant data. And now, in the Streaming era, it is a 100% clusterfuck, no matter how smart (and they are smart) all of these upstart analytics firms are in trying to define a new set of measurements for a new set of numbers that are nothing like the box office and TV ratings we have chewed on for decades.
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