by Chris Neumer
My mother is a saint. Before I had interns, she would help me transcribe my interviews, laboring well into the night to get a word-for-word transcript of my conversations with actors, producers and directors. My dad is a warm-hearted, teddy bear of a man who has never done anything but support and encourage my brother and I. In spite of these wonderfully redeeming qualities of theirs, Hollywood absolutely hates my parents. Yours too. Is there any other conclusion that can be drawn from the horrendous titles that are constantly being repromoted in honor of Mother’s and Father’s Day?
One of the most forgotten or overlooked elements in Hollywood is the catalog title. It’s a term that barely registers with most people and yet, it is one of the biggest cash cows in the studio system.
Studios look at their films as products to be sold (artists cover your ears). First, there is the initial investment into the actual creation of the product; namely making the movie. This is, rather naturally, the largest outlay of cash in the entire process.
Secondly comes the marketing of the product; ads for the movie are seen everywhere, the film’s lead is on the cover of every magazine at the corner stand and on Letterman and Leno on subsequent nights, and promotional materials for the film can be purchased at McDonald’s. A film’s marketing is also a very expensive proposition, particularly on the tent pole releases.
| ALSO IN THIS COLUMN | • The latest cinematic entry to MoMA will surprise you
• The MTV Movie Awards outdo themselves
• Getting inside what a 'boom man' is
• Inside the new releases that matter
• Sharon Stone doesn't like, uh, Chinese people? • Al Gore's shocking new endeavor
• The Five Things I Learned This Week
• Behind-the-scenes of Stumped's interview with producer Emilio Ferrari
|
At this point in time, fifteen minutes before the movie’s first showing, the grand majority of spending is done for the studio. Yes, there will be some ads for the movie in its first week and yes, there is a marketing budget for the film’s later DVD and Blu-ray release, but this is generally such a small fraction of the amount of money spent on production and theatrical marketing that it barely deserves mentioning. Once a film has been available on the home entertainment market for about eighteen months, it becomes known as a catalog title. The beauty of catalog titles (for the studios at least) is that they’re already paid for! Release Batman as a special edition DVD or trot out the original, black and white Mummy movies in a three pack, it doesn’t matter, the studio has a new product to work with that it barely has to spend anything to create.
While creating a new special edition DVD or an old DVD with new packaging technically requires doing something, repromoting old titles actually doesn’t (other than paying Best Buy a small fee to put the titles in a premium purchase area). It’s for this reason that you see DVDs for romantic comedies near the cash registers around Valentine’s Day, African-American themed films during Black History month, horror movies around Halloween and Pearl Harbor movies near the beginning of December. The studios have to do very little and, in return, they see a huge bump in the sales of their catalog titles.
Before every Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, the magazine receives several press releases trumpeting roughly a dozen movies that would be perfect gifts for our moms and dads. Last year, Fox’s press release headline read: “Give Mom a Gift She Can Enjoy Over and Over!”
The funny thing about these repromotes though is how many of them seem designed to give your parents horribly unfitting films for their special day. 2007’s Fox titles that were being championed as a great way to show mom that “she is better than a box of chocolates” involve sexually suggestive titles like The Banger Sisters, Woman on Top and Man Trouble (and if there’s one person whose ‘man trouble’ I don’t want to know about, it’s my mother), plot lines that are ripe with infidelity, A Walk in the Clouds, lesbians, Kissing Jessica Stein, and falling marriages, Trust the Man.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom… here’s a movie about cheating on dad in order to awaken the sexual beast hidden deep within you! If only they sold greeting cards to go with these gifts.
This year, Fox decided against a Mother's Day repromote; people, I suppose, could just pick one of the twenty titles that they didn't buy last year. Instead, they came up with a Father’s Day repromote that was designed to “celebrate the everyday hero” (their emphasis, not mine). To help dad understand that he, as an everyman is still important and, that anyone, regardless of their talent level, can succeed and be a hero, Fox suggested I get my dad… X-Men and The Fantastic Four.
If those feel good, rags-to-riches, underachievers make good (after being struck with high levels of radiation) didn’t do the trick, Fox suggested I get my father old war movies that I hadn’t ever heard of. Titles like Carve Her Name with Pride, Morning Departure, Secret Invasion and The Seceret of Santa Vittoria.
One movie I am happy to say Fox didn’t suggest I get my father was the DVD of Unfaithful. For this I was truly pleased; it’s always nice to see society and popular culture heading in the right direction. Then I realized the saddest truth of all: the reason Fox didn’t suggest I give my father was because they’d suggested I give it to my mother a year ago. (If I was interested in spending more than $15 on presents for mom last year, I could have bought her another title that Fox thought would be perfect to express my feelings of love and gratitude: their biopic about the famous sex researcher, Kinsey).
After much thought and deliberance, this year I’m chosing to get my parents the exact same gift. I’m going to give them both a big hug… and his-and-hers copies of the Kama Sutra. It seems safer than listening to Fox recommend movies I should get them.
Nothing Makes a Movie Good Like Putting It in Metal
Notes on the repackaging of older titles
As I touched on above, releasing new DVDs of older titles is a guaranteed cash cow for a studio. The cost of these special editions is minimal—there is little in the way of overhead outside of the price of authoring the DVD, a limited marketing budget and occasionally the fees of some DVD producers for creating the DVD’s bonus features.
The worst of these repackaged DVD were courtesy of the non-defunct Artisan Entertainment. When Artisan released "new" versions of Rambo and Terminator 2, they put the DVDs in metal containers. Heavy metal containers with sharp corners. Heavy metal containers with sharp corners that could easily draw blood should you be up late at night and accidentally drop the DVD on your foot because you mistook your Playstation for a cat in the dark and tried not to trip over it. Suffice it to say, DVDs should never be able to actually puncture the skin if dropped from waist height onto the top of your foot. Hypothetically speaking.
Fox also has metal cases--as part of their SteelBook Collection--but the corners are rounded. I will get into their Lenticular Collection later... as soon as someone can tell me why Fox just doesn't call the latter collection their Hologram Collection.
THE QUESTION: I've enjoyed watching movies for a long time and have waited far too long to ask the question, what is a "boom man" and what does he do? Dan S. via e-mail
THE ANSWER: Terminology for the different crew positions on a film production can be a rather amusing topic for people outside Hollywood circles. Such is the nature of things when an industry has positions with titles like '2nd 2nd assistant director', 'best boy', 'key grip', 'clapper loader', 'gaffer' and the label at hand, 'boom man' (or 'boom operator'). Interestingly, the labels are also somewhat malleable in the sense that what a 2nd 2nd assistant director does on one movie might not be what a 2nd 2nd assistant director on another movie. But back to the boom operator.
One of the most hidden elements of filmmaking is the element of sound. Whenever possible, productions try to use location sound (sound that is captured while shooting). It's definitely cheaper that way since no additional dialogue recording (ADR) will be necessary and the amount of time needed to mix the sound is substantially lessened. In order to capture the location sound (and specifically the actors' dialogue) as efficiently as possible, film crews use a microphone on a stick that is held over the heads of the actors, just out of frame. That microphone is called a boom. The man who holds the boom is the guy credited as the boom operator or boom man.
To assist the boom man, the boom is counterbalanced to make holding it easier that in would initially appear. As is the case with most behind-the-camera positions, there is a not often examined art to being a boom man. He has the unenviable task of unobtrusively holding a fairly heavy, 15-foot long microphone close to the actors and yet out of sight of the camera--if the tip of the microphone appears in frame, the take is effectively ruined, if the microphone is too far away from the actors, the sound is unusable. If the actors have to move around during the take, it's the boom man's responsibility to follow them with the microphone. Suffice it to say, operating a boom is a physically demanding position where perfection is taken for granted. These are reasons 1-7 of why I will not be a boom man.
