Nicholas Thurkettle

I have a few traditions around this time of year:

-I publish a 10 Best/10 Worst list from the movies I saw that were released in the previous year; thus closing the book on them so I can exclusively review releases from this year.
-I publish my predictions of who will win this year’s Academy Awards.
-I have seen all the Best Picture nominees.

None of those traditions hold this year. The reasons are many and interrelated. You may have noticed that I am months behind on the movie reviews I publish, and I still have about 10 I intend to write. Organizing my writing time and goals is an ongoing struggle, with the way my life is structured right now.

I could give myself the excuse that, with 10 Best Picture nominees for the first time in my life, it’s understandable that I missed one (An Education) in the run-up. I know I will catch it soon, but I always had a certain OCD pride in seeing all the nominees in advance, so I could feel extra opinionated.

But now I will see that habits can be broken and the world does not come to an end. And I’ll get to do the important thing, which is to enjoy the ceremony with friends, and appreciate the passing of another excellent year of cinema.

And by the way? This isn’t a full round of predictions, but all that talk of this being the year of Avatar versus The Hurt Locker? In the last two weeks, I have come around to thinking there is a different possibility for one of the two top prizes – Inglourious Basterds.

My reasons why?:

-Harvey Weinstein distributed Inglourious Basterds; and no one knows how to run a better single-minded, no-bullet-un-fired campaign of ratfuckery for Oscars than Harvey. The well-timed news articles complaining about Hurt Locker’s originality and accuracy in the final hours before the ballot deadline, the leak of that producer’s e-mail breaking Academy rules by bad-mouthing Avatar; someone has done a very good job provoking a hot war between those two pictures. With the new vote-counting procedure for Best Picture, the movie with the most first-place votes won’t necessarily win, if everyone outside its camp ranks it much lower. In religion, business, and politics, always ask: “Who benefits?”

-James Cameron got his big sweep with Titanic, and Oscar has a resistance to repeating history this exactly. Titanic may have been criticized as hokey, but it was providing romantic sweep and melodrama that gave a patina of classicism to its scope. Avatar doesn’t score as high for its all-ages dramatic appeal, and is probably a little too weirdly-spectacular for the older voters (and boy are there a LOT of them).

-The Hurt Locker’s box office was small. REALLY small. Look at the most recent Best Picture winners – Slumdog Millionaire, No Country For Old Men, The Departed, Crash, Million Dollar Baby. The lowest grossing of them, No Country, had over five times Hurt Locker’s box office when it won. Locker finished its run in theatres many months ago, and while it ran an amazing awards campaign, it doesn’t change the fact that just not a lot of people have seen it. And being on DVD doesn’t provide the same cultural currency payoff. That said, because of the strength of its campaign, and the historic possibilities for director Kathryn Bigelow, I still think it is well-positioned to win Best Picture or Best Director, or possibly both. But I now think that, if it splits, the movie it splits with will be Inglourious.

-The Academy’s favorite prize to give is the make-up prize. Quentin Tarantino had to be satisfied with the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Pulp Fiction, one of the greatest and most influential films of its generation. He’s a slow-burning savant who doesn’t put out movies as often as other filmmakers, and eccentric enough that he doesn’t always put out movies that can attract the approval of the respectables. Inglourious is roundly admired, financially successful, and shows him working at the peak of his craft. The Academy has a chance to give him one of its top prizes, and can’t be assured it will have another any time soon.

-Did I mention Harvey Weinstein?

Now I think I know how baseball fanatics feel, when they draw swords over steroid-inflated statistics, or exactly which of the umpty-ump scandals besmirching The Great American Pastime™ over the course of a century was the one that made it Lose Its Innocence™. When the field is ever-evolving, greatness becomes a moving target, and comparisons to history a trap. But oh, aren’t the arguments fun?

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences threw one humdinger of a curveball when they announced that they would nominate ten films for the honor of Best Picture of 2009, instead of the field of five which has been traditional for over 65 years. This was not an arbitrary act; it was a calculated experiment to see if they could increase viewership for the Oscar telecast by strengthening the odds for nominees that Joe Popcorn Combo has actually seen. This was a bold counterstroke after last year’s snubbing of mainstream masterpieces The Dark Knight and WALL*E in favor of The Reader – a movie so prestigious hardly anyone had seen it at all.

What the Academy remembered is that for the non-industry viewer, suspense over the outcome is not on the shortlist of reasons to watch. The non-industry viewer has probably only seen two or three of the movies in contention, if that, and have only the exposure to, or interest in, the awards season horserace that they get from Entertainment Weekly. They don’t get lost in the weeds of the For Your Consideration ads. When a Best Picture front-runner is a popular, big-grossing movie – particularly if it is still in wide release – ratings consistently go up. I think this is because, for the average viewer, Oscar is coming into their living room to affirm their intelligence and taste, which they enjoy.

Now AMPAS cannot have known that James Cameron was already preparing to handle their visibility problem – his Avatar is already one of the biggest hits of all time, and is becoming the same sort of irresistible cultural black hole as his previous film, Titanic. That makes it a Day One frontrunner for the big prize, the inspiration for many potential blue-skin jokes on the night of the broadcast, and a guaranteed ratings draw.

So has the experience proved useless? I do not think it has. With every film critic, professional and otherwise, making a ritual out of a top 10 list, for Oscar to do the same hardly feels alien at all. And looking at the 10 they chose reveals not 10 movies whose greatness everyone necessarily agrees on, but 10 movies that represent a diverse spectrum of the many things the movie industry does well. We have science-fiction, inspiring drama, wicked social satire, contemporary stories and period stories, groundbreaking visual spectacle, rueful comedy, an inspired pulp war epic, and only the second animated feature in history to be in contention (more on that in a bit). There are still safe choices in there, but also some admirably daring ones. If we keep this up, we might even see a documentary in there someday.

Of course, the Academy is a consensus of voters, so maybe five movies just weren’t a big enough sample to produce good consensus results. Maybe this actually provides a little inoculation against some of the goofier inclusions and exclusions. Certainly you will find boosters disappointed that Invictus couldn’t even make a ten movie shortlist, or that Where the Wild Things Are was forgotten entirely. But aren’t the arguments fun?

Probably the most troubling argument has to do with the new normal of prestige in a Best Picture nomination. With twice as many handed out, are they now worth only half as much honor? And can’t we think of years when there just haven’t been ten truly outstanding films? With the graveyard of Oscar history already haunted by mediocre nominees, haven’t we just laid the groundwork for many, many more? These are all possibilities, and not likely to be solved by half-measures like a field of eight nominees. As the brilliant-but-mortal George Carlin once observed about the 10 Commandments: “10 sounds official. 10 sounds important.”

I don’t think you’re going to see this experiment go away after this year.
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I often say that working in the film business is like being a sprinter lined up in the stadium for a 400-meter dash; only you don’t wait seconds for the starter to fire his pistol, you wait months, maybe years. But he could pull that trigger at any moment, and Jimmy, you’d better keep limber for it, because only one guy gets to hit the tape at the end.

I’m flexing my own muscles right now. If something happens – and it may happen – it’s going to happen unbelievably fast. Stay tuned.

I don’t know what I’m going to do more often in this life; fall in love or let myself hope I actually have a chance of making a movie. A new opportunity for the latter came into sharper focus today – I have a small raiding party together and we’ve breached the first couple doors of the fortress; and boy howdy is it exhilarating as ever.

It’s small…I’m talking minuscule. This is one of those budgets that wouldn’t cover a week’s food on a superhero movie. There is a legitimate question whether or not the script I’ve written can actually be made for the money that is on the table. IF everyone does three jobs and works for circus peanuts, and IF we catch a couple of breaks on our locations, and IF this camera we have access to can actually live up to its cost-saving billing, and IF we can trim the script and schedule this thing hard and deep with no lube, then…maybe, Jimmy, maybe.

I would be producer, writer, assistant director, and at least a few other tasks along the way. I would have to quit the office job; not immediately but once things started ramping up – which, given the weather requirements of the script might not be for several months. But I also found out today that my screenwriting class is definitely on for the spring, which means money. It didn’t take me long to start working the personal budget numbers. IF the class happened in the fall as well, and IF I finished the novel in a timely manner so I could bring in the rest of that money, and IF I could pick up a few one-off production gigs like I was awhile back, and IF I don’t eat at restaurants or drink in bars for the majority of 2010, then…maybe.

But I’m not walking yet. A good piece of advice I once read about the question of when to leave your dayjob is: “You’ll know when it’s no longer possible to keep it.”

More on this as it develops.

There must be a term for the threshold beyond which the behavior of an individual or organization becomes unmockably retarded. When you have found the exaggeration someone might have used to satirize your actions and actually lapped it.

From Variety.com: Sony Takes ‘Risk’ With Board Game

Risk. The board game. The one they made fun of on that episode of Seinfeld. Soon to be a Sony Pictures Development Hell project.

I have had this long post brewing for awhile about Hollywood’s binge on branded properties, and the long-term (lack of) wisdom it shows. I still intend to write it, because I was there at the ground floor of this stuff: My last job in the development world (way back in 2004) was for a company whose business model was built around scooping up old IP (Intellectual Property) rights and reviving them as movie projects. Ask me someday about the story proposal I wrote for a Frogger movie.

I should not even have to make the mathematical point that this year’s most notorious box-office disaster was based on a branded title: Land of the Lost.

Like I said, I shouldn’t even have to make that argument. It should be loudly, clangingly obvious to anyone who hasn’t succumbed to studio brain phage that Risk is not the raw material for a movie. It is a board game where people roll dice to conquer the world, and everybody tries to hold Australia, because you get the two extra guys every turn and you can only attack it from that one place. The article says Will Smith’s company will produce the film. Just picture Will Smith saying “I know I don’t need Northwest Territory, but I’ll get a Risk Card next turn if I win!”

At this point, they are just paying for a title, ANY title, that people recognize and with which they have a positive association. Very shortly they will be proposing “Banana! The Movie!”

Back in January, Dr. Jeffrey Huberman, the honcho of the College of Communications and Fine Arts at my alma mater Bradley University, made his annual trek to Los Angeles along with students and faculty getting a taste of our corner of the entertainment business. It’s always good for a free meal or two, plus catching up and conversation with fellow alums and former screenwriting students.

This year, prior to the official reception, some of us assembled at a Chinese restaurant on Pico, and before I knew what was happening, Dean Huberman started videotaping us with his phone as we talked about our present careers and the experiences at Bradley that prepared us for them. It’s finally been cut together into a swanky-looking recruiting tool.

So, if you feel like gazing at my descending chin flesh and hearing me tell a few rambling anecdotes about hard work and the strange turns of life that brought me to writing in Hollywood, here you go:

Part One:

Part Two:

Back when I worked in feature development, one of my unwritten job functions was to get free work out of writers. We made independent films – which, you may have heard, there isn’t a lot of money in at any end. So, my ability to finagle free options and free re-writes was how we kept a slate of films alive. I was good at it because other writers could see I spoke their language, and because the company I worked for put in the time and effort to show them the quality of our track record and professional relationships. Since they usually weren’t seeing money up front, we had to give them faith that the movie had a better chance of being made – and a chance of being made better – with us.

I just finished what you might call an unsuccessful negotiation with a budding producer. He liked a script of mine and wanted it to wave around in an upcoming meeting with some independent investors. It’s a script that’s better suited to be made outside the studio system, and I’ve been looking for independent investors for it anyway. But when it came to reasons why I should do such-and-such for him for free, he did pretty much the opposite of what you ought to do.

Here’s the thing – if you are going to treat a writer like they just got off the bus, and you have their full name, it is wise to Google them, on the off-chance that they have not just got off the bus. In fact – you might want to re-think doing that at all.

Also, a writer who has not just got off the bus will know that having a meeting coming up with people who have money is not the same thing as having money. Being the former, and carrying yourself with a sense of entitlement equivalent to the latter, will work out about as well as Dirk Diggler’s recording career.

Finally – if you are going to demand the immediate ouster of an attached director so you can direct yourself; providing some evidence that you know how to direct (beyond insisting you are good at it in an e-mail) helps shore up your image of professionalism.

Forgive the late-night sarcasm; trying unsuccessfully to get this conversation onto a keel of mutual respect made me miss a big chunk of Monday Night Football.

The wisdom of where the studios choose to invest their money, project-wise, and in what amounts, is a strange sport to study. People root for the financial success or failure of movies they don’t like or haven’t even seen, without any sense of who actually made them. Maybe it is inspired by this vague hope that financial trends might shift what types of movies are made – and it is true that this will happen, but I have never lost by betting on Hollywood’s ability to learn the wrong lesson – after all, this is the town that watched the triumph of Lord of the Rings and made Eragon.

As it has always been, green-light-decision-making is blind, it is fear-driven, and it is only good at what the collective wisdom decided worked before – even if the collective wisdom needs to ignore a few inconvenient realities that, if considered, might suggest that a lot of these people shouldn’t have jobs. In Hollywood, it’s always 2am at the craps table. As William “Nobody Knows Anything” Goldman once wrote: “Anyone who says differently is selling something”.

This is pre-amble to what may, or may not be, a regular feature around here – where I comment on the weekend box office top 10 from my own perspective. Numbers come via the good folks at Box Office Mojo.

1. Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself
Weekend Take: $23.4M
Current Domestic Total: $23.4M

Tyler Perry proves he does not even need critics to launch one of his pictures. Perry is not re-writing the rule book, he is simply using it more intelligently than his peers, and beating the major studios at what they claim as their game – a branded, steady, cost-conscious stream of audience-targeted “product”. The conventional wisdom is that grown-up dramas are squishy and out of favor, overtly religious movies make people uncomfortable, and movies with black casts are bad investments because they do not sell well internationally. Yet he consistently makes two movies a year that are mostly grown-up dramas, which feature almost-exclusively black casts, and wear their faith on their sleeves – and in spite of almost universal critical panning, they are profitable.

One secret to his success is that he labored to build a core audience that he serves and tends and grows like a garden; he works quickly enough that they doesn’t forget him, and his ego does not demand he re-invent himself with every project, but allows him to play within pre-approved boundaries. His audience knows what they are buying as surely as when they buy a frozen dinner. But the more important secret is mathematical. The man spends wisely. I Can Do Bad All By Myself, like many of his films, is adapted from one of his plays, which he not only performed live but released on DVD, which gave him an inexpensive rough draft to test in front of an audience, and built awareness and loyalty. And the feature version cost only $13M – so after a single weekend it has already cleared the bar for success. Not many filmmakers, on their seventh feature, would be satisfied working at that budget. But not many filmmakers would even have finished three features at this point in their career, much less seven. And what I would like is for some more talented filmmakers to recognize that you can make adult drama at this price – you just have to know how to nurture the audience and then sell it to them.
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