Review
“A rich adventure that will change the way you look at the movies.”
–BusinessWeek
“Edward Jay Epstein is here to tell us that when it comes to Hollywood these days, we’ve got it all wrong.”
–The Washington Post Book World
“One of the virtues of The Big Picture is Mr. Epstein’s astonishing access to numbers that the movie studios go to great lengths to keep secret. . . . A groundbreaking work that explains the inner workings of the game.”
–The Wall Street Journal
“Hollywood has needed one of these for a long time–a user’s manual. This one could not be more complete. . . . [Grade] A.”
–Entertainment Weekly
“Entertaining and enlightening.”
–The New York Sun
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
Edward Jay Epstein is author of a number of books, including Inquest: The Warren Commission, News from Nowhere: Television and the News, Establishment of Truth, Legend: Lee Harvey Oswald,and Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer. He lives in New York City.
From The Washington Post
Edward Jay Epstein is here to tell us that when it comes to Hollywood these days, we've got it all wrong. Each week the box-office grosses rung up by the big new movies are published, and each week it is near universally assumed, reflexively and reverentially, that they represent not merely an accurate ranking of current films but also an accurate record of how much they are making for the studios that produced them. Tommyrot, says Epstein. These seemingly huge earnings are wildly misleading, as the cost of making, distributing and showing new movies almost always far exceeds what they earn in theaters. Hollywood's highly imaginative accounting practices disguise this reality, but more to the point, theaters aren't where movies make money any more. "The massive moviegoing audience that had nurtured the [old] studio system simply no longer exists," Epstein writes. "In contrast to the 4.7 billion movie tickets sold in America in 1947, there were only 1.57 billion tickets sold in 2003. So, even though the population had almost doubled, movie theaters sold 3.1 billion fewer tickets than they had in 1947." In the years immediately after World War II, theatrical releases accounted for 100 percent of the studios' worldwide revenues; in 2003 they accounted for a mere 18 percent. Where do the movie companies make their money now? From what lawyers call "intellectual properties" -- "licensing their filmed entertainment for home viewing" on DVDs, videotapes, broadcast and cable television programs, and selling spin-offs (dolls, games, books and the like) from movies aimed primarily at children, such as the Disney animated films and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
Epstein argues, and most persuasively, that we persist in thinking about Hollywood in terms that no longer exist: the "dream factories" that were the old studios -- MGM, RKO, Paramount, Columbia, Fox, Universal and Warner Bros -- where movies were the only products, stars and lesser actors were bound to studios by rigid contracts, and theaters were owned by the studios that supplied them. Now, he says, the old Big Seven have been replaced by the new Big Six: Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, "global entertainment companies . . . that collude and cooperate at different levels to dominate filmed entertainment." Movies earn a very small percentage of their total revenue, but are "their principal source of prestige and satisfaction in Hollywood."
The grasp of the Big Six is astonishing. They "own all six broadcast networks in America," as well as "64 cable networks whose reach accounts for most of the remainder of the prime-time television audience," a combination that enables them to "control over 96 percent of the programs that carry commercial advertising during prime time." They "control the television networks depended on by advertisers to reach children under 12 . . . and those designed for younger teens." They "dominate the worldwide distribution of movies, a studio business [the late] Steve Ross once described, with considerable justification, as a 'money machine,' " and they "control a large part of the entertainment media, including magazines . . . TV and radio interview shows . . . and cable channels that publicize movies." All of which is to say that they control "one of the largest consumer-based industries in America: home entertainment," and they bear only glancing resemblance to the studios of old:
"The main task of today's studio is to collect fees for the use of the intellectual properties they control in one form or another and then to allocate those fees among the parties -- including themselves -- who create, develop, and finance the properties. It is now essentially a service organization, a dream clearinghouse rather than a dream factory. As clearinghouses, they are very different creatures from their predecessors, and this difference is as apparent from looking at their financial reporting as it is from looking at their products."
At this point Epstein launches into a detailed examination of their accounting practices, the essence of which is that "what is central to the clearinghouse is not the art of the film but the art of the deal." Filmmaking now divides essentially into two broad categories: blockbusters (no, I didn't know that the word is "a term coined in the 1920s to denote a movie whose long line of customers could not be contained on a single city block") or would-be blockbusters, and more serious films made by "independent subsidiaries" to earn Big Six corporations and their ranking executives "the awards, media recognition, artistic bragging rights and other non-economic rewards they sought in Hollywood."
The blockbusters are aimed at children and teenagers and are scripted according to "the Midas formula," the ingredients of which include "a child or adolescent protagonist," a "fairy-tale plot in which a weak or ineffectual youth is transformed into a powerful and purposeful hero," "bizarre-looking and eccentric supporting characters that are appropriate for toy and game licensing," a happy ending "with the hero prevailing over powerful villains and supernatural forces" and "conventional or digital animation to artificially create action sequences, supernatural forces . . . and elaborate settings." In two words: "Harry Potter." In four: "Lord of the Rings."
The blockbusters do well enough in American theaters -- the first "Harry Potter" pulled in more than $317 million -- but ticket sales are a drop in the bucket: That film's total earnings as of last year were $1,249 billion, the biggest chunk of which ($436 million) came from worldwide DVD sales. In effect, as Epstein persistently argues, theatrical release now exists not to make money but to open the way for "intellectual property" income to be earned over the long term from other sources. As the "Midas formula" makes plain, these movies are strictly product; they may win the occasional award, since Hollywood reveres success, but they have little if anything to do with cinematic art.
Such art as does still emerge from Hollywood can be found in the comparatively modest productions from the "specialty film units -- Miramax Pictures, Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight, Paramount Classics and Warner Independent Pictures," which are a return "not so much to the studio system as to the art-house system, which had at one time coexisted alongside the Hollywood studios." These movies are modest only by Hollywood standards: Their average cost was "an astounding $61.6 million in 2003, nearly two thirds that of studio movies," and "since many of the more adult films produced by the independent subsidiaries did not appeal to the youth-oriented toy, game, and other ancillary markets, they often resulted in huge losses for the studios."
The Big Six swallow these losses not because they're suicidal but because "studio executives seek, along with strictly commercial projects, projects that are likely to attract the sort of actors, directors, awards and media response that will help them maintain both their standing in the community and their own morale." As Epstein says, "as persuasive as the [Midas] formula is from a moneymaking standpoint, it doesn't satisfy the community members' appetite for prestige, recognition, and creative expression. These are among the needs that drive the less visible but surprisingly powerful non-economic logic of Hollywood."
Epstein laments much of what comes out of Hollywood these days and fears for its future as computerized imaging assumes an ever more central role, but he does Hollywood the courtesy -- as too many of us here in the effete East do not -- of taking it seriously. He points out that the "celebritized star" whose face we see in the supermarket checkout line is likely to be a man or woman who rose from unprepossessing roots, worked hard to get to the top and works hard to stay there. To wit, "Reese Witherspoon, who began her acting career when she was 15, prided herself on arriving on the set of 'Legally Blonde' at 6 a.m. to give makeup crews two and a half hours to prepare her look and remaining, if necessary, late into the night."
As the phrase "celebritized star" suggests, Epstein isn't always the most felicitous of prose stylists, and at times reading The Big Picture can be a bit of a slog; it doesn't help that he seems to be almost completely humor-challenged. But he's a bulldog researcher, he's brought a great deal of interesting material together and he has interesting things to say about it. His account of the grueling, amazingly expensive and time-consuming process by which movies are now made is an eye-opener; for an actor, who has "a more distant relationship to his product than his counterpart on the stage," it can be "frustrating, unsatisfactory and exhausting." It is remarkable, in fact, that so many good performances get onto film -- I think, for example, of "Mystic River" and "Lost in Translation" -- in such circumstances.
How much longer this will last is in doubt. Epstein worries that "Hollywood's traditional culture will . . . find itself replaced by the computer culture," and he has good reason to. Much evidence suggests that the geeks are taking over. Whatever their considerable skills and expertise, they're technicians, not moviemakers. The respect of the Hollywood community almost certainly means nothing to them, and they almost certainly have little or no interest in serious filmmaking. No one who loves movies can regard the potential implications of this with pleasure.
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The Two Hollywoods
The Twilight of the Gods
On March 20, 1948, the elite of Hollywood, braving freezing temperatures and gale-force winds, filed past the newsreel cameras into the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles for the twentieth annual presentation of the Academy Awards. Once inside, they discovered a stage that had been transformed into a towering birthday cake, with twenty giant Oscar statuettes in place of candles.
The studios had much to celebrate that night. Their movies, the most democratic of all art forms, had become the principal mode of paid entertainment for the vast majority of Americans. In an average week in 1947, 90 million Americans, out of a total population of only 151 million, went to a movie, paying on the average forty cents for a ticket. Nor was this massive outpouring, about two thirds of the ambulatory population, the product of expensive national marketing campaigns. It was simply the result of regular moviegoers going to see whatever was playing at their neighborhood theaters.
Most of these moviegoers didn’t go to the theater to see a particular film. They went to see a program that included a newsreel; a short comedy film, such as the Three Stooges; a serial, such as Flash Gordon; animated cartoons, such as Bugs Bunny; a B feature, such as a western; and finally, the main attraction. In 1947 in America, movie houses were more ubiquitous than banks. There were more than eighteen thousand neighborhood theaters. Each had only one auditorium, one screen, one speaker (located behind the screen), one projection booth, and one marquee. Every week, usually on Thursday, a UPS truck picked up the previous week’s reels and delivered the new ones. The new film’s title on the marquee and the listings for it in the local newspapers constituted all the advertising most movies got.
Virtually all of these movies and shorts came from regional exchanges owned and operated by seven distribution companies that were, in turn, owned by seven Hollywood studios: Paramount, Universal, MGM, Twentieth Century–Fox, Warner Bros., Columbia, and RKO. In little over a generation, these studios had perfected a nearly omnipotent mechanism for controlling what the American public saw and heard. It was known, collectively, as the studio system.
These studios had their common origins in the arcades, nickelodeons, and exhibition halls of the silent-film era. Their founders, self-made and self-educated Jews, had been part of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century wave of immigration from Eastern Europe. They had worked at menial jobs as ragpickers, furriers, errand boys, butchers, junk peddlers, and salesmen and then gone into the business of showing movies. Here they found an enthusiastic audience, especially among those not yet fully literate in English, and a great deal of competition for it. To rise above their competitors, they instinctively sought what later economists would call “economies of scale.” Louis B. Mayer, the founder of MGM, borrowed money to expand from a single theater in Haverhill, Massachusetts, to a small group of theaters that he combined into a “circuit”—so called because the reels of a single movie could be sent by bicycle from one theater to the next (with showtimes cut so close that sometimes one theater was showing the first reel of a film while another theater was showing the last), allowing multiple screenings of—and multiple admissions for—the movies he rented from film exchanges. As their circuits expanded, these entrepreneurs began opening their own film exchanges and distributing movies to other theater owners, but they still made most of their money from tickets bought at their own box office—so called because the cash went into locked boxes.
When they found that they could not get enough movies on a regular basis from independent moviemakers, these new distributors took the next step and started making their own films. Initially, their studios were in the East, but as their production expanded after the turn of the century, they came under increased pressure from the Edison Trust, the legal entity formed by Thomas A. Edison to control the basic patents on movie cameras and projectors in America. The Trust filed a constant stream of lawsuits against the nascent film companies, who finally decided to relocate their studios a continent’s width away from the reach of the Trust’s East Coast lawyers. They chose the newly incorporated village of Hollywood, California—a place they could control—for their new home.
In less than a generation, these entrepreneurs had literally gone from rags (or furs) to riches. By the 1940s, the studio heads were among the highest-paid executives in the world. Having come from poverty, they reveled in this wealth and dubbed themselves moguls—an appellation that, although perhaps not strictly appropriate since it originally referred to absolute Moslem rulers, became part of their identity. Louis B. Mayer, who had scavenged rags as a newly arrived immigrant and at nineteen did not have, as his son-in-law David O. Selznick later put it, “the price of a sandwich,” was in 1947 the highest-paid executive in America, with an annual salary from MGM of $1.8 million.
The studios produced nearly five hundred films in 1947—features and B movies. While marketing strategies varied slightly from studio to studio, the movie business in 1947 was a relatively simple affair. The studios did not license their films to television or other media or license their characters for toys, games, T-shirts, or other merchandise. Foreign markets provided some revenue, but that income was mostly offset by high taxes—Britain had a 75 percent import tax, for example—and most European and Asian countries had restrictions on currency repatriation. As a result, profits from abroad were almost impossible to retrieve.
In short, studios looked to a single source for virtually all their money: the American box office. In 1947 the six major studios earned over 95 percent of their revenue from their share of ticket sales (called “rentals,” since it was technically the “rent” theaters paid for films) at North American movie houses. This came to $1.1 billion, which made movies, after grocery stores and automotive sales, America’s third-largest retail business.
The studios were able to harvest this windfall extremely efficiently because they controlled almost all the movie theaters. MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount, Twentieth Century–Fox, and RKO had their own theater chains, which produced about half of their total revenue, while Columbia and Universal controlled chains of theaters less directly through their distribution arms. Among the theaters under studio control were most of the first-run houses in major cities in the United States and Canada, where films had their premieres. During these first runs, films got their reviews, garnered publicity, and generated the word of mouth that served as the principal form of advertising. Thanks to their direct ownership of the theaters, studios were able to determine where, when, and for how long their films played in their first run. Such engagements could extend for many months while studios prepared the subsequent release to neighborhood theaters. For example, in 1947, Samuel Goldwyn’s The Best Years of Our Lives was still playing at New York’s Astor Theater, owned by MGM through its Loews subsidiary, six months after its premiere.
In addition, the studios indirectly controlled almost all independently owned theaters, which included most of the neighborhood and second-run movie houses, through ironclad contracts that forced the theater owners to commit to show a given number of films (usually ten) in a so-called block. If they did not accept a block, they got no studio films at all—which meant they did not have the star names to attract an audience. Only a few dozen art theaters that showed foreign films could afford to turn down this “blind-bidding” arrangement.
Not only were the studios able to control the bookings of their films, but they enjoyed a monopoly on the resulting revenue. Stars, directors, writers, and other talent did not share in it. Neither did producers. In rare cases these participants might receive a share of the eventual profits, but never of the studio’s rentals.
The studios were further aided by low distribution and marketing costs. Because films opened in only a handful of theaters in major cities before moving on to other regions, the same prints and posters could be used first in the Northeast and later on in the South and West. Distribution costs therefore were low, averaging only about $60,000 a film in 1947. Further, there were no national advertising campaigns, and since theaters paid a good part of local advertising and stars freely supplied the publicity on radio and in newsreels, the advertising budgets averaged less than $30,000 a picture.
What remained after these distribution and advertising costs were deducted from the rental revenue were the studios’ net receipts. In 1947 these totaled approximately $950 million.
To ensure a profit, studios obviously had to produce their films for less money than their net receipts totaled. To maximize their economies of scale, each studio had organized what amounted to a film factory, with staff and equipment that could operate around the clock. On their soundstages, shadowless light was cast by vast arrays of arc lamps, artificial weather was whipped up by wind, rain, and snow machines, and seas were created in indoor pools. On their back lots, exotic locales could be replicated and filled with extras dressed from the stocks of costumes and other props stored in their warehouses. For example, in 1947, MGM shot the adventure movie The Three Musketeers, wh...
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