LOS ANGELES — In these troubled times, America’s film studios are hard at
work on planned pictures about a battered boxer; the post-apocalyptic wasteland;
a bad human-resources executive whose job is to fire people.
Where is Busby Berkeley when you need him?
If moviegoers have delivered a message in the last few months, it is that
they want their films, for the moment, at least, to be a lot more fun than their
lives.
Among topics connecting with viewers since financial markets collapsed in
October: animated penguins (“Madagascar:
Escape 2 Africa”), holidays (“Four
Christmases”), dancing teenagers (“High
School Musical 3: Senior Year”) and vampires who don’t bite (“Twilight”).
What did not work nearly so well were the historical calamities of “Australia,” the missing children and mayhem of “Changeling,” or jihad — no matter how far it was kept from the billboards — as in “Body of
Lies.” Even so, studios have continued to green-light a number of such
sober, serious films in the face of global economic mayhem.
Hollywood, it seems, is still trying to get this recession thing sorted out.
Over the past three months the major studios, their specialty divisions and
some of their biggest independent producers have been moving toward production
with some films that are noticeably more downbeat than those that have buoyed
the marketplace lately.
The mismatch speaks more to the film industry’s internal dynamics than to any
lack of common sense. Scripts that had been in development for a year or more
were finally judged ready to shoot just as the jolt of an economic crisis hit
the national psyche.
So pictures conceived in the bubble were being born as it burst. That is
leaving studio executives with slightly tougher, more challenging schedules than
they might choose were they to start from scratch today — or forcing them to
make difficult choices.
Thus, Universal Pictures now says it is not planning to shoot the once
seemingly imminent “Bobby
Fischer Goes to War,” a drama about the 1972 chess showdown between Mr.
Fischer and Boris Spassky. But the studio is jumping on a comic-book adventure
fantasy, “Scott
Pilgrim vs. the World,” with Michael
Cera.
In a further complication, studios have slowed their planning as they wait to
see whether members of the Screen
Actors Guild, whose contract expired months ago, will authorize a strike as
early as January.
The next wave of selections will be lighter. “Family comedies, romantic
comedies, buddy comedies are going to be an easy sell,” said Michael Shamberg, a
producer whose best-timed credits include “The Big Chill,” which caught the baby
boomers on a life-cycle bump in 1983, and the corporate exposé “Erin
Brockovich,” which opened as the market hit a frothy top in 2000.
Last week Daily Variety reported that Warner’s New Line unit had won an
auction for film rights to the stage musical “Rock of
Ages.” That might point toward a brighter approach to the studios’ current
development, if literary sales were not so few and far between these days.
Of script, book and stage play sales — the stuff of movies in the far future
— Jeremy Zimmer, a partner at United Talent Agency in Hollywood, said: “I can’t
notice a significant change at this point, other than that there’s a lot less
activity.”
Still, Alcon Entertainment and its collaborators are pushing ahead with “The Book
of Eli,” to begin production in February for distribution by Warner
Brothers in 2010. If the national mood remains grim, this science-fiction
film, directed by Albert and Allen Hughes, promises to be grimmer: Denzel
Washington plays a loner who must battle his way through a ruined
America.
Similarly, Paramount is still lining up “The
Fighter,” to be directed by Darren
Aronofsky, with Mark
Wahlberg as the boxer Mickey Ward, known as Irish, and an actor yet to be
named as his drug-battered trainer. The studio also has “Up
in the Air,” directed by Jason
Reitman, in which George
Clooney plays the human-resources guy who cares more about his
frequent-flier miles than about the people he fires; it is closer to
production.
Other projects promise to be on the serious side as well, notwithstanding the
signals from the audience in the last few weeks.
Those include “The
Tourist,” from Spyglass Entertainment, in which Tom
Cruise is expected to play a threatened American traveler; “The
Last Airbender,” from the filmmaker M.
Night Shyamalan and Paramount, about an “avatar” that must save the world;
and an untitled movie from Warner, directed by Clint
Eastwood, based on the book “Playing the Enemy: Nelson
Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation,” about how rugby helped unite
race-torn South Africa.
In a much earlier downturn, Berkeley cheered millions of moviegoers by
choreographing “Gold
Diggers of 1933,” a song-and-dance spectacular about down-and-out actors on
Broadway. The film, itself a successor to “Gold
Diggers of Broadway” from 1929, was a hit and spawned sequels aplenty, even
as the
Great Depression slogged on.
By 1931, in fact, Hollywood had already gotten the message. Along with the
prestige releases “Cimarron” and “Trader
Horn,” and the Victorian melodrama “East
Lynne,” two of that year’s Academy Award nominees for best picture were
comedies: “Skippy,” about two boys and a dog, and an adaptation of “The
Front Page,” the stage classic about cynical Chicago reporters.
Lakeshore Entertainment, for its part, earlier this month began filming one
of several future movies that aim to make matters feel less depressing. It is a
new version of “Fame,” the high-energy dance musical about students at the High School of Performing
Arts in New York, for distribution by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The original lifted spirits back in 1980, when inflation was at 14.4 percent,
and the unemployment rate was 7.5 percent, only a little worse than now.
As “Fame” was released, on May 16 of that year, the Iranian hostage crisis
had stretched into its 195th day. The movie took in a relatively modest $21
million at the box office. But 7 of that year’s top 10 films in terms of
revenue, including “Airplane!,” “Stir
Crazy” and “9
to 5” — now a stage musical set for a Broadway opening in the spring — were
comedies.
(In another stab at the teenage dance genre, Paramount is close to shooting a
remake of “Footloose,” which starred a young Kevin
Bacon in 1984.)
Still, none of this was really a factor, as Lakeshore executives began
assembling their cast for the remake a year ago.
“I think it just stemmed from what was happening in television,” Robert
Burke, Lakeshore’s executive vice president for worldwide marketing, said in a
telephone interview.
“You know, ‘American Idol,’ ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ ” Mr. Burke added. “The
hopes for this are
high.”