There’s nothing Hollywood gossips enjoy so much as a flop. Not a little or medium sized flop, the sort that happens when the audiences don’t turn up at the cinemas over the first weekend and the studio starts planning the DVD release on the Monday morning. That happens so regularly it hardly warrants a mention. Let’s face it, most movies don’t make a profit – a least that’s what the studio accountants always claim.
No, what Hollywood tongues really relish is a mega flop, a disaster of Icarus type proportions in which the melting wax comes from the wings of one of cinema’s hitherto golden untouchables. So, if your name is Brad Pitt, these must be worrying days.
In three weeks time (June 21), World War Z, the zombie apocalypse movie that Pitt not only stars in but also produced, is to be finally released – six months late. Having cost around $220 million to make, with an estimated further $125 million needed for worldwide marketing and a 3D version, Paramount Pictures are looking at a big hole in their pocket if no one likes it.
Failure won’t do much for Brad’s reputation either. And, while the movie hasn’t yet been seen by the ticket buying public, who always make the final decision on these matters, the advance gossip coming out of Hollywood isn’t good.
It must have looked so exciting when in 2007 Paramount paid a million dollars for the critically well received science fiction novel by Max Brooks – son of Mel Brooks, that creator of one of the most hilariously cynical show biz movies ever, The Producers.
Yes, Brad must have thought, with World War Z here was an opportunity to do a big, megabucks action movie, which, while appealing to hundreds of millions of teenagers around the world who love stories about zombies, could also be a pious metaphor about the crowded, consumer-led modern world we’re living in.
What could be better? A good-goody message wrapped in blood and gore. What could go wrong?
Apparently, plenty. As screenwriters came, wrote and went, studio executives were fired or resigned, and massive battle sequences were filmed and then abandoned when Pitt’s character began to look more like a violent, ruthless zombie slayer than a heroic husband and dad who’s saving the world, a whole new ending had to be eventually written and shot.
Now Pitt and Paramount await their fate. $345 million, and that is said to be a conservative estimate, is an awful lot of money to be riding on one film about the undead.
But how, you might ask, can any movie cost so much? How can experienced, clever film makers start shooting with a script that doesn’t have a decent ending that will satisfy the star/producer, the director, the studio, the ratings certificate people (Paramount wanted a PG) and, most of all, the punters? How can they all get it so wrong – and presumably they must have thought they’d got it wrong or they wouldn’t have had to rewrite and reshoot the ending?
Well, Hollywood’s modern habit of putting most of its eggs in one big basket and aiming summer films at teenage boys, that is, movies stuffed with explosions, monsters, alien planets and comic book heroes who can fly or swing through forests of skyscrapers, doesn’t make things easy. Modern special effects can be astonishing, but cheap they aren’t.
But there’s something else. Obviously every movie is different, but, if there’s one constant factor in films that fail, it’s the script. If the story and characters don’t work on paper, then, no matter how brilliant and beautiful the stars or how ravishing the photography, the movie will struggle, often while shooting, and usually later in the cinemas.
Think of all the big movie money losers you can remember. You probably didn’t see the Martian escapade John Carter last year because it had a $250 million funeral very soon after its release, but you will have heard of Raise The Titanic (“It would have been cheaper to have lowered the Atlantic”, said its producer, Lew Grade), and Ishtar, the Eighties comedy turkey with the biggest stars of the day in Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty that finished the career of director Elaine May. And then, most infamous of all, there was Heaven’s Gate, the beautiful but relentless Western epic that did for United Artists as a studio.
No one sets out to make a flop and before filming begins all the principals are filled with good intentions and doughty hearts. Only when things begin to go wrong, when stars decide they don’t like their parts and want rewrites, when the weather plays unseasonal tricks and shooting has to be stopped, when directors turn into megalomaniacs and when expensive equipment breaks down do the nerves of the producers begin to tighten.
As it happens I’ve had some painful first hand experience of this, albeit on a much more modest scale, when, thirty odd years ago a movie I’d written which was based on one of my novels ran into trouble in Rome. There’s no fun, I can tell you, standing in the splendour of a Roman villa on location waiting and waiting with a camera crew and a hundred extras as a sumptuous meal begins to rot and then smell under the lights, while money haemorrhages away and hardly a frame of film is exposed. Small wonder my hair began falling out.
But who was to blame? As the screenwriter, obviously, I was in part, as were the director, a couple of actresses, maybe the producers, and, I suppose, the two writers who in turn replaced me. We never got the script right, any of us, and, when we all compromised like mad just to keep filming going, it just got worse and worse. In the end, the movie was abandoned mid-way through shooting.
It was a merciful release – particularly when my hair stopped falling out and began to grow back. It was, also, an expensive education for everyone. The producers and director went on to have great success with other movies and years later I turned the experience into a novel called Shadows On A Wall, in which everything that can go wrong on location does go wrong. If Brad Pitt hasn’t already read it, perhaps he ought to get a copy before he starts another mega-movie.
But then, he may not need to read it. There’s no rule that says that a film that has had problems will be a flop. Jaws went way over budget, but then became a classic; Gladiator was being rewritten while shooting was going on, making the Russell Crowe character tender rather than simply brutal. It became a smash hit, too, while Gone With The Wind went through three directors and endless delays yet turned out to be one of the all time favourites.
Then there was the pre-release gossip that The Godfather would bankrupt Paramount, and that Apocalyse Now would never recover from the double whammy of a typhoon that ruined the sets and star Martin Sheen’s heart attack while on location.
Wrong again. Both films were huge hits, the critics and the public loving them. Obviously it helped that they had the brilliant Francis Ford Coppola as producer, director and one of the screenwriters, but the final writer on World War Z was Damon Lindelof from the hit TV series Lost. He must know a thing or two about shaping and twisting a story to keep an audience satisfied.
So perhaps Brad Pitt will have the last laugh after all, and for the rest of summer the world will be filled with gormless looking teenagers walking about, stiff limbed with their eyes half closed pretending to be zombies.
And even if World War Z doesn’t quite do the business Brad Pitt and Paramount must be praying for, there’s always the chance that Brad’s arch-rival in the heart throb stakes might come a cropper, too, when Disney’s The Lone Ranger, with Tonto played by Johnny Depp, opens just a little later on.
Because as everyone in entertainment knows, if you can’t succeed yourself, what’s most important is that your friends and rivals fail, too. And with a budget of $215 million, the Lone Ranger and Tonto will have to do some galloping to make a profit. Does Depp have waxen Icarus like wings under his Tonto feathers? We’ll soon see.
But, hang on. Two hundred and fifteen million dollars for a cowboy film? Surely all you need a few horses and big hats. How could any Western possibly cost that amount?
Don’t ask me. This is Hollywood.
