Variety editors Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing spoke with PW by phone from Hayes's office in Los Angeles.
PW: What readership are you going after with Open Wide?
Dade Hayes: All of America. [laughs] It's a book that people who don't know much about the movie business will be really interested in. We made an effort to take the reader behind the scenes at every interval of the film campaigns that we're describing to show the machinery at work in the test screenings, the press junkiets, the bickering among studio executives, directors and actors, the production machinery generating the thousands and thousands of prints that are shipped to thousands and thousands of theaters on opening weekend.
We hope that people in Hollywood flip to the index to see if they're quoted, and that everybody else reads front to back.
There is a sense throughout the book of art held hostage to money. So if there's a villain in the book it's the box office itself.
At various points we were awestruck at the power of the marketing and spending and the kind of machinery—a lot of people talk about the Frankenstein myth as governing this. We talk about the Wizard of Oz. There is a definite dark side to that, but we were careful not to make the book a jeremiad.
There are so many ways to think about it. When we wrote it, I was thinking about what we saw as somewhat of a pathology, or as a kind of addiction or distraction for people in Hollywood. Everybody is so focused on the fast money.
You had extraordinary access. How did people respond while you were observing them?
Access has been at the center of this project from day one. We're proud of the level of access that we ultimately obtained but it didn't come cheap. There are very few people who we spent a lot of time with who just spoke freely. At every stage they were aware we were there. And the stakes were so clear, drummed into their heads from the time they first set foot on a studio lot, that talking about a movie before it comes out is the ultimate bad juju. So that made for a lot of drama and a lot of really good human moments that we tried to capture.
What lessons did you take away from this experience?
The lack of institutional memory was really astonishing. The fact that no one seemed to know the names of the films. We were excited at having done research on a movie that one studio had released earlier and the head of distribution or marketing had no recollection of its performance or its meaning to the studio. I can see how that happens, but it is striking that their jobs are such that they're on this hamster wheel, weekend after weekend after weekend, so of course the first casualty is history or a sense of perspective.
Another point that was perpetually interesting to us was the ephemeral nature of pop culture. These movies opened everywhere simultaneously on one night and within a few days they were evaporating from the cultural consciousness. These big summer movies really have only one weekend to live or die. It's very Darwinian.
Jon, you used work in the publishing industry. Please compare the film business culture to the book business culture.
One thing people here ask me about the book is, "How quickly will you sell copies?" What people don't understand is that unless it's Bill Clinton's book or a big title with a national laydown, books take longer to work their way into the cultural slipstream than blockbuster movies.
Another really important distinction is that the pervasive nature of marketing and spin-doctors and the forces of publicity in Hollywood is so much more powerful than in book publishing. Today the studios' marketing departments are much bigger than the production deparments. Marketing is a big corpporate process that's heavily reliant on market research and polling and they have enormous war chests to spend on promoting their movies. There's no comparison to book publishing. Even with a blockbuster author in publishing, the publicity budgets are relatively small. If you advertise on television, it's sort of unusual and you can't do a really big ad campaign. Whereas the studios are spending $30 million or more on a single film TV campaign.
Yet so many films tank after major marketing. Of course there's so much advance word on films these days.
That points to the Internet. A real savvy about grosses and budgets has been injected into the process. You can look at the millions of people studying box office with concern, but it's also kind of an awareness that we didn't have as a culture decades ago. The Tivo-megaplex-video game universe that we live in is a culture of choice and autonomy. If there's anything to take away from this whole story, it's that there are choices, and some people can exercise those.
