When the stars are not aligned

Chamber005 said:
So the question should be a GREAT movie with GOOD advertising or GREAT movie with a GOOD name...

...This is why I feel Celebrity will continue to harm film and could eventually start to be seen as a negative...
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Taken to its logical conclusion then, I guess you better make sure to make a MEDIOCRE or at best PRETTY GOOD film, because if you make a GREAT one, or heaven forbid a REALLY GREAT one, you and your cast would run the risk of becoming Celebrities, which in your version of the future means you'd be doomed.
 
Ted Spencer said:
Taken to its logical conclusion then, I guess you better make sure to make a MEDIOCRE or at best PRETTY GOOD film, because if you make a GREAT one, or heaven forbid a REALLY GREAT one, you and your cast would run the risk of becoming Celebrities, which in your version of the future means you'd be doomed.
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LOL

Well, I don't think any of the actors I'm working with (or will work with currently) are too much concerned about stardom. I tend to work with like-minded folks.

But absolutely and without sarcasm if you become a Celebrity as an artist it seems to me that it is intensely difficult to have your work be more important to an audience than is your Celebrity. I think many Celebrities deal with this (and because of their mediocre talents can't overcome it).

Obviously creative artists have an easier time of it than do performance artists. I can't imagine anything worse for an actor than being recognizable. When your entire artistic position is comprimised by something as daunting as Celebrity -- sure you make a bunch of money, but who cares about money if you're no longer able to be effective as an artist?

But a lot of the time you see actors become their Celebrity and realize that they were never really actors in the first place, they were just people who wanted to be famous.
 
I think what you're forgetting is that a lot of people become famous because they're talented. Daniel Day Lewis is perfectly capable of being effective as an artist. Having people ask him for an autograph isn't going to change that.
 
RallyMonkey said:
I think what you're forgetting is that a lot of people become famous because they're talented. Daniel Day Lewis is perfectly capable of being effective as an artist. Having people ask him for an autograph isn't going to change that.
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That seems to be what a large portion of Celebrity used to be about, but if you look around, honestly, ask the population en masse who they're more familiar with, Kate Gosselin or Daniel Day Lewis, and the former will get the resounding percentage.

You used to have to actually do something or accomplish something in order to be a Celebrity. Now none of that matters.

So if Celebrity is further cheapened in the next decade and the next, we won't be too far off from the cheapness of Celebrity cheapening the films in which the Celebrity appears.

I'm not saying that a famous actor is a bad actor or that a famous actor who is also known for being a great actor will hurt a film, I'm saying that an actor who has a "name" but who is not necessarily known BECAUSE they are a great actor (e.g. B/C listers) in your movie could actually do much more harm than good. Having Lorenzo Lamas as your lead actor opposed to some guy no one has ever heard of could easily hurt the integrity of your film and possibly even its long term profitability.
 
When movies that have cast Kate Gosselin as the lead start making big bucks at the box office, you can start complaining. Right now, the big box office pulls are people who have proven themselves as actors. Will Smith, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Sandra Bullock. Now, not necessarily good actors, mind you. But they are known as actors, they began as actors, and they're not huge pulls in the tabloids. When was the last time you saw a scandal involving Will Smith? Yet, there's not denying he's a major celebrity, has huge box office appeal, and would most likely improve any one of our films if we somehow were able to cast him.
 
RallyMonkey said:
When movies that have cast Kate Gosselin as the lead start making big bucks at the box office, you can start complaining. Right now, the big box office pulls are people who have proven themselves as actors. Will Smith, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Sandra Bullock. Now, not necessarily good actors, mind you. But they are known as actors, they began as actors, and they're not huge pulls in the tabloids. When was the last time you saw a scandal involving Will Smith? Yet, there's not denying he's a major celebrity, has huge box office appeal, and would most likely improve any one of our films if we somehow were able to cast him.
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But again, that's apples and oranges. I'm talking for the low-budget guys (and the "names" they can afford).

Also, as I've said, I'm talking about business trends. Trends have to do with forecasting. And by my estimations it isn't about Kate Gosselin's name helping a production, it's about Tom Cruise's HURTING a production -- as, in the near future, we could see Celebrity marginalizing film. This isn't radical thinking, it's been progressively getting more and more obvious as the decades have gone on.

It used to be that the ONLY thing you needed was Cary Grant or Fred and Ginger in your movie. The film didn't have to be particularly good, it just had to show off the stars doing what they do. No, though, with the invention of reality television and the paparazzi, the real-life storylines of Celebrity typically supercede the films the Celebrities appear in.

I can't imagine data would be very easy to find on this, but I'd like to know, percentage-wise, if in the last decade 100 low budget films with "name" actors made more or less percentage of profits than 100 low budget films with no name actors.

Obviously Paranormal Activity pretty much destroys the curve, so even leaving that out of the equation, I wouldn't be surprised if the safer bet in low budget films is transferring "name" actor money to marketing money (all things being equal in regards to the script and execution).

Heck, let's say Avatar breaks every single box office record in history and smashes through 1 billion, it will still, percentage-wise, be an epic failure compared to something like Paranormal Activity, and certainly Star Wars.
 
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In many cases a "name" actor is part of the marketing since it may require less marketing dollars to get people to see the film. It is a balance of where to spend the money. Some genres do not need name actors and in some cases can even distract, as in the horror genre.

Marketing can also be different, marketing to a distributor to be picked up, or marketing to the end buyer are two very different strategies with the latter being more expensive.

Michael
 
I've been leaning more to the idea of putting up and coming musicians in the film that have very strong and loyal fanbases, easy to target and almost guarantee DVD sales. Bands tour and are always in front of audiences, They usually have their own online stores and merchandise tables at their gigs.

If you can find an artist like that, and they fit a role in your story... and if they had decent acting skills then it can be a winning idea.

Thats more leaning to the COME UP WITH THE BEST MARKETING STRATEGY vs. REMOVE ALL DISTRACTIONS FROM YOUR STORY
 
That's a nice idea, but professional musicians and singers who are also fine actors are very, very rare. The two abilities are actually almost completely unrelated. Rappers are another matter, basically because they're actually not musicians. What they do is much closer to acting than music, which is why there are so many of them who have had enormous success on film and TV. The number of popular music stars (who got famous as such first) who have had comparable acting success is relatively very small. It's much easier also to find good actors who can sing reasonably well, since musical theatre is so much based on that, but again, very few of these ever sustain significant careers on the music-only side.

I do expect that my position on this will draw a considerable amount of disagreement here however... : )

BTW, at least in my own long experience in the music business, and having started out as an art student, it's my observation that music and art talents frequently do coincide. But surprisingly rarely music and acting, at least not at a high level in both.
 
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It's interesting that the catalyst behind this thread was a Newsweek article I'd read that mentioned films as being just an aside in the storylines that is Celebrity (and thus its possibly negative effect to the integrity of a film in which Celebrity appears), because GQ just published an article this week concerning a similar trend, but instead of films they referenced the change in Celebrity and how it affects late night talk shows.

"The whole late-night-talk-show business model was always about offering us the illusion of intimacy with famous people, which makes it more than a little bit inconvenient that celebrity is now as devalued as a sack of Zimbabwean dollars."

Again, I think this kind of rhetoric applies to the future of film (and especially as it concerns the lower level Celebrity that indie film is apt to be able to afford).

For as long as I can remember I've felt that actor movie stars were terribly over valued, the same as professional athletes. But the problem is that if you don't give the money to them, who do you give the money to? Certainly in film there is a large line of people who could get paid better, but in athletics it's a different story. Maybe someday we'll see a better tax structure that sees a team's surrounding city see a lot of those profits instead of 30 million dollar salaries. And, I suppose, the same could be said for film profits, but unlike the New York Jets, you can film a movie in Canada as easliy as you can in New Jersey.

That's more of a OT tangent, though.

Regardless, the trend appears that as we move forward and Celebrity continues to be devalued and actors continue to seek out fame, "movie stars" will become less and less important in the film business. ACTORS will still be vital, as always, but if an actor chooses to submerse him/herself in the accolades of fame, the consequences could be that their fame prevents them from being a viable choice for a film.

Again, though, like with any business, the trend will begin on the micro level and the big boys will only bend once they have no other choice than to do so.
 
Chamber005 said:
Obviously Paranormal Activity pretty much destroys the curve, so even leaving that out of the equation, I wouldn't be surprised if the safer bet in low budget films is transferring "name" actor money to marketing money (all things being equal in regards to the script and execution).
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Paranormal Activity is an exception, not a rule. The last time a film like itself actually opened to wide release was The Blair Witch Project, almost a decade ago. How is a particular kind of film that comes around once in a decade destroying any curve?


Regardless, the trend appears that as we move forward and Celebrity continues to be devalued and actors continue to seek out fame, "movie stars" will become less and less important in the film business.
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That's a pipe dream.
 
subtleinspiration said:
Paranormal Activity is an exception, not a rule. The last time a film like itself actually opened to wide release was The Blair Witch Project, almost a decade ago. How is a particular kind of film that comes around once in a decade destroying any curve?
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Because even if you only included one Paranormal Activity in an entire decade, percentage-wise, it pretty much kills the top 10 grossing movies of all time -- combined.

Theatrical release isn't really a big factor when you're talking about percentages. If you made a 50K indie flick and sold it via self-distribution and earned, say, 100K total, you just grabbed a 200% profit, which is much more than most Hollywood films.
 
Ted Spencer said:
Rappers are another matter, basically because they're actually not musicians.
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Huh? Thats like saying the Pope isn't catholic

Ted Spencer said:
The number of popular music stars (who got famous as such first) who have had comparable acting success is relatively very small.
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I agree with that, but for a lot of micro budget indie projects they are casting first time no name actors with questionalble acting talent... hey they might as well have a first time actor that has the potential of bringing some marketing leverage to the table.

Im not anti-story... Im just pro-marketing.
 
(Re: rappers not actually being musicians)

Imaginate said:
Huh? Thats like saying the Pope isn't catholic
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Fundamentally, rapping is rhythmic speaking. For my money that's got little more to do with music than dancing, which is rhythmic movement. Thus, if rappers are musicians, then so are dancers. But neither are.

The discussion gets trickier when we try to define percussionists in the same terms, but I'm comfortable calling them musicians because of the enormous complexity of it, and particularly of doing it well, and the profound, ancient integration of percussion with tonal music. On the other hand there's the old joke about the band that consists of "four musicians and a drummer".

But I digress...

Rapping is much closer to acting than music, which explains why so many rappers have become durable movie and TV stars, just *within the last decade* or so, where singers and other musicians very rarely have, even though they've had a far, far longer time to (not) do so. For me, that fact alone pretty much proves the point.
 
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subtleinspiration said:
I'd like to see some hard numbers on that.
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LOL

Okay, just grabbing the top ten and not doing all the inflation drama as that would have little impact regardless -- top ten movies of ALL TIME, taking their domestic AND foreign gross (and Paranormal Activity doesn't even have a foreign gross yet)

The top ten movies cost 1.348 billion dollars to make and earned 9.822 billion dollars, or a 700% approx return.

Whereas Paranormal Activity cost 15K and (so far) has earned 107.737 million or, a 7,182% return.

Even if you DIDN'T add in the marketing of the top ten movies of all time and DID add in the marketing for PA, they would still get crushed. (10 million for marketing still gets over 1,000 percent return). And remember, we're talking about 10 movies vs 1, and the top ten movies of ALL TIME vs a movie shot on a camcorder with no stars.

You now have your hard numbers. ;)
 
I think you have to consider the big franchise type movies are just that - you need to look at overall revenue generated since that is what they are designed for - Burger King, toys, t-shirts, and everything else a "movie" can be slapped on to these days.

Michael
 
Excellent point MichaelP. Studios don't make movies and expect all their money back on the box office. They derive additional revenues from selling the soundtrack, action figures, sponsorships with food joints and what not, etc... So the box office money alone can't give you an accurate picture of profit.

Michael H.
 
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