The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex Page 8
So catastrophic was the public’s response to Heaven’s Gate that the film’s title entered the lexicon of screen failure, in the same way that ‘Watergate’ (or simply ‘-gate’) has become shorthand for any form of scandalous corruption. A full 15 years after Cimino’s super-expensive debacle, Kevin Costner would find himself embroiled in a costly catastrophe of his own – which the press jovially dubbed ‘Kevin’s Gate’ – Waterworld. Like Cleopatra before it, Waterworld had the dubious honour of being ‘the most expensive movie ever made’, its ever-increasing price tag sparking furious pre-release press interest (although, when adjusted for inflation, Cleopatra’s whopping shopping list still proved comparatively unbeatable).
Here is the pitch for Waterworld: Kevin Costner is a fish.
Really. With gills and everything.
And a tail.
OK, so I made up the bit about the tail. But in its original drafts the script for Waterworld did clearly describe its aquatic hero, cast adrift in a sunken future-world, as having evolved cod-like characteristics. Six writers and 36 rewrites later the residual gills remained, although growing nervousness about the potential audience response to ‘Fishtar’ (so-named after the infamous Beatty/Hoffman failure Ishtar, which lost $45 million) meant that Costner’s fintastic mutations were underplayed to the point of unnoticeability. What you were left with was a straggling action-adventure epic in which a bunch of futuristic pirates, led by a cackling Dennis Hopper, attempted to hang on to the last of the world’s oil supplies while Costner and co searched for the mythical ‘Dryland’, the coordinates of which had been tattooed on to the back of some poor water baby whose ancestors knew how to find Mount Everest. Or something. It is, to be sure, a very silly film indeed, alternately boring and jaw-dropping, with occasional interludes of watery weirdness punctuated by explosive action sequences apparently designed as adverts for jet-skis.
It is reported that trash-maestro Roger Corman was offered Waterworld at a very early stage and turned it down because he figured it couldn’t be made for less than $3 million. In the end, Universal made it for somewhere in the region of $175 million, with Costner himself reportedly chipping in $22 million of his own money to bolster his pet project. He didn’t direct the movie, as he had done with the Oscar winning Dances with Wolves (also dubbed ‘Kevin’s Gate’ before it became a huge hit), but he seems to have had more control over the project than nominal helmsman Kevin Reynolds. Certainly Costner shouldered most of the blame for Waterworld’s apparent failure when it finally opened to derisory reviews and underwhelming US box-office receipts, while its floundering studio underwent a headline-making sale to Seagram. ‘It helps to remember that a mere actor can bring down a company,’ carped Variety, adding that, ‘Anyone who thinks that Kevin Costner didn’t have a role in Matsushita unloading MCA/Universal to Seagram’s Edgar Bronfman Jr. is dreaming.’
So was Costner the new Cimino?
Not quite. For whilst Heaven’s Gate had indeed crippled United Artists with its ludicrous costs and dismal takings, Waterworld’s books are somewhat harder to balance. Yes, the film took only $88 million at the American box office, of which as much as 45 per cent could have been retained by the cinemas themselves. And yes, with its sinking sets, hurricane-warning delays, rewrites, reshoots and massively troubled production history the film ended up costing far more than it ever should have done – certainly more than the on-screen results merited. But as the budget became the story, so worldwide public interest in the movie grew; this was demonstrated nowhere more clearly than in Japan, where Waterworld was actually marketed with giant bill-boards declaring it to be ‘the most expensive Hollywood movie ever made’. It worked – despite the lousy reviews, Japanese punters flocked to see what all the fuss was about, turning Waterworld into a hit in this crucial Asian territory. Around the world the experience was the same; in the UK alone, Waterworld racked up a very respectable $7 million at the box office, making it one of the year’s most solid earners. I was working at Radio 1 when Waterworld opened here and I remember very clearly putting together an uncharacteristically businessy piece for Newsbeat, whose editor specifically instructed me to ‘concentrate on the money. No one cares about the film, just how much it cost.’ In a way he was right – the combination of the Seagram sale and the film’s astronomical budget had indeed made Waterworld far more newsworthy than a film about a talking fish might otherwise have been. (Did anyone but me give a damn about Howard the Duck?)
But the truth is that, after hearing all those news stories, people did start to care about the film, enough to pay to see where all that money had gone. Because, in the end, money is the one unsinkable commodity in Hollywood. And little by little, Waterworld’s fortunes started to turn around. As part of the sale to Seagram, Matsushita ‘ate the film’s $175 million production costs’ (Variety); this left Seagram to reap the benefits of its worldwide revenues, which wound up totalling around $250 million. After a perhaps predictably poor Stateside run, the movie actually became something of a cash cow for its new owners, doing better in foreign territories than anyone could have predicted.
And then there were the ancillary sales – the television rights and (more importantly) the booming video sales. Remember, according to some industry analysts Cleopatra had finally gone into profit in the mid-eighties, with soaring ‘sell-through’ video sales paying off the debts the film had so miserably failed to recoup in cinemas. The book-balancing power of the small screen had been understood by Hollywood ever since NBC had paid $5 million for the TV premiere of Gone with the Wind, with CBS stumping up another $35 million for 20 subsequent airings over the next 20 years. At around the same time that Michael Cimino was merrily putting paid to UA with his auteurist overspend on Heaven’s Gate (for which his contract, incidentally, specified no penalty for the director’s financial and artistic indulgences), the more wily producers of American Gigolo were pre-selling their $5 million production to ABC for $6 million (they would have got $7 million but John Travolta bailed, leaving Richard Gere’s spectacular buns to save the day).
With the rise of VCR in the early eighties (the format had been little more than a novelty sideline in the seventies), video sales became every bit as lucrative as TV deals. By the time Waterworld splashed into cinemas, the idea that healthy video sales could, at the very least, offset unrecouped theatrical losses was gaining more and more traction. This appeared particularly true for big-budget cinema failures which, it transpired, were far less likely to flop on VHS, where audiences seemed to have different demands and viewing expectations. Although spectacle and star names alone had never been enough to guarantee box-office success for cinema movies, such ingredients proved effectively infallible in the home-viewing market, where anything that looked like a ‘proper movie’ (as opposed to a straight-to-video cheapie knock-off) could find a surprisingly eager audience. All a film needed to become a home-viewing hit was ‘marquee recognition’ – the sense that the film you were taking home to watch on your telly had previously had its name emblazoned on the front of your local cinema, where you had clocked it and failed to watch it, but resolved to catch it on video at a later date. In the case of Waterworld, the press attention that its big screen release had garnered meant that the video release had marquee recognition to spare, and as a result the video enjoyed the kind of solid chart-topping success that had proved so elusive in American cinemas. Never mind the theatrical losses, on video Waterworld was a hit.
As the video market expanded, it soon became clear that more people were watching movies at home than in theatres – a fact we now take for granted but which seemed frankly staggering 20 years ago. In this new marketplace, the role of the cinema box office would ultimately become secondary to the profits accrued by video and later DVD sales, for certain titles – the ancillary markets having effectively become the primary markets in terms of money. While Heaven’s Gate producer Stephen Bach had insisted that no one paid much attention to ancillaries until the mid-seventies, by the mid-ninet
ies the distributors of many lower-profile releases were viewing cinemas as a loss-leader to boost all-important video sales. In the eighties, when I worked for the British industry paper Video Trade Weekly, I wrote a feature on the increasingly common practice of ‘theatrical platforming’ – a marketing strategy which involved taking a movie that was clearly designed and destined for the video market, and shoving it into a cinema for a week in order to increase its home viewing value. Crucially, it made no difference if the film flopped or attracted terrible reviews; all that mattered was that it had seen the inside of a cinema and could therefore be shelved alongside the ‘premium’ rather than ‘straight-to-video’ titles in Blockbuster, thereby increasing its saleability.
The apotheosis of this trend came with the UK video release of Brian Yuzna’s underrated rubbery shocker Society in 1990, a terrifically twisted fantasy in which a young boy discovers that the rich are not like you and me, but are in fact shape-shifting aliens. A cult favourite amongst the horror cognoscenti, Yuzna’s directorial debut boasted eye-popping rubbery mutations courtesy of an eccentric Japanese FX whizz who went by the somewhat self-explanatory name of ‘Screaming Mad George’. During their regular shape-shifting orgies, the wealthy weirdos would indulge in an act of slimy pseudo-sexual congress called ‘shunting’, in which their bodies would melt and merge into a sea of sticky, fleshy gloopiness, a pulsating mass of shuddering, undulating orgiastic meat with outcrops of recognisable human features – an arm here, a head there, and way over yonder something vaguely resembling an anus. During the film’s head-scrambling climax, our human hero punches his hand up an alien’s rectum and right up into its head, pushing out its eyeballs before grabbing hold of its face from within and then swiftly withdrawing his arm, turning his adversary inside out through his arsehole! It’s quite a moment, all achieved without the use of CGI, thanks to the very tactile miracle of good old-fashioned foam latex.
Ah, those were the days.
But I digress. The point of this brief excursion into the fabulous realms of what Yuzna called ‘plastic reality’ is that the owners of the UK distribution rights to Society perceived this horror oddity to be essentially a video title whose value could nonetheless be increased by the briefest of theatrical releases. The fact that the film was actually something of a genre gem which garnered a few genuinely glowing reviews mattered not a jot. When it came to announcing this forthcoming title in Video Trade Weekly, the distributors took out a full-page advert, upon which was emblazoned not adulatory quotes from important critics or eye-catching stills of monster fun from the movie but instead a giant snapshot of the Prince Charles Theatre in London’s Leicester Square, the marquee of which duly confirmed that on one particular rainy afternoon this esteemed cinema was indeed showing Society. As with so much video marketing, it was a move that was at once stupid yet brilliant: stupid because it suggested that no one had any idea just how great this little movie really was; brilliant because they understood that no one cared about the quality as long as the damn thing had been projected inside a movie theatre at least once. Which Society demonstrably had.
As for the blockbuster releases, a successful theatrical run remained crucial, but increasingly the risk of a box-office failure could be underwritten by the insurance policy of the VHS and DVD markets in the same way that TV licensing had long been underwriting cinema. Nowadays, falling DVD sales and the rise of pirate discs are jointly blamed for the movie industry’s imminent collapse, which is apparently just around the corner. It isn’t, and anyone who worries that the majors, who do the most vociferous whining about these subjects, are actually cash-strapped needs their head examined. Suffice to say that Hollywood currently sees home-viewing sales as a market worth protecting and only the very naïve (or nostalgic) believe that the financial future of the film industry lies solely, or even primarily, with cinemas.
As for Waterworld, far from becoming what Variety called ‘the disaster which the film industry needed to start a serious course correction’, it actually ended up demonstrating just how unsinkable the big-budget ‘event movie’ template really was if backers were willing (and able) to play the long game. Cleopatra took over a decade to pay for itself; Waterworld probably managed the same feat in less than five years. And although no one likes to admit it, we probably have the strangely twisted template of Waterworld to thank for the existence of Titanic, which went on to become the biggest-selling and (stop me if you’ve heard this one) ‘most expensive’ movie of all time.
Like Waterworld, Titanic was a waterlogged production with a dodgy script which ran massively over-budget, and which was widely predicted during its ever-expanding production period to be a lavish vanity-project disaster in the making. As we all know, it went on to make $1.8 billion worldwide and is currently being digitally dicked around for re-release in 2012 in eye-boggling commemorative 3-D (more of which later). Yippee. The fact that Titanic is not a great film is somewhat beside the point – its world-beating success speaks for itself. What is important is that it was allowed to be made only a couple of years after Costner’s alleged water-related ‘flop’, with Fox and Paramount jointly shouldering the burden of its out-of-control costs. In what turned out to be a terrifically smart move, Paramount took the domestic rights for a capped sum of $60 million, with Fox handling worldwide in return for picking up the rest of the production tab. (They figured the excess cost couldn’t be much more than $40 million. Doh!) As total costs spiralled from $100 million to $200 million, Paramount found themselves in the enviable position of having paid a fixed rate for a film whose widely reported budget just kept growing and growing – with headline-grabbing results. Fox, meanwhile, were left wondering if Titanic’s international box office could get close to matching the $167 million made by Waterworld outside the US, which would at least go some way toward recouping the whopping $140 million they had accidentally ended up sinking into the film just to get the damned thing finished. The only thing that kept their hopes afloat was the fact that Waterworld was a terrible film (Titanic couldn’t possibly be any worse) and it still managed to turn a buck. If Titanic was any good at all, they might just get away with it …
Nearly $2 billion later, some of us were still wondering why Titanic didn’t become Fishtar after all. With hindsight it’s easy to be blasé about Cameron’s canny audience manipulation, but there’s just so much wrong with Titanic (at least from the perspective of an old fart like myself) that its success still gets under my skin. It’s bothered me for years. Some months after the film’s record-breaking release, I found myself in the company of Paramount boss Sherry Lansing, and felt impelled to tell her just how grievously the film had failed in my all-important eyes. To her infinite credit, she listened patiently and politely while I explained how Cameron had dropped the ball with a film that was about to win 11 Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture.
Here’s what I said …
First up, the big problem with Titanic is that it isn’t A Night to Remember. Whereas the latter is essentially a film about Englishness in crisis (and is therefore interesting), the former is a film about Hollywood in hysterics (and is therefore annoying). In A Night to Remember, the band played on. In Titanic, Celine Dion sang.
Any questions?
Next, the stars. According to James Cameron’s honking screenplay, Rose is a naïve, innocent rose (geddit?) who, whilst being dragged across oceans by her caddish fiancé (whose money will secure her family’s future), falls for the altogether more worldly-wise Jack, who has spent the last few years whoring his way around Europe with one-legged prostitutes. Sadly, while Kate Winslet has the appearance of a woman of substance, Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t look old enough to be out on his own. You don’t want Rose to shag him, you want her to adopt him.
DiCaprio was, of course, cast as Jack on the strength of his starring role in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. In Titanic, he would effectively reprise this doomed-pretty-boy schtick, playing another floppy-fringed upstart with the hots for a s
ocially unobtainable prom-queen type who would go weak at the sight of his unsheathed rapier. The only real difference would be that, whereas Juliet kills herself after Romeo kicks the bucket, Rose’s heart would go on and on and on and on …
Then there’s the script itself – Shakespeare it ain’t. If the iceberg hadn’t sunk the bloody boat, then the dialogue would surely have done so. Among Titanic’s more memorably awful lines, one stands out in my mind; it is the moment when, as the butt-end of the sinking boat starts to creak up out of the water and various CGI souls fall dramatically off the deck, Rose grabs Jack and says helpfully, ‘This is where we first met!’ It’s a line that makes me want to stand up and scream, ‘Yes I know that’s where you fucking met, I’ve been watching the movie for the last two hours (as has everyone else) and we all watched you meet there, and frankly if I’d known you were going to come up with crap like that at a moment like this, then you would both have been better off throwing yourselves to an icy death in the first place …’
All of which brings me to the crux of the Titanic problem, which is this:
From the minute the ship hits the iceberg, I don’t care what happens to Jack and Rose; all I can think about is the army of jolly Oirish-dancing types who are now drowning below decks, along with all the other badly sketched, incidental caricatures whose lives seem so much less important to the film-makers. I don’t care if Jack drowns, or if Rose goes on to have loads of grandchildren, only to return years later to drop expensive jewellery into the sea.
I just don’t care (and I’ll care even less in 3-D).
Sherry Lansing, God bless her, sat through all the above with a look of serene amusement on her face. And then, when I’d finished, she put down her glass of chilled mineral water, folded her extraordinarily elegant hands under her chin, smiled charmingly, and said, ‘The problem with you is that you’re not a teenage girl.’