When Hollywood Did It Right: THE FIRM turns 30

A glimpse into the apotheosis of a robust Hollywood eco-system that has all but disappeared

(Note: This essay is part of a series that highlights a time when Hollywood was America’s greatest soft power weapon, boldly broadcasting the best of America to the World and daring them to match our excellence. My hope is that if we can continue to remind Hollywood of a time when its output was objectively and consistently great, that they might one day remember how to make movies that average Americans actually want to see.)

EPISODE TWO: THE FIRM

The problem with movies turning a certain age is that we all turn a certain age right along with them. For me, this understanding arrives with more poignancy when the movie in question is one which I remember vivdly from formative periods in my life… formative periods like 30 years ago… June of 1993… the summer I left home to seek my fortune in Hollywood.

James Earl Jones once spoke about baseball marking the time as America rolled by like an army of steamrollers, but for me, it has always been the movies.

In my own life, movies have marked the time.

The older I get and the more I realize that there is more of my Hollywood career behind me than there is in front of me (maybe… probably), the more I find myself having experiences like the one I had re-watching THE FIRM. It is an intensely emotional experience, and its essence is this… that the existence of films like THE FIRM, or to be more precise, the absence of films like THE FIRM here in 2023, invokes a sense of nostalgia for something lost that should not have been… something that isn’t even that far in our past.

It’s possible that I am the only one who feels this way, but I doubt it. Rather, I believe the converse is true… that nostalgia is one of the last remaining crutches holding up a sick (and possibly dying) movie business.

That the business of the movies is gravely ill seems to me self-evident. If it were not, then TOP GUN: MAVERICK, with its aging but still potent movie star lead, would not have spent an entire summer, literally the whole summer, alone atop the box office. And we would not now be staring down the barrel of another movie and TV season full of remakes of better made, and better-loved, movies from the 70’s and 80’s.

Unlike so much modern “content”, what we used to call “movies” before we decided to deconstruct an entire creative industry and turn it into just another tech business controlled by the almighty algorithm, THE FIRM does not have a “message”… at least, not in the current Year Zero political sense of the word. The movie’s only “message” is an entirely uncontroversial one… that corruption and murder are bad and we should avoid them both.

In that sense, THE FIRM is an “old fashioned” movie, one composed of black hats and white hats, good guys and bad guys, and the innocents caught between them. It has not had its story twisted and pretzled into some kind of allegory meant to evoke the Emmanuel Goldstein villains of our current moment… Donald Trump, perhaps, or the Murdoch family. To create movies that are morality plays meant to overtly deconstruct our own political current events is an unfortunate modern habit which, I believe, fatally anchors a movie in the time in which it was made and mortally wounds its chances of ever becoming a timeless classic.

THE FIRM exists in defiance of this unfortunate modern cliche. It is not about the specific problems or the politics of the early 1990’s, but about human nature and the eternal battle between good and evil. It was made, not to teach us a lesson, but to entertain us… to tell us a story… to thrill us… to surprise us… to make us laugh in a darkened theater on a Friday night, and to send us home smiling.

This is how it used to be, both in Hollywood and in movie theaters across the fruited plain… it is, perhaps, the way things ought to be.

Certainly the alternative, to relentlessly push what The Critical Drinker calls “The Message”, has not produced consistently great movies, nor has it produced a healthy movie business with a robust bottom line. Two possible paths for the future lay before us… we can either find a new way forward, one that emulates the consistent runaway successes of the past, or we can continue to drive the car, Thelma and Louise style, towards the rapidly-approaching cliff.

I would prefer the former, but in order to properly understand what has gone wrong and avoid the latter, we must first look at what movies like THE FIRM did right.

To do that, let’s start with the concept of risk management.

Talk to any investment advisor and they will tell you that one of the most important investment strategies you can employ is to diversify your portfolio.

Why?

Because diversifying your portfolio mitigates risk. If you are invested in only one company, or a single sector, then a dissolution of that company or a crash in that sector can wipe out your entire investment overnight. But if your portfolio is diversified across multiple companies and sectors, the damage of a single company or sector crashing is going to be mitigated by all the other companies and sectors which did not crash.

Simple enough… in theory.

And the movie business is supposed to work the exact same way. It’s no more or less risky to spend a hundred million dollars on a theatrical release without knowing for sure whether or not audiences will show up in 2023, than it was 50 years ago. But now, as then, there are things we can do to mitigate that risk. And many of those mitigation strategies are on full display in THE FIRM.

Let’s start with the Producers… Scott Rudin, Lindsay Doran and John Davis. These are three of the most prolific producers of their era… Scott Rudin alone has more than one hundred credits as a “Producer.”

Most people understand that a critical function of the “Producer” is to find great stories and develop them into screenplays that can be made into movies. But a lesser known, but no less critical job performed by the Producer is risk management. And this is a job which begins long before a single frame of film is exposed.

No movie is ever a sure thing, but Producers manage risk for their studios by bringing them movies that are as likely as possible to make money. They do this by assembling what we call a “package” of bankable “elements” which, together, would tend to increase the odds that audiences will show up and pay to watch a given movie.

To bet the success of your movie on only a single “element”, say one Movie Star, would be very risky. But with THE FIRM, Rudin, Davis and Doran made sure they had several bankable elements involved in their project, in order to mitigate the risk. They delivered to Paramount a best-selling novel, an iconic director (Sydney Pollack), at least one writer with a long track record of writing timeless Hollywood classics (Robert Towne, who wrote CHINATOWN among many others), and a whole raft of movie stars from Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman to Holly Hunter, Hal Holbrook, Wilford Brimley, Ed Harris, David Strathairn and Gary Busey.

(NOTE: It’s hard to define what a “Movie Star” is, but for a hint, go back and watch Gene Hackman’s character introduction in THE FIRM. Even though Hackman was 63 and well past his prime when the movie was made, and even though he does nothing but lean casually against Tom Cruise’s office door and suggest lunch, and even though I’ve seen the movie many times, I literally gasped when he first appeared on screen. There aren’t many Movie Stars left who can do that… suck the air out of your lungs the very first time you see them on screen)

Each of these “elements” together, assembled into a “package” by the Producers of THE FIRM, brought a different built-in audience to the theater with them and helped to mitigate the risk of making and releasing what was, for the time, an expensive movie.

The most powerful Producers of the 80’s and 90’s who were (mostly) able to guarantee this kind of risk diversification on every movie they produced are mostly gone now. Some have been lost to scandal… Scott Rudin was taken down by the #TimesUp movement (a subsidiary of "#MeToo Inc.). Other blockbuster Producers from that era, like Lindsay Doran (75), John Davis (70), Jerry Bruckheimer (80), Art Linson (81) and Joel Silver (71) have begun to age out, leaving behind precious few who know how to do the job of building a big studio blockbuster, and who have the power to do so reliably and consistently.

Each of the major studios used to have dozens of these big Producers on their back lots with deals that paid them to develop whole slates of movies across multiple genres. These deals typically came with “overhead” which paid for offices on the lot, as well as the salaries of “Creative Executives” and their assistants. Producers with studio deals also received lucrative “salaries” which were treated by their home studio as advances against the fees they would eventually be paid to physically produce their movies.

Contrast that system with the manner in which most Producers are paid now. Here in 2023, big studio Producer deals are rare and most of the work Producers do is done on spec, meaning they don’t get paid until the movie gets made… and big studio movies don’t get made as often as they used to.

You can probably already see how this radically changes the risk calculation. A Producer who has his or her most basic expenses paid for, not just his office and his executives’ salaries but more fundamental things like his own personal home mortgage and the food on his plate at Morton’s, would obviously be much more likely to take a risk and produce something unusual or extraordinary… something audiences haven’t seen a million times already… than a Producer who does not already have those things taken care of.

And what happens when Hollywood’s business strategy is to make only one kind of movie over-and-over (superhero movies, for example), or to restrict itself to an endless stream of sequels and remakes? Diversification flies out the window… and any hope of effective risk management is defenstrated right alongside it.

On top of the financial changes that have fundamentally disrupted the way Producers get paid, the job itself has gotten much more difficult because of the many structural changes Hollywood has experienced over the last 25 years. The era of the movie star is over, for one thing, and there are very few truly bankable stars left. The traditional publishing business is dying too, which makes it much more difficult to find books that arrive in Hollywood pre-baked with the kind of built-in audience John Grisham’s novel delivered, and which the Studios still crave. And even the triple-A star director has begun to disappear as an institution. Spielberg is in his 70’s… ditto Ron Howard, Peter Weir and Bob Zemeckis. Ridley Scott is 85. At a relatively spry 69, Jim Cameron is mostly making movies inside his computer these days, and even David Fincher, the 61-year-old baby of the bunch, has trouble getting his movies released theatrically.

There is no doubt that there are great young directors out there making movies that will one day be considered classics. But the critical question remains, when it comes to those directors whose names mean so much to audiences that they mitigate business risk when they are part of a “package”, are we replacing them as quickly as we are losing them?

I doubt it.

And what about screenwriters?

Across the board, screenwriting has changed a lot in the thirty years since THE FIRM premiered in theaters, and not always for the better.

I love Aaron Sorkin’s writing, but I think Sorkin’s style (along with others like him) has infected the business of screenwriting in a way that has started to become unhealthy. I think that too many less talented writers use Sorkin’s style as a crutch… like, “maybe if I just have my characters say a lot of words and give those words an Aaron Sorkin (or David Mamet or Quentin Tarantino) machine gun rhythm, no one will realize that my characters aren’t actually saying very much at all.”

Much like our discussion of the character introductions in PREDATOR from Episode One of this series of essays, the scene about 48 minutes into THE FIRM, where Tom Cruise visits his brother (played by David Strathairn) in prison is a marvel of efficient storytelling… the dialogue is so precise, so perfect, so intentional, that you learn more from what they don’t say than from what they do.

When the two men meet, a wall of grey prison bars between them, Strathairn senses his brother’s discomfort and needs to find a subtle way to let his brother know that it’s OK, that the guilt Ray sees on his brother’s face isn’t necessary. “Don’t beat yourself up kid, If I wasn’t here, I wouldn’t want to be here either”, he says. There are three credited screenwriters on the movie, not incuding the novelist himself John Grisham, but I’d be willing to bet Robert Towne wrote that line… it has that same laconic CHINATOWN vibe that Towne’s dialogue always had, the one that says what needs to be said without doing so explicitly.

“Forget it, Jake… it’s Chinatown…”

Later, the chaotic life the two men experienced as children growing up with an insane single mother is summed up, not by a ten minute monologue that plays like a therapy session, but by this simple back-and-forth.

Strathairn: Mom still with the same guy?

Cruise: It’s always the same guy…

Those two lines, combined with the visual of one brother in jail, facing off across a wall of prison bars against a second brother whose life has been put in jeopardy because he was lured by the twin vices of money and status into taking the wrong job, tells you everything you need to know about the upbringing these two men must have endured. And it does so without making you sit through ten minutes of self-indulgent dialogue.

Once upon a time, efficient writing like this was the hallmark of great filmmaking. Most the movies we commonly think of as the best movies ever made were written this way.

For instance… did we need to know all the sordid details of what happened between Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood when Indy was a student of her father’s? Or was it enough to know just this:

Marion: I’ve learned to hate you the last ten years.

Indy: I never meant to hurt you…

Marion: I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it!

Indy: You knew what you were doin’…

Marion: Now I do… get out!

It’s hard to imagine getting an entire backstory in five insanely efficient lines like that from a modern Hollywood product. But Speilberg’s characters were busy, they didn’t have time for a therapy session…

If great screenwriting is snappy and efficient, it is not by accident. And it’s not because Bobby Towne, or Bill Goldman, or David Mamet or Quentin Tarantino simply preferred machine gun rat-a-tat dialogue, either.

It’s that way because of time pressure.

One hundred years of relentless time pressure. Pressure on screenwriters to deliver a great story with a beginning, a middle, and an end which occurs within a contractually enforced range of 90 to 125 minutes. They weren’t trying to create a franchise, or appeal to foreign audiences, or build a “cinematic universe”… they were simply trying to make a single great movie for a broad American audience to enjoy for a couple of hours on a warm summer night.

And if they did it well, then their reward was that they were given the opportunity to do it again… and again… and again.

Efficient screenwriting has become something of a lost art. Modern writers in the streaming era are more likely to tell you everything, while leaving nothing to subtext, nothing to the imagination. They no longer feel the time pressue that Goldman and Mamet and Towne felt, and so they no longer feel as pressured to deliver dialogue in a clever or efficient way. Modern screenwriters have all the time in the world… they are more likely to be told something like, “give us a story that can become six movies” or “one that lasts eight to ten episodes and meanders off plot at regular intervals”, than they are to be told “get us in and out in 90 minutes.”

And indeed, as I write this, Zak Snyder’s REBEL MOON is landing in theaters with “Part One” literally in the title… and THE FIRM itself eventually became a wholly unecessary 22 episode TV series ten years ago.

I’m old enough to remember when Hollywood didn’t even think about making a sequel until after the first movie was a hit, nor did it take great movies and try to squeeze blood from a stone by turning them into serialized TV shows that no one asked for.

That was the way it used to be…