Michael Moore; his agent, Ari Emanuel; director Terry George; Jeff Daniels; and Malcolm McDowell, got together in a panel discussion for a week on what is wrong in the movie industry.
Terry George said, "I believe that selling movies is like selling corn flakes to the studio, quite often, there's nothing in the box at all."
Moore offered that Hollywood is pushing mediocre, "cookie-cutter" movies.
The huge salaries of actors was considered one of the major problems of the industry according to Malcolm McDowell, citing Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks specifically.
"We're fascinated as much as anybody because we're talking about it," George added. "The public is to blame. Don't blame the actors, you're the ones that watch them."
Jeff Daniels thought that marketing was also destroying good films.
Ari Emanuel disagreed that movies were basically being mass-produced in the "cookie-cutter" way that Moore suggested and said that, "I don't think anybody goes out with any intention to make a bad movie."
Some of these things are real problems in my opinion. The bloated salaries of stars isn't the publics fault though, it's the studios who don't do their homework and see that it has never been the stars that make the movie at all. It has always been the quality of the story offered that make it all happen.
Look at movies that get big first-weekend numbers based upon a well-known director or actor. If the movie isn't done well, it flops right away and takes a loss. It doesn't matter who makes it or is in it. In this sense, Terry George is right.
But he is also wrong in the area of people watching big actors and so are part of the problem. Again, this is an illusion, based upon what I wrote above. I've said it before on this blog that if you want to see if this is true, take any actor and list all of the movies they performed in and the money the movie made. The results on a graph would look like huge upswings and as many valleys.
It's good to see some of the insiders looking at real issues and saying what, for the most part, are the problems that Hollywood has to overcome.
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