How to Mend a Drug Scandal in Three Steps or Less: Heath Ledger and Wallace Reid
This month’s Vanity Fair
There’s been a bit of fanfare over Peter Biskind’s recent Vanity Fair piece on Heath Ledger — available only in summary form here. (You know, for those of you interested in celebrity, Vanity Fair costs a ridiculous $12 dollars a year — definitely worth it for the airplane reads alone, let alone glossy photos).
Biskind is a well-known Hollywood ‘historian,’ best known for his book on the ‘silver age of Hollywood,’ Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and his look back on the rise and fall of the ’90s indie movement, Down and Dirty Pictures. (Both of which are required reading in each and every Tom Schatz class — I think I’ve read or skimmed some sections five times now). Biskind is also a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, a past editor-in-chief of Premiere, and a general smut-monger. If you’ve read his books, you understand — he loves stories — the more lurid, the better. There are a few in his books that genuinely test the limits of good taste. He doesn’t care whether they’re true or not — he even oftentimes reports a counter-narrative — but loves to put such things in print. It certainly sells. One of my advisors (on friendly terms with Biskind) told me that he never does research — has no theoretical or Variety background, never goes to archives — but remembers EVERYTHING that ANYONE has ever told him in an interview.
In other words, he’s perfect for Vanity Fair, which loves to make any story — whether it’s about Bernie Madoff, Sarah Palin, or Heath Ledger — into a melodramatic, thrilling tale of smut, back-stabbing, andhe-said/she-said. The celebrity profiles are notorious soft, but they’re also responsible for some of the most notorious recent celebrity admissions: Brad Pitt basically admitting that he doesn’t think that marriage is forever (when he was still married to Aniston); Angelina Jolie disclosing that her rendezvous with certain men in hotel rooms for sexual gratification (and nothing more) so that she could concentrate on being a mother to newly-adopted Maddox.
This look to Heath Ledger is a nice combination of the Biskind and VF-profile style. Usually, this sort of piece would NOT be the cover — VF subjects are usually living, promoting something, and hot. But when “new information” about a beloved figure is discovered (or manufactured), it sometimes spurs a cover: sometimes with Marilyn, othertimes with a Kennedy, and this most recent cover with Ledger.
A Los Angeles Times columnist has declared the article “celebrity porn,” ridiculing the Biskind/VF style and claiming,
Virtually everything in the piece, even the tales of how Ledger pals Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law volunteered to help Gilliam finish “Parnassus” after Ledger’s death, has been reported elsewhere. After a while, you start to focus less on Biskind’s meddlesome reporting and more on Gilliam, asking yourself: Why is the filmmaker still talking endlessly about Ledger 18 months after his death? Is it just because he lost a friend and collaborator? Or is it because Gilliam knows that a Vanity Fair cover story will help him continue to beat the drums for his movie, which still hasn’t found a U.S. distributor?
Excellent point. And I’m sure this was, at least in part, strategic on the part of Gilliam — he realized that rousing anticipation for the film would encourage distributors to bid for the film, which, from the sounds of it, promises to be as weird as The Fountain meets Alice in Wonderland.
But the article also serves a less overt or financial function — in providing the details of Ledger’s life, demeanor, and artistry, including his emotions and actions in the months and days leading up to his death, it soothes concerns and provides a form of cultural ‘closure’ to the rupture that was his unexpected death by drug overdose. When a celebrity dies in some ‘scandalous’ way — most commonly drug use, sometimes, as in the case of Keith Carradine, in a more illicit fashion — it tears a hole, if you will, in the ideological fabric that resassures us of societal solidity and our place within. Put differently, an unexpected death makes us question what we believed to be true.
For instance, I had no connection to Heath Ledger. I greatly admired his performance in Brokeback Mountain and knew of his upcoming role as the Joker, but was not what I would term a ‘fan.’ Yet I remember exactly where I was when I heard NPR announce his death — and keenly recall how surprised I was. I had a vision of Ledger as a doting father and, albeit separated from Michelle Williams, not in danger of eminent death. I had heard the stories of his ‘absorption’ into the role of the Joker — and Jack Nicholson’s words of advice on maintaining the self, lest it be sucked into the psychosis — but that didn’t mean I thought he was going to die. His death thus served, for me and millions of others, as a surprise — especially as it was laden with smutty overtones in the early hours of reporting, when it was associated with one of the Olson twins, a masseuse, dozens of pills, nakedness, etc.
What we need, then, to resolve this problem, to restitch this hole, to reassure us that method acting isn’t destructive, that we didn’t pay money to see a money slowly killing himself onscreen, that handsome young talented men don’t succumb to addiction, is an answer: some sort of reckoning.
In the case of Ledger, this has been accomplished in two ways:
1.) The overwhelming awarding of his performance in The Dark Knight.
I’m in no way saying that the performance wasn’t incredible, or didn’t merit recognition. But awarding it certainly served as an affirmation of Ledger’s talent — that his life, and specifically this peformance, was not for naught. To NOT award it would be tantamount to declaring his life — and the method of his death — to be a scandal, unworthy, worthy of scorn.
2.) This Vanity Fair article — and others of its ilk.
Here I turn to another drug scandal — one that few remember yet rocked Hollywood when it occurred. Along with the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, the death of Wallace Reid (due to complications from withdrawl from heroin) is considered one of the greatest scandals of the classic period. As mentioned, it’s generally forgotten, but as a compelling chapter in Headline Hollywood (Mark Lynn Anderson’s “Shooting Star: Understanding Wallace Reid and His Public) explains, the scandal of Reid’s death was not only a huge scandal — but also a huge victory for the newly organized Hays Office, which successfully parlayed what could have been a story of Hollywood excess and sin into a narrative of a star sacrificing his all for his public and a “national lesson” for the masses.
Briefly, the Hays Office was instituted — at the insistence of the studios — to regulate Hollywood films, which were under fire from all sides for ‘encouraging vice.’ Instead of subjecting themselves to a national regulatory agency, the studios decided to regulate themselves. The Arbuckle scandal was the final straw in putting the agency in place — not only would it regulate the content of films, but the behavior of the actors as well. With the Hays Office in place, there would be no more drunken fat men supposedly raping starlettes in hotel rooms!
But then Wallace Reid succumbed to heroic addiction. In the early ’20s, Reid was one of the biggest stars — rivaled only by Pickford and Fairbanks — with a star image as a strapping young man who, at least in his film roles, would exhaust himself for the sake of the greater good (laboring all night to help others out of a mine disaster, for example). Thus the idea of his addiction rang incredibly out of character — how could such a strong body fall victim to such a drug?
Therefore, before he died — when he was in treatment — his wife, with help from the Hays Office, helped to create a brilliant media manipulation that framed Reid’s addiction as:
a.) the product of an early on-set injury (he became addicted to pain killers after a back inury). His addiction was thus transformed into a something that occured while he was trying to get back into shape to do his job for the people — he just wanted to please his public!
b.) the fault of a national crime syndicate. Constructed as such, it reinforced federal calls for a national crack-down on drugs (the first war against drugs — quickly followed by prohibition, which probably should have taught us a lesson about wars on addictive substances). He was thus a figurehead for larger governmental forces — and a VICTIM!!
c.) using MORPHINE, not heroin. Heroin was a poor people’s drug — and thus had to be disassociated with film stars, which were already on a slippery slope as members of the nouveau riche. But morphine — that was a high class drug. It’s like the difference, today, between crack and cocaine. Or maybe between meth and prescription drugs.
Wallace Reid’s widow even participated in a film against drug use — the equivalent of a PSA for “don’t use drugs,” only not as thoroughly as acknowledged as propaganda. In the end, Wallace Reid’s star was recuperated — instead of a junkie, he was transformed into a victim, both of his desire to please and devious men of ill-repute.
So how does this relate to Heath Ledger?
While the Biskind article is neither as sincere nor bald-faced manipulative as the discourse surrouding the Reid overdose, there’s a fair amount of image repair going on throughout the piece.
First: Remind us of the immense talent lost
“This final performance, while not the tour de force of weirdness that was the Joker, is good neough — more than good enough — to remind us that Leger’s death has deprived the movies of one of their most accomplished, and promising, talents”
Second: Remind us of his immense commitment to both craft and family
Multiple mentions of his performance in Brokeback Mountain, connection and intense loyalty to Gilliam (for whom he had previous starred in The Brothers Grimm — and who he apparently credits with ‘liberating’ his acting). What’s more, he LOVED his daughter: “above all else, Ledger was devoted to his young daughter and feared he might lose custory. ‘He was absolutely obsessed about Matilida,’” according to Gilliam. And he was such a class act that three top actors agreed to step in and finish the film for him.
As for his break-up with Willaims: She courted stardom, he didn’t. She bought into the Oscar campaigning, he didn’t. He reportedly had an anxiety attack when his handlers tried to turn him into a teen idol. He was the anti-star star: he didn’t want the renown pushed upon him. He was, overall, the victim: of too much talent and too much audience fascination.
Third: Explain and innoculate his addiction.
Ledger was on drugs because: 1.) He had battled pneumonia, 2.) He was overworked (only two weeks between The Dark Knight and Parnassus) 3.) He was in a constant struggle with insomnia — caused by anxiety over needing/wanting to see his daughter after the separation from Williams. The only release he found was in massage, acting exercises, and, apparently pills.
Importantly, the death was not the result of an OVER-dose, but a negative combination of doses. He had too many things in his system - he was not hedonistic in his abuse, just needy for release.
Even more importantly, the cause of his anxiety was NOT (or at least entirely linked to) his role as the Joker — instead, it was the confluence of over-work and dedication to craft and family that precipitated his death. This is an essential move: for if it was the role as the Joker that caused his death, we, as an audience, would in effect be pleasuring in his demise each and every time we viewed, and found pleasure, in his performance as The Joker. Audience guilt assuaged.
Now, please bare in mind that I’m not saying that Ledger isn’t any of things this article claims of him — or that he didn’t care about his daughter, wasn’t dedicated to his craft, etc. I’m just looking to way that the discourse concerning those dedications is deployed to mend over the rupture created by his death — and how such narratives can still prove effective, even 18 months after the event. Star drug abuse, like any other star scandal, demands a reckoning. Some reckonings — like this one — are simply employed more deftly, and more invisibly, than others.
Nikki Finke and the (Old) New Industry Journalism
Over the course of my comps studying, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “new” mavens of gossip — Perez Hilton, Harvey Levin at TMZ, to some extent Lainey. While these gossips share characteristics with some figures from the past — Perez is the new Hedda Hopper; Levine is the new head of Confidential — there’s no one as ruthless and powerful as some of the columnists of yore. That’s not just nostalgia — those old columnists were published in thousands of outlets (newspapers, weeklies, via radio broadcasts) across the country. Their audience was HUGE. And while Perez garners millions of hits of a day, that’s nothing compared to a nation-wide newspaper audience from the 1940s.
But then there’s Nikki Finke, author and founder of Deadline Hollywood Daily. If you’re not in the industry or media studies, you’ve probably never heard of the name. But as an article in this morning’s New York Times explains,
In the three years since she started Deadline Hollywood Daily, a daily blog about the entertainment business, her combination of old-school skills — she is a relentless reporter — and new-media immediacy has made her a must-click look into the ragingly insecure id of Hollywood.
Among movie executives, the stories of Ms. Finke’s aggressiveness are legion, but they remain mostly unspoken because people fear being the target of one of her withering takedowns.
“I’d prefer not to ever deal with her,” said a senior communications executive at a studio who declined to be identified. Many others declined comment saying, variously, “she gave me a nervous breakdown,” “she terrifies me,” and “there’s no percentage in me saying anything to you about Nikki no matter what it is.”
But they all read her. In a town where people often secretly hope for the worst, Ms. Finke delivers wish fulfillment. During the recent merger of the William Morris and Endeavor agencies, she ridiculed William Morris executives to the point of distraction. She has published network schedules before many people at the network knew what was on them.
Finke is the most powerful journalist in Hollywood right now, and she’s doing it using a combination of “old school” journalism — tons of contacts, always on the phone — and new media immediacy. You can find her site here — I’ve been reading it for several months now, and she indeed breaks stories earlier — and with more, well, panache, than Variety, NYT, or any other industry source.
She’s tremendously powerful — but like many who have successfully wielded power in Hollywood (such as Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA (and then Universal) who parlayed consistent behind-the-scenes manipulation as an agent into becoming head of one of the largest and most successful studios) she is consistently anonymous. The article calls her “hermetic.” There’s only ONE picture of her in the press files, dating to 2006 — an anecdote that again recalls the lore of Lew Wasserman.
She hangs out behind her computer, spends a ton of time on the phone, has a web of reliable informants, and has developed a reputation of fear for herself. People give her things — scoops, schedules, news of firings — because they’re scared to be on the opposite end of one of her posts.
This is of course nothing new. All the old school gossip columnists and early smut mag editors leveraged information and threats in order to receive scoops. They all played favorites — as the article asserts Finke does as well (her favorites, however, aren’t stars — they’re studio heads. And also labor: the site first rose to prominence during her meticulous coverage of the Writer’s Strike. She was firmly and unabashedly on the side of the writers — one of the few power players in Hollywood to do so.) As I mentioned above, she uses the “old style” journalistic tactics of an army of sources and general investigative digging to get what she wants — before starting Deadline Hollywood, she had a long career in journalism.
But she’s also incredibly different, and here’s how:
1.) She is a woman. And she leverages power in Hollywood. Apart from the spectacular Sue Mengers, an agent with ICM in the late ’70s/80s, few women have successfully wielded power in Hollywood. Finke, however, is not only wielding that power but sustaining it — despite attacks on all sides. We might attribute this to her relative anonymity — it’s hard to attack her for her dress, to shoot embarrassing pictures of her, or otherwise humiliate her in the style usually reserved for women when she keeps such a low profile.
2.) She started and remains in control of her own site.
Unlike Parsons or Hopper, who both worked for men — Parsons, in fact, was heavily beholden to William Randolph Hearst. Finke, however, was initially the owner of her own site — it was ‘hosted’ by LA Weekly — and only recently sold to Mail.com, where she will still control her site, presumably with very little oversight. She’s entirely in control of what is published — the words, rhetoric, choice of topic, etc. are completely hers. This is possible, of course, because of new media and blogging technologies — when she decided to go out on her own in a few years ago, she wanted to do it on the cheap — and there are few cheaper ways of reaching a mass audience than the blog. For me, this underlines the ways in which new media technologies do indeed, from time to time, facilitate the rise of non-traditional voices.
3.) She’s not covering celebrities.
If she does, it’s on their salaries. She’s covering INDUSTRY — the traditionally male realm of Hollywood. Salaries, deals, schedules — that’s her bread and butter. Again, transgressing the ‘traditional’ place for female reporters in Hollywood…which might be part of why she so angers so many people. She also has a distinctly ‘masculine’ writing style — she’ll write TOLDJA in all caps whenever one of her speculations/predictions comes true — and the site itself is presented with a particularly masculine aesthetic (bold fonts, neutral colors, very few pictures). She means business. And it has garnered her respect — and fear. The NYT piece describes her style as “thuggish” — and this morning’s post reads:
DHD on Page 1 of The New York Times: The article about DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com by NYT media columnist David Carr for Friday is online. It claims I’m “thuggish”. So thug this: I’ll be back to work on Monday.
4.) She’s no Walter Winchell. She’s better.
The Times pieces opens by comparing Finke to Winchell, who operated as a quasi-gossip-columnist/industry reporter for decades, mostly for Hearst’s New York Evening Graphic and via radio broadcasts, where his trademark staccato delivery became famous. Like Finke, Winchell relied on informants, secrets, alliances, fear — see Neal Gabler’s massive and excellent tome Winchell — but he was also a man, mostly operating out of New York, concerned with celebrity, very publicly known/seen, and a viscous Red-mongerer and ardent supporter of Senator Joe McCarthy.
Finke’s insistent defense of the labor side of the WGA strikes signals a clear opposition to such tactics: she’s not a Commie, but she certainly doesn’t think the place of the press is to root out or destroy the power of labor, especially in the already labor-hobbled Hollywood.
In other words, the comparison is off.
Ramifications:
In many ways, having an industry watch-dog, for lack of a better word, like Nikki Finke is a blessing — it keeps the industry on its toes as to promises, mergers, secrecy, back-stabbing, etc. And as both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter continue with cuts to their print editions and general reporting (and Premiere down to a bare-bones innocuous online site), Nikki Finke has taken up residence in the journalistic vacuum they’ve created. She’s doing it more brazenly than any of the above sources ever dared, but she can afford to — as the article again points out, “Her liabilities in the world of print — a penchant for innuendo and unnamed sources — became assets online. To admirers and detractors, she is the perfect expression of the Web’s original premise, which suggested that a lone obsessive could own the conversation.”
I don’t need to state that the blog, in all of its form, is the ascendant form of journalism. Whether in the form of Huff Post, Perez Hilton, TMZ, or Nikki Finke, it’s increasingly where people in the industry (and from the outside looking in) go to get their news and speculation. What remains to be seen is how such immediate reporting — and the somewhat ‘democratic’ access to authorship — will affect the way business is done in Hollywood.
As I discussed in an earlier blog post, the proliferation of industry info has its benefits and drawbacks — a point heavily debated in the comments section, which I suggest you check out. Nikki Finke — and the spread of her blog, which will certainly become only more widely read following a front page NYT article — is a participant in this selfsame phenomena. She’s not USA Today or Entertainment Tonight, though — she’s making far more important and essential information available, which might lead to a more educated understanding as to the meanings/raminfications of grosses, openings, up-fronts, etc. Right?
A Starless Summer?
The Demi-Stars of The Hangover
As I’ve been reading about the ebb and flow of star leverage over the last 100 years of Hollywood, I’ve been thinking about the way this summer’s films reflect the current state of star power….or the continuing paradoxical role of the star in the Hollywood film.
As Richard Dyer asserted long ago, the problem with the star is that they are at once a necessary component of a successful film….yet completely unreliable as an actual predictor of success. Huge stars star in huge flops all the time. The tension (and difficulty) of Hollywood — and what, in some ways, makes it such a ‘boom and bust’ industry — is that it is at once industrially and commericially driven…yet producing texts which are, for better or for worse, ‘art.’ And as art, they are subject to the tastes, whims, and inclinations of an unpredictable audience. Formulas that work great one year flop the next; antiquated production heads fail to realize shifts in national sentiment (as was certainly the case in the late ’60s, when the studios churned out massive big budget musical flops….and all the young demographic wanted to see was Easy Rider).
What does seem reliable, however, is the pre-sold product, best defined as a film that has a pre-established and thus guaranteed base audience — people who will go see the film because they loved the book, the first film, etc. Today’s Hollywood relies heavily on such products — Harry Potter, Terminator, Angels and Demons, The Notebook, Twilight, even Passion of the Christ. This isn’t exactly that novel of a concept — Hollywood has long capitalized on the popularity of stage plays and books, all the way back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1904). (Just think of Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, 502 versions of Wuthering Heights…dozens of weepies based on best-selling ‘women’s novels,’ historical novels like Mutiny on the Bounty, etc. etc.)
Selznick’s Brilliant Exploitation of the Pre-Sold Property
When you have a pre-sold property, you might try to up the hype by casting stars: thus Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code. You try to make it an even bigger blockbuster by casting international stars: thus Audrey Tatou in The Da Vinci Code.
But casting big name stars like Hanks ups the initial production cost of the film tremendously. Someone like Hanks may also leverage his star power to demand points off the gross or profits — meaning that he reduces his asking price (which might be anywhere from $10-20 million) in order to receive a portion of either the gross or the net of the film. (Of course, points off the gross is far more lucrative, as studios often claim substantial (and sometimes dubious) marketing costs, making it so that the film ‘officially’ grosses very little.) Add in a powerful director (Ron Howard) whose production company is co-producing (and most likely staking claim to profits as well) and other members of a supporting star cast (Ewan McGregor) and you’ve got an expensive film.
So why cast Hanks (and an ugly, long-haired Hanks at that) when you could probably sell the film on its name alone? For the best selling book of the last decade, you’ve got a guaranteed audience.
Summit Entertainment certainly heeded this advise in developing Twilight — they knew they’d get a guaranteed $10-$20 million from pre-sold audiences alone. They budgeted the film small, knew it’d generate much of its own publicity, hired a small but respected indie director (Catherine Hardwicke, of Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown) and two relative unknowns in the leads. (Importantly, they cast a minor heartthrob in the Edward Cullen role — Robert Pattinson had appeared as the endearing and tragic Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter 4.) In this way, with a production budget of only $37 million, the film went on to gross $382 million worldwide — $191 domestic, $190 international. Astounding numbers. The success may be, at least in part, attributed to the overal cultural phenomenon that surrounding the book, its fans, and the release of the film, but a greater financial algebra was at work.
I’d trace this philosophy back to Jaws, when Spielberg, packaged, along with the authors of the book, to direct the film for MCA/Universal, fought the powers-that-be to cast relative unknowns in the lead roles. (Wasserman et. al. wanted to cast one of their many loyal stars in the role and thus guarantee the success the film — Spielberg wanted chemistry. And to focus on the shark. He won, as did the film.)
And thus we reach our current star-less summer. In the 30+ years since Jaws, studios have relied more and more heavily on ‘tentpole’ or ‘high concept’ films (for those of you unfamiliar with the term ‘high concept,’ the Wikipedia entry is surprisingly helpful).
to anchor their summers (and, in truth, anchor their profits for the year — the more high concept and exploitable the product, the more money the parent conglomerate can pull in through ancillary ‘paratexts’ and side products.) As I pointed out above, some tent pole/high concept are bedazzled with stars, but this summer’s success track record seems to underscore the continuing trend toward high concept, pre-sold properties, auteurism, and, remarkably, a return to the studio ‘brand’/style that characterized the studio system… and a definite turn from star-centered blockbusters.
Let’s take a look at the summer successes:
1.) Star Trek.
This film is an ultimate pre-sold product. Legions of Star Trek loyalists of many ages. Add in hundreds of thousands of J.J. Abrams fans — reactivated following last season’s Lost renaissance. Plus excellent reviews and word of mouth, the recent success of franchise ‘reboots,’ and you’ve got the numer #1 film of the summer (and the year….obviously will be ousted, but still impressive, this late in the game). Yet the biggest star is Leonard Nimoy. Eric Bana is unrecognizable. The leads = all unrecognizable, albeit highly charismatic. The production budget = director, effects, marketing. Not stars.
“Harold” from Harold and Kumar is the biggest star in this shot.
2.) Up.
Like all Pixar product, Up is not ‘traditionally’ pre-sold. It’s not based on a fairy tale, a book, a video game, etc. But it is pre-sold — just in a very different way. Just as a Columbia screwball or Warner Bros. gangster film was ‘pre-sold’ — in that audiences knew the quality and entertainment value to expect from those specific genres from those specific studios — everyone knows what to expect from a Pixar picture. There’s not really any high concept — um, old guy and round boy go to Peru on floating house and find funny dogs? Not very sexy sounding — but a solid, diverse demographic is guaranteed. Also guaranteed overseas, as animation is particularly amenable to translation. Biggest star: ED ASNER. Or, arguably, Dog with Funny Grammar.
3.) The Hangover.
This movie is this year’s Knocked Up. Both come from sorta-kinda ‘auteurs’ — or at least directors who can be positioned as ‘the director of this other funny movie’ (Judd Apatow was coming off of The 40-Year-Old Virgin; Todd Phillips directed Old School.) The Hangover is high concept at its ‘finest’: four dudes go to Vegas, get wasted, and can’t remember their super crazy shenanigans!! Then they have to go figure everything out! Combination gross-out, dude-fest, Vegas-love, weird-personality, physical comedy….and no stars. Demi-stars. Bradley Cooper’s other major role = the asshole in Spring sleeper hit He’s Not That Into You. Heather Graham = nice nod to Swingers, otherwise probably super cheap to get. Ed Helms? TV star. Zach Galifianakis? Esoteric (yet hilarious) cable comedy show (Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) and a last name readily resistant to stardom. Budget of $35 million (add in million for the tremendous marketing blitz) and a gross thus far of $127 million…and still number 1, three weeks running. (Importantly, The Hangover has done only $15 million internationally — one thing that stars can sometimes do is elevate American juvenile humor into an attractive commodity for overseas audience. Not so much on this one.)
Other big hits, not so much summer, but also without major stars:
Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Fast and Furious, Monsters vs. Aliens,
The In-Betweens:
Wolverine. Huge gross…is Hugh Jackman a star or the host of the Tony’s?
Night at the Museum: Sure, there’s an army of stars in these films, and Ben Stiller probably makes a huge amount of money. But is Ben Stiller a huge movie star? A marquee name? Any capable comedian could star in these films.
Angels and Demons: Doing great worldwide, but only $124 domestic.
The Losers (thus far):
Terminator: Salvation Disappointing opening weekend. Christian Bale is a huge star following Batman….but can’t save it. Was beat by Night at the Musuem, for goodness sakes. Reported budget of $200 million; only $280 international thus far — will do well in ancillary, but also cost a bunch to advertise…overall, Warner Bros. is pissed.
Land of the Lost: TREMENDOUS disappointment. Despite Will Farrell’s extensive and far-reaching publicity tour for the film, opens in fourth place. Budget of $100 million, only $40 million so far internationally…probably will top out at $50 million max. High concept/pre-sold (Land of the Lost was a television program in the ’70s, correct?) meets highly paid usually-well-received star….maybe Ferrell should stick to smallish budget quirky/weird quasi-nostalgic films? Or has he already done all of them that were roaming around Holllywood?
Cheesy Poster, ’70s Television…Not Enough for Will Ferrell to overcome.
The Taking of Pelham 123:
Much has been made of the fact that the film opened soft because John Travolta was still grieving his son’s tragic death and thus unavailable to promote the film. Really? You think John Travolta on the red carpet would save a film with a name like this one? It’s a sorta-kinda presold property — there was a moderately successful film in the ’70s of the same name — but what’s the impetus to remake it? Plus Denzel doesn’t get to play the bad-ass. Another $100 million budget, $30 million international gross thus far. Not even two supposedly huge draws can save it…and even thought Travolta isn’t a huge draw for, say, me…see the success of Wild Hogs.
Psuedo-Summer star-filled that underperformed and prove my point:
The Soloist, Duplicity, State of Play
The point I’m driving toward is a general shift away from high-concept paired with stars….and toward using stars in collaboration (such as He’s Just Not That Into You, when Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, Scarlett Johannsen, and Ben Affleck play ‘supporting roles’) or in prestige pictures (both big and small) which don’t do super well, yet bring in prestige and ancillary dollars through word-of-mouth and awards-buzz.
In other words, are stars becoming a novelty?
Even Will Smith — long thought to be the last sure-fire star, able to open any movie — faltered to score with this winter’s Seven Pounds. It seems the movies making the most money “star” special effects, pre-sold properties, catchy marketing, or quirky, unglamorous (and usually male, overweight, and/or Jewish) comedians. Maybe stars have simply become a summer novelty — when there’s so much high-concept and pre-sold property to choose from, do you go with a movie with a star that you like….or a franchise/concept you like? Probably the latter.
What will the rest of the summer prove? Harry Potter 6 and Transformers will be huge hits — but what is Megan Fox doing appearing all over Europe in slinky dresses? Is she a star? Is she even an actress? Bruno will also do very well — but again, isn’t Sacha Baron Cohen now a pre-sold brand? I’m also very curious to see how The Proposal fares — a nice piece of rom-com counterprogramming, but is Sandra Bullock still a draw?
The one film that might challenge this theory is Michael Mann’s Public Enemies — which relies on an always-lucrative genre (historical gangster) but whose biggest selling point is Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, head-to-head. Universal is opening it on July 4th weekend — where Will Smith and his myriad high concept films once held court — and it’s certainly expected to do well. But, again, is Johnny Depp a sure thing? Since Pirates, the industry certainly thinks so; however, his only test since the manic culmination of that franchise has been Sweeney Todd.
Stars obviously matter to studios — they are the hottest commodity out there. But should they be? As the high concept and pre-sold property becomes more and more lucrative, won’t the rights to the property itself become the most valuable — and the studios will move to rely on ‘stock players’ (Megan Fox is nothing if not a ‘stock player.’ She’s be the B-picture Angelina Jolie at MGM) the way they did during the classical era?
Megan Fox, B-Movie Angelina Jolie
Are “big stars” — Clooney, Jolie, Pitt, DiCaprio, etc. — now most valuable in middle-sized projects with unfamiliar names, no franchise or previous reference point, that need the very distinctive pre-sold product of the star to sell them?
A Little Backstory: Confidential Magazine
I’m going to be referencing Confidential regularly, so I thought I’d do some explanation upfront. If you’ve heard the name, chances are you heard it in L.A. Confidential, the film noir starring Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger — the title is a play on the magazine, and the Danny DeVito photographer character (Hush Hush, on the QT) plays a caricature of the head of Confidential, Robert Harrison (it’s more of an amalgam of several people involved with Confidential, but whatever.)
Yet Confidential is incredibly important — and one of the starting points of my dissertation — because it was the first national magazine to actively degrade the stars. There had been moves to decry celebrity actions in the past — the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, for example — but this magazine made it its business (and it was a very successful business) to discover star ‘secrets’ and exploit them. From this point on, two distinct ‘tones’ of gossip have become prevalent: the type that props up celebrity and the type that degrades it. Put differently, there are types of media that, even if they publish a few negative stories, ultimately work to help us believe in the stars are who they tell us they are….and then there are types of media that thrive on exposing celebrity as a construction, as fake, even hypocritical. Maybe a list will help make this clear:
Gossip that ultimately props up celebrity:
Gossip that Tears Celebrity Down:
Of course, this delineation isn’t firm: Us Weekly gives ‘my side of the story interviews’ all the time, Perez has his own sheltered loves (another point I’ll get to)….only TMZ is an ‘equal-opportunity offender,’ which, again, I’ll get to. But before all this, there was Confidential.
During the 1950s, a number of ‘pulp’ magazines, Confidential foremost amongst them, poked holes in the ideological fabric of the wholesome ‘50s, suggesting, to an audience that quickly reached 4 million readers per issue, that sexual and other moral “deviance” ran rampant in the Hollywood universe. Despite the best efforts of the studios, the traditional fan magazines, and the stars themselves, the gossip rags shed light on Hollywood’s unseemly underbelly. In suggesting this sort of behavior, the rags further stretched the ideological holes that would later erupt into the ‘60s counter-culture.
The reason they were able to do this is multi-fold. First, the stars had been ‘let loose’ and ‘gone wild.’ This isn’t to say that they were engaging in any more scandalous behavior than they had in the past — it’s just that many of them were no longer under contract. Because just as the studio system dissolved following the Paramount Decrees, so too did the star system — when Olivia De Havilland sued Warners citing ‘indentured servitude laws,’ the studios could no longer leverage their talent into interminable, all-controlling contracts. Stars began to go independent, hiring talent agents (Lew Wasserman of MCA in particular).
But when they left their studio contracts, they also shed two key star-maintaining components:
1.) The Morality Clause. Granted, some single-film contracts still included morality clauses (some do to this day) but that didn’t mean that a star couldn’t be ‘immoral’ (drinking, sleep around) between films.
2.) The Studio Publicity Department. When a star was under contract to MGM, for example, if anything went wrong — they ended up drunk in someone’s room, a star fathered an illegitimate baby, another got pregnant and needed an abortion — they called “The Fixers,” Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling. Each studio had fixers, but MGM had the best ones, as it had the most stars. They paid off police, journalists, hotel owners, doctors — whatever it took to keep the star’s image clean.
This is what a star lost. Of course, when a star signed with agent Lew Wasserman, they gained a different sort of protection — a bit of ‘Fixing’ still remained, and there just wasn’t the expose industry there is today…all of Hollywood depended on the stars’ success. But overpaid beautiful people will make trouble.
Thus Confidential. It’s not that the stars were actually more scandalous in the 1950s — that they were more immoral, more drug use, or more homosexual activity…it’s just that the cover-up was poorer. And Confidential exploited that weakness, hiring private investigators, paying off police clerks and secretaries, whatever it took to get dirt. They had a basic cover design, funny, alliterative titles, poor quality photography, pulpy inside pages….but it sold like crazy. Humphrey Bogart famously quipped that ‘Everyone reads it…but they say that the cook brought it into the house.” They never blasted declarations — instead, as you see in the first magazine image, they’d say ‘Why Liberace’s Theme Song Should be ‘Mad About the Boy.’
Or, as you see in the above image, they insinuated the fantastical: the story ‘Why Sinatra is the Tarzan of the Boudoir’ detailed how his daily breakfast of Wheaties helped keep in fit in bed. The source: one of his regular call girls. The Wheaties might be bunk, but the implication of sexual promiscuity was the real smut.
Confidential only published in its truly smutty form for four years (1954-1958) before a massive trial (during which hundreds of stars were called to testify) forced Harrison to sell the magazine, effectively disassembling his smut network. But the legacy lives on strongly today, both in the more fantastical National Enquirer tabloids and TMZ.com.
Is there anything you’d like me to post about/talk about? I’ve already got one request from Josh to explain Perez’s hatred of Rumer Willis. I’ll go there. So suggest away.
