Whose Fault is it!?
One of my favorite scenes in the excellent feature film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER occurs about an hour and fifty minutes in. John Clark’s (played by Willem Dafoe) drug interdiction unit of American Soldiers has been hunted down and destroyed by Colombian paramilitary forces controlled by the drug cartels. Desperate to save whomever he can, Clark travels into the Colombian jungle with CIA Deputy Director Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) to look for survivors. When they reach the site where the unit met its end, a lone survivor, Ding Chavez (Raymond Cruz) roars out of the jungle and grabs Clark by the throat, believing erroneously that Clark left them there to die. It seems, for a moment, as if Chavez might kill Clark with his bare hands right there in the river. But Ryan intervenes, gets between the two men and tells Chavez “It’s not his fault…”
Chavez turns on this new interloper, a man he does not know, and shouts into his face “WHOSE FAULT IS IT!?”
Ryan calmly replies “it’s my fault.”
I’ve been thinking about this scene a lot over the last few months as Hollywood Blockbuster after Hollywood Blockbuster has fallen flat on its face. Things have been better lately, with BARBIE, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, and OPPENHEIMER all doing big business, but there is no doubt that it has been a horrible summer for the theatrical movie business… and as twin labor actions continue to rock the town, the movie business may emerge from the summer worse off than ever.
And so it’s natural to ask, here in the bitter aftermath, “whose fault is it?”
There are a lot of reasons why Hollywood movies aren’t working right not, and many of them (woke storylines, listless CGI, a reliance on shallow diversity as a substitute for real character development) have been exhaustively discussed here at The Continental Congress and elsewhere.
But now that the last legacy franchise installment of the Summer, INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY, has officially flopped, in part because Disney, Lucasfilm and Paramount gave us a version of Indiana Jones that none of us who have loved Indy for forty years wanted… old, depressed, divorced, dependent on booze and no longer on top of his game. Now that Indiana Jones has joined a long and distinguished list of characters from Luke Skywalker to Elrond, The Hulk and Han Solo who have been similarly emasculated and tossed unceremoniously on the ash heap of Hollywood History. Now that all this has happened… it’s time to talk about who else might be at fault.
Because when it comes to protecting popular franchise characters, Hollywood has always had one last line of defense… a defense that, lately, has fallen down on the job.
This last line of defense is (or had been) the power of the Movie Star.
I’m going to tell you a story. It’s probably not true, this story, but I’m going to tell it anyway. Partly because it’s funny… but mostly because, true or not, it perfectly illustrates how things can work when this last Hollywood line of defense is working as it should.
The story goes like this… Bruce Willis jumps on a conference call with the producers and executives involved in the DIE HARD franchise to discuss plans for another sequel, after the success of the first two films. During this discussion it becomes clear that the studio and producers want something included in the movie that Bruce does not think is appropriate for the character that he’s made famous. It’s just not something he thinks audiences would want to see John McClane do. It gets heated, neither party is willing to back down. Finally, Bruce says “Guys, lemme ask you a question… who’s your second choice to play John McClane?” and disconnects the call.
At its heart, this is a story about the strategic exercise of raw power. The answer to Bruce’s rhetorical is that there was never a Plan B for John McClane because no one could have replaced Bruce Willis in that role. Whether or not this call actually happened, even the casual fan understands that Bruce was always in a position to dictate terms when it came to developing the character he made famous back in 1988.
One of the most critical elements to successful movie development has always been a Movie Star who understands their value, who understands what their audiences want from them, and who uses their leverage as a Star to make sure that their movies deliver on the promise they make to their audience every time they put their name on a film above the title.
Some stars are still willing to use that leverage, but most are not. And we can see how this has affected the Hollywood bottom line. For there was a time when Stars were the most powerful element in the entire Hollywood system and they damned well knew it. It’s hard to argue that the work product back in the days when Stars were Stars wasn’t vastly superior to what we’re being fed now, here in an evironment where Development and Marketing executives are often the most powerful people in the room.
One of the best books ever written about the movie business is William Goldman’s autobiography ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE.
The first chapter of Goldman’s book is called “The Powers That Be” and the first section of that chapter, 35 pages of it, is called simply, “Stars.” This section is comprised mostly of stories about situations when Movie Stars made Goldman rewrite his scripts in ways that he really didn’t want to. These stories include some instances when, he believes, those rewrites made his scripts worse and, in some cases, killed his movies altogether. I certainly understand Goldman’s complaint… he’s was an artist and it must’ve been very difficult for him to kill off his babies just because some actor (spit!) told him that he must. But in retrospect, it’s quite likely that many of the changes those Stars demanded made the movies that came out of them more successful. It also follows, that some of the changes which utimately killed movies in their cribs probably saved Goldman from box office disaster.
And this is how it used to work in Hollywood, back when Movie Stars sat on top of the mountain, knew the power they wielded, and weren’t afraid to use it. Movie Stars, by virtue of the fact that they are always the most visible part of any movie release, have the most on the line and often understand better than anyone else what their fans want from them. Golden Age stars, including the Mega-Stars of the 80’s, mostly understood that if they refused to use their leverage, and if the movies in which they appeared were consistent flops, then they would be forced by the moviegoing public to accept the lion’s share of the blame. And indeed the pre-2000 Movie Star era is chock full of legendary stories about Stars making demands for changes on set in order to protect their image.
Typically the Hollywood press woould file these stories under the category of “diva behavior” but I was always a little more sympathetic to the Stars in these situations than most. After all, the average moviegoer has no idea who writes, produces or directs most of the movies they see, but they surely know who the stars are. And if the movie is bad, whom do we think they’re going to blame?
Movie Stars were once hyper-protective of their image because they understood that the magic of Stardom, more than any other form of Hollywood Magic, is the most fleeting of them all.
The path to a green light is a very different one now. And while I understand that standing up to an entire studio that is singularly focused on corporate brand management, in a situation where Marketing Executives often hold veto power over the final greenlight decision (as well as the star’s multi-million dollar payday), can be scary… it’s pretty hard to argue that in a world where only one man (Tom Cruise) seems willing to put his foot down and tell the suits how things are going to go, the work product has gotten worse and worse.
Mark Hamill could’ve said “I don’t think my fans want to see a Luke Skywalker who has become an angry depressed hermit, who tried to murder the son of his best friend, and who has lost everything he bled for in the original movies that everyone still loves, so who’s your second choice to play Luke?” Ditto for Harrison Ford with both Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Neither of them appear to have done so, and now those characters are dead and gone, likely for a very long time.
Creating franchise characters out of thin air is extremely hard to do, and every time it happens, it’s something of a miracle… a black swan event that is nearly impossible to manufacture. Which places a huge responsibility on the shoulders of those who create and develop these iconic characters to get it right each time they revisit them.
And right now, Hollywood is getting it consistently wrong. Some of the responsibility for that has to be placed at the feet of those Movie Stars who still remain. They have tremendous power to determine how they, and their characters, are portrayed… it’s a shame that so few of them choose to exercise that power.