John August

Film Industry

Setting is not story

Film Industry, Genres, Pitches

[This article](http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-paradise-prison26-2009jul26,0,3103335,full.story) from Sunday’s LA Times makes a great case study in the difference between an interesting setting and an actual movie idea:

> Pagasa may be a 75-acre speck of sand and rock, but that hasn’t stopped a swarm of countries from battling over the hundreds of specks of sand and rock that make up the Spratlys, which may be the most disputed island chain on Earth.

> So, in 2002, the Philippines decided to establish a small colony of hardy civilian settlers on the island, augmenting the two dozen military workers who earn special “loneliness pay” to live on the far-off spot — and bolstering its claim that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

> The result is sort of “Cast Away” meets Plymouth Rock.

It’s worth reading John Glionna’s entire article, because it’s quickly clear that Cast Away is only one of many different kinds of movies you could set on the island.

Here are some elements I found compelling:

* **Isolated, together.** The “volunteers” are far from home, but never alone. In fact, the island is so tiny you can’t get away from someone.

* **Primitive and modern.** Despite the airstrip, most of their food comes from fishing. A bad typhoon can destroy them. Yet they keep blogs.

* **An international dispute over an unimportant piece of dirt.** Is it really the airstrip the Philippines wants to protect, or its ego?

What is a Pagasa movie?

Is it a thriller? Most thrillers rely on something to isolate the protagonist, either literally (Panic Room) or figuratively (The Bourne Identity). Islands work well for this. In 2002, I pitched a version of Alien v. Predator set on an island in Maine during a massive storm; Pagasa could work similarly.

Is it a comedy? Pagasa is a military installation, so it’s not hard to envision a version of Stripes, cast with a bunch of funny younger actors.

Is it a romantic comedy? Given its isolation and lop-sided male-female ratio, it’s a natural and cinematic setting.

My point is that there’s a big difference between the world of a movie (the setting, the rules, the background color) and the movie itself. And that bridging that gap is what screenwriters do.

When you’re a newish-but-working writer in Hollywood, you get sent articles like this all the time. The producer or creative exec will say, “We think there’s a movie here. Come in and pitch your take.” Generally, they’ll give you some kind of direction, like, “We see it as The Piano, but, you know, funnier.”

As the screenwriter, your job is to come up with the characters, conflicts, goals, themes, reversals and set pieces that make the story worthwhile. (In TV, you call this breaking a story.) You’re not getting paid for this, even though it may take a week of your time. Rather, you’re auditioning for a job. You want them to hire you to write it.

Most of the time, you won’t get the job. But breaking story after story is amazing practice, and each pitch helps you figure out not only how plot works, but how the movie industry works.

Playing to the core

Film Industry, Genres, Prince of Persia

Brian Lowry cautions against [taking Comic-Con buzz too seriously](http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118005970.html?categoryid=1682&cs=1):

> Surrounded by ardent fans, it’s easy to get sucked into Comic-Con’s vortex of enthusiasm, forgetting that even with 120,000 people descending on the convention center, that’s still a very, very self-selected group.

The same thing happens at Sundance: films that get a rapturous response in Park City often underwhelm at lower altitudes. Everything plays better to a hungry crowd, particularly one that has trekked a long way just to see what you’ve got.

But that’s not a reason to avoid either festival. If you can’t play to the base, you’re unlikely to push beyond it, either. A movie like Iron Man wants its geek bona fides before pushing further towards the mainstream. Where it gets trickier is a show like Pushing Daisies. Winning a small, ardent fan base can be self-limiting, particularly if it sets you off as a niche program out of the gate.

None of my projects are directly featured this year, though Jordan Mechner will be on a panel about his [Prince of Persia graphic novel](http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2009/07/prince-of-persia-panel-at-comic-con/) — a prequel to the movie — and Tim Burton will inevitably get questions about our next two movies.

Cablevision and the Supreme Court

Film Industry, Follow Up, Television

In January, I wrote about [Cablevision and the Infinite TiVo](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/cablevision-and-the-infinite-tivo), a plan by a cable operator to shift recording of TV shows from users’ boxes to a central server:

> Cablevision wants to offer DVR as a service instead of a device. Rather than recording 30 Rock on the box attached to your TV, the show will be recorded at Cablevision’s headquarters. Then, when you want to watch it, Cablevision will send the show to your television. If it works right, it should feel just like a normal DVR. Only without the cost of the DVR.

I thought it sounded great if you were a consumer, or Cablevision. And pretty damn bad if you were a copyright holder, or someone who produced content. Like, say, a screenwriter.

> Cablevision’s RS-DVR is back-door video-on-demand. They’re trying to offer the networks’ output to their customers on their own terms, without paying any additional fees.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagrees. Sort of.

Today, it [refused to hear an appeal](http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090629-711145.html) on the Cablevision case, allowing the Second Circuit Court’s decision to stand. Cablevision can begin introducing its service.

In a brief to the Supreme Court, the U.S. Solicitor General’s office had already urged the Court to skip this case, [rather than risk bad precedents:](http://www.techlawjournal.com/topstories/2009/20090529.asp)

> Network-based technologies for copying and replaying television programming raise potentially significant questions, but this case does not provide a suitable occasion for this Court to address them.

> The parties’ stipulations, moreover, have removed two critical issues — contributory infringement and fair use — from this case. That artificial truncation of the possible grounds for decision would make this case an unsuitable vehicle for clarifying the proper application of copyright principles to technologies like the one at issue here.

If Cablevision’s service really is *exactly* analogous to a conventional DVR — a giant farm with one hard drive per customer, recording shows only a time-forward basis (no reaching back to record last week’s 30 Rock) — then it’s pretty easy to use the metaphor of a very long hard drive cable. A different case, or a more ambitious service, would offer a better venue for figuring out what role a middleman can play in offering content to consumers.

I don’t think consumers really want a virtual DVR. They want content. They want to watch whichever TV show they want, whenever they want it. And they should be able to.

As I said in my first article:

> The studios should then negotiate with Cablevision and all the other cable and satellite providers to roll out a system that calls this service what it really is: video-on-demand. A consumer should be able to watch (or record in their home) an episode when it’s first broadcast, or get it through VOD for a fee. That fee should be low, cheap enough to make it an appealing alternative to piracy.

Per-screen average

Film Industry, Follow Up, Projects, The Nines

As often happens in comment threads, the discussion for my post [A hard time to be an indie](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/hard-indie) focused less on the original article and more on the observations of a single commenter. In this case, [Rebecca](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/hard-indie#comment-171902):

> I’ve always wondered why the movie Lars and the Real Girl wasn’t released more widely. I only read rave reviews about it and everyone I know who saw it loved it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. They didn’t even release it widely enough to make a profit, the dumbasses.

> Here are the numbers:

> The movie had a $12,000,000 budget. [According to boxofficemojo.com](http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend&id=larsandtherealgirl.htm), it made $90,418 opening weekend in 7 theaters for a $12,916 average per theater.

> The Proposal opened this past weekend in 3056 theaters and grossed $33,627,598 for an average of $11,004 per theater.

> At 5 weeks, Lars and the Real Girl averaged $2,456 per theater after the number of theaters was reduced from its peak the week before.

> The latest Night at the Museum, just averaged $2,636 this week, its 5th.

> It looks to me like decent marketing in various markets, in conjunction with a much wider release, could have made this movie -– and everyone involved with it -– a LOT more money. Can you explain why it would not have made sense to release it into more than 321 theaters during its entire run? Other than thinking that challenging, quirky and maddening = noncommercial, I mean?

Apples, meet oranges.

Per-screen average is simply math: a given film’s box office divided by the number of screens it plays on. ((And even then, it’s a messy measurement. Particularly with wide releases, theaters can increase or decrease the number of screens devoted to a picture even over the course of a weekend, based on demand and sell-outs.)) As a pure number, it tells you nothing about the size of theater, the percentage of seats sold, or what would be typical for that theater on that night.

Bringing in $2,300 over a weekend might be a great haul at a tiny theater in Des Moines, but would be a disaster at Grauman’s Chinese.

The number is only useful when comparing movies in fairly similar situations. If The Happy Harpist made $44,000 at four theaters, and My Third Elbow made $10,000 at three, it’s fair to say that Harpist is outperforming Elbow with an $11,000 per-screen average.

But drill deeper, and you might find reasons why Harpist’s numbers are misleading. For example, it’s possible Harpist made $34,000 on one of its screens, and only $10,000 on the other three. Maybe it’s a hometown director, or other special circumstance. ((Or maybe it’s The Nines. We debuted on two screens — one in New York, one in LA. Two-thirds of our money came from LA’s NuArt.)) Take away that one theater, and Harpist and Elbow are now a dead heat.

More importantly, if you’re one of the low-performing theaters for Harpist, *your* per-screen average is only $3,333. You will make your decisions about whether to keep playing the movie based on that number. Never forget that distributors don’t ultimately decide which movies stick around in theaters; the exhibitors do. They look at their internal numbers to decide which movies will make them the most money.

**With a small number of screens, per-screen average is hugely affected by variations between individual venues.** The denominator — which screens, and where — matters a lot.

Conversely…

**With a big number of screens, per-screen average is relatively unaffected by variations between individual venues.** If you’re playing in 4,000+ screens, it doesn’t matter nearly as much which screens those are. You’re a wide release, playing at every other megaplex in the country. Distributors desperately scramble to get as many good screens as they can, simply so they can generate as much money as they can. Per-screen average is the last thing on their mind.

Some movies are able to successfully platform (expand) from a few screens to a lot. Juno, for example. But if you look at Juno’s [weekend boxoffice breakdown](http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend&id=juno.htm), you’ll see that it never came close to its opening weekend $59,124 per-screen average again. As it climbed to 2,000 screens, the per-screen average plummeted because the denominator had gotten so big. Trust me: Fox Searchlight didn’t care. They were too busy making gobs of money.

Same for The Proposal. Same for Night at the Museum 2. Unlike the makers of Lars and the Real Girl, who carefully selected each of the seven venues it debuted upon — like Goldilocks, not too big, not too small — the studios releasing blockbusters want as many seats as possible. They’re not looking to expand. They don’t need to nurture. They simply want the maximum amount of money, preferably in the shortest amount of time.

Rebecca points to the fifth weekend of Night at the Museum 2 and its $2,636 per-screen average. She conveniently omits that on that weekend it earned $7.8 million. **Money is money. Per-screen average is just a figure.**

Back to Lars
—–

While it’s absolutely fair to play Monday morning quarterback on a movie you love and believe could have made more money, the folks who released Lars and the Real Girl are not dumbasses. You can disagree with their marketing and perhaps their release date. I wouldn’t be surprised if the filmmakers feel disappointed. But they clearly tried to platform the movie much like Juno, and it didn’t work.

Courtesy Box Office Mojo, here are the [numbers for Juno](http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend&id=juno.htm):

juno box office

And here’s [Lars](http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend&id=larsandtherealgirl.htm):

juno box office

Both Juno and Lars started in three theaters, then expanded to 300 in their third week. But Juno far out-earned Lars at every step. By the time it went wide, Juno also had the advantage of the Christmas holiday.

As you’re looking at the Lars chart, rather than focusing on the per-screen average, look at the red numbers in the % Change column. Starting with Nov 2-4, it was making less each week. It was on a decline. The distributor couldn’t justify the millions of dollars it would take to expand the run when it was earning a fraction of that each week.

In the end, Lars and the Real Girl made just under $6 million domestically. Many indies would love to reach that number.

Could Lars have made more money? Perhaps with a different combination of marketing and luck. But per-screen average has nothing to do with it, and using that figure to compare it to wide releases is specious. Limited releases have high per-screen averages *because* they’re on so few screens, not despite it.