discostu Wrote:
interesting read:
Puttnam's Law (why conformity, even in failure perpetuates pandering to the lowest common denominator)
There's a corollary to this:
some bitter hack who's amazing screenplay never sold Wrote:
Puttnam was known for making small prestige pictures, Hollywood for making bloated commercial ones. And Puttnam not only embraced the difference; he touted it. No sooner had he taken office than he issued a manifesto in which he excoriated the "tyranny of the box office" and the "lowest common denominator of public taste" to which Hollywood had so often pitched its films. To say he was a maverick would have been an understatement.
And so Puttnam roared through Hollywood. In short order, he attacked the talent agents who at the time virtually ran the entertainment industry, dismissed one of Columbia's prime producers, Ray Stark, and reviled stars who, he lamented, made exorbitant salaries that he felt extorted the studios. He even disdained making "Ghostbusters II," a surefire hit, albeit one at a steep cost. Instead, he announced a slate of 22 films at an average budget of $11 million — the sorts of films on which he had made his reputation — on the theory that no single movie could bankrupt the studio and that a few hits could greatly enrich it.
So what happened? Puttnam so threatened the status quo that barely a year after taking the job and before a single film from his slate was even released, he was unceremoniously forced out of the studio, though he would claim to have left of his own volition. He had made a lot more enemies in Hollywood than friends, but even so there was an inordinate amount of schadenfreude at his demise. The consensus was that Puttnam was an arrogant fool. If he had only kept his mouth shut and made the typical big-budget movies, he probably could have remained at the studio even if his movies bombed — his successor, Victor Kaufman, had made those sorts of movies at Tri-Star and still got the promotion — because everybody in Hollywood made those movies. Puttnam's crime was not in failing — but in failing by doing something no one else in Hollywood would have done.
And that is that his mouth got him in trouble. The best way to do something truly unique within the constraints of the system, especially if you want to be proven right, is to do all the "conformist" tropes, but also pursue your own agenda. If he had made GBII, and watched it flop, while also releasing a slate of great movies that were successes, the world would have moved his way.
I agree that you can get the limb sawed off by trying to be too outside the box, because all industry is basically conservative - "we do it this way because that's the way it's done" - but you can also affect change if you hide your agenda. Just ask LBJ.
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Throughout his life, from childhood until death, he was beset by severe swings of mood. His depressions frequently encouraged, and were exacerbated by, his various vices. His character mixed a superficial Enlightenment sensibility for reason and taste with a genuine and somewhat Romantic love of the sublime and a propensity for occasionally puerile whimsy.
harry Wrote:
I understand that you, of all people, know this crisis and, in your own way, are working to address it. You, the madras-pantsed julip-sipping Southern cracker and me, the oldman hippie California fruit cake are brothers in the struggle to save our country.
FT Wrote:
LooGAR (the straw that stirs the drink)
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