How Thrills Pay the Bills at Paramount

DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press was talking recently with the producer of “The Castle,” a prison action-drama that her studio is currently filming with Robert Redford and James Gandolfini. Like all movie marketers, she wanted to be reassured that the film would be a crowd-pleaser. So she used Hollywood shorthand.

“I said to him, ‘Just deliver me a Paramount movie and I’ll be happy,’ and he knew instantly what I was talking about,” she explains. “Their thrillers are a genre unto themselves. They know exactly how to make movies that are titillating without being a turn-off.”

Sixty years ago, studios had distinct personalities: Warner Bros. made gangster movies. MGM made musicals. Universal made horror movies. But today’s studio conglomerates prefer to assemble a diverse slate of pictures--teen comedies, summer action flicks, adult romances and the occasional Oscar-caliber drama--that essentially cover all bets. Paramount does that too--it’s had hits with splashy action fare like the “Mission: Impossible” films, teen romances like “Save the Last Dance” and romantic-comedy fluff like “What Women Want.” But the studio has been especially successful in recent years selling a string of action-packed adult thrillers, including “Kiss the Girls,” “Double Jeopardy,” “The General’s Daughter,” “Breakdown” and “Rules of Engagement.” The latest in this long line, “Along Came a Spider,” got off to a promising start over the weekend, taking in $16.7 million at the box office.

The films often have been eviscerated by the critics; the Washington Post, for example, dismissed “Double Jeopardy” as a “silly exercise in car crashes, chases and nasty outbursts of generic violence.” And Paramount’s cold-blooded cost-consciousness has made it notorious among agents and producers as the toughest place to do a deal in town. In a recent studio overview, Entertainment Weekly asked: “Is this a studio or an insurance company?”

But the Paramount machine is the envy of rival studios, who believe that its disciplined, risk-averse executive team has developed a shrewd formula for turning modestly budgeted thrillers into sizable hits.

“Paramount has had such great success with these movies that it makes each subsequent film work even better because it discourages the rest of us from putting anything up against them,” says Sony Pictures distribution and marketing chief Jeff Blake. “They’re so good at selling these movies that if they plant their flag on a date, you stay away from it.”

You can’t accuse Paramount of bragging. It is characteristic of the studio’s standoffish attitude toward the press that studio Chairman Sherry Lansing and her top executives declined to be interviewed for this column, even though it offered a glowing review of their marketing and production prowess. (For years, Lansing said that she returned every phone call to her office, but that applied only to agents and producers, not reporters.)

Still, the studio’s success speaks for itself. “Kiss the Girls,” made for $27 million in 1997, earned $100 million worldwide. “Double Jeopardy,” made in 1999 for $40 million, earned $178 million worldwide. “The General’s Daughter” cost $60 million and made $156 million worldwide. The latest entry, “Along Came a Spider,” is a $30-million thriller that stars Morgan Freeman as police detective and psychologist Alex Cross, matching wits with a diabolical kidnapper.

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The movies largely share a similar formula--morality tales laced with enough sex and surprise twists to attract two key audience quadrants: young women and older men. Released away from the hotly competitive summer and holiday seasons and made without expensive visual effects, they are our modern-day B-movies, the cinematic equivalent of airport thrillers--the kind of paperback page-turner people pick up at LAX when they’re afraid there might not be a good movie on the flight to Boston. In fact, both “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider” are adapted from James Patterson’s series of Alex Cross thrillers that are easier to find at an airport than a Starbucks cafe latte.

The movies, with their crusty police investigator heroes and reliance on old-fashioned car chases and surprise twists, also have a lot in common with TV dramas such as “NYPD Blue” and “Law & Order,” especially in the way that they team comely young actresses (Ashley Judd in “Kiss the Girls” and “Double Jeopardy,” Madeleine Stowe in “General’s Daughter,” Monica Potter in “Along Came a Spider”) with weather-beaten veterans (Tommy Lee Jones, co-star of “Double Jeopardy” and “Rules of Engagement,” John Travolta in “General’s Daughter,” and Freeman, co-star of “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider”).

Most rival studios have avoided the genre, believing it was impossible to make money with mid-range budget movies with no A-list movie stars and TV-style subject matter. But while an actor like Freeman may not be a first-dollar gross player (considered a plus at Paramount, since the studio doesn’t have to share its profits with him), as an Oscar winner he has box-office gravitas. When you see him in a TV spot, you basically think: How bad could this movie possibly be?

Paramount isn’t shy about selling two key story elements that TV can’t offer enough of: nail-biting suspense and steamy sex. Especially sex. “The General’s Daughter” was perhaps the kinkiest major studio movie since “Basic Instinct.” The movie had a dominatrix, secret torture chamber, S&M; videos, a brutal gang rape and lots of salacious footage of a dead nude woman. After showing several suggestive images, the movie’s trailer posed the question: “Was she raped? No. . . . Worse.”

If there’s one key reason Paramount is good at selling these movies, it’s that it has someone running the studio that actually enjoys them. In fact, if you look back at Lansing’s career--she was a producer and executive at 20th Century Fox before taking the reins at Paramount a decade ago--her biggest hits have been with steamy thrillers and melodramas, most notably “Fatal Attraction,” “The Accused” and “Indecent Proposal.”

After test audiences demanded that Glenn Close, “Fatal Attraction’s” sexual aggressor, be punished at the end instead of Michael Douglas’ cheating husband, Lansing persuaded director Adrian Lyne to shoot a new ending. When the film became a huge hit, Lansing incorporated the lesson into her filmmaking philosophy: When you’re making a popcorn picture, you have to please the audience.

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If Paramount had a motto, it would be: The customer is always right. Most studio marketers will test 15 or 20 different TV spots for a new movie campaign; Paramount will often do 30 or 40. Producer Mace Neufeld, now making the new Jack Ryan thriller, “Sum of All Fears,” says Paramount sent him 50 rough versions of the film poster before he was a month into production.

If a film isn’t scoring well at research screenings, the studio will change the ending, re-shoot key scenes, edit out unpopular characters--anything to make the movie play better. Until he made “Along Came a Spider,” director Lee Tamahori had always resisted having his films subjected to preview screenings. Paramount tested “Spider” seven times before the film was finished.

“If you’d told me going in that we’d test my movie that many times, I would’ve cut my wrists and let the blood flow where it may,” Tamahori said. “But rigorous test screening is very much the Paramount philosophy. After all, this is the studio that made a fortune with ‘Congo.’ So when they say we know how to make these kind of movies, I said, ‘OK, let’s give it a go.’ ”

That doesn’t mean that Lansing blindly relies on research-screening numbers. In fact, after a test screening, she and her executives will give notes to filmmakers before they even look at the audience-response numbers. Tamahori says that Lansing’s team of executives understands the studio formula so well that he spent more time working with then-Paramount production executive Don Granger than he did with the film’s producers.

Tamahori sensed that “Spider” had a weak ending, so during filming in Vancouver, he shot three variations on the surprise finale. At the film’s first test screenings, audience reaction to the ending was lukewarm. After each screening, Tamahori made changes: compressing the story, taking out unnecessary explanatory material and cutting back the scenes he’d shot with Penelope Ann Miller (“She was great,” he says, “but the audience didn’t want to feel her pain; they wanted to get on with the story.”)

Finally, he and his writers came up with three scenarios for the ending. After consulting with Lansing and Paramount President John Goldwyn, Tamahori reassembled the cast and spent six days in Vancouver shooting a new finale. When it tested well, Tamahori knew he’d done his job; he’d delivered a movie Paramount could sell.

The result is a surprisingly well-crafted movie--the modern-day equivalent of a gritty 1970s Don Siegel thriller. “If you want to make ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,’ Paramount is probably not the best place to be,” Tamahori says. “But for me, making a thriller, it was a really satisfying experience. As a director, you don’t normally expect or want a lot of input from studio executives. But when I first sat down with Don Granger, he said, essentially: No offense, but at Paramount, we know how to do these movies. And you know what? He was right.”

“The Big Picture” runs each Tuesday in Calendar. If you have comments, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.