Word: hollywooders
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...Monday's Chapter 11 filing by Lehman Brothers and the bailout of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America have only added to a yearlong credit crunch that is changing the way film financing deals are structured in Hollywood. Not unlike homebuyers facing tougher standards to get a mortgage, the people who greenlight movies are facing more stringent demands from their financiers. "All of the studios, if they want to get a deal done in this environment, will need to better align their interests with investors," says P. John Burke, a film finance lawyer at the firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer...
...Four years ago, movie companies and Wall Street banks embarked on a promising romance. Before then, the smart money on Wall Street had stayed away from Hollywood. And not without good reason - starting with William Randolph Hearst in the silent era, plenty of wealthy investors with stars in their eyes had lost big money in the high-risk business of financing single films. But in 2004 banks like Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs found themselves with a glut of capital and no place to put it. Studios, meanwhile, were looking for a way to please their fiscally conservative corporate...
...That's because in the last 12 months, as the economy began to buckle under the housing crisis, some banks dropped out of Hollywood, including Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Kleinwort. Those sticking around are asking for more for their money. Now investors are demanding that studios lower their distribution fees, market their films with more discipline and, most importantly, stop cherry-picking the best films from their slates. In the earliest deals, studios withheld their biggest potential hits from the funds - Sony kept all earnings from its Spider-Man sequels, for example, while investors picked...
...What Hollywood and the press who cover it once would have treated as an unmissable cinematic moment - a pairing of two of the greatest actors of their generation - is instead being greeted around town with a shrug. "It's like Ali and Frazier are about to fight," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box office tracking firm Media By Numbers. "And people are weirdly indifferent...
...just Hollywood that has changed since Heat. Its leading men have a lot more road under their feet. "Thirteen years ago they were beautiful - lean and muscular and in their middle-aged prime with great haircuts," says Jeffrey Wells, of the blog Hollywood Elsewhere. "Today they're softer, grayer, saggier, less cool. It's a hard pill to swallow, but they're just not top-dog machismo types any more." Beyond the indignities of aging that all actors inevitably face, Pacino and De Niro have both appeared in a string of bad films that damaged their personal brands. For Pacino...