Word: warners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hottest thing traipsing through Hollywood last week was not another $1 million, half-written movie script, or Julia Roberts, or even Warner Bros.' squad of shiny dark Jaguars. Instead it was a supposedly top-secret 28-page memo from Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief of Walt Disney Studios, to a small group of his colleagues. In the memo, which leaked out and instantly set fax machines buzzing all over town, Katzenberg called on the studio to avoid high- priced stars whenever possible, shun the "blockbuster mentality that has gripped our industry" and return to Disney's roots as a budget-minded filmmaker...
Disney isn't alone. Rival moguls at Warner and Paramount Pictures have begun preaching their own cost-containment messages. The reasons are as simple as a friendly ghost, an ingenuous hooker and an eight-year-old hero. The three top- grossing films of 1990 -- Ghost, Pretty Woman and Home Alone -- cost a relative pittance to produce and were driven by syrupy, uplifting stories rather than star power. These films succeeded beyond all hopes in a year when studios shelled out $30 million to $60 million to make films with big-name stars and fancy productions. Many of these budget busters...
Some studios, like Warner, will now avoid "overpackaged" films that are chock-full of stars. Case in point: Warner's The Bonfire of the Vanities, the $35 million fiasco starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith. Other studios, notably Universal Pictures, are stressing "back-end" deals, in which such stars as Arnold Schwarzenegger (Kindergarten Cop) and Tom Cruise (Born on the Fourth of July) receive a cut of ticket sales as opposed to a hefty up-front salary. "If we don't control costs, we won't have much of an industry left," warns Thomas Pollock, head of Universal...
...Marc E. Warner's editorial "Lies, Lies Baby" (January 7) misses the point completely with respect to musical "borrowing" of the type exhibited by M.C. Hammer, Vanilla Ice, Tone-Loc and other performers (mostly, though not exclusively, rappers). An injustice is not done to the public when these performers sample a riff or fill--rather, the injustice is done to the original artist. Thus, Vanilla Ice's stories about his ghetto youth are almost comical, while his blatantly false claims to writing the bass line to "Ice, Ice Baby" are chilling (his line differs by one half beat from...
...Warner rightly points out that much early rock & roll (as well, I might add, as blues and jazz) consisted of white musicians' "outright thievery" of black musicians' work. This hardly justifies the same practice in 1991. After all, when Madonna's "Justify My Love" contains the exact same drum beat as James Brown's "Funky Drummer Beat," we witness the exact same phenomenon half a century later...