Accounting for Taste

Joe Roth is on a roll--finally. The 50-year-old chairman of Walt Disney Studios had a difficult fall, with two of the studio’s most anticipated films (“Beloved” and “Holy Man”) tanking. But lately, there’s no stopping him. “A Bug’s Life” has easily bested the season’s other animated ant movie (DreamWorks SKG’s “Antz”). Jerry Bruckheimer’s “Enemy of the State” has performed well. And Adam Sandler’s “The Waterboy” had the studio’s second-highest opening weekend ever and is still going strong. At year’s end, Disney and Paramount are neck and neck for most box-office receipts in 1998. Meanwhile, rumors have swirled about Roth, with many speculating that the veteran executive (he once headed 20th Century Fox) and former independent producer could move to another studio. In a recent interview with The Times’ Amy Wallace, Roth discussed his excitement about--and “ongoing conflict” over--the future.

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Question: This year, you’re going to have a $23-million movie, “The Waterboy,” make $160 million domestically.

Answer: Might even be closer to $175 [million].

Q: And a $60-million movie, “Beloved,” make $25 million.

A: As much as I think that [writer] Bill Goldman’s wrong about Hollywood--”Nobody knows anything”--I have to look honestly at myself and say a year ago, if you had said, “Add the gross of Oprah Winfrey and Jonathan Demme’s ‘Beloved’ to Eddie Murphy and Stephen Herek’s ‘Holy Man’ and multiply that times six and you’ll get the best of ‘Waterboy’ “--you know anybody in the United States would have had you committed. But that is what’s happened. “Waterboy” will end up being the No. 3 picture of the year. You can’t make people come see what it is that they’ve decided they don’t want to see. And conversely, you can’t keep people away from what it is they’ve decided they want to see.

Q: Is that depressing sometimes?

A: It’s daunting. It’s really depressing when it doesn’t work. It’s very hard to stay up in this business. You never know quite where you either made [a film] work or broke its back. I had about as bad an October personally as I’ve had. I’m thinking about leasing out the studio next year in October and letting somebody else swallow it. But the fact is we’ll have five $100-million domestic grossing pictures this year. We had five last year. No one’s ever had five in a year, and we’re doing it two years in a row.

Q: You really have to put enormous faith in your gut instincts.

A: If that’s not working, you’re finished. It’s a two-level system. The first level is you read a piece of material or you hear an idea and you act intuitively. If the answer is no--as it is most of the time--that’s the end of it. If it’s yes, then you start doing your homework. Can these guys really do it? Have they done something before? Is somebody else doing something like this? Where can I put it [in the release schedule]? If you’ve been doing this as long as I have, once you get past the first level, you form a profit-and-loss statement in your head. You say, “What’s it going to cost? What are its prospects?”

Q: Give me an example.

A: Wes Anderson’s movie, “Rushmore” [opening in February]. In the middle of making “Armageddon,” he and Owen Wilson handed me their script. I knew what they had done before--I loved “Bottle Rocket,” and “Rushmore” was completely original. I said, “OK, it’s gonna cost $11 [million] or $12 million. If we can find the center of it, the picture will go out and gross $30 [million] to $40 million and make a nice profit.” If for some reason I was wrong, and it doesn’t translate to as many people as I thought, the most you could lose in a picture like that is $5 million. The script reminded me of some of my favorite British angry young man movies--”O Lucky Man!” or “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner”--and I said, “Wow, here’s a voice for the future.” So you’re always balancing things like commercialism, legacy, future, money, brand.

Q: You recently shelved--and then resuscitated--a movie at the other end of the budget spectrum: “Bicentennial Man,” directed by Chris Columbus and starring Robin Williams.

A: “Shelved” is too strong a word.

Q: OK. But how much is too much for a movie these days? What’s the magic number? Under $100 million?

A: There’s no magic number. But in Hollywood right now, if you make a large film--not an action film but a large drama--with a first-dollar-gross director [who takes a cut of the movie’s gross receipts] and a big movie star, you are looking at [opening at] Christmastime, with five or six [similar] movies. When all is said and done, if you treated those five or six movies as one movie, you will have gotten one big old break-even. And for Christmas, which should be your second-biggest time of the year, you’ve got to do better than break even.

Part of the puzzle is that unfortunately a big-name director who is a first-dollar-gross player is not responsible. I don’t mean [personally] irresponsible but not technically responsible for the cost of the picture, because they’re getting their money off the top. If that director lures a big actor who wants to work with [him or her], the actor may also get money off the top.

Between the two of them--and again, I don’t want to make this sound conspiratorial, but this seems to be the way it plays out--they spend a long time making the picture, which means it costs a lot. And dramas normally play to people over 25 or 30 and more female than male and more domestic than international. And so you wake up in the morning and you ask yourself, “Does this picture need to be perfect in order to break even?”

Q: And at Christmas, you’re looking at marketing dramas to the people who are the hardest to get out of the house.

A: Right. Tell me how different the audience could possibly be [this year] for “The Prince of Egypt,” “Stepmom” and “Patch Adams”? They have a lot of the same traits--big stars, big directors--and they’re not going to naturally appeal, I think, to the most available [young] audience. So our “Bicentennial Man” is for next Christmas. It has a big director and a big star. The first budget came in over $100 million and it was too much. As much as you like a movie, you have to say, “We have to lower the break-even on this picture.” Which is what we did.

Q: Does all this make you want to steer clear of big director-big star duos?

A: Well, you have to really choose very carefully. If you’re going to spend $80 million to make a drama and give away 25% of the gross to a director and an actor, just know that you’ve narrowed the [possibility of profits]. . . . It’s debilitating to the audience in a funny way, because it’s hard to get two big movie stars now into a picture with a big director because there isn’t enough to go around.

Q: Why is New Line Cinema making the next Adam Sandler movie and not Disney?

A: I love Adam Sandler. I talked to him every day for about six weeks; I talk to him every other day now. But his representatives came in and asked for an unbelievable amount of money for his package. And I just thought I’d be giving back the money we made on “Waterboy.” So it didn’t make any sense.

Q: If you could change three things about the movie industry, what would you change?

A: Oh, God, what wouldn’t I change?

Q: What would you change first?

A: From an enjoyment standpoint, I wish we were not so under the microscope of the press, which has made the weekly box office into a kind of sport of winning and losing. I wish we would stop keeping score so much. It permeates everything. I worry that this new generation of filmmakers is too consumed with bonanzas--big hits--and I think that will make them make lesser films. I [might relieve] the pressures that are on us being owned by multinational companies.

I wish it were 50 years ago and everybody was under contract with the studios. And that great directors made two or three pictures a year on 23-day schedules, and that people didn’t have television sets with a hundred channels on them and they didn’t spend three hours a day on the Internet. I don’t have a computer and I don’t have e-mail and I don’t communicate in that way at all because I’m frightened to death of alienation.

I’d like to go back to when . . . people went out and saw movies all the time. I’d like this not because it would make [Disney] more successful, but because I think the communal spirit breaks down as you get so many different ways of personally accessing stuff.

Q: You’ve long said you wanted to make fewer movies. In 1998, you released 21 films. Next year, you’re planning 15 live-action pictures and three animated ones. If you release too few movies you need them all to be hits, but if you make too many you cannibalize your own profits. What’s the right number?

A: It’s impossible to find a perfect balance. . . .

Next year we’ll put out the fewest movies the studio’s put out in a long time. “Tarzan” and “Inspector Gadget” are our two big summer movies. “Toy Story 2” will sit right there at Thanksgiving Day, where we’ve won the last five years in a row. “Bicentennial Man” will be at Christmas. And we’re making this little movie “10 Things I Hate About You” for less than $15 million that is a teenage version of “The Taming of the Shrew.” We own 100% of the movie, and it is aimed at the most available and most addicted audience--and I say that in a nice way.

Next year, because we’re not doing [the $100-million-plus] “Armageddon,” we are vested in six or seven individual filmmakers--Michael Mann, Larry Kasdan, Tim Robbins, Spike Lee, Anderson, Garry Marshall. These are all talented people who have something on their mind. And our average budget goes down to $32 million per picture--$20 million below the industry average. I’ve got to hope that a couple of their pictures work. It doesn’t do any good [to lower budgets] if they don’t work.

Q: You’ve heard the rumors about yourself. How long do you want to be a studio chief?

A: I don’t want to use the newspaper to talk about my future specifically, because I don’t think it’s appropriate. I hear [rumors] all the time, and I attribute more of that to the kind of chaos and difficulty inside the industry than I do to my own comings and goings. I love movies, and I have an ongoing conflict about my relationship to the movies. I love working here. And at the same time I am conflicted about how to be not just the most effective but [the most] gratified.

[As a producer], if a movie didn’t work I could go hide in the desert somewhere or go to Hawaii and pretend it didn’t happen. But here you’ve got to come in at 8:30 a.m. on Monday morning and sit right there [he points to a chair] with 25 people in a room. And you have to say, “We did the best we could” or “We were all wrong.” You have to be able to keep going through it. It’s not the easiest thing.