The Hollywood Economist 2.0 Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE HOLLYWOOD ECONOMIST

  “[A] terrific job.… There’s fun to be had in knowing specifics, and Epstein offers plenty.”

  —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

  “The mysteries of modern-day film financing … the seamy underbelly of Hollywood spreadsheets.”

  —THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

  PRAISE FOR EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN’S THE BIG PICTURE

  “A rich adventure that will change the way you look at 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 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

  “In his adroit charting of the confidence flow between the various entities and eras Mr. Epstein kicks up a lot of little surprises … Edward Jay Epstein is quite good.”

  —LARRY McMURTRY, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  “… [A] valuable education for those seeking to enter and understand the entertainment industry.… Factually impressive.”

  —JOEL HIRSCHHORN, VARIETY

  “Epstein peels away the Hollywood facade and gives a nuts-and-bolts view of how the six entertainment empires—Viacom, Fox, NBC/Universal, Time Warner, Sony, and Disney—create and distribute intellectual property today.… [He] presents a fascinating look at the unbelievable efforts that must be coordinated to produce a film.”

  —BOOKLIST

  “In vivid detail, he describes the current process of how a film is made, from the initial pitch to last-minute digital editing. There’s a refreshing absence of moral grandstanding in Epstein’s work. With no apparent ax to grind, he simply and comprehensively presents the industry as it is: the nuts and bolts, the perks and pitfalls and the staggering fortunes that some in the business walk away with. This is the new indispensable text for anyone interested in how Hollywood works.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “[A] meticulously reported new book.”

  —THE BALTIMORE SUN

  “What one learns from these investigations is that the deepest, darkest secrets in Tinseltown have nothing to do with sex, drugs, blasphemy, or politics, and everything to do with money.”

  —THE WEEKLY STANDARD

  “Edward Jay Epstein blew the lid off Hollywood’s dirty little open secret.”

  —THE WASHINGTON TIMES

  “Compelling.… [Epstein] demystifies the contemporary process of film-making in the digital age.”

  —THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

  ALSO BY EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN

  Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth

  Counterplot: Garrison vs. the United States

  News from Nowhere: Television and the News

  Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism

  Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America

  Cartel: A Novel

  Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald

  The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion

  Who Owns the Corporation?: Management vs. Shareholders

  Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA

  The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend

  Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer

  The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood

  THE HOLLYWOOD ECONOMIST RELEASE 2.0

  © 2010, 2012 E.J.E. Publications, Ltd., Inc.

  All rights reserved

  First Melville House printing: January 2012

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-051-8

  Parts of this book appeared in earlier form in The New Yorker, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Gawker, and The Wrap.

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  v3.1

  For Susana Duncan

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  Why We Don’t Understand Hollywood

  PART 1

  The Popcorn Economy

  Ten Years Ago, I Learned the Real Secret Is the Salt

  Why Do Most New Movie Theaters Have Fewer than 300 Seats?

  Sex in the Cinema: Asset or Liability?

  The Vanishing Box Office

  The Reel Silver Lining

  PART II

  Star Culture

  The Contract’s the Thing—If Not for Hamlet, for Arnold Schwarzenegger

  Movie Stars Come in Two Flavors: $20 Million and Free

  The Angst Question in Hollywood: What Is Your Cash Breakeven?

  The Sad Lesson of Nicole Kidman’s Knee—Or What a Star Needs to Get a Part

  The Starlet’s Dilemma

  There Is No Net

  The Video Windfall

  Nobody Gets Gross

  “I Do My Own Stunts”

  PART III

  Hollywood’s Invisible Money Machine

  Why Lara Croft: Tomb Raider Is Considered a Masterpiece of Studio Financing

  Money-For-Nothing from Germany

  How Does a Studio Make a Windfall out of Being on the Losing Side of a Japanese Format War?

  Romancing the Hedge Funds

  Ending Up on the Wrong End of the Deal

  Ever Wonder Why New York Looks Like Toronto in the Movies?

  The Foreign Mirage

  Pushing the Pseudo Reality Envelope

  The New Civil War among the States

  The Rise and Fall of Pay Television

  For Whom Does the Movie Business Toll?

  PART IV

  Hollywood Politics

  In the Picture

  Paranoia for Fun and Profit: The Saga of Fahrenheit 9/11

  The Saga Continues

  Plus Ça Change: Paramount’s Regime Change

  Tom Cruise, Inc.

  The Studios—Required Reading

  An Expert Witness in Wonderland

  PART V

  Unoriginal Sin

  Audience Creation

  Teens and Car Crashes Go Together

  The Midas Formula

  Market Testing Villains

  Why Serious Fare Went Small Screen

  PART VI

  Indie Film

  The Oscar Deception

  Can Indie Movies Survive?

  How to Finance an Indie Film

  PART VII

  The Politics of Streaming

  The Quest for the Digitalized Couch Potato

  The Samurai Embrace

  The Rise of the Tube Moguls

  The Last Days of the Video Store

  And the End of Theatres?

  Downloading for Dollars

  EPILOGUE

  Hollywood: The Movie

  APPENDIX I Warner Bros. Distribution Report #6

  Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

  APPENDIX II Warner Bros. Distribution Report #4

  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

  INTRODUCTION

  WHY WE DON’T UNDERSTAND HOLLYWOOD

  There was
a time, around the middle of the twentieth century, when the box office numbers that were reported in newspapers were relevant to the fortunes of Hollywood: studios owned the major theater chains and made virtually all their profits from their theater ticket sales. This was a time before television sets became ubiquitous in American homes, and before movies could be made digital for DVDs and downloads.

  Today, Hollywood studios are in a very different business: creating rights that can be licensed, sold, and leveraged over different platforms, including television, DVD, and video games. Box office sales no longer play nearly as important a role. And yet newspapers, as if unable to comprehend the change, continue to breathlessly report these numbers every week, often on their front pages. With few exceptions, this anachronistic ritual is what passes for reporting on the business of Hollywood.

  To begin with, these numbers are misleading when used to describe what a film or studio earns. At best, they represent gross income from theater chains’ ticket sales. These chains eventually rebate about 50 percent of the sales to a distributor, which also deducts its outlay for prints and advertising (P&A). In 2007, the most recent year for which the studios have released their budget figures, P&A averaged about $40 million per title—more than was typically received from American theaters for a film in that year. The distributor also deducts a distribution fee, usually between 15 and 33 percent of the total theater receipts. Therefore, no matter how well a movie appears to fare in the box office race reported by the media, it is usually in the red at that point.

  So where does the money that sustains Hollywood come from? In 2007, the major studios had combined revenues of $42.3 billion, of which about one-tenth came from American theaters; the rest came from the so-called backend, which includes DVD sales, multi-picture output deals with foreign distributors, pay-TV, and network-television licensing.

  The only useful thing that the newspaper box office story really provides is bragging rights: Each week, the studio with the top movie can promote it as “Number 1 at the box office.” Newspapers themselves are not uninterested parties in this hype: in 2008, studios spent an average of $3.7 million per title placing ads in newspapers. But the real problem with the numbers ritual isn’t that it is misleading, but that the focus on it distracts attention from the realities that are reshaping and transforming the movie business. Consider, for example, studio output deals. These arrangements, in which pay-TV, cable networks, and foreign distributors contractually agree to buy an entire slate of future movies from a studio, form a crucial part of Hollywood’s cash flow. Indeed, they pay the overhead that allows studios to stay in business. The unwinding of output deals, which started to occur much more frequently in about 2004, can doom an entire studio, as happened in 2008 to New Line Cinema, even though it had produced such immense box office successes as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yet, despite their importance, output deals are seldom mentioned in the mainstream media. As result, a large part of Hollywood’s amazing moneymaking machine remains nearly invisible to the public.

  The problem here does not lie in a lack of diligence on the part of the journalists, it proceeds from the entertainment news cycle, which generally requires a story about Hollywood to be linked to an interesting current event within a finite time frame. The ideal example of such an event is the release of a new movie. For such a story, the only readily available data are the weekly box office estimates; these are conveniently reported on websites such as Hollywood.com and Box Office Mojo, which also attach authoritative-sounding demographics to the numbers. If an intrepid reporter decided to pursue a story about the actual profitability of a movie, he or she would need to learn how much the movie cost to make, how much was spent on P&A, the details of its distribution deal and its pre-sales deals abroad, and its real revenues from worldwide theatrical, DVD, television, and licensing income. Such information is far less easily accessible, but it can be found in a film’s distribution report. (See, for example, the report on Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil on this page.) But this report is not sent out to participants until a year after the movie is released, so even if a reporter could obtain it, the newspaper’s deadline would be long past. Hence the media’s continued fixation on box office numbers, even if reporters are aware of their irrelevance in the digital age.

  This book’s purpose is to close gaps like these in the understanding of the economic realities behind the new Hollywood. In this pursuit, I benefited enormously from the help I received from people inside the industry. I was greatly aided by distribution reports, budgets, and other documents given to me by producers, directors, and other participants in the making and marketing of movies, and I am deeply indebted to several top studio executives who furnished me with the secret MPA All Media Revenue Report for 1998 through 2007 and with studio PowerPoint presentations concerning marketing costs. These documents revealed the global revenue streams of Hollywood films, including the money that flows in from theaters, DVDs, television licensing, and digital downloads.

  I am also grateful for the help I received from the Motion Picture Association, which is the major studios’ trade and research organization, and particularly from Robert Bauer, its director of strategic planning; Julia Jenks, its director of worldwide research and information analysis; and Dean Garfield, its former executive vice president.

  I further thank everyone who answered my often-pesky e-mails (and my sometimes off-the-wall questions), including John Berendt, Jeffrey Bewkes, Laura Bickford, Robert Bookman, Anthony Bregman, Michael Eisner, Bruce Feirstein, Tara Grace, Billy Kimball, Thomas McGrath, Richard Myerson, Edward Pressman, Couper Samuelson, Stephen Schiff, Rob Stone, and Dean Valentine.

  I am especially grateful to the very talented director Oliver Stone for casting me in a small part in his Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps in November 2009. This bit role allowed me to view the art of moviemaking—and it is an art as well as a business—from a perspective that I would not otherwise have had.

  I also received an invaluable education in Hollywood law from Alan Rader and Kevin Vick at O’Melveny & Myers, which retained me as an expert witness in the Sahara lawsuit, and from Claude Serra of Weil, Gotshal, and Manges. These lawyers helped me understand the art of the deal.

  I also am indebted to those editors who helped shape this material, including Tina Brown and Jeff Frank at The New Yorker; Jacob Weisberg and Michael Agger at Slate; Howard Dickman, Erich Eichman, and Ray Sokolov at The Wall Street Journal; Mario Platero at Il Sole 24 Ore; and Gwen Robinson at The Financial Times. Finally, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Kelly Burdick at Melville House, who suggested the idea for The Hollywood Economist—and brilliantly edited the book.

  PART I

  THE POPCORN ECONOMY

  TEN YEARS AGO, I LEARNED THE REAL SECRET IS THE SALT

  Once upon a time, attending the local movie theater was an experience that most Americans shared on a regular basis. For example, in 1929, the year of the first Academy Awards, an average of ninety-five million people—about four-fifths of the ambulatory population—went to movies every week. There were more than twenty-three thousand theaters, many of palatial size, like the six-thousand-two-hundred-seat Roxy in New York. In those days, the major studios made virtually all the movies that people saw (over seven hundred feature films in 1929). The stars, directors, writers, and other talent were under exclusive contract, and, in addition, the studios owned the theatrical circuits where first-run movies played. This regime, which allowed the major studios to exert total control over movies, from script to screen, came to be known, and feared, as “the studio system”; it more or less ended in 1950, when the United States Supreme Court upheld antitrust decrees ordering several of the major Hollywood studios to divest themselves of their theater chains.

  Today, in a world with television, video, the Internet, and other home diversions, weekly average movie attendance is about thirty million, or less than 10 percent of the population. As a result of this diminishment, many larger theaters either clos
ed or divided themselves into smaller auditoriums under one roof. (There are only a third as many theater sites today as there were in 1929, but there are more screens—over thirty thousand.) These multiplexes afforded theater owners significant economies of scale. They could also show a greater variety of films, tailored to different, if smaller, audiences. And as smaller theaters closed the chains expanded; today, the fifteen largest North American chains own approximately two-thirds of all the screens. These large chains, and their centralized film bookers, are the principal gatekeepers for the American film industry. They are responsible for determining what movies most Americans see.

  Today a handful of nation-wide multiplex chains account for more than 80 percent of Hollywood’s share of the American box office, and a large share of these bookings are done at ShoWest, the annual event in Las Vegas in which movie distribution and exhibition executives meet over four days to discuss plans for releasing and marketing upcoming films. In 1998, I contacted Thomas W. Stephenson, Jr., who then headed one of these major chains, Hollywood Theaters, and arranged to accompany him to ShoWest. Stephenson was willing to let me tag along to meetings in Las Vegas on the condition that I not directly quote or identify those with whom he met. As part of the deal, he agreed to a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell protocol in which, unless they specifically asked, he would not identify me as a journalist to the other participants at these meetings with bankers and studio executives.

  On the way to Las Vegas, Stephenson, an energetic, peppery-haired man in his early forties, gave me a quick course in the economics of his business. Of the $50 million customers that paid for tickets in 1997, he said his 450-screen chain, Hollywood Theaters, kept only $23 million; most of the rest went to the distributors. But, he continued, since it cost $31.2 million to pay the operating costs of the theaters, his company would have lost $8.2 million if it were limited to the movie-exhibition business. Like all theater owners, though, he has a second business: snack foods, in which the profit margin is well over 80 percent. And with the snack foods, Hollywood Theaters made a profit of $22.4 million on the sale of $26.7 million from its concession stands. “Every element in the lobby,” Stephenson told me, “is designed to focus the attention of the customer on its menu boards.”