Exploiting Hollywood 1980.

Chapter 1607 Signing a Director Talent
Ronald did not follow up on the cooperation projects with 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Columbia, nor did he attend the cooperation ceremonies and other matters. He delegated all matters to his colleagues.

Michel Cannold negotiated distribution agreements with several major studios, and obtained a share of some distribution work for New United Artists in the country. The reorganized team joined the distribution and marketing teams of various studios as partners to assist in their work.

It just so happened that the newly formed United Artists Distribution, except for a few old employees from the old United Artists/MGM period who joined the new United Artists, most of the others were either transferred from Daydream or newly recruited young people, who really needed some learning and practice.

David Simkins was responsible for following up on the script. Ronald gave his own understanding of the script, and left the specific process of repeated wrangling, rewriting, and rewriting to the team to solve.

These people all started following Ronald from his entrepreneurial works such as "Dirty Dancing" and "Adventures in Babysitting". At a young age, they were appointed as the heads of United Artists, one of the eight major studios at the time and the most well-known among artistic creators in the industry. They are all full of energy.

Of course, due to DDH's option agreement, if the projects they are responsible for under United Artists achieve good box office results, their personal wealth will also increase by leaps and bounds.

All of these tasks had to be reported to Ronald twice a week. Since he had worked his way up from being a studio assistant, Ronald knew the key points of these reports and would not make any major mistakes.

He also has veteran Michael Medavoy to help monitor various projects, and he is fully aware of the progress, possible problems, etc.

These things didn't take up too much of Ronald's time, so he had plenty of time to make breakfast for his family, help Diane memorize her lines, fly to New York to meet with Helen, attend social events on Martha's Vineyard, and so on.

As the chairman of a listed company with a good structure, mature and experienced personnel, and pioneering ideas, Ronald can actually sit back and enjoy the fruits of his labor most of the time. He can also spare more time to think about more important issues, such as how to discover new directors and actors and give them opportunities to grow.

From the company's perspective, he can leave a huge favor and then let them sign a film contract with United Artists. From the industry's perspective, obviously expanding the market is the most important issue for companies in Hollywood.

Movies are already a niche industry, and the audience who watch movies once a month are teenagers and some movie fans. In fact, the general public can only go to the cinema during the summer and Christmas seasons.

Only by constantly innovating, producing excellent artistic works, and attracting audiences who do not usually watch movies to theaters can we preserve and expand this market.

Only when the market is stable can there be a suitable space for those niche films to make money. If the market is gradually shrinking and no newcomers enter, then the entire Hollywood will only seek insurance and invest only in big productions with big directors and big stars. Not only will the output and quality of the so-called popcorn blockbusters be reduced, but the so-called niche art films will have no room to survive.

Ronald thinks that going to film festivals is one way to find directors with potential. Now Harvey Weinstein is fully committed to creating films that win awards at film festivals.

But there is a limitation to this approach, which is that the director may not be suitable for directing the most common commercial films in Hollywood. Film festivals usually have small juries to decide the winning films, which makes taste more random.

Many times, it may be that a few judges have a special preference for a certain movie, which can make the movie win the award.

However, the jury, which is composed of industry insiders, does not always have the same taste in appreciating movies as the audience. Industry insiders are more concerned about the film's expression techniques and the complexity and layering of the actors' performances.

What ordinary audiences care about most is the kind of story that doesn't stop you for a moment and makes you want to keep watching what happens next.

So, Ronald's current method is to watch some movies that have done well at the box office in theaters around the world every week and discover some talents from them.

The first movie that amazed him was a movie with a very strange name, called "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar"

The three "female" protagonists of this movie are Patrick Schweitzer, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo.

Yes, this is a comedy about two New York Drag Queen beauty pageant champions, one white and one black, who take a Hispanic Drag Queen to Los Angeles to participate in the National Drag Queen Competition. They accidentally enter a conservative southern town and become good friends with a group of women in the town.

Patrick Schweitzer has played a masculine idol like Johnny in Dirty Dancing, Wesley Snipes has played athletic characters like streetball basketball players, and John Leguizamo has played a gangster in Daring Harbour.

In this movie, three men with overflowing male hormones put on women's clothes, thick makeup, and retro clothes from the 1960s and 1970s, and actually performed a kind of "enchantment"...

You know, movies are the art of images, and men and women are the two most familiar characters to the audience. The director's imagination for images and his ability to train actors can be tested by being able to make the protagonists, who used to be male idols with overflowing hormones, show feminine qualities.

Ronald asked someone to find out that the director of this strange film was a British woman named Beben Kidron. She used to shoot documentaries and TV series for the BBC. She was one year younger than Ronald, but she had been shooting TV series for almost as long as Ronald.

Knowing full well the discrimination against women in this industry, especially in the field of directing, Ronald felt that Ben Kidron was even more amazing. He found her through his agent and promised to invest in her next film.

Biban Kidron was also unambiguous and asked Ronald whether he had full creative freedom. United Artists is known for giving directors the greatest creative freedom in history. He didn't know whether Ronald could give him the right to final cut, as well as freedom in important matters such as script preparation and casting.

Of course, Ronald’s answer to her was very direct: he had creative freedom but had to accept the supervision of New United Artists.

It was impossible for United Artists to give Michael Cimino as much creative freedom as it did in the early 1980s, and in the end they were held hostage by him and had to keep increasing the budget.

Therefore, the so-called creative freedom must also be included in micro-project management. Specifically, from the director's project proposal, script writing, project preparation, casting, location scouting, to formal shooting, etc., New United Art will have a series of important standards that must be met before it can give the green light to move on to the next film.

Moreover, New United Artists will have people with rich film experience who work closely with the director to provide any necessary support and report promptly when the director deviates from the original creative intention and significantly increases the budget.

If these requests are reasonable, United Artists will be more inclined to meet them than other major studios. If the requests go beyond the scope of the film's box office recovery, they will be rejected.

In short, compared with other major studios, Ronald's conditions are more relaxed creative freedom, and will not restrict the presentation of the film script and characters because of the requirements of the stars. Instead, it respects the integrity of the director and the story more.

In today's market where celebrities decide everything, Ronald's approach is very rare. Of course, you have to get Ronald's approval on your creativity to enjoy this creative freedom, otherwise, you can just be a tool director and make commercial films.

Biban Kidron was quite satisfied with this, after all, it is not easy to find a boss who truly understands the art of film. Having such an art master to talk to, many communication problems are much simpler.

He liked New United Artists' conditions better than Ben Kidron, so he gave up Miramax's conditions. Weinstein always asked directors to use more stars instead of actors who were suitable for the roles in the script, and he interfered with artistic creation even more than Ronald.

Another film that shocked Ronald was David Fincher's "Se7en," which was released on the same day as "Showgirls," by the veteran Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven.

As a result, the box office of this large-scale, suspense film far exceeded that of Paul Verhoeven, who was famous for his box office success.

Although Verhoeven had previously made RoboCop, Basic Instinct and other very popular exploitation films that upgraded the budget and stars with the shooting style of B-level films, it seems that with Showgirls, after achieving continued success, Verhoeven finally opened up his desire to express himself.

This "Showgirls" is full of his own ideology and expression of the alienation of human beings by American capitalism.

The heroine Elizabeth Berkeley is not a typical sexy star, and her brown curly hair is not the traditional blonde or black hair that Hollywood likes. The bad guys in the movie are all white. A white hitchhiker robs the heroine, but the one who treats her well is an unemployed black man.

All these plot arrangements full of personal preferences are funny to the audience who are familiar with the reality of America. Do you really think that you are more likely to be robbed by a white person who drives a pickup truck and gives you a ride than a black person without a legitimate job?

In comparison, the Seven Deadly Sins were easily accepted by American audiences.

The male protagonist is an impulsive detective played by Brad Pitt, his partner and mentor is a veteran detective played by Morgan Freeman, and the villain is a perverted murderer played by Kevin Spacey.

He killed several unrelated victims according to the seven deadly sins in the Bible, and finally killed the wife of the detective played by Brad Pitt (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), and finally let the detective played by Brad Pitt kill him.

The film received a poor response during its internal screening, as many people felt that it was too dark and violent, and contained extremely violent elements such as beheadings.

But after the film was released, the box office response was exceptionally good. It is possible that the scandal between Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow also added some marketing effect.

However, compared to the star's performance, Ronald cares more about David Fincher's great progress.

When he filmed Alien 3, it was a box office failure and almost destroyed the good reputation of the series that Ridley Scott and James Cameron had established in the first two films.

This film, Seven Deadly Sins, seems to have been reborn. It seems that David Fincher learned how to make a Hollywood commercial hit overnight.

This film, based on the story of the Zodiac Killer who has never been caught in history, unexpectedly hits the mark of American audiences' love of watching this type of story.

Ronald also felt very educated. He originally thought that the box office success of The Silence of the Lambs was largely due to the ability of director Jonathan Demme. Although Demme's directing level is indeed extraordinary, it now seems that the audience has a strange natural interest in this kind of serial killer theme, which may have played a more critical role in the box office.

David Fincher is generally considered to have reactivated his directorial career after this movie, and he is being sought after by several major studios, hoping to sign a contract with him for his next movie.

However, David Fincher himself still believes that the reason why this film, released by New Line Cinema, a subsidiary of Turner Media, was able to achieve box office success is related to the fact that they gave him more creative freedom.

The film, Seven Deadly Sins, cost no more than $3500 million to make, and grossed $1300 million in its first weekend, with domestic box office expected to exceed $ million. If a major studio were responsible for the distribution, the figure could be even higher.

Therefore, his negotiation requirement was to maintain the greatest possible creative freedom. After New United Arts approached him, it was only as one of the possible competitors.

The biggest competitive advantage of United Artists is that as one of the top eight, it can still provide the same creative freedom as a small publishing company. The disadvantage is that the so-called publishing team is actually not as competitive as the other seven.

Ronald treated it as a process of building relationships and instructed his team that they would rather lose to others than give David Fincher the impression that United Artists was like a big studio that controlled many creative aspects.

Give this director who revived his career as a Hollywood director some time. Even if United Artists fails to cooperate with him this time, with Fincher's mentality of fully controlling the creative process, it is very likely that it is only a matter of time before he cooperates with United Artists in the future.

Paul Verhoeven, who was facing conflicts with MGM due to the box office failure of Showgirls, also entered the preparation process for his new film.

MGM was unwilling to continue supporting his creations, believing that he had run out of ideas. New United Artists offered to help, saying it was willing to be responsible for the production and distribution of Van Hoeven's next film.

Paul Verhoeven, perhaps stung by the box-office failure of Showgirls, insisted on meeting with Ronald.

The director has achieved great success in Hollywood, so he has a lot more requirements for filming. After the failure of Showgirls, he is obsessed with his autonomy in his next film, so he will consider partners only after ensuring creative freedom.

Ronald agreed to come to his house to talk, but before meeting him, he left him alone for half an hour.

"Director Van Hoeven, I was watching TV with my family just now and didn't know you were here. Please accept my apology."

Looking at Van Hoeven who was already sitting restlessly in the study, Ronald came up and apologized to him, which prevented him from getting angry.

"What kind of TV has attracted your attention? Many Hollywood directors I know don't watch TV series." Van Hoeven still teased Ronald.

"Ah, I don't watch TV either. The TV station is broadcasting the Simpson trial live right now. The closing arguments just came out... This is the news that we Americans are most concerned about..."

"So is he guilty or innocent?" Upon hearing this, Van Hoven was at a loss for words.

"I guess the jury will need a few weeks to deliberate. Come, let's talk about your new project..."