A commenter below says: "If you lay down enough chips ... (you produce films that are successful)" ... or something.
That's a variant of the ancient and well-loved saying: "Put enough monkeys in front of enough typewriters, and one will produce the works of Shakespeare." ...
Mais non ....
Nitwits don't run large enterprises for very long because they tend to run those enterprises into the ground. It becomes fairly obvious, fairly fast, that these folks aren't up to the job and they get replaced. Even the competent, and borderline competent, often have short runs. The market is an unforgiving mistress.
What does happen -- further down the food chain -- is that middle managers are often promoted out of their area of competence and remain in place for years because the boss who promoted them doesn't want to admit her or his mistake.
But at the top? Life is often brutal, ruthless and short (much like a peasant's existence under Genghis Khan).
But let's crank it back to specifics; specifically, the movie industry. I give you, as Exhibit One, the Bubble Factory.
The founder of the Bubble Factory was Sidney J. Sheinberg, the respected longtime president of MCA Inc., who ran that company for decades with Lew Wasserman, the chairman, and an eminence grise in Hollywood ...
Mr. Sheinberg started the Bubble Factory with his two sons, Jon, 39, a former talent agent and studio executive, and Bill, 36, a lawyer and former television executive. The production company was fully financed by Seagram.Even by Hollywood's lavish standards, the deal forming the Bubble Factory was, as Mr. Sheinberg told The Los Angeles Times in April, ''the most lucrative afforded an autonomous entity by a studio.'' Most details of the deal were never disclosed. But it included an extraordinary provision that gave the Bubble Factory the right to give a green light to three to four pictures a year, for five years, each costing $35 million to $40 million, without studio approval ...
So. Dear old Sid (et famille) was given plenty of chips. In fact, he was pretty much given a blank check, with which he could return to the cashier's cage again and again.
And what happened?
One flop followed another: ''Flipper,'' grossed $20 million; ''McHale's Navy,'' about $4 million; ''That Old Feeling,'' about $16 million. At Sony, the Bubble Factory produced ''The Pest,'' which grossed $3.6 million. The company also has a Tim Allen comedy, ''For Richer or Poorer,'' which will be released by Universal later this year ...
Anybody remember For Richer or Poorer? I thought not. And guess what happened to the Bubble Factory? As the New York Times wrote twelve years ago:
'BUBBLE POPS AT U'' shouted the front-page headline in The Daily Variety last week. To the world outside Hollywood, the words were gobbledygook. In Hollywood, the headline made perfect sense and confirmed the rumors: the Bubble Factory, a two-year-old production company, was severing its ties to Universal Pictures ....
Let's recap: The Bubble Factory was a company with money, prestige and freedom. It ended up failing because it wasn't headed by a person that was able to create entertainment that resonated with the people who went to the movies.
In the 1930s, producers thought they could replicate Walt Disney's success by hiring away his staff. An obvious idea, but one that didn't pan out too well. In the nineties, the money men believed that Sid Sheinberg, who had helped launch Stephen Spielberg and worked at Lew Wasserman's side to build a movie and television empire, could create motion pictures that people would flock to see. Turned out they were wrong again.
There's a reason that only a chosen few are showered with riches when they deliver hit features. Few can do it with consistency. It takes, in the final analysis, something more than an infinite number of poker chips or lots of monkeys at many typewriters. It's a matter of talent ... and timing ... and being in sync with popular tastes.
You don't have those qualities, all the chips in the world won't make you Master of the Movie Universe.
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4 comments:
Hence Digital Domain's gasp. Good luck to 'em--but in my opinion, they're re-starting TOO big. It's a crap shoot anyway, but they're now using all of their chips.
Most of the chips laid down by these people are buffalo chips.
Great post, Steve. I love it when "common knowledge" is debunked.
Another bit of false common knowledge is that any film will be a hit if it has a wide enough release and a large enough marketing budget. A lot of producers and studios have gone bankrupt thinking that one was true.
Seems to me Steve, you know very little about filmmaking or about those who foster it. Mr. Sid Sheinberg is one of the greatest studio heads of all time, and no studio head has had better than a 50/50 success rate over their entire career since 1943, including Sheinberg. But, taking pot shots at a man who has an eye for talent (do some reasearch and familiarize yourself with the people Mr. Sheinberg has fostered, backed, and produced for.) and who, as an executive, is known for his ideas, good or bad,(unlike so many studio heads, Mr. Sheinberg actually has independant ideas)- your comments are glib and cheap. What is the 'success' rate of any starting business in the first 5 years? To attack Mr. Sheinberg's ability, or worse, suggest his inability, to create sucessful films based off of the Bubble Factory's first few years is amateur and ill informed. Any new venture is risky regardless of the backing it has, even more so when one looks at the film industry. (Do the math and tell me the average rate of return on 1 million dollars) So I advise you to try this: sit in your 1 bedroom apartment and write a screenplay, then hit the bricks and pitch it, get an executive to want to produce it, devolop it, cast it, shoot it, post it, finish it, deliver it, and then sell it to a distributor, and then, actually get it releaed. No easy task even with alot of chips, Steve. But, once you have done this and had a 'success', then come back and write another comment from the perspective of someone who is informed and can speak with first hand knowledge on the subject. I bet your idea of 'success' will be quite differnt, and you might not be so quick to bash those in the industry who have historically taken risk on new talent based off of the people involved and not off of a spread sheet and the bottom line... oh and Steve, how many years was Sid Seinberg head of MCA? and Universal? Both are public companys right, are they not? And the Bubble Factory, some more math so don't be afraid, take their total cost of each film made since the company's inception and compare it to the profit of each film, including domestic home sales as well as foriegn home distrobution (you can find all this on IMBDPRO)and tell me if Mr. Sheinberg and his sons, have been sucesssful, and if you still feel Mr. Sheinberg is incapable of making successful films.
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