The text of this was posted the other day, and I held off posting in the hope that the San Francisco Film Society would convince Soderbergh to allow the video to be made available. Below the video, I've excerpted some of my favorite bits. The whole speech is fantastic.
State of Cinema: Steven Soderbergh from San Francisco Film Society on Vimeo.
So what I finally decided was, art is simply inevitable. It was on the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and it's because we are a species that's driven by narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try and make sense out of all this chaos. And sometimes when you get a really good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that thing that's impossible which is entering the consciousness of another human being – literally seeing the world the way they see it. Then, if you have a really good piece of art and a really good artist, you are altered in some way, and so the experience is transformative and in the minute you're experiencing that piece of art, you're not alone. You're connected to the arts. So I feel like that can't be too bad.
Now we finally arrive at the subject of this rant, which is the state of cinema. First of all, is there a difference between cinema and movies? Yeah. If I were on Team America, I'd say Fuck yeah! The simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that's made. It has nothing to do with the captured medium, it doesn't have anything to do with where the screen is, if it's in your bedroom, your iPad, it doesn't even really have to be a movie. It could be a commercial, it could be something on YouTube.
Cinema is a specificity of vision. It's an approach in which everything matters. It's the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn't made by a committee, and it isn't made by a company, and it isn't made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn't do it, it either wouldn't exist at all, or it wouldn't exist in anything like this form.
There's a feeling of "elevation" that Roger Ebert discussed on his blog, a feeling that serious cinema lovers look to as the goal of the art form. Soderbergh's emphasis on the intentionality of "cinema" hits the nail on the head.
You can make a really good-looking movie for not a lot of money, and when people start to get weepy about celluloid, I think of this quote by Orson Welles when somebody was talking to him about new technology, which he tended to embrace, and he said, “I don't want to wait on the tool, I want the tool to wait for me”, which I thought was a good way to put it.
But the problem is that cinema as I define it, and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience. The reasons for this, in my opinion, are more economic than philosophical, but when you add an ample amount of fear and a lack of vision, and a lack of leadership, you've got a trajectory that I think is pretty difficult to reverse.
This crystalizes the problems choking the film industry very nicely. As opposed to fearing risk, Hollywood has chosen to do its own version of eliminating it through their own unique means of sticking their heads in the sand.
So then there's the expense of putting a movie out, which is a big problem. Point of entry for a mainstream, wide-release movie: $30 million. That's where you start. Now you add another 30 for overseas. Now you've got to remember, the exhibitors get half of the gross, so to make that 60 back you need to gross 120. So you don't even know what your movie is yet, and you're already looking at 120. That ended up being part of the reason why the Liberace movie didn't happen at a studio. We only needed $5 million from a domestic partner, but when you add the cost of putting a movie out, now you've got to gross $75 million to get that 35 back, and the feeling amongst the studios was that this material was too “special” to gross $70 million. So the obstacle here isn't just that special subject matter, but that nobody has figured out how to reduce the cost of putting a movie out.
This part of produciton economics is what often escapes people. Before the movie even rolls, it has to make over $120 million just to make its money back, whether it gets there through domestic and foreign box office, cable/TV sales, ancillary (licensing, etc.), or a combination of them all. If the movie isn't a big blockbuster hit, the potential revenue from all other sources drops off dramatically and exponentially.
I know one person who works in marketing at a studio suggested, on a modestly budgeted film that had some sort of brand identity and some A-list talent attached, she suggested, “Look, why don't we not do any tracking at all, and just spend 15 and we'll just put it out”. They wouldn't do it. They were afraid it would fail, when they fail doing the other thing all the time. Maybe they were afraid it was going to work.
The greatest fear in Hollywood is that of a change to the status quo, a version of the the business that keeps people well-paid, in corner offices, and otherwise fat n' happy. None of the serious power-brokers wants to be the one who helped lead the charge toward something that could either make them look bad nor jeopardize their skiing vacations and palatial estates.
But let's go back to Side Effects for a second. This is a movie that didn't perform as well as any of us wanted it to. So, why? What happened? It can't be the campaign because all the materials that we had, the trailers, the posters, the TV spots, all that stuff tested well above average. February 8th, maybe it was the date, was that a bad day? As it turns out that was the Friday after the Oscar nominations are announced, and this year there was an atypically large bump to all the films that got nominated, so that was a factor. Then there was a storm in the Northeast, which is sort of our core audience. Nemo came in, so God, obviously, is getting me back for my comments about monotheism. Was it the concept? There was a very active decision early on to sell the movie as kind of a pure thriller and kind of disconnect it from this larger social issue of everybody taking pills. Did that make the movie seem more commercial, or did it make it seem more generic? We don't know. What about the cast? Four attractive white people… this is usually not an obstacle. The exit polls were very good, the reviews were good. How do we figure out what went wrong? The answer is: We don't. Because everybody's already moved on to the next movie they have to release.
Even though there are variables upon variables at play, Hollywood is still obsessed with painting the failure all over the filmmaker, lest one of the much greater number of things controlled by or accountable to the studio side be found to blame.
Because in my view, in this business which is totally talent-driven, it's about horses, not races.
I think if I were going to run a studio I'd just be gathering the best filmmakers I could find and sort of let them do their thing within certain economic parameters. So I would call Shane Carruth, or Barry Jenkins or Amy Seimetz and I'd bring them in and go, ok, what do you want to do? What are the things you're interested in doing? What do we have here that you might be interested in doing? If there was some sort of point of intersection I'd go: Ok, look, I'm going to let you make three movies over five years, I'm going to give you this much money in production costs, I'm going to dedicate this much money on marketing. You can sort of proportion it how you want, you can spend it all on one and none on the other two, but go make something.
Psychologically, it's more comforting to spend $60 million promoting a movie that costs 100, than it does to spend $60 million for a movie that costs 10. I know what you're thinking: if it costs 10 you're going to be in profit sooner. Maybe not. Here's why: OK. $10 million movie, 60 million to promote it, that's 70, so you've got to gross 140 to get out. Now you've got $100 million movie, you're going spend 60 to promote it. You've got to get 320 to get out. How many $10 million movies make 140 million dollars? Not many. How many $100 million movies make 320? A pretty good number, and there's this sort of domino effect that happens too. Bigger home video sales, bigger TV sales, so you can see the forces that are sort of draining in one direction in the business. So, here's a thought… maybe nothing's wrong. Maybe I'm a clown. Maybe the audiences are happy, and the studio is happy, and look at this from Variety:
“Shrinking release slates that focus on tentpoles and the emergence of a new normal in the home vid market has allowed the largest media congloms to boost the financial performance of their movie divisions, according to Nomura Equity research analyst Michael Nathanson”.
They get simple things wrong sometimes, like remakes. I mean, why are you always remaking the famous movies? Why aren't you looking back into your catalog and finding some sort of programmer that was made 50 years ago that has a really good idea in it, that if you put some fresh talent on it, it could be really great. Of course, in order to do that you need to have someone at the studio that actually knows those movies. Even if you don't have that person you could hire one. The sort of executive ecosystem is distorted, because executives don't get punished for making bombs the way that filmmakers do, and the result is there's no turnover of new ideas, there's no new ideas about how to approach the business or how to deal with talent or material. But, again, economically, it's a pretty straightforward business. Hell, it's the third-biggest export that we have. It's one of the few things that we do that the world actually likes.
I feel like this is exactly how the studio system is backing itself into a corner, by choosing to make fewer moves to actually produce content, thereby making the stakes larger per production and at once allowing for exponentially less new "franchise" product to become available. Everything is a spinoff or remake of a proven success, with little to no fresh blood seeping in, no matter how you slice it. There was a time when MGM/Sony/EON wanted to spin Halle Berry's "Jinx" character off of whichever Bond movies she was in, and now reports show Universal is toying with spinning Dwayne JOhnson's character off of the Fast & Furious franchise.
Theft is a big problem. I know this is a really controversial subject, but for people who think everything on the internet should just be totally free all I can say is, good luck. When you try to have a life and raise a family living off something you create…
There's a great quote from Steve Jobs:
“From the earliest days of Apple I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software we'd be out of business. If it weren't protected there'd be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there's a simpler reason: It's wrong to steal. It hurts other people, and it hurts your own character”.
This cuts both ways: people who aren't millionaires or significantly well-off in the industry need to face the fact that their product is overpriced and/or too hard to consume, and this is one of the reasons Jobs' massive iTunes gambit is working so well. iTunes standardized the pricing structure for digital ownership of media, something that the studios are trying to rebel against (far too late, I might add) with things like Ultraviolet, which again, are always unwieldy and ill-conceived. To act as if "bootleg culture" needs to somehow be completely wiped out is to say that evil needs to be erased from the planet. That's noble and everything, but unrealistic. I'm not saying that's what Soderbergh says here, but that this is a much larger conversation than how some may condense his thoughts.
But let's sex this up with some more numbers. In 2003, 455 films were released. 275 of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released. So you're not imagining things, there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. 549 of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in studio films, and yet, ten years ago: Studio market share 69%, last year 76%. You've got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you've got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That's hard. That's really hard.
This is the most difficult-to-swallow bit for those who try to be optimistic about Hollywood. This sort of shift over the last decade will, for better or worse, paint how the next decade will go.