Maybe the Film Failed Because It Just Wasn’t Good

When Leonard Mlodinow asks, “Why are smart people in Hollywood blind to the randomness that rules their industry?” he seems to suggest that box-office success is nothing more than a coin toss (“Chaotic,” July 2). If this were true, why would Disney squander $7 billion in stock to purchase Pixar? Taking Mlodinow’s assertion to its logical extreme, Pixar’s unbroken string of hit films is the result of luck alone; talent, taste or a solid sense of what constitutes a good story do not enter into the equation.

While there clearly is an element of unpredictability to a film’s success, Mlodinow does a great disservice to the creative community when he suggests that a stinker such as “Poseidon” is essentially equivalent to a film such as “X-Men: The Last Stand.” The truth is that among the “tent pole” films he discusses, most of those that fail do so because they’re simply not very good.

Ian Marks

Van Nuys

*

As a publicist, I was fascinated that the article covered everything about what happens in planning, making, exploiting and releasing movies and that it tried to analyze why some pics make it and some don’t. But there was no mention where reviewers come in. Are we to believe that they are meaningless, after most of them panned “The Da Vinci Code” and still the international box office was huge?

Jerry Pam

Los Angeles

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Mlodinow mistakes misplaced power for randomness. The numbers crunchers and their theories are part of the problem. My father, Harry Tugend, wrote or produced about 40 screenplays, and they made a profit. As he explained to me, really smart business people can take over studios and usually run them into the ground, because making movies involves artistic choices and is completely different from running any other business.

Business people generally have a below-average artistic understanding. The professors who were quoted in the article are even more clueless than the modern-day executives, who couldn’t create a story line if their lives depended on it. My father didn’t like being an executive and “promoted” himself to freelance writing. But people like him are not welcome in today’s executive ranks.

James Tugend

Los Angeles