The Philippine Online Chronicles

Notice the selling point for Hollywood movies. They tell us that it’s the number one movie in America. Or the ads will tell us how long it stayed at number one, or how long its theatrical run was. Or perhaps we will be informed of the previous “blockbuster” work that the cast and crew have done. Also possibly, considering the present summer season’s glut of sequels, remakes, and reboots, we will be told how successful these franchises have been.

The selling point is not the movie’s actual quality or critical acclaim, but how it does at the box office. The logic then follows that if people shelled out money to watch this movie, then you will probably want to do the same. The commercial aspects of the film are what seem to draw crowds.

Looking at this from the perspective of a critic, one can’t feel that the critic and the movie review are diminishing in their power, if they ever really had any power at all. In the contemporary viewing world, as A.O. Scott has observed, it’s more review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic rather than actual reviews that people turn to. And again, even if these aggregators say a film is terrible, more likely than not people might still watch it because of the buzz it has created. It’s not about whether the movie is any good at all, but whether enough buzz has been created to turn it into a “must-see” movie. In this paradigm we see “commercial blockbusters” as sure releases, while a lot of great films fall through the cracks, relegated locally to week-long or less theatrical releases, straight-to-DVD releases, or more often than not, movie buffs resorting to torrent downloads.

How did we get to this point? Granted that Hollywood movies have always had a commercial quality to them, but when did sales receipts and marketing behemoths matter more than a film’s actual merit?

This is what the eye-opening book Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession by Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing addresses. It serves as a history of contemporary Hollywood in the wake of concepts of the box office and its importance. The book is expansive in its scope as it reaches back to the history and developments of Hollywood filmmaking, film distribution, the dynamics of selling movies to theater owners, the development of the theater industry, the shift towards the importance of marketing, the evolution of film marketing, and so many other things. It illuminates and enlightens while providing readers with an insider’s look at the action.

There are moments when the ideas presented in the book are, at least to the movie critic (me, anyway) frightening and sickening: the unimportance of a film’s quality, the reliance on test audiences who demand a dumbing down of films and how the studios willingly follow those whims, and the kind of things that are sacrificed at the artistic level (if artistry is even considered at all, as the book shows that most of the people behind the movie business don’t really care about movie artistry anyway) so that the film will be more marketable.

One of the many commendable things about the book is the way that it provides so much history and information without getting bogged down in details, losing direction, or simply getting boring. All the research presented here remains interesting and is presented in a writing style that is accessible and makes efforts to give us data not in info dumps but in a narrative form that feels like we’re driving towards something.

What provides the book with such a propulsive style is the way that it has been structured. The authors decided to track three films that were being released on a July 4th weekend. So the book follows these movies as they are in production, and then as they are marketed, and then ultimately after release and what their performances at the box office mean to the creators and companies involved. While following these films the authors intersperse information and stories about the various aspects of making and marketing the films, while also dicussing all of the business concerns surrounding them.

I appreciated how the authors chose three movies that have generally disappeared from moviegoer consciousness, pointing towards the essentially disposable nature of the Hollywood summer blockbuster, while also showing the kind of work that goes into selling films that don’t really matter. They followed Legally Blonde 2, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and Sinbad. If you missed these movies, don’t feel bad, as seeing them or how good (or bad) they are doesn’t matter. It’s about their journey to the box office and how, as inconsequential as they are (for example, newer iterations in the Terminator franchise have decided to ignore that third film), these movies’ releases came to mean so much to Hollywood.

Another strong point of the book is how it shows us so many aspects of the film business that we are rarely privy to and do not think about when buying our tickets and watching a movie in the theater. It takes us to test screenings, to cutting room for trailers, to press junkets and sales floors, to the number-crunchers whose data is fought over, and to the executives’ offices as they wait for the results of the box office sales.

While it ignores the artistry involved in filmmaking, there is clear reason for it. That’s not what this book is concerned about, because that’s not what the industry is concerned with. Interestingly, the book explores the need for a new system at the end as the marketing behemoths are shown to be the monsters that they are. Whether the needs for change in the system as perceived in this book will ever actually take effect, or whether the box office monster will ever topple, are questions that remain to be answered. But Open Wide does a great job of opening our eyes to the business aspects of filmmaking and to the world that exists behind the movies for which we shell out our hard-earned money.

Speaking of shelling out hard-earned money, this book finds itself in the Bargain Bin section at National Bestsellers in Robinsons Galleria. Rummaging through the sale racks, as I am wont to do, I fished this out of a bunch of self-help books and YA novels for a mere P100. Less than the cost of a movie ticket, if we want to throw that consideration in there. I would’ve paid full price for this book because it’s so informative, well-written, and entertaining.

Image from: http://www.powells.com/biblio/72-9781401359850-0