Getting Serious? : Success of ‘Philadelphia,’ ‘Schindler’s’ Sends a Signal to Hollywood

So, what now Hollywood?

The Oscars are over for another year. And the industry had a record $5.2-billion year at the box office.

If 1993--when the major studios tried to “do the right thing” by releasing such consciousness-raising films as “Schindler’s List” and “Philadelphia”--proved anything, it was that quality can sell.

But, this is not a new concept. Any industry veteran will tell you that the majors have always made their share of provocative, issue-oriented movies. Some actually made money.

“But, you always did them with a sinking feeling that you were betting on a long shot,” says John Calley, the new president of United Artists, who as Warner Bros.’ head of production in the 1970s championed such risky pictures as Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.”

Today, notes Calley, “there seems to be a market for the long shot and, if anything, film companies are more aggressively pursuing material of real significance.” He says this is definitely the case with himself and his boss, MGM chairman Frank Mancuso, the former head of Paramount Pictures.

Calley, who dropped out of Hollywood for 13 years in 1980, admits that if someone had come to him 14 years ago about releasing “The Piano,” he would have been “baffled--and wondered, ‘What do we do with it?’ ”

Back in 1974, although Warners financed Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord,” of which Calley was a big fan, he said the studio’s distribution executives refused to release the foreign-language movie domestically “because they didn’t know what to do with it.” (The film was released in the U.S. by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, and overseas by Warners.)

The major studios, says Calley, “are now honoring films of serious content and recognizing not only their value to society but their value as moneymakers.” He claims that even a film like Columbia’s “The Remains of the Day,” which he and Mike Nichols co-produced with Merchant/Ivory and which cost around $10 million, “will (eventually) make a very significant amount of money.”

“There’s now a rational perception,” Calley says, “that films of high quality have an audience waiting for them, and at the same time that doesn’t diminish the potency of other kinds of (more commercial) films.”

Producer Dawn Steel, production president at Paramount Pictures and a former studio head at Columbia Pictures, says: “We’ve always known that if you make a good movie, the audience will come most of the time. That we could make movies that have something to say and that they can make money--I never felt those things were mutually exclusive. . . . But, maybe, we’ve just lost sight of that in the last couple of years.”

TriStar President Marc Platt, who had supported “Philadelphia” before any top-flight stars were attached, says he’d like to think that the past year proves that films can be provocative and emotional and find a mainstream audience all at the same time--”and that would help similar films to evolve.”

“Philadelphia,” he says, proves that audiences are “intelligent and seem to be hungry for movies that deal with relevant, albeit difficult or sensitive, subject matter.”

While it is not the first movie to deal with AIDS, “Philadelphia” is the first major studio release about the disease. Platt said he hopes the fact that the film was headlined by Tom Hanks, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, proved that a heterosexual actor “going outside himself to portray a gay man” will help break down barriers that exist in conventional Hollywood.

Both “Philadelphia,” which has grossed $66.8 million domestically, and Steven Spielberg’s three-hour, black-and-white Holocaust epic, “Schindler’s List,” which has already sold more than $100 million worth of tickets worldwide (and industry pundits predict that figure could double), attracted bigger audiences than even the studios that released them expected.

Nonetheless, because of their questionable commercial viability, neither came to the screen easily, even though each cost considerably less than the industry average of $30 million.

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With such serious movies proving good for the pocketbook as well as for the consciousness, it raises the question if 1993 is the wake-up call Hollywood needed?

Twentieth Century Fox chairman Peter Chernin says, “Clearly, this has been a very encouraging year in terms of the quality of movies.” He said “over and over again during the year, we learned there was a more sophisticated adult audience out there than many of us thought previously.”

As the number of films pouring into the marketplace today increases (especially with Disney and Warners each releasing upward of 35 a year), Chernin says, audiences are saying, “We’re not interested in volume, but in good movies that are unique.” He said that includes issue-oriented movies such as “Schindler’s List” and “Philadelphia” or pure entertainment offerings like “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “In the Line of Fire.”

The message that audiences are giving to the studios, Chernin says, is “Don’t make cookie-cutter formula movies,” a goal he admits, “is easier said than done.” Moviegoers are saying, “We want good movies, not necessarily art movies, but movies with character and dimension and uniqueness to them.” And quality, the Fox movie chief concedes, is “a tough, scary word.”

Because 1993 was a year that financially rewarded quality, Chernin says “it will push everybody to at least try for quality.”

Paramount Pictures chairman Sherry Lansing said that although clearly the mandate of any studio head is to “make movies that make money,” the kind of business that some of the serious subject films are doing “encourages us to know we can make all kinds of films now . . . . We can make movies for that intelligent, over-25 adult audience, who are going to the movies in spades, and justify it now.”

Tom Pollock, chairman of Universal Pictures, agrees: “You can do well by doing good.” That notion, he says, becomes even more relevant “in a world where there are so many choices for moviegoers, and people are reluctant to spend money on films they may not feel they’re getting their money’s worth on.”

One of the ways a picture can stand out, he suggests, “is if it’s good--not that it has a marketing hook or a major star or that 600 people get gunned down in the first five minutes. Hey, how about that for a revelation?”

What is the lesson in all this?

“Make really good movies and most of the time they’ll really work--but not all the time,” Pollock muses.

But UA’s Calley warns of an inherent danger in Hollywood’s tendency to jump on the now-vogue “quality sells” bandwagon. He fears studios will start churning out “an avalanche of oddball films, and probably a lot of them shouldn’t be made . . . then the pendulum will swing back.”

But, of course, Hollywood is notorious for trying to imitate someone else’s success.

Veteran comedy director Ivan Reitman (“Twins,” “Ghostbusters,” “Kindergarten Cop”), who directed last year’s “Dave” and is currently prepping the Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy “Junior,” avows: “There’s no such thing as a guy named Hollywood. There are thousands of people all hunting for their next movie and we all have individual desires and agendas for doing what we do.”

Reitman says that for years he has been wanting to tell the story of his parents’ survival from communism and the family’s “harrowing” escape from Czechoslovakia in 1950, but “I have never felt emotionally ready to tackle it. I have to do what I feel is right for me.”

The director pointed out that in addition to the serious hits of ‘93, “there was a great range” of comedies and action adventure movies--from “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Dave” to “Jurassic Park” and “In the Line of Fire”--all of which “had substance to them.”

And as Universal’s Pollock reminds, Hollywood should “never forget the message” in Preston Sturges’ 1941 Hollywood satire, “Sullivan’s Travels.”

The film’s central character, a commercial director, decides to go out and make a serious art movie only to realize that what people really want is laughter and escapism in their lives.

“So, it’s not so bad making pure entertainment.”