celebrity gossip, academic style

….and other complaints. If you’re a long-time (read: two month) follower of the blog, you’ll recall a post from late June, entitled “A Star-Less Summer?” in which I contemplated the failure of recent star-headed films (Land of the Lost, Imagine That, Pelham 123) and the success of high concept. The rest of the summer season confirmed that prediction: as August draws to a close, the top seven grossers line-up as such:

(All gross figures taken from Boxofficemojo.com). With the success of District 9 (starless — the lead performer had never even appeared in a feature film) and lots of fingers crossed over Inglorious Basterds (which seems to have just fine), the press was ready to make some big assertions.

First Huge Claim: A-List stardom is dead.
The Times published a short piece, “A-List Stars Flailing at Box Office,” with large pictures of Denzel Washington, Will Farrell, and Julia Roberts telling us that they can no longer ensure an audience. Choice quotes include:

“The spring and summer box office has murdered megawatt stars like Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Eddie Murphy, John Travolta, Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks, Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell.”

““Imagine That,” starring Mr. Murphy, was such a disaster that Paramount Pictures had to take a write-down. Mr. Sandler? His “Funny People” limped out of the gate and then collapsed. Some of these may simply have not been very good, but an A-list star is supposed to overcome that.”

“This weekend, Mr. Pitt has an opportunity to stop the bleeding. His “Inglourious Basterds,” an R-rated Nazi thriller directed by Quentin Tarantino, arrived in theaters Friday. Harvey Weinstein and The Weinstein Company built the marketing campaign for the film almost entirely around Mr. Pitt.

And the actor may pull it off — kind of. Mr. Weinstein contends that Mr. Pitt’s drawing power is not remotely in question. “Brad Pitt is a super-superstar at the apex of his popularity, and he’s a large part of why people want to see this movie,” he said.”

I don’t disagree with those claims — and they’re certainly supported by the box-office grosses of big, starry films this summer. But I also think that it’s not that people no longer love stars . Stars can be just as ‘high concept’ as a film based on alien prawns in South Africa or toys from our childhood, as Justin Wyatt has made clear. What’s missing — and here’s where I’d like to revise my original post on the star-less summer — is quality. I’m not talking Oscar-bait quality. I’m talking quality genre fare, quality in scripts written to play up a given star’s persona, quality in marketing, editing, length. The Times does briefly gesture this way, explaining that “Talent agents argue that stars are not to blame, faulting script concepts that fail to translate to the screen, poor release dates, awkward marketing or ill-advised efforts by popular actors to stretch in new directions.”

As my friend Colin pointed out, it isn’t so much that audiences didn’t want to see stars, but that the star-headed movies just weren’t that good. I’m not saying that Transformers was ‘good’ — but there’s a reason that a tightly plotted rom-com like The Proposal beat out the rather horrendous The Ugly Truth. Both are star-vehicles, both are genre pics — but one is simply smarter, more enjoyable, funnier, better fit to the star’s persona, and with more chemistry than the other. That’s the reason it’s grossed $260 million international on a $40 million budget, whereas The Ugly Truth has pulled in just under $92 million on a budget of $38 million.

And as Kristen and Courtney reminded me, this very article — or very close variations on it — has been published every year. I’ve personally run across it several times during my research this summer — Neal Gabler predicting the demise of stardom and a reversion to the studio system following Paramount chairman Sumner Redstone’s public admonishment of Tom Cruise, the Times citing a different set of academics making the very same claims about the statistical proof that stars do not ensure movie hits, this article in the British press on the new reliance on untested talent.

But stars have NEVER ensured movie hits. NEVER. Cary Grant starred in just as many stinkers and middling films as successes. Marlene Dietrich, Garbo, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Joan Crawford — all were either labeled ‘box office poison’ or declared unable to carry a film at one point or another in the ’30s and ’40s. After early success, Brando couldn’t carry a film to save his life. Jimmy Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Andrews — all had huge hits and mammoth disasters. Julia Roberts may have had a streak of big films in the late ’90s, but are we forgetting the seven films she made after Sleeping with the Enemy — all of them stinkers? Tom Hanks in Bonfire of the Vanities? Joe Versus the Volcano? Last Action Hero? Billy Bathgate? Cutthroat Island? The Postman? Waterworld? Last Action Hero?

Just One of the Big Star Bombs of the Early 1990s

And the idea, as one article cites, that big stars are being passed over for untested talent — well, of course. How did the big stars become stars in the first place? Because a big star passed (or was passed over) and they got a shot — as in the case of Julia Roberts and her role in Pretty Woman, which every major female star in the business nixed. But the case of Twilight — which the critics have been holding up as an example of no-star filmmaking — is instructive. First, this is a teen movie, with a tremendously presold product. Second, they were limited in who they could cast: even if Summit had the money to pay stars (which it didn’t) who could they have cast? Zach Efron and Miley Cyrus? And for the Native American character? True, they’re refusing to grant Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner points off the gross, and they’ve hired some bigger names for the sequels (Michael Sheen, Dakota Fanning, Bryce Howard). But Twilight, like any number of teen genre pics over the past 50 years, is not a star vehicle. It’s a concept vehicle, with a handsome vampire to fill the pre-sold concept of Edward. It’s not Robert Pattinson who girls are ga-ga over: it’s Edward, with Pattinson’s face attached. This is a key distinction. For big-star vehicles, it’s the other way around: Tom Cruise, with some character’s particular life attached; Julia Roberts, with some zany romance life attached. The STAR is the high concept, not the plot, or the vampire romance on which it is based.

Edward Cullen is the star — not Pattinson

I digress. Returning to my original point, people — whether those people are in the industry, in the press, or in the audience — somehow hold to this idea that big star = big hit. Dyer pointed out in 1977 that star presence could not, and never has, ensured a hit. The beauty of the studio system was that a dud didn’t sink a studio, or even a star — he was already slotted for at least three more a year, all of them with controlled budgets, and his star could and would be recovered. The dynamics of film financing have changed dramatically — and films now do ride on the shoulders of a single star.

But I think it’s unfair to blame the stars for this summer’s flops. Or perhaps our ‘blame’ is misguided: instead of saying that the stars are dead, or at least not viable, it should be that the stars — and the studios who finance their films — have failed to create pairings (and advertisement for those pairings) between content and star that will better insure success. Will Ferrell in a movie about time travel to a dinosaur world? Adam Sandler in a comedy with a very serious third act? And as for the soft success of Angels and Demons and Public Enemies, I can only say that the public’s interest in the Dan Brown series has seriously dampened (was The Da Vinci Code that memorable? Especially with Hanks’ hair?) and Public Enemies should have been a smaller, cheaper film.

Finally, Inglourious Basterds isn’t doing well because it stars Brad Pitt. Pitt’s face might be all over the posters, but that’s Weinstein’s doing. It’s a Tarantino film, plain and simple. That’s the ‘pre-sold’ quality — Pitt is just an added bonus.

Ultimately, I’m frustrated with the rehearsal of the same arguments at the end of each cycle, whether post-Oscars or end-of-summer. So long as studios continue to retrench with remakes, conservative remakes, and half-hearted attempts to recreate past success, the stars placed in those films as a means of bedazzlement will continue to fail as well. A star doesn’t make a good movie. A good movie, including help of a charismatic performance, will make or help sustain a star.

The Second Huge Claim: Twitter is Changing the Game

I’d been seeing a bunch of articles and blog posts detailing the ways in which Twitter sank Bruno and led to the huge second week drop-off for G.I. Joe. Anne Thompson pointed to this article in The Baltimore Sun, which claims

While word of mouth could always make or break a movie, it usually took days to affect the box office. But the rise of social networking tools like Twitter may be narrowing that time frame to mere hours. And that has Hollywood on edge.

This summer, movies such as “Bruno” and ” G.I. Joe” have had unexpected tumbles at the box office - just within their opening weekends - while “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” survived blistering critical reaction to become a blockbuster.

Box-office watchers say the dramatic swings may be caused by Twitter and other social networking sites that can blast instant raves - or pans - to hundreds of people just minutes after the credits roll.

Ad Age has also been keen to underline a correlation between Tweets and box office success — they’ve created a chart that tracks the number of Tweets, release dates, and success of the top five films. Their conclusion: the more Tweets, the better the performance. Hrm. Sort of. Alisa Perren directed me to David Poland’s posts here and here (scroll up from the comments), both of which do a pretty great job of debunking the myth of the Twitter-Success correlation.

Like Alisa, I see such reporting as a continuation of the hype over the Iran Twitter ‘Revolution’ — it’s a sexy topic, but it’s rather unfounded. As Chuck Tryon and others have discussed, taste ‘authority’ has certainly been shaken up in the years since the rise of the internet, online reviewers, and social media — fewer people look to major reviewers to determine the weekend’s film, and movies like Transformers are labeled ‘critic-proof.’ I definitely agree that ‘authority’ has been dispersed. But as communications scholars have studied for decades, people have always looked to culture ‘authorities’ — whether in their own families, friend groups, larger communities, or Facebook friend feed, Twitter feed, or alternative news source — for advice or direction on what to see. While I make it my business to research and know about most films released, including festival buzz, time in post-production, budget, problems, fanfare, etc. (and so do many people reading this blog) we are obviously in the minority. Which isn’t a critique of people who don’t read Variety and Nikkie Finke. We’re the weird ones. Most people rely on others — people like us, or people who are less scholarly film-buffs, or even just their son or daughter — to figure out what they’ll see or rent. Twitter supplies another source of such authority, and it also allows users to search to see what people outside of their friend group are saying, but it has by no means revolutionalized the way that word-of-mouth functions. Sleeper hits, whether Blair Witch Club, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, or even Love Story, District 9, March of the Penguins, rely on strong word-on-mouth. These days, word-of-mouth includes digital-word-of-keyboard.

A piece of District 9′s Brilliant Marketing Campaign

But it’s also a matter of marketing, as District 9, Blair Witch, and Love Story - all films with brilliant marketing campagins — make abundantly clear. And here’s the wrap-around concluding point: no film can succeed simply because it has a star, strong social media and spoken word-of-mouth, a great script, a pre-sold property, or fantastic marketing/studio support, which includes a proper release date. Perhaps it needs to have four of the five, or at least three of the five. But when more than two are missing — as in the case of the big flops of the summer — who are we to blame? What kind of story do we write? Perhaps that’s the listlessness that led so many critics — including A.O. Scott and Ebert — to write vitriolic indictments of the industry and its offerings. I don’t entirely agree with their conclusions — but I understand the feelings of confusion, anger, and sadness.