Hollywood’s money men have killed originality, says Boorman
Veteran British director lambasts ‘visually illiterate’ financiers for dearth of ground-breaking movies
HOLLYWOOD films tend to be predictable, look alike and are made by executives who despise originality, claims one of Britain’s foremost film-makers.
John Boorman, the award-winning director and producer of films such as Deliverance and Hope and Glory, said that with advertising and distribution arms influencing decisions and mainstream US films being sold via TV trailers the key motivator was how to sell a film to big studios in 30 seconds.
He said: “When pitching a story to the studios, one was increasingly asked what was the 30-second TV ad? You had to suggest something they had seen before. If you couldn’t express it in 30 seconds then it should not be made because this is how they sell them. In this scheme of things, originality became the enemy.”
His observations appear in his memoir, Conclusions, published next month.
He writes: “A well-known star toting a gun or kissing another star tell audiences what they need to know. They have seen it all before. Sequels are easy to sell for the same reason, hence their proliferation. The enemy is originality – how to sell something unfamiliar in 30 seconds? Consequently, Hollywood films have a tendency to look alike and to be predictable.”
He said: “In the 50 years I have been making movies, the film industry has been in perpetual crisis. In the Fifties, it was the threat of television. But in the Sixties they thought maybe young directors understand what the audience wants. This brought the flowering of movies like Bonnie and Clyde … and on into the Seventies with Mean Streets. But mass audiences stayed away.
“Then came Star Wars and the mass audiences came, identifying themselves as 14-year-old boys. We then saw mindless special-effects films that worked intermittently and were costly to make. The advertising and distribution arms became more dominant than the creative arm.
“Traditionally, a movie would open with one print in New York and Los Angeles and gradually open wider. This put it at the mercy of the critics and word of mouth and led to the idea of opening with 4,000 prints and a massive advertising campaign sometimes eclipsing the budget of the movie, with the object of getting all your money back before the reviews came out.”
He cited Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which opened to mixed notices and poor business but “gradually built an audience and became a massive hit. Under the present system, it would have failed, lost forever.”
He said streaming giants such as Netflix had changed the industry. “Your film, rejected by all the studios, goes out on Netflix and is seen by 10million people on its first night,” he said.
Roma, the acclaimed family drama streamed on Netflix, was a case in point.
Boorman said: “Against all odds a few really good films get made, and once in a decade one arrives that seems to reinvent cinema: 2001 was such a movie, and now we have Roma.”
Being a black and white Spanish language film with no stars and a maid as the lead character, it would never have been picked up by a big studio, he said.
“Alfonso Cuarón (its director) clearly didn’t listen to the script gurus who will instruct you to divide your script into three acts and weed out the originality that will frighten the executives.”
Nowadays, he said, “a script has to be written for producers and financiers, many of them visually illiterate”.