Word: studioful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What movie studio wouldn't be dancing in the streets with films like The Silence of the Lambs and Dances with Wolves to its credit? Answer: Orion Pictures, the studio that released both hits. The Jodie Foster thriller and the Kevin Costner western come at the end of a losing streak that has lasted more than two years and helped run up $500 million of debt with such busts as The Hot Spot, State of Grace and Valmont. So even though Lambs and Wolves together have grossed a stellar $230 million, Orion is struggling to keep the wolves from...
...attract new investors, the studio last week disclosed plans for a "major capital or financial restructuring" and an executive shake-up that pushed chairman and octogenarian co-founder Arthur Krim into an essentially powerless position. Such actions may not be enough. Orion's upcoming releases look weak -- and the studio is so hungry for cash that last month it sold its most promising new picture, a movie version of TV's cult hit The Addams Family, to Paramount at a loss...
...trend may be encouraging, a hint that Hollywood movies demand more complex characters, not just more elaborate special effects. Or it may be further evidence of the industry's creeping conservatism. Studio bosses haven't become more literate. They are simply playing it safe, luring an aging movie audience with properties that have already proved their appeal. Why pay as much as $3 million for an original script, then pay someone else to rewrite it, when you can pick a test-marketed product off the bookshelves for a tenth of the price...
...book is now part of a package," says Peter Gethers, the publisher of Villard Books as well as a novelist and screenwriter. "It gives producers and studio people something to hold in their hands, instead of just pitching an intangible idea to a director or actor. They trust themselves not an iota. And rightly so, since they don't know what makes a good movie, and they don't know how to turn a book into a movie. So they're buying up a lot of books. And from these they will get screenplays that just don't work. Once...
Buying a book also allows the studio to sidestep all that messy artistic independence; the writer and the director have a blueprint they'd better stick to. "Studios don't like to take chances with something that hasn't been validated in another commercial form," says screenwriter-director Paul Schrader, whose sleek, sere new movie, The Comfort of Strangers, was adapted by Harold Pinter from Ian McEwan's novel. "A film like Silence of the Lambs would have never hit the screen had it been original material. It's just too raw. It could be filmed only because...