Film Biz Plans To Stomp Through Apocalypse

If you're looking for some good news as the recession tests our fleshy parts with its sharp little claws, you could do a lot worse than a visit to ShoWest to commune with the nation's theater exhibitors. Why shouldn't they be generally hopeful, with history to bear them out, of continued good business? They're currently riding a wave of boffo box office that's making the industry forget the bad old days of say, mid -2005.

From Black Friday in 1929 through the waning days of the Great Depression as it gave way to the start of World War II, Hollywood production surged to levels unheard of today. A huge appetite for double features meant, as pointed out by Otto Friedrich in City of Nets, that there were about four hundred new movies per year to watch. And there were more movie theaters (15,115) than banks (14,952): "That was the most remarkable thing abut Hollywood in 1939: how successful it was. While the rest of the country wallowed along through the remnants of the Depression, Hollywood kept making more and more money. Several movie studios went bankrupt and had to be "reorganized", but the movie industry as a whole flourished."

Though Warner Bros. chief Alan Horn gave a thoroughly upbeat report on his studio's record 2007 and a robust, Harry Potter, Batman (The Dark Knight) and Steve Carell (Get Smart) -stoked slate in 2008, perhaps the recession-fighting bonhomie was highest as Universal president of marketing Adam Fogelson addressed a theater full of exhibitors at the ShoWest convention after leading with the news that 2007 had also been Universal's best year ever.

He'd had far different sentiments when blogger Gunjun Bagla interviewed him in early July of 2005, a month after key Uni aspirant Cinderella Man had opened to just $18 million and dropped an average of about forty percent in the three succeeding weeks. The studio's earlier The Interpreter and Kicking and Screaming with respective grosses of $72.6 and $ 52. 7 million, had shown that Nicole Kidman an Will Ferrell were not sure bets and the near-future slate, including Spielberg's Munich, Sam Mendes' Jarhead and Peter Jackson's King Kong was an expensive set of prestige pictures with (rsults would soon show) no guarantees. Said Fogelson then,"Earlier in the year, we thought this was a blip but six months is long enough. This is serious and we don't have the answers."

Fogelson, who shares with his Uni colleague and distribution kingpin Nikki Rocco a reputation for candor, noted that this year marked the studio's first trip to the gathering since 2003, when they had Bruce Almighty, Seabiscuit and American Pie 2 (all became hits) and in the kind of optimism that goes down easier with a re for plain speaking, promised that late Spring and summer would bid to be "the strongest in our history".

Not neglecting to cajole the exhibitors that it would really help if they would go ahead and show the "red-band" (or non-PG) trailers when they could be pinned to appropriately raunchier first-run features, gave them a taste with Judd Apatow's Forgetting Sarah Marshall. After it closed with a joke generically not too different from Cameron Diaz's famous natural mousse job in Something About Mary, he shook his head slightly and muttered with a grin, "So proud." Between that and the Baby Mama trailer capper, wherein surrogate mother Amy Poehler apologizes to her client Tina Fey for farting in her purse it was clear that the studio still has its comedic foot planted deep in the craftier sort of gross-out comedy that Apatow brought to a crest for them with Knocked Up.

A useful professional knack Fogelson has cultivated is showing full fervor for more narrowcast projects like July 18th's Mamma Mia ("I'm perfectly happy for that to be a chick flick," he said, skipping the volume-centric statistics re the stage musical that he had pounded home to the ShoWest attendees) and Guillermo Del Toro's Hellboy2: The Golden Army. Singling out Del Toro's craft, he let his film-wonk side show--"the practical work h does with creatures creates a reality that's unique and apparent in the frame" and added, not without justification, that most in the audience came to have a look at the summer blockbusters, "But that trailer blew a lot of people away--I was excited by what happened in that room".

He wouldn't bite on the reports that Del Toro, with whom Uni wants to stay in business, is abut to be mightily distracted by a pair of Hobbit movies that Peter Jackson will produce for New Line. Perhaps alluding to the studio's up-and-down relations with Jackson, dating back to the under-performing and probably mishandled The Frighteners and including the King Kong adventure in which Jackson stepped up to pay production cost overruns and help the studio's thin bottom line on the film, he said, "Somehow we'll all take care of each other over the years".

Asked what makes him a something of a mellow philosophical type in a shark pool business, he credits his father Andrew, a sometime marketing maven at Columbia, United Artists and Warner Bros., who welcomed him into a film consulting partnership right after Adam graduated from Stanford in 1989. "Everyone in our lives save for our nuclear family said we were bound to ruin a great father-son relationship by working together, and it gave us additional joy to prove everybody wrong."

He's never looked back, except perhaps at the ad spot for Hulk that ran during the 2003 Super Bowl and was widely assumed to be the unveiling of "Unfinished effects--that's the urban legend...no one liked how he looked, but that was not an unfinished Hulk. I'm interested to know how a Super Bowl spot that led to a $61 million opening--the second biggest for a Marvel film that's not a sequel--became a `mistake'".

The Internet harassment has already ramped up for the studio's June 13 release The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton and Liv Tyler, with rumors that the opinionated Norton is giving the producers and young director Louis LeTerrier (The Transporter and its sequel) fits in the editing room. Look," says Fogelson, "There's almost no film I can point to on our slate, now or ever, that doesn't have these kind of very real and frequently confrontational discussions between smart parties about what to do in post-production."

Fogelson says with due respect to Ang Lee, "who's a brilliant artist and accomplished what he wanted to", for this version the producers took heed when:

The public said what we want is a Hulk who's more heroic, that isn't spending the whole movie depressed about his condition, we want the Hulk to fight a worthy adversary, and for the movie to look like a big, giant Marvel popcorn film. And I think what that trailer is demonstrating is, that's what they've gone after this time.

Popcorn and Norton aren't words often used in the same sentence, but Fogelson reiterates that some debate was expected. "Edward wasn't simply paid to read his lines and go back to his trailer--he was brought in with the intention of having him entirely, creatively involved in the film. It's never the case that you watch a rough cut and everyone says great, now lock it and go home. So all that's happening now is that Edward's past history as someone who gets involved, and the past history of Hulk as a film, are conspiring to make it juicier for people to talk about."

In the big room in Vegas, Fogelson saved perhaps his fondest delectation for Wanted the Angelina Jolie/James McAvoy vehicle whose slam-bang trailer--mostly derived from an opening sequence that Fogelson unspooled in its entirety as a kind of surprise treat for the audience--shows the actress "exactly as viewers want to se her".

Before that line occasioned some wise-guy responses, the exec let the footage do the talking, as McAvoy shoots, flirts, and gets serious hang time with Jolie. "I want to be him, " said Fogelson after the roaring sound effects had quit, adding almost to himself, "There's no chance."

Later he defined what he meant about Jolie as seen in he film: "Somebody who's not all good but clearly not all bad. All woman and simultaneously the strongest person in the room with self-assuredness but a sense of humor--men and women both are responding to the complexity of the character and from both the anecdotal and quantitative responses, it's speaking to them very loudly."

He had put it a bit more bluntly in Las Vegas--"Angelina leaning out of a speeding Cobra firing a shotgun". And going up against Pixar entry Wall-E on June 27, which some would call a bit rash? "It feels like perfect counter-programming. I fully expect them to win the Number One spot. And I think both movies will have a spectacular weekend."

By the time The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor was unveiled the soundtrack crunch had just about deadened the crowd' s ears, but Fogelson rhapsodized about the move to Chinese mythology (they have mummies, too, he noted) and the film's positioning just seven days after the China Olympics open--the makings of a global box office monster."

A longer talk with Fogelson reveals that he specializes in the art of the possible. He'd love some Cloverfield-scale viral buzz on more of his pictures, but says, "You can't replicate something that really depends on the concept and/or the filmmakers. Baby Mama is a very funny movie but that doesn't' mean viral is gonna happen." (The studio's plan there is to emphasize the arrival as a pop culture force of Tina Fey, with Poehler not far behind.)

Fogelson doesn't see many pitfalls in his slate's dates; he's happy enough to arrive with his Incredible Hulk five weeks after the presumed (so Uni is hoping) success of Iron Man: "I think that a positive experience only benefits Hulk . The Marvel characters all live in a Marvel world and they are not completely, uniquely, independent from each other so while there isn't an obvious linkage, I think that there is some synergy there that we'll be able to take advantage of.

Asked to sum up a summer in which several other studios have slates that have their own blockbuster potential, Fogelson admits to being a believer in the film-biz truism that a rising box office tide lifts all boats:

If you go back and really study summer box office over many years I think you will find the critical factor in terms of dating a film in the summer is to pick a weekend where you can own your audience among the films opening. But there is little to no evidence that shows movies in the marketplace are being substantially impacted by new films coming in. Knocked Up can open to $30 million and even though giant movies keep coming every week thereafter, can go on to do 150. Pirates can open to 40 or 45 in a summer and go on and gross 350... movies that have legs will have legs no matter what comes after.

Now, if you open on the wrong weekend where another movie is crushes you that can be a problem. But a long as you get off to a good start, I think movies that are really gonna play are gonna find a way to play out no matter what else happens

And that's a dogma, if history holds, that just may be recession-proof.