As the Movie Business Founders, Adam Fogelson Tries to Reinvent the System
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For Immediate Release: January 4, 2016 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255 As the Movie Business Founders, Adam Fogelson Tries to Reinvent the System In the January 11, 2016, issue of The New Yorker, in “The Mogul in the Middle” (p. 36), Tad Friend profiles Adam Fogelson, the chair- man of Hollywood’s newest studio, STX Entertainment, which is on a mission to change the movie business. Fogelson, forty-eight, came up as a marketer at Universal Pictures, which he ran from 2009 to 2013 before being fired—coincidentally just moments after green-light- ing “Jurassic World,” which became the third-highest-grossing film of all time. After leaving Universal, he saw an opportunity to prove that his idea about filmmaking was right. He became the chairman of STX, which was founded by Bob Simonds, in 2014, and set about dis- rupting the floundering filmmaking business, which has increasingly come to rely on big-budget, blockbuster franchises to insure a return on investment. “With Simonds’s checkbook, Fogelson was going to demonstrate that you could build a studio without theme parks and television networks to help you market your films, and without anything like the two or three thousand people most studios employ,” Friend writes. “He was going to pick the right films, spend less to make them, spend just as much to market them, and win back audiences who’d forsworn the moviegoing habit.” He was going to save the industry. And he didn’t expect much thanks. “The studios all hate us, all six of them,” Fogelson tells Friend, who accompanies him in meetings about forthcoming projects with directors and actors, including Keanu Reeves and Jackie Chan. “They hate us because they don’t want to have to go to New York and explain to their bosses how we’re making fifteen movies a year with only seventy employees.” One agent tells Friend, “Bob and Adam are the chip-on-the-shoulder guys,” adding, “Their brand is ‘We were right, and you should have listened.’ ” Fox’s Stacey Snider tells Friend, “At Universal, Adam found breakout winners in the mid-budget category, and I’ll bet that he can find them for STX,” continuing, “But the challenges STX faces are absolute.” A leading agent adds, “I think STX is kidding itself with its business model, trying to disrupt the studios at the end of the studio age.” But Simonds says he sees “a huge vacuum” in the industry for character-driven, John Hughes-level films: “the place you can tell human stories—what I think of as movies.” Simonds sought funding in China—as, Friend notes, all Hollywood has begun to do. Last spring, Huayi Brothers, a Chinese film conglomerate, invested in STX’s entire slate, putting up a quarter of the studio’s production costs. The investment banker Donald Tang tells Friend, “They saw how enthusiastic STX’s employees were, and that they were willing to take less in compensation for much more in incentives. They didn’t see that at the traditional studios.” STX’s first release, “The Gift,” which starred Jason Bateman and cost just five million dollars to make and $27.5 million to market, had its début last summer. The film opened at nearly twelve million dollars, and went on to gross forty-four million. It earned strong ratings on Cinema-score and Rotten Tomatoes. Fogelson felt quietly vindicated, and Simonds was pleased by the success. “I’d rather have fifteen mediocre-performing movies than five big hits,” he says. “We believe in tonnage, because this is a landgrab. We’re using stars and brands to cut through the fucking cat videos.” Saudi Women Are Beginning to Know Their Rights In “Sisters in Law” (p. 22), Katherine Zoepf reports from Saudi Arabia, and explores the grow- ing presence of female lawyers there, as well as the subsequent expansion of Saudi women’s un- derstanding of their legal rights. In 2004, Saudi Arabia introduced reforms allowing women’s col- leges and universities to offer degree programs in law. The first female law students graduated in 2008, but, for several years after that, they were prohibited from appearing in court. In 2013, law li- censes were granted to four women, including Bayan Mahmoud Zahran, who became the first Saudi woman to open a law firm. “Today, several thousand Saudi women hold law degrees, and six- ty-seven are licensed to practice, according to justice-ministry figures released at the end of Novem- ber,” Zoepf writes. Zoepf speaks to several female Saudi law students, several of whom tell her that they aren’t sure that they will seek jobs, in law or anything else, after graduating. “Many of them seemed to be studying law in the same spirit of intellectual curiosity that might lead an American college student to major in classics,” Zeopf writes. “When I asked why they’d chosen the field, most said that it was because law programs for women were new—it was exciting to be a pioneer.” Ac- cording to Zoepf, the greatest effect of the reforms so far seems to be a growing awareness, among ordinary Saudi women, of the legal rights they do have, and an increasing willingness to claim these MARCELLUS HALL rights, even by seeking legal redress, if necessary. “Since I was very young, and started noticing how women are treated in this country, I’ve had this feeling about women,” a law student named Mohra Ferak, who has organized free public lectures so that local women can better under- stand the law, tells Zoepf. “I don’t like anyone to underestimate us.” Ashima Shiraishi’s Route to the Top In “The Wall Dancer” (p. 22), Nick Paumgarten profiles Ashima Shiraishi, a fourteen-year-old New Yorker who seems destined to be- come the most talented rock climber in the world. When Shiraishi was born, to two creative Japanese parents after more than a decade of trying to conceive, they considered her a miracle baby. Climbing was not originally a part of their plan. “The real miracle may be that a lit- tle girl from the unmountainous island of Manhattan, born to insular, artistic immigrants who had never tied a figure-eight knot, became, by the age of fourteen, possibly the best female rock climber ever—a Gretzky of the granite,” Paumgarten writes. Ashima excels at sport climbing and bouldering. “She is a gym-era child who nevertheless climbs outside whenever she can,” Paumgarten writes. “That’s where you make a name for yourself.” Still, she claims to have no interest in the big walls of Yosemite, to say nothing of serious mountaineering. “I’m not really into Alpine,” Shiraishi tells Paumgarten. “I don’t like the cold. I don’t like ice or snow.” For her, a climb is a puzzle, not an ex- pedition. In August, Shiraishi won gold medals in bouldering and sport climbing in the world championships, in Arco, Italy, in the fifteen and under bracket. “She can’t compete against adults in sanctioned competitions until she turns eighteen, but when she has competed in re- gional contests she has beaten them,” Paumgarten writes, adding that she and her parents have their eyes on the 2020 Olympics, to be held in Japan, where climbing may be added as an event. This would provide the best opportunity for Shiraishi, who counts ClifBar and The North Face among her sponsors, “to get on a Wheaties box,” Paumgarten writes. The founder of the climbing-video company Big Up Productions, which has made films about Shiraishi, tells Paumgarten, “She has a chance to completely change the game of climbing in the next few years.” How the Whitney Is Transforming the Art of Museum Conservation In “The Custodians” (p. 50), Ben Lerner examines the work of the Whitney’s replication committee—an unusual, but increasingly cru- cial, body within the museum. “The committee is, as far as I know, the only one of its kind,” Lerner writes. Founded in 2008, it is led by Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, who also leads the Whitney’s conservation department. Conservators, curators, archivists, a lawyer, and a regis- trar round out the team of fourteen. “The committee convenes to determine when a work of art, or a part of a work of art, cannot be fixed or restored in the traditional ways—when and how it must, instead, be replicated,” Lerner writes. “These discussions result in recommen- dations that affect the way art works are maintained, classified, and described in exhibitions.” Lerner details their painstaking work, which is done, whenever possible, in consultation with artists. He notes that Mancusi-Ungaro and her peers are conservators of skill: they know a material’s chemical composition, its reflectance levels, its history of usage (and if they don’t know they’ll find out). “In an era when many critics speak of the rise of curation as art—when artists arrange objects as often as they make them—conservation is deeply curatorial, as conservators choose which aspects of a work are presented and how,” he writes. “To treat conservation as it has traditionally been treated— as the behind-the-scenes work of minimally invasive technocrats, bursting onstage every few decades during a cleaning controversy and then receding into the shadows—is to exclude essential questions about culture and value from the domain of contemporary art.” Plus: In Comment, Amy Davidson recalls Europe’s Great Famine of 1315-1317, which was largely caused by the weather, and consid- ers how today’s changing climate has both moral and political costs (p.