Cheering For The 1% (Or Perhaps The Top 25%): Part Three

 The following is an essay I wrote a year ago for a class on celebrity culture. Over the next five Fridays, I will upload another part of the essay. I find it to be pretty relevant today for a number of reasons (the NBA lockout, the Occupy Wall Street protests, this recent article from Forbes ,etc.) and hope you find it to be an enjoyable read.    

     Every producer wants to fund something with immense cross-over appeal. This is where the four quadrants come into play: males over the age of twenty-five, females over the age of twenty-five, males under the age of twenty-five, and females under the age of twenty-five. A potential blockbuster must ideally be able to appeal to all four potential quadrants (very few do, but that's why there's so few mega-hits). With Harry Potter and Twilight, the producers were weary but ultimately successful. Would the Potter franchise be deemed too kiddy-like and youth oriented for adults? Would Twilight's teenage romance plots scare off the men and young boys who would rather take in the new Transformers shoot-em-up (another franchise based on a pre-sold property, although this time plastic toys and an animated television series)? Although both franchises faced these questions, they didn't suffer from the results. Their awareness was so high that each film found a way to expand, in one way or another, their popularity as evidenced by the ever gracious financial results. The studios responsible for the franchises, Warner Bros. for Potter and Summit for Twilight, ran brilliant self-serving property tie-ins, with merchandise ranging from clothes to toys, theme park attractions and Halloween costumes, with everything else coming full circle as the original source material, the books themselves, consistently sold more and more copies.

     Although there were some well known faces that showed up from time to time, neither of the two film series were reliant on star power. The adults used in small supporting roles in Harry Potter and The Twilight Saga were never actors who drew in money at the box office – their star power was more of the much smaller arthouse variety, gaining strong reviews that outpaced their paychecks. The leads of the two franchises, three in Potter and three in Twilight, were not teen sensations when they were first cast; the books' popularity made the first film a success, which as a result lead to stardom and unending paparazzi for the teens in the follow up. They became stars because of the material. They didn't sell the movie, the movie sold them. Fans were vocal about who they wanted to see play the parts, but when the producers made up their minds, going for young and pretty actors who had parents and agents willing sign them up for multi-film contract commitments, the fans accepted and adored the casting result. These actors became teen and pre-teen idols over night, faces of a franchise like the aforementioned basketball player, Joe Johnson. And then, as it so often seems to occur, something funny happened and neutered their worldwide stardom potential. The actors attempted to branch out and try something different, away from the safety net of a pre-sold property. The results were less than stellar.

     In order to test the limits of their newly obtained awareness in the media spotlight, distribution companies, producers, and agents put together, without even knowing it, an unique Hollywood experiment. Studios released movies long put on the shelf starring the teen stars in order to capitalize on their instant fame. Agents also got their clients smaller movies to work on in-between shooting installments of their bread and butter mega-franchises so that they could prove to the world that they were “real” actors and not just reliant on a brand name to help sell a movie. These men and women were their own brands....or so they thought. Attempting to branch out and try more edgy adult fare (as far removed as possible from the work they were known for), the actors were involved in several critical and financial disappointments. Daniel Radcliffe, Mr. Harry Potter himself, starred in a small drama titled December Boys, which everyone ignored regardless of the month it was set in. Twilight's Kristen Stewart racked up box office dud after box office dud with The Yellow Handkerchief, The Runaways, and Welcome To The Rileys, while her male vampire co-star Robert Pattinson failed to further his financial prospects with the very weak performing Little Ashes and Remember Me. In trying to confirm their stardom, these men and women willingly had it poked and deflated. As it turns out, the Twilight and Harry Potter fans were coming out to see Twilight and Harry Potter, not the actors in them (or at the very least, the lead actors were nowhere near the top selling point).

     This result leads to a common question being thrown around in various entertainment outlets today: do movie stars matter? Why spend the big bucks on a movie without insurance? Instead, use a successful pre-sold, pre-tested idea to greenlight a film, and then the results have a better chance at mirroring its predecessor. Although this is not fool proof, it is, as Kael mentioned earlier, just a way of playing the game, a way of saying “but I followed all the steps” when trying to defend your expensive failure. Rather than looking for the next big superstar, producers are on the look out for hot new properties. Let's make The Chronicles of Narnia books into studio tentpole pictures for Christmas! Let's greenlight other novels like The Golden Compass, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and Sin City. We'll turn toys into movies, i.e. G.I. Joe and Transformers. Heck, the movie Clue was a big hit in the 1980s, so let's get back to work obtaining the rights to other classic boards game like Monopoly and Battleship. Time to turn Scooby Doo, The Smurfs, and Yogi Bear into live action movies and watch parents and their kids race to the multiplex.

     There is another concept (back) on the rise in modern day moviemaking, 3-D, an optical illusion posing as gimmicky stardom. James Cameron, the most vocal and technically savvy of all the pro 3D filmmakers, has used the process to start a worldwide conversation. His previous films, pre 2009, were usually headlined by big name stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger (a good example of a star who used his fame in politics). Titanic, his 1997 film about the ill-fated ship, took two known but unbankable stars in Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and surrounded them with millions upon millions of special effects, leading to a result of over a billion dollars in worldwide box office. The actors provided an emotional arch, but the film's success largely came as a result of the spectacle. It was large (the most expensive film ever made up to that time), had a well known story, and a sexy Christmas release date. Titanic became more of an event than movie. The biggest star may have been the anticipation and buzz itself. In a review that prompted Cameron to try and get this L.A. Times critic fired, Kenneth Turan wrote on the movie, “to the question of the day – what does $200 million buy? – the 3-hour-and fourteen minute Titanic unhesitatingly answers: not enough. Note that despite the hopes of skeptics, aghast at the largest film budget of modern times, money enough to run a full-dress presidential campaign or put a serious dent in illiteracy, the answer is not nothing. When you are willing to build a 775-foot, 90% scale model of the doomed ship and sink it into a 17-million-gallon tank specifically constructed for the purpose, you are going to get a heck of a lot of production value for your money. Especially if your name is James Cameron.” (Turan 622).

     On the actors, Turan continues, “both Winslet and DiCaprio are capable actors.....but they are victimized, as is everyone else, by dialogue that has the self-parodying ring of Young Romance novels.” (Turan 624). Although Mr. Turan's views on the film were not widely shared, his review was somewhat positive in describing the visual CGI aspects. His point was that the film was not about the writing or the star actors, but the shocking “can you top this?” attitude Mr. Cameron took on towards the film's second half. Cameron has a way with making spectacle count. His latest movie, Avatar, recently topped Titanic to become the highest grossing film ever made, adjusted for inflation. Promising to revolutionize the way we thought about 3-D, Cameron made an expensive science fiction movie with a nod to American history and romance (the tall blue characters were metaphorically blue as well). And once again, Cameron decided to cast up-and-coming – although not quite there yet – lead actors with movie star potential. There were no names above the title besides the director's; people were coming to experience Avatar, and the romantic leads benefited from the once in a lifetime circumstance (or maybe twice in a lifetime circumstance, as both Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, the two Avatar lovers, have other franchise hits on their resumes to boast about). Avatar, like Titanic, used a high concept to sell its virtues and get people talking.