Big budgets and small pay

As Michael Gubbins reported a few months ago in MovieScope, “At the turn of the century, there were four films made with budgets above $100m. Last year there were 22.” Movies that cost obscene sums of money – and, importantly, have commensurate marketing budgets – regularly turn a profit thanks in large part to their being aimed at teenage boys and stuffed full of product placement, but directors attempting to make a film with a comparative modicum of financing will probably find Hollywood an increasingly alienating place in the coming decade. Smaller movies will still exist, and most will eventually find their audience through festival screenings and some on-demand streaming services, but cinemas increasingly exist solely to serve multiplex-goers and older crowds whose taste never strays from safe-bet art-house films.

Critics and commentators keep telling us that we’re living in a “new golden age” of television; should filmmakers who find themselves unwelcome in LA just become television-makers? Steven Spielberg made waves twice this year: first when he announced that he was hoping to bring to the small-screen Stanley Kubrick’s famously unrealised epic Napoleon, and again when he and George Lucas told an audience at USC that they (almost gleefully, and without a shred of irony or self-awareness) predict the collapse of the very same blockbuster system they helped usher into being in the 1970s. Now Spielberg has said he’d like Baz Lurhmann to direct Napoleon – for HBO. Laughably awful choice of director aside, this is actually pretty interesting from a distribution and production-environment perspective.

Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra was famously welcomed by the cable channel when it was deemed “too gay” for Hollywood; it did reasonably well at the movies here and in other nearby markets due to its format and its director and stars’ fame – but you can’t realistically show a miniseries in cinemas. HBO will, therefore, run into the same problem trying to profit from Lurhmann’s Napoleon miniseries as they have with their current slate of TV shows (GIRLS, Game of Thrones, etc).

That is, potential consumers in non-US markets, unable to purchase the product, will likely make use of less-than-legal methods to access it in a timely manner. (Then there’s the whole problem of wanting to see only a selection of episodes, rather than a whole-channel subscription.) This divide – between enormous movies and tantalising but legally inaccessible TV shows – only more keenly illustrates the dire need for US television providers to see the world as the Internet does: as one market, free of geographical boundaries.

An aside relevant to last week’s discussion of working for free:

It turns out that even on a major Hollywood production people are sometimes asked to work for peanuts in exchange for exposure and the possibility of more and better-paid work. A few days ago, a graphic designer named Juan Luis Garcia posted an open letter to the director Spike Lee. In it, Garcia details how he was approached by a design agency (employed by Lee’s production company) to create posters for the director’s new film, a remake of Oldboy.

He was informed that they were working with a small budget but that he would (eventually) be “compensated fairly through the licensing buyout fee.” Lee liked Garcia’s work, and selected it as the film’s key art – but the agency made Garcia an “insultingly low” offer, propped up by promises of “exposure” and “[the] potential for more work”; Garcia declined. The agency brazenly took Garcia’s concept and created a very similar final poster, but what’s worse is that they used his original art on their social-media pages (which posts have since been taken down) without ever, apparently, paying him a cent. This seems to have been the only official response so far: