Sifting Through the Mud, Looking for a Better Way
When you write about the movie business, your phone rings off the hook at Academy Awards time with calls from journalists around the world, wanting to hear an insider’s Oscar predictions. But this year the questions were about something very different--the fusillade of attacks against “A Beautiful Mind.”
Bloodied but unbowed, “A Beautiful Mind” staggered out of the ring victorious on Sunday night, winning four Oscars, including best picture. But it was an ugly win. The film endured 15 rounds of below-the-belt punches in what was viewed as the seamiest Oscar campaign in recent memory. The Oscar slugfest generated tons of media coverage, with nearly every piece focused on how the Academy Awards have fallen captive to the kind of nasty mudslinging you’d expect to see from a really tawdry affair--like a Mike Tyson weigh-in or a California gubernatorial primary.
The other Oscar pictures barely suffered so much as a scratch. The accusations were all focused on “A Beautiful Mind.” But why was a film about a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician’s battle with schizophrenia such a magnet for media scrutiny? And is there anything the academy could do to clean up the Oscar race next year? Here are a few thoughts:
Any filmmaker who decides to make a high-profile movie about a living person should fasten their seat belt and prepare for a bumpy ride. Any biopic that doesn’t tell the truth--the whole truth--about its subject is likely to become a punching bag for over-eager media sleuths and special-interest groups. Ron Howard hasn’t even committed to making “The Alamo,” but the New York Times has already run a piece speculating on who might be offended if the film is seen as tilting toward the Texans or Mexicans.
Universal Pictures went out of its way to position “A Beautiful Mind” as a pseudo-biography, billing the film as “inspired by events in the life” of Nash. The studio hoped it might lessen the impact of the film’s having airbrushed out some messy events in Nash’s life. No dice: Critics treated the film as if it were a History Channel documentary. I think “Beautiful Mind” would’ve been a far better film if it had explored more of the contradictions in Nash’s life instead of airbrushing them out.
But sugarcoating the life of an obscure academic is not the same as re-imagining the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as Oliver Stone did with “JFK.” Nash is hardly a public figure: It’s his life, not ours. And it was Nash who established the ground rules by making the filmmakers sign an agreement promising not to raise the uncomfortable issue of his sex life.
Still, if I were making movies in today’s Fact Police era, I’d be concerned. Film is a dramatic medium, and drama sometimes needs a little mythologizing to breathe. “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” just to name two mesmerizing “inspired by” films, are full of whoppers and half-truths--they could never have stood up to the media’s Sgt. Friday grilling.
Be careful what you wish for: “13 Days,” the Kevin Costner-starring film about the Cuban missile crisis, was factual to a T--and a gigantic snoozefest. But why did “Mind” get clobbered and the Will Smith-starring “Ali,” which opened the same day, get a free pass? Director Michael Mann did scrupulous research, but there’s plenty of fodder for nitpicking, whether it’s how the film presents Ali’s relations with the Nation of Islam or glosses over Ali’s womanizing. One key difference: “Ali” was a huge failure at the box office, so it didn’t present a tempting target.
In Hollywood, if you have a hit, you’re fair game for backbiting from jealous rivals and a fat target for anyone with a grievance. “Ali” also had the vocal support of its title character, who is still a beloved American folk hero; attacking the movie would be akin to belittling a legend now crippled by Parkinson’s disease.
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Much of this year’s nastiness was also inspired by the blood feud between Miramax and DreamWorks, which have been at odds ever since Miramax out-campaigned DreamWorks in the 1999 “Shakespeare in Love” versus “Saving Private Ryan” best picture race. The two studios have had competing films each year since, this year’s rival films being Miramax’s “In the Bedroom” and “A Beautiful Mind,” which was co-financed by DreamWorks.
With relations between the two studios in need of a mediator, every story about the Oscar race was viewed as an attack by the other side. When the Drudge Report ran a story on Dec. 20 saying Nash’s homosexuality had been “deliberately left out of the movie!” DreamWorks immediately fingered Miramax for planting the item. When the New York Post ran a story in January saying Miramax had been badmouthing “A Beautiful Mind,” Miramax instantly accused DreamWorks of planting the piece.
One of the most vociferous “Mind” bashers was Roger Friedman, an Internet columnist with close ties to Miramax. After I wrote a column on Feb. 5 decrying the Oscar excess, Miramax’s publicists wrote a 10-point defense of their Oscar tactics. It turned out to have a hidden message: the first letter of each point spelled out: D-R-E-A-M-W-O-R-K-S. To make things even more uncomfortable, “Mind’s” Oscar publicity consultant was Tony Angellotti, who helped engineer the “Shakespeare” upset for Miramax before defecting to Universal. Angellotti is the best Oscar publicist in town, but he’s also the most aggressive.
His presence made everyone a little trigger-happy, especially at DreamWorks, where they were still bruised over his role in defeating “Saving Private Ryan” and unhappy to find him also working this year as an Oscar consultant for “Monsters, Inc.,” DreamWorks’ only real competition in the new best animated feature category. The rival studios tried putting on a good face at Miramax’s Oscar party Saturday night, when Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein and DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg performed a skit that had the two men in anger-management therapy together. There were a few laughs, but the jokes felt forced.
The media has been quick to blame Oscar publicists like Angellotti for much of the Oscar race mudslinging--and not without some justification. Miramax Oscar publicist David Horowitz was caught tipping off an L.A. Times reporter to the first Drudge smear against “Mind.” More recently, the press cited 20th Century Fox as having spread damaging gossip about the film, encouraged in part by Angellotti, who told reporters that Fox was the prime culprit. However, no one produced any evidence of Fox’s misdeeds, and disinformation was everywhere.
DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press told me that Fox Chairman Tom Rothman had apologized to Katzenberg, for his studio’s rumor-mongering. But when I called Rothman, he denied making any apology, saying that he had nothing to apologize for and hadn’t talked to Katzenberg in months.
Instead of putting all the blame on Hollywood, we in the media should look in the mirror. In recent years, those of us who write for mainstream newspapers and TV news outlets have become patsies for almost any dirty trick because of our willingness to run stories based on Internet gossip and charges made by anonymous sources. Matt Drudge, for example, first attacked “Mind” in December, yet waited until March 5--just after the final academy ballots went out--before publishing a second attack on the film, charging it with leaving out what he luridly described as “shocking Jew-bashing passages” from the Sylvia Nasar biography. Either Drudge is a very slow reader or someone planted the item.
It was old news--and non-news. Nasar’s book has been out for years, and none of the prominent reviews of her book bothered to mention the anti-Semitic incidents, which were clearly schizophrenic-induced hallucinations. Yet the entertainment media treated the Drudge smear like raw meat. Worse still, outlets like Entertainment Weekly, which normally provides stellar Oscar coverage, aired the anti-Semitism charges without citing their origins, allowing readers to assume they came from a credible source. Maybe we should take more time to evaluate the newsworthiness of wild charges--the way we’re taught to do in journalism school--before tossing them into the mix just because they add some sizzle to our stories.
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I’ve heard from enough academy board members to know how aggrieved people feel about this year’s contretemps. But the academy doesn’t have the power to limit spending or the clout to penalize studios for charges of negative campaigning. When I floated the idea of a studio adopting a voluntary Oscar code of honor, a movie executive on the phone burst out laughing.
However, here’s one small suggestion: Why not move up the Oscars a month? Oscar films are all in release by year’s end, leaving plenty of time for academy members to see them. If the various film critic associations can pick a best picture winner by New Year’s, surely Oscar voters could do it by late February. A shorter campaign would force studios to spend fewer ad dollars, put the squeeze on the growing number of pseudo-award shows and maybe bring a note of sanity to what’s become an embarrassing commentary on the industry’s lack of self-restraint. With the Oscars, less could be more--much like the Oscar show itself.
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The Big Picture runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.