They’re Rumors, Not Predictions

Movies that are perceived to be in trouble wave any number of red flags. First and foremost, production drags on for extra months as the budget spirals upward. The director may be a tyrant like James Cameron on “Titanic.” Or he may simply lose control of his $100-million budget, as Kevin Reynolds did on “Waterworld.” A sullen male star may hole up in his dressing room snorting cocaine. Or, always a bad sign, the studio may move a movie’s release from prime time to fringe time as 20th Century Fox did when it pushed “The Last of the Mohicans” out of summer 1992 and into October.

A few decades ago, studios had enough control to bury the red flags under a counteroffensive of positive publicity on all but their most expensive and notorious movies. Today, there are few secrets on any Hollywood film set. And the 100 crew members and 14 leading actors have little loyalty to their current studio bosses because they will be working at a different studio next month.

“It’s gotten more and more difficult, if not impossible, to cover up what went on on the set when crew members go from the day’s work to pounding out gossip on the Internet,” says Laurence Mark, co-producer of “Jerry Maguire.”

So when Bill Murray and Lucy Liu had joint tantrums on the set of “Charlie’s Angels” last spring, shutting down production for the rest of the day, they might as well have stood on Hollywood Boulevard waving a red flag saying “$65-million production in trouble” at passing cars.

But the Murray-Liu screaming matches were only red flag No. 1 for “Charlie’s Angels.” Red Flag No. 2 was the pink, blue, yellow and green pages of new script that tumbled out of the copying machines daily and bore the names of at least 10 writers. Red Flag No. 3 was a widely mocked teaser trailer that made the movie about three female private eyes seem extremely earnest and no fun at all. And then, of course, the director, known only as McG, had never directed a movie before.

“We live in a world of gossip,” says Tom Sherak, who spent 17 years in the upper echelons of distribution and marketing at Fox before leaving a few weeks ago to become a partner in Revolution, former Disney movie chief Joe Roth’s new movie company. “Information flows like a river down a mountainside. Ten years ago, if you were at a test screening and hated the movie, you could only tell your four best friends. Today, you can go on the Internet and tell the world.”

Bad word of mouth has always been Hollywood’s worst nightmare. In 1963, when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the married (to other people) co-stars of “Cleopatra,” made a steamy spectacle of themselves cruising Rome’s Via Veneto at night, the movie never recovered.

“We were on the front page of the New York Daily News and the New York Mirror five days in a row,” says film producer Jack Brodsky, then a Fox publicist. “Burton complained that he hated ‘seeing all this stuff’ in the papers. He couldn’t understand the furor. ‘I always sleep with my leading ladies,’ Burton said.”

And the bigger the movie, the more likely it is to get bad word of mouth. At a cost of $44 million, “Cleopatra” was 44 times as expensive as “Tom Jones,” which won the Oscar for best picture that year. “Cleopatra” was way over budget, especially when the London sets were rebuilt in Rome. Taylor was being paid an unprecedented $1 million, and suddenly she was in the hospital with a deliberate or accidental overdose of pills. Brodsky, an executive producer of the upcoming “The Black Knight,” adds: “Even today, it’s still the general opinion of people that ‘Cleopatra’ was a financial disaster--although it wasn’t.”

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“Charlie’s Angels,” the hit ABC television series of the late 1970s, made a pop culture icon of Farrah Fawcett and short-term stars of Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd. In the big-screen version, the sexy girl detectives are played by Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu. Whether the resurrected “Charlie’s Angels” is a dud like last year’s “Mod Squad” or a blockbuster like the movie version of “Mission: Impossible” will be decided after the movie opens in nearly 3,000 theaters Friday.

Columbia’s counteroffensive against the movie’s earlier bad publicity included sending the three stars to an outdoor survival school for a magazine article proving that they were best friends and willing to share each other’s torment on a three-day desert hike without cell phones, food or blankets. Columbia also put on a glitzy, old-fashioned premiere Oct. 22 at the Chinese Theatre, closing down much of Hollywood Boulevard. The party afterward had belly dancers, a disco and goody bags that included a copy of Marie Claire magazine with the survival cover story. Tracking polls show that “Charlie’s Angels” will do good business its opening weekend. Until results are in from the second weekend, producer Barrymore and ex-music video director McG can take comfort in the fact that perception does not always turn into reality.

In summer 1997, three months before the premiere of “Titanic,” Hollywood insiders catcalled the movie “waterlogged” and “the ship that will sink Fox.” In the summer of 1939, three months before the Atlanta premiere of “Gone With the Wind,” Hollywood insiders called the movie “The White Elephant” and “David’s Folly.” Both David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind,” and James Cameron, the producer-director of “Titanic,” spent lavishly and went months over schedule. “Gone With the Wind,” at $4.25 million, was the most expensive movie made during the movies’ first four decades. Its cost in 1999 dollars has been calculated at $100 million. At $200 million, “Titanic” was the most expensive picture of the 20th century.

In the end, what they cost and the chaos of their production didn’t matter. “Gone With the Wind” sold an unprecedented $14 million worth of tickets. “Titanic” earned more money than any movie in history. As icing on a very rich cake, “Gone With the Wind” won eight regular and two special Academy Awards. “Titanic” won 11 Oscars.

“Because of ‘Titanic,’ studios are less worried when everything seems to be out of control,” says producer Mark. “They can soothe themselves with: ‘Look at “Titanic.” ’ “

They might do better to frighten themselves with “Heaven’s Gate” instead. Good directors are, most often, egotistical perfectionists. The nearly absolute power directors achieve after they have provided a studio with a commercial and artistic blockbuster can too easily corrupt them into thinking that their next movie will be, must be, a masterpiece.

Michael Cimino’s Vietnam saga, “The Deer Hunter,” won an Academy Award for the best picture of 1978 and was among the top 10 box office hits of 1979. Cimino’s vision of an epic western based on 19th century Wyoming range wars had been green-lighted by United Artists for a relatively modest cost of $7.5 million.

But “Heaven’s Gate” didn’t go into production until “The Deer Hunter” had won its five Oscars. Cimino was allowed whatever grandiose effects he felt were necessary on a location several states away from the restraining hands of studio executives. They were shocked to discover that, among other profligacies, he had built a huge irrigation system so that his battle scenes could be shot on grass. The final cost of “Heaven’s Gate” was $36 million at a time when the average movie cost $9.4 million. The final result was an exquisitely photographed, muddled movie with no story that belly-flopped at the box office.

Actually, the final result was the sale of United Artists to MGM. Just as “Cleopatra” had almost bankrupted Fox in 1963, “Heaven’s Gate” led Transamerica Insurance, the studio’s owner, to bolt the movie business.

In 1979, United Artists had a second out-of-control movie--this one more than a year behind schedule--that finally reached theaters. The wisecrack was that “Apocalypse Now,” Francis Ford Coppola’s loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” was unreleasable and should be called “Apocalypse Never.”

“Apocalypse Now” could have been a primer on how not to make a movie. It was filmed in the Philippine jungles during typhoon season. Coppola’s out-sized appetite for everything from food to grand gestures and major themes inflated the budget from $12 million to $31 million, including money that was spent rebuilding sets destroyed by a typhoon.

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More than 20 years later, “Apocalypse Now” is still recognized as an extraordinary--and controversial--movie. Directors like Coppola, who won four Academy Awards for his “Godfather” films, are always in danger of having their films perceived as troubled because they paint on huge canvases, usually go over budget, and most often deal with risky, serious subjects.

Set in Cuba during the last days of Batista’s dictatorship, Sydney Pollack’s 1990 picture, “Havana,” had bad word of mouth from the beginning, and the movie was a commercial and artistic failure. But Pollack had been equally dictatorial and anxiety-ridden on his previous film, “Out of Africa,” and the same rumors had swirled around it during production. “Out of Africa” was a commercial success and won seven Oscars.

Studio executives still tend to write a blank check when they are dealing with a powerful director. If the director is also a movie star, his check-drawing power is even greater. After Kevin Costner’s success as the star of “Field of Dreams” and as the star-producer-director of “Dances With Wolves,” no one questioned his desire to make a movie entirely on or underwater, or his insistence that “Waterworld” be directed by his friend Kevin Reynolds instead of allowing Universal to hire a director specializing in complex special effects. The $15-million “Dances With Wolves” had won seven Oscars and sold $424 million in tickets across six continents. Costner got what he wanted.

What Universal got was seasick crew members, a budget that ballooned to $175 million, a year of bad publicity, a director who was eventually fired and replaced, unofficially, by Costner, and a 1995 movie about a landless, post-apocalyptic world. Nevertheless, “Waterworld” did respectably at the box office abroad. Warner Bros. wasn’t as lucky with its rumor-plagued, post-apocalypse Costner movie, “The Postman,” in 1997. As he did on “Dances With Wolves,” Costner produced, directed and starred, this time as a con man who rebuilds American civilization by delivering old mail. At a cost of more than $80 million, “The Postman” sold $17 million in tickets in North America.

“Waterworld” and “The Postman” had the misfortune to be made in the 1990s, long after the studios had lost their ability to bottle up rumors. In the hot summer of 1942, a major movie lurched toward the end of production with the writers writing new scenes every night that were shoved into the hands of the actors in the morning. On July 17, the star finally balked at learning new speeches every day and sulked in his dressing room, ignoring the producer who was begging him to return to the set. But Humphrey Bogart’s tantrum and the distress of writing an ending for “Casablanca” were simply notes in the daily production reports, to be discovered by scholars 30 years later.

“There was a more cohesive nature to the industry then,” says the producer of “Big Daddy,” Sid Ganis, who has been the head of marketing at Columbia, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Lucasfilm. “Those who worked at MGM or Warner Bros. were loyal to MGM or Warner Bros in every sense of the word. Today, if there’s a disagreement on the set, in no time 400 people know about it and talk about it.”

It was after the David Begelman scandal hit the front pages of newspapers in 1978--Begelman, the head of Columbia’s movie division, was convicted of felony grand theft--that the press began to spotlight the business of movie-making. In 1978, the New York Times ran a front-page article on summer movie grosses, and by the early ‘80s, major newspapers and magazines began to focus on weekend box office results. “Entertainment Tonight” went on the air in 1981, to be followed by a dozen more syndicated, network and cable programs dealing with the entertainment business and culture.

At the same time, a harder-eyed look at the financial nuts and bolts of movie-making was considerably more cynical. “Trying to convince people we believed in ‘Last of the Mohicans’ was impossible,” Sherak says of Fox’s 1992 adventure film set during the French and Indian Wars. “Once you take a picture out of the summer and put it in the fall, people think something must be wrong with the movie. But we really thought July 4 was too competitive a weekend for the movie. And we were right. It was brilliant to release ‘Mohicans’ in October.” A moderately budgeted movie, “Last of the Mohicans” sold nearly $75 million in tickets in American and Canadian theaters.

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Cynicism was followed by the Internet. Suddenly, gossip was magnified and amplified. “The Internet is as significant as Walter Winchell ever was, and Winchell was the most influential gossip columnist who ever existed,” says Ganis.

“I was on the Internet the other day and found a ‘Star Wars’ trailer from Episode II,” says Sherak. “But there is no footage from Episode II. The movie hasn’t started to be made. A kid in Florida pieced together footage from the previous ‘Star Wars’ trailers and added footage of actors in Episode II from their other movies. We thought about saying cease and desist. But everything is so speeded up today that by the time you make a big thing about it, it’s over.”

So, unable to stop the tide of anonymous gossip and reviews, the studios had one choice--to join the enemy. “Every movie has its own Web site,” says Ganis. “That’s how incredibly useful it is for publicity. On a movie’s Web site, you can give a hint of a raunchy, sexy scene that you couldn’t show in a television commercial.”

As has become customary the week before a movie is released, the millions of subscribers to America Online were offered a live online chat with the three stars of “Charlie’s Angels.” And if the reviews of “Charlie’s Angels” aren’t to Columbia’s liking, studio executives can do what the movie industry has been doing for the last year: infiltrate Ain’t-It-Cool-News.com and other gossipy Web sites and post their own anonymous glowing reviews.