I'm Cook will love to hear this.







http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/ ... inful.html

I love when a producer tries to make it sound as though they had any hand in the artistic process. In TV, yeah, but not film. Of course, there will always be guys like David O. Selznick and Harvey Weinstein who will try to impose their visions on the final product, but thankfully it still mostly belongs to the directors.

That's a complicated thing that varies greatly from film to film. Sometimes, the producer has significant say, especially with movies that tend towards big budget entertainment. In those cases, the director is basically the producer's representative who gets down into the dirt with the creative team.

I doubt producers have much say in a Scorsese project, though.

All I heard was wahhhhh.

This is a philosophy that gives us The Golden Compass and Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and doesn't take into account DVD sales and post-nomination promotion. Hugo is going to win a bunch of Oscars, which will allow its distributors to proclaim it "Winner of six Oscars" or whatever. If it wins Best Picture, it will make its money back.

It's still at least 50 mil away from breaking even. The truth is that even though Hugo's Oscar nom success bodes well for it, box office does matter. You can call Hugo a noble failure if you want, but at the end of the day Scorsese will not be getting another 100 mil+ budget for the rest of his career, Hugo will not be any sort of classic, and if the director were anybody else, he/she would quite possibly be looking at the end of their career. Yet all of Hugo's supporters seem to be in denial about that truth. Some of its supporters think it still needs to find an audience. But again, many people who saw it disliked it. It sounds like this producer learned that audiences like to be entertained, not lectured at and talked down to.

I take it you will soon be appologizing to Nolan for dissing The Dark Knight? Because obviously now, by the standard you just established here, that is by your own reasoning, it is the greatest movie of 2008.

I mean you are aware that it grossed the most money in 2008 right? Therefore, if box office matters, then by that standard, The Dark Knight was at least an unquestionable success.
-Jeremy

Or I could just praise Heath Ledger's cadaver, the hype for which Nolan owes a lot of thanks.

By that logic, Queen of the Damned should have been a hit.

That's just the problem. "That logic" can only be applied to one movie at a time. There's no all-important law that decides whether a film will be a hit or a flop. You have to take movies on a case-by-case basis. Yes, Dark Knight was a huge hit, for reasons that have little to do with its actual merit, and nothing to do with Hugo's faults. Hugo fails for unusual reasons that cannot quite be compared to the success or failure of other movies.

I'm sure the whole 'people in general these days don't give a shit about anything from before they were born' was at least partially a contributing factor.

Why should they? Granted, any director, producer, writer, critic, editor, or other industry professional should be expected to know their shit. But why should the layman care? They're paying a hard fee to see something good; Hugo might be appropriate if AMC Theaters was a college and customers paid tuition, but it's not. Then again, a good director can make mainstream audiences historically conscious without talking down to them. Believe it or not, averaqe Joes, and I mean average, still have a degree of sophistication, including an interest in history.

If this is true (and I agree that it is), then it seems more than a little counter productive to speak in the absolute terms you frequently speak in, no?

As for the produer's comments, it makes sense to chance your approach as a producer when you take a big loss on a costly film. I don't think that necessarily says anything about the quality of that film, but from a purely financial standpoint, it makes perfect sense to change your business model if it isn't working. That said, as a fan of film as an artform, I'd argue that it's tough to have any kind of personal vision if the movie is trying to attempt to figure out what the audience wants.

Congratulations McGamesCook, you just discovered anti-logic!

In other words, box office total has nothing to do with film quality for some films and yet it is related to film quality for other films, at the same time! Who would have thunk?

Or is it just that films that you like or dislike have correspondingly high or low box office totals are the ones where quality is related to box office total and in cases where the box office total fails to confirm the films you like/dislike is when box office becomes irrelevant?
-Jeremy

Well, I, for one, would feel like a rather superficial person if I was only ever concerned with the present. I mean, it like, "I'm finished with school, so I don't have to learn anything more about the world." Is it any wonder history keeps repeating itself?

I have as much concern about the past as anyone else...so much so that I don't have to prove it by spending 170 million on a children's film that isn't really a children's film. You all know very well that many people who see Hugo come out failing to realize Melies was a real person...the only thing those people learn is how boring and hollow a 3D movie can be. The film justifies the bold statement, gratifying an interest in history...but doing that alone doesn't make a film good. All it does is confirm that you haven't wasted your time watching old movies, but it doesn't tell anyone anything they don't already know. War Horse, on the other hand, is highly enlightening to any kind of viewer. A friend of mine was shocked by the opening battle scene; she had no idea that WWI began with swords on horseback. If you want to keep in touch with history, you've been looking in the wrong place.



If a film flops, it's always for a reason. Each person must decide for his/herself whether the film's faults are enough to write it off entirely. You can say that fantasy mixed with film history works for you, but that basic dichotomy is still the reason why it flopped. Point being, this movie was not over anybody's head, as some have implied. It simply hit all the wrong notes. You also can't argue that "oh, but Scorsese wasn't going for mainstream appeal," because what would you call the opening Sacha Baron Cohen slapstick sequence? That evoked a poor imitation of Babe: Pig in the City or some other animal movie, which doesn't have much to do with film preservation.

^ I didn't mean to direct that post directly at you, but I have encountered a fair amount of people (young people in particular) who have that sort of Why should I care about that? It happened before I was born. mentality about them. And, yes, I agree that "Hugo"'s historical aspect was almost certainly not a factor in its box office shortcomings.