From Pitch to Production in Hollywood
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Dying of Encouragement: From Pitch to Production in Hollywood The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Russell, Rupert Henry. 2013. Dying of Encouragement: From Pitch to Production in Hollywood. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11158240 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © - Rupert Russell All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Orlando Patterson Author: Rupert Russell Dying of Encouragement: From Pitch to Production in Hollywood Abstract Social scientists have long held that the media has a profound effect on modern societies. However, the cultural production of motion pictures and television shows has largely been neglected as a topic of inquiry. The following dissertation seeks to fill this lacuna in the current research by offering a systematic, comprehensive, and comparative analysis of the industry known colloquially as “Hollywood.” Specifically, this dissertation seeks to uncover the matrix of causal processes that filter the infinite array of potential television shows and motion pictures to the chosen few that are selected for production. This process is known as “development and green lighting.” Drawing from 110 interviews with writers, directors, producers, agents, managers, studio executives, network executives, financiers, and assistants who had been involved in the development and green lighting process, I explore not just decision making but the social milieu within which those decisions were made. Over the course of three chapters, three distinct social processes are examined in turn: institutional scripts (“Formulas”), status (“Stars”), and social capital (“Relationships”). Throughout the thesis, a new approach to cultural production is carried out, based on an inductive methodology where micro-level social processes are examined in the context of macro-level struggles over legitimacy, power, and resources. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..............................................................................................................v Dedication ......................................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1: Introduction .......................................................................................................1 Chapter 2: Formulas ..........................................................................................................30 Chapter 3: Stars .................................................................................................................84 Chapter 4: Relationships..................................................................................................145 Chapter 5: Conclusion .....................................................................................................195 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................220 iv Acknowledgements I wish to thank Orlando Patterson for six years of mentorship: for helping me transpose my Anglophone sensibilities to the American market place of ideas and for providing guidance, support, encouragement, into every intellectual avenue I have pursued while I have been enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard. I also extend my deepest appreciation to Jason Beckfield and Christopher Winship for their feedback and insights throughout my work on this thesis. I have appreciated enormously the freedom my dissertation committee gave me when I moved to Los Angeles to explore the labyrinth and their support of my chosen line of inquiry. The dissertation would not have been possible without the participants in the project. They gave me both their time and their contacts. This dissertation would have been impossible without such support. This dissertation was also made possible by the National Science Foundation and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard whose funding allowed me to immerse myself in the field in California. v To Mum vi Chapter 1 Introduction * “It’s a Tough Business” In the summer of 2011, an aspiring screenwriter had been hounding an agent at the Above the Line Agency in Beverly Hills to read his screenplay. But the agent wouldn’t return his calls. So finally, in an act of desperation, he sent the screenplay and his laptop in a briefcase to their offices addressed to the agent. Security became suspicious of this unsolicited package and called in a bomb squad. The office was evacuated and the entire block was sealed off. His briefcase – with his screenplay and laptop inside – was detonated. “I feel sorry the guy’s stuff was blown up,” the head of the agency, Rima Greer, admitted, “it’s a tough business.” (McKinley, 2011) “Nobody Knows Anything” Sometime in 1981 another aspiring screenwriter, Chuck Ross, decided to perform a little experiment. “Would the people in today’s Hollywood recognize a great film if it stared them in the face?” he asked himself. In the late 1970s, the classic Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, had regularly topped the best-ever-film rankings from the critics and public polling alike. On its release in 1942 it won Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best 1 Director at the Academy Awards. It was a brilliant movie that everyone remembered and loved. So Ross pulled out a copy of the screenplay and made two minor changes. He changed the name of one of the characters and the title of the screenplay to Everybody Comes to Rick’s, which was the title of the book it was adapted from. The studios don’t accept unsolicited screenplays (in case a writer who once sent their beloved script to the studio lot would later recognize a detail of his probably-never-read-script in one of their pictures 20 years later and sue them for copyright infringement); they only receive them from agents. So Ross went to the Writers Guild of America and got a list of all 217 registered talent agencies. He promptly sent his barely modified version of Casablanca to every single one on the list. Eighty-five read the screenplay and got back to him. Only 33 agencies – a fourth – recognized the script as Casablanca. Most of the responses were light hearted. “Have some excellent ideas on casting this wonderful script, but most of the actors are dead,” one agent from John Crosby and Associates wrote back. Only three agencies wanted to take the script to the studios, but only two as a motion picture. “It sounds like it would be very good for TV,” one agent at Seiden & Associates told him over the phone. Another eight noticed a similarity to Casablanca and gently suggested that he make his a little more original. The rest rebuffed him, ignored him, or wanted to re-work it. “Never send a screenplay unsolicited again!!!!” was a fairly typical response, this one from the Larry Karlin Agency: “I gave you five pages to grab me – didn’t do it.” Alan Nicolette, assistant to Ansley Q. Hyman, had these criticisms: “Too much dialogue, not enough 2 exposition, the story line was weak, and in general didn’t hold my interest.” Paul Dekeyser at John La Rocca & Associates added: “I regret to say that we will not be able to help you with your script. I strongly recommend that you leaf through a book called Screenplay by Sid Field, especially the section pertaining to dialogue.” Ross then went and asked Sid Field himself what he thought of the dialogue in Casablanca: he “loved it.” (Ross, 1982) The legendary screenwriter William Goldman who penned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid famously said that in the movie business, “Nobody knows anything.” (Goldman, 1983) What he meant was that you could never guarantee a hit movie. You could have a killer premise, the biggest star, the hottest writer, and the most visionary director with a huge budget and an even bigger marketing campaign and still produce a flop that nobody wants to see. But Ross’s experiment points to a second meaning of “nobody knows.” That they don’t know anything about movies - at all. That they are making decisions not based on a knowledge of movies but of a different kind of knowledge altogether. It is this second kind of knowledge that is the subject of this dissertation. It does not attempt, as many previous studies have done, to test the variables ascribed to movies or television shows that will statistically predict their success. Instead, it will examine how people in Hollywood evaluate and define success. This, as we will see, are two entirely separate questions. For sure, the real successes of failures of movies or television shows impacts on how executives, producers, writers and actors pick projects. But the question of the validity – the rate of accuracy at predicting success - of those evaluations falls outside the scope of this dissertation. Rather, this dissertation is about how people 3 attempt to “know” about movies. And, as the tale of Chuck Ross’s Casablanca experiment suggests, this knowledge is not found in the archives of the Academy of Motion Pictures. It is found in an altogether different locale: the social interactions, relationships and histories of Hollywood denizens. It is, in other words, a social knowledge. “It’s Doesn’t Make Any Sense” For the