'Undefeated': A provocative look at race and class in sports

If we’ve learned anything from the mega-media onslaught over Jeremy Lin, it’s that racial and ethnic stereotypes are still a powerful force in America, especially in the world of sports. My 13-year-old son’s generation is largely colorblind about its sports heroes. If only we could say the same thing about the knuckleheads who write about sports, especially the jerk — excuse me, Foxsports.com columnist Jason Whitlock — who tweeted a nasty remark about Lin’s anatomy the other day, which was followed by a crude ethnic slur in a headline on ESPN’s mobile site.

“Linsanity” inspired comic Larry Wilmore to do a whole ironic riff on “The Daily Show” about the indignity of an Asian American player taking the NBA by storm, right in the middle of Black History Month. When Jon Stewart asked why, as an African American, Wilmore wasn’t more supportive of a person of color’s achievement, Wilmore grouched: “Don’t reduce this to a discussion about my race. This is about his race.”

I bring this up because “Undefeated,” a new documentary that opened last weekend, raises a bundle of provocative questions about how much of a dividing line color is in our lives. The film, directed by T.J. Martin and Daniel Lindsay, is a lovingly crafted portrait of the football team at Manassas High in North Memphis, Tenn. The squad is a cauldron of troubled inner-city kids that undergoes an improbable transformation at the hands of Bill Courtney, a volunteer coach who is just as determined to make a difference in the kids’ lives as he is to win football games.

Most critics have lauded the film. But others have been unsettled by a thorny issue only glancingly noted in the movie: Courtney is white, while his entire team is African American. It’s almost exactly the same setup we saw in “The Blind Side,” the 2009 hit that, like “Undefeated,” focused on a white do-gooder who reached out to help a needy black kid who happened to be a potential NFL football player.

Like “The Blind Side,” “Undefeated” offers a Rorschach test for how people see race in America. At a time when we have a black president, isn’t it time we stopped obsessing about the race of people in our movies? Or in a country where so many people believe that our black president is a Muslim, or not a natural-born citizen, or a man with a “phony theology,” is racism still a wound that hasn’t healed?

From the standpoint of awards, Oscar voters have taken both films to heart. “The Blind Side” earned Sandra Bullock an Academy Award while “Undefeated,” distributed by the Weinstein Co., has landed Martin and Lindsay a documentary Oscar nomination. It’s a high honor for the young pair, who are entirely self-taught--neither went to film school.

For the filmmakers, the high point, so far, was showing an early cut of the film to Courtney. “When Bill watched it, he was a big ball of tears,” recalled Martin. “Finally, he laughed and said, ‘OK, show it to me again. I couldn’t bear to watch the first half-hour because of how fat I looked.’”

Martin, who’s 32, and Lindsay, who’s 33, decided to make the film after reading a newspaper story about O.C. Brown, the team’s star 300-pound lineman, who was living with one of the team’s coaches during the season. Brown needed tutoring to get his grades up enough to land a college scholarship. But no tutor would venture into his poverty-stricken neighborhood.

As soon as Martin and Lindsay set up shop in Memphis, they began following the ups and downs of several other players, notably Chavis Daniels, a talented but volatile player who returns to the team after spending 15 months in a youth prison.

Courtney has a deep emotional connection with his players. In one of the most powerful moments in the film, we discover that Courtney, like many members of the team, grew up in a fatherless family. It’s hardly a surprise to discover that the Weinsteins own the remake rights to “Undefeated,” since its narrative essence — a coach helping a team of troubled kids triumph over adversity — is at the core of dozens of classic sports films.

Watching the film, I couldn’t help but ponder whom I’d want to cast as Courtney in the remake. After all, it’s easy to assemble a who’s who of great actors who’ve played football coaches, including Gene Hackman (“The Replacements”), Denzel Washington (“Remember the Titans”), Al Pacino (“Any Given Sunday”), Billy Bob Thornton (“Friday Night Lights”), Dennis Quaid (“The Express”) and Ed Harris (“Radio”).

With the exception of Washington, those coaches are all white, which raises an unsettling question: Why do so many movies about African Americans have a white protagonist at their core? As the Wall Street Journal’s John Anderson put it, the feelings the kids in “Undefeated” might have about their white coach is a question “that crosses a viewer’s mind, and one that doesn’t get an answer” in the film. When I asked the same question of the filmmakers, they insisted that race wasn’t an issue. (For the record, Lindsay is white and Martin is biracial.)

“In ‘Blind Side,’ they make a point of bringing up race, especially when you see that Sandra Bullock’s wealthy white friends are shocked by what she’s doing,” explains Lindsay. “For us, the kids set the tone. They never brought it up, so we didn’t bring it up. There’s a valid criticism to why feature films get financed that are about white heroes in a black setting. We just told the story we saw and for the kids, race wasn’t on their minds.”

If race isn’t on their minds, class certainly is. When Brown goes to live in his coach’s sprawling home, he says the wealthy manicured subdivision took some getting used to. He remarks on how people jog around the area and says if he did that in his neighborhood, people might think he was running from the police.

Of course, in America race is almost always on someone’s mind, which is why when Chavis drives his coach crazy with his unruly behavior, refusing a ride in his truck, Courtney blurts out: “You don’t like driving with white people?”

If nothing else, “Undefeated” is an indispensable example of the quixotic passion that sports inspires in us all. “Sports is embedded in the fabric of America,” Martin said. “People identify themselves through sports teams. It’s the one thing in our culture where, regardless of where you come from, you have a common passion that breaks down the walls between us.”

Still, as much as I admire the film’s storytelling, I wish it had spent a little more time exploring the chasm between the wealthy white Memphis enclaves and the kids’ desperately poor inner-city neighborhoods. Sports is one of the few ways to inspire honest discussions about race and inequality in America. Which is why it’s so bracing to see phenomena like Jeremy Lin pushing us past all the usual sports cliches and toward a deeper understanding of ourselves.

RELATED: Clint Eastwood's Super Bowl: Chrysler vs. conservatives

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--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: The Manassas Tigers 2009 football team is featured in the new documentary "Undefeated."

Credit: Dan Lindsay/TJ Martin/The Weinstein Company

 

The best picture slump: Is Hollywood stuck in an Oscar bubble?

This year’s box office is booming, except, gulp, for Oscar movies. The 2012 grosses have been surprisingly strong, up nearly 18% year to date compared with 2011. But if you think any of that is thanks to people rushing out to see the best picture contenders ahead of Sunday’s Academy Awards show, think again.

Just look at this past weekend’s box office, which featured five films taking in more than $20 million in U.S. ticket sales over the four-day Presidents Day period. None were Oscar films. In fact, the best performer of this year’s nine best picture nominees, the George Clooney-starring “The Descendants,” finished in 11th place, with an estimated $3.5-million take.

“The Artist,” the prohibitive favorite to win the Oscar for best picture, finished 13th. It took in about $3 million — up 8% from the previous weekend, but it still hasn’t made deep inroads outside of the country’s most cosmopolitan urban markets. In 13 weeks of release, “The Artist” has grossed only $28 million, not bad for a black-and-white nearly silent film but less than what “Safe House” made this past weekend alone.

In years past, Hollywood insiders have cited a post-nomination “Oscar bounce” at the box office as justification for the millions of dollars it spends on Oscar ads. And Hollywood is still in full-on Oscar campaign mode. Clooney has not only showed up for screenings and filmmaker Q&As, but God help him, taken “CBS This Morning’s” Charlie Rose and Lara Logan on a tour of his home, patiently answering every eye-rolling question, including one from Logan, who actually asked, “What’s inside your fridge, George?”

But when you look at the cold hard numbers, the bounce looks more and more like myth than reality.

With the help of Hollywood.com box office swami Paul Dergarabedian, I charted the combined weekend box office grosses for this year’s nine best picture candidates. Though their total box office did indeed rise slightly the weekend after the nominations were announced, it was hardly the highest-grossing weekend for the combined candidates. In fact, if you wanted to win a trivia contest, just ask someone to name the biggest box office weekend for the best picture nominees.

The unlikely answer? The weekend of Aug. 12, when three future best picture nominees, largely propelled by the opening weekend grosses from “The Help,” made a combined $26.7 million. The second biggest weekend was in late September, when the grosses from “Moneyball,” “The Help,” “Midnight in Paris” and “Tree of Life” totaled $23.8 million. The weekend after the Oscar nominations were announced Jan. 24 was only the fourth-largest weekend for best picture nominees, also trailing New Year’s Eve weekend, when the combined best picture nominees made $21.9 million.

Last year, the best week for best picture nominees was also New Year’s weekend, when the best picture nominated films did roughly 70% more business than they did the weekend after the Oscar nominations.

In fact, it’s hard to make a strong case that many of the nominated films were helped in any significant way by the Oscar nominations. Even “The Descendants,” which has continued to have a strong showing at the box office, had its biggest grossing weekend at Thanksgiving, not after the nominations were announced. The only films you can argue that have really benefited from Oscar-related box office are “The Artist” and “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” though both films have spent a healthy chunk of their box office gains in nonstop Oscar advertising.

Sure, some folks are taking in these movies at home, via video-on-demand or Netflix. Four of the best picture nominees — “The Help,” “Midnight in Paris” “Moneyball” and “The Tree of Life” — are available to watch at home. But studios say they’re not seeing much revenue even on that end.

Studio marketers are rarely in sync on many issues, but they are in unanimous agreement that they are getting less and less bang for their Oscar buck with each passing year.

“We don’t even see a big bump anymore when a best picture winner hits home video,” said one leading studio marketer. “The Oscars are about ego and recognition. The spending just doesn’t stand up to any rational analysis. The culture has changed. The era when an elite institutional award could have a lot of sway with the public is pretty much at an end.”

It’s no secret that the academy has been considering the idea of moving Oscars up into late January, as early as the weekend before the Super Bowl. It’s an idea whose time has come, especially since it would push the nominations closer to Christmas and New Year’s weekend, traditionally the biggest moneymaking weekends for most Oscar films.

That would concentrate public attention on the top films but condense the endless campaign season, which now stretches from the early September film festivals to the end of February.

The Oscar nominations have also lost much of their clout because the public decides what it thinks about a movie much earlier than it ever did in the past. Most of this year’s films got little in the way of a bump because moviegoers had access to so much Oscar hype so early in the process that by the time the nominations arrived, they’d either seen the film or checked it off their to-do list.

Older audiences may not be tweeting their friends on Friday night after seeing “Hugo” or “War Horse,” but there is so much chattering-class buzz about the Oscars these days that anyone who wants to feel in the know about the top movies is almost obligated to have an opinion by the time their friends show up for holiday get-togethers. When I had friends over for New Year’s Eve, the kitchen was full of moviegoers who had already decided — three weeks before it landed 10 Oscar nominations — that “The Artist” was hugely overrated.

It’s great to have buzz, but with the Oscars, it looks like all that anticipation can be a real buzz kill.

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--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: The cast of "The Artist" at the Golden Globe Awards. From left: Missi Pyle, Uggie the dog, Jean Dujardin, Michael Hazanavicius and Berenice Bejo. Credit: Al Seib/Los Angeles Times

 

 

Alexander Payne is eager to head back to 'Nebraska'

I went to see Alexander Payne the other day, curious to hear how he was holding up after spending the last few months on the awards circuit, touting "The Descendants," which is up for five Oscars, including best picture and best director. Payne is from Omaha and being a Midwesterner, he's a straight talker -- polite but firm.

Knowing he'd probably rather be back in Omaha than out on the hustings in Hollywood, I asked him how he was handling all the attention. "I don't campaign," he answered, sitting in his airy office on the third floor of an old brick building in Santa Monica. "The studio campaigns. I get trotted out to different events and try to appreciate all of the appreciation for the film. I'm very polite to those who say they've enjoyed the film. The only thing that genuinely tires me is the repetition of the same exact question that I've heard all around the world."

Of course, being a snoopy journalist myself, I had to ask -- what question might that be? "George Clooney and I did a Times Talk session with David Carr the other day, and he asked me, 'Why has it been seven years [since you last directed a film]?' And I replied, 'May I direct your attention to a Frank Bruni article from last November that addresses that very issue?'"

As I said: polite, but firm. I figured Payne would be more interested in talking about his upcoming film, "Nebraska," a story about a father-son road trip across the state that he hopes to shoot later this year. I admit to harboring a special fondness for Nebraska, having family roots there myself. My grandfather grew up in Omaha, where his uncle, Julius Meyer, was pals with Sitting Bull and served as an Indian interpreter and trader, running a store called Julius Meyer's Indian Wigwam.

I showed Payne a photo of Uncle Julius from the 1870s, standing with several Sioux outside the Wigwam. "Where was the store?" Payne said, after studying the photo. I told him it was at Farnam and 14th Street. Payne stared at me. "14th and Farnam?" he said incredulously. "That's where I live."

Small world, huh? Payne still spends most of his time in Omaha, where he has a loft apartment on the top floor of an art deco building downtown. It's right across the street from where the Indian Wigwam used to be. To hear Payne tell it, he's eager to shoot another film in Nebraska, where he made many of his earlier movies, including "About Schmidt" and "Election."

He first read the "Nebraska" script, originally written by Bob Nelson, nearly a decade ago. "Election" producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa had shown it to him, asking if he could find a young Nebraskan director who might be right for it. "After I read it, I said, 'What about me?'" Payne recalled. "It's a road-trip film, so I didn't want to do it right away after 'Sideways.' But Albert and Ron were kind enough to wait."

Casting will be tricky, because Payne says the lead roles are very specific. "It's a lot like casting a Mike Leigh film," he said. "The lead is a cranky Midwestern guy. He goes in and out of dementia and cajoles his son to drive with him from his home in Billings to Lincoln, Nebraska, because he thinks he's won a sweepstakes there. I need Henry Fonda when he was a crotchety old [son of a gun]. But he's not available, so I'm looking elsewhere. I always liked the austerity of Fonda's acting, so that's what I'm going for."

When I asked why he wanted to shoot the film in black and white, Payne had a simple answer. "Because it would look so cool. It seems that our politicians see the world in black and white, so why not our artists? Did Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' have to be in black and white? No. But is it fantastic that it was? To see New York like that? Yes!"

He laughs. "I watch 'Paper Moon' about once a year. Black and white is a good thing."

It would be a good thing if Payne ends up winning some awards on Oscar night. His work on "The Descendants" is the most assured directing of his career. But he isn't holding his breath. He's eager to get back behind the camera, especially if it means he can be back spending time in Nebraska. As he put it: "I'm there whenever I don't have to be here."

He hangs on to the old Omaha photos I gave him. Payne is clearly a man who has a strong sense of place. He tells me that his house here in L.A., up in Topanga Canyon, is reputed to have once been the residence of the notorious gangster Mickey Cohen. "I have no evidence to prove it," he quickly adds. "But I will say that when I've been gardening in my backyard, I've often dug up old whisky and beer bottles."

Payne laughs. "I suppose that doesn't prove anything, but it certainly doesn't disprove it either."

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-- Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Alexander Payne discusses "The Descendants" on a panel at the Pacific Design Center. Credit: Toby Canham / Getty Images

Oscars 2012: Was 'Wings' Hollywood's first bromance?

Today the Oscars are the ultimate showbiz institution — with a swarm of pundits, publicists and consultants keeping the machine running smoothly all season long. But when the Academy Awards were first launched in 1929, it was such small potatoes that news of Oscar’s debut didn’t even get top billing in Variety, which went instead with a story about someone tampering with secret new sound equipment during a movie theater break-in.

The film known today as the first best picture winner (there was also a winner that year for “best unique and artistic picture”) was “Wings,” which is only now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

The movie, released in 1927, was the “Avatar” of its day, a mammoth hit that was still playing in theaters two years after its premiere. It remains the only silent film to win a best picture Oscar, though it may soon have to share that distinction with “The Artist.” “Wings” stars Buddy Rogers, Richard Arlen and Clara Bow (with a cameo by the then-unknown Gary Cooper) in a story about the exploits of fighter pilots during World War I. Paramount made the movie for a then-staggering $2 million.

The historic film screened recently at the academy — and what I saw was both a marvel and a disappointment. Thanks to director William “Wild Bill” Wellman, a decorated wartime pilot himself, “Wings” is perhaps the first film to capture the visceral thrill of armed battle in the sky. The film’s dogfight scenes are astounding even today, filmed with hundreds of real planes and shot with a revolutionary technique for the time: Cameras were mounted in the front of the planes so the actors could actually play their scenes in the air.

Sad to say, when the film is on terra firma, it sags badly. Everything is played too big and broad, especially the flimsy love triangle with Bow, which is the stuff of lame melodrama.

What’s most striking about the film is that, despite the presence of Bow, clearly on hand for her box-office clout, the film is a buddy picture. The real dramatic relationship is between the two daring young flyboys. In essence, “Wings” is the model for 80 years of adventure movies to come — it’s a male love story. Bow is on hand for decorative effect. The soulful affection is all between the two men. When Arlen dies at the end of the picture, mistakenly shot down by his pal, Rogers actually kisses him goodbye full on the lips.

Their relationship — men emotionally bonded by perilous adventures together — echoes across Hollywood history in films by our greatest directors, from Wellman to Clint Eastwood, from Howard Hawks to Quentin Tarantino, from Don Siegel to John Woo. The relationships in “Wings” turn up time and again in dozens of classic male-bonding movies — “Only Angels Have Wings,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Wild Bunch,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Mean Streets,” “Top Gun,” “Reservoir Dogs” and “The Hurt Locker,” to name a few.

It’s hardly a surprise that Wellman was the man to launch the buddy melodrama genre. Expelled from high school for dropping a stink bomb on the principal's head, he was a rough-and-tumble guy whose disdain for actresses was well known. He preferred working with men, saying actresses took too long to prepare for their scenes. When he directed “The Public Enemy,” it was Wellman’s idea to have James Cagney smash a half-grapefruit in his girlfriend’s face, saying it was something he fantasized about doing to one of his wives (he had four).

Like so many American filmmakers who followed his lead, Wellman found relationships between men the essential DNA for dramatic storytelling. It’s still a man’s world, even at Oscar time. No matter who wins the lead actress statuette this year, be it Glenn Close, Viola Davis, Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams or Rooney Mara, she won’t win for being in a film whose central story involves a relationship between a man and a woman.

So if you’ve always wondered why the movie business was such an insular boys’ club, take a look at “Wings,” which is more than just a dusty old Oscar classic. It’s the film that put Hollywood’s love affair with bromance on the map.

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Photo: From left, Charles (Buddy) Rogers, Clara Bow and Richard Arlen in a scene from the 1927 film "Wings," the first best picture winner at the Academy Awards. Credit: Associated Press/AMPAS

Clint Eastwood's Super Bowl showdown: Chrysler vs. conservatives

When I sat down to talk politics with Clint Eastwood in November, the 81-year-old movie icon made it crystal clear that he didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and wasn’t planning to in 2012 either. In fact, since Clint first voted for president, way back in 1952, he couldn’t remember ever voting for a Democrat.

Moreover, when it came to government stimulus, he had this to say: “We shouldn’t be bailing out the banks and car companies. If a CEO can’t figure out how to make his company profitable, then he shouldn’t be the CEO.”

So if Clint was against bailouts, why did he do the now infamous Super Bowl ad for Chrysler? And why did it hit such a raw nerve with conservatives, who’ve been up in arms for the last few days, convinced that Dirty Harry had suddenly become a shill for Obama?

To hear the caterwauling on the right, you’d think that Clint was proposing that Detroit embrace sharia law, not sell more made-in-America automobiles. Fox News commentator Karl Rove labeled the ad “Chicago-style politics,” saying it was a sign of what happens when “the president of the United States and political minions are in essence using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.” National Review editor Rich Lowry lambasted the ad as a ludicrous deification of Detroit, arguing that “If Detroit is a model for our future, we should prepare for national collapse … it remains a byword for urban apocalypse.”

New York Post film critic Kyle Smith was just as scathing, saying: “It’s hard to think of Clint Eastwood as dishonest, isn’t it? But it’s either that or he’s just too dumb to realize his Super Bowl ad was an Obama campaign commercial.”

All I can say is: Did they see the same ad that the rest of us did? Or as one commenter on YouTube put it: “Would someone please tell the right-wing hyperventilators that ‘working together’ is not a code for communism.”

I don’t pretend to know Eastwood all that well, but having interviewed him a few times over the years, it seems pretty clear to me that he did the ad because, personal politics aside, he’s delighted to see — and be associated with — an underdog American company that’s actually generating home-grown manufacturing jobs. Any effort to put blue-collar folk back to work is OK with him, even if his natural political instincts made him suspicious of big government putting Chrysler back in the driver’s seat.

Eastwood, thank God, is not a professional politician, so for him, job creation trumps ideology. Unfortunately, in today’s hyper-partisan political universe, that sort of attitude is akin to heresy.

Still, something else was at work here. First off, the Super Bowl is such a huge spectacle — this year’s broadcast had roughly 110 million viewers — that in the new social media era almost any big event will, by its mass-cult nature,  generate some kind of controversy. Sometimes it’s a tasteless ad, sometimes it’s an inappropriate gesture  during the halftime show. But something, however minor, is almost guaranteed to provoke a storm of indignation, even if nearly all the Sturm und Drang evaporates in a matter of days.

But the uproar over the Chrysler ad also has a lot to do with Eastwood’s iconic status as America’s most beloved tough guy. After all, Eminem did an ad for Chrysler during last year’s Super Bowl that was virtually indistinguishable in tone from the Eastwood spot without prompting even a ripple of GOP protest. So it wasn’t just the message, it was also the messenger.

Conservative operatives like Rove had every reason to view the ad as being an Obama vehicle — if the Obama campaign were hiring a spokesman to get its message across to swing voters, Eastwood would be at the top of the list. The only problem with this logic was that the Super Bowl spot was made by a car company, not the White House. And despite all of the conspiracy theorizing, there’s no evidence that Chrysler paid $12.8 million for the two-minute spot as political payback to the White House. Chrysler simply had the good fortune of finding the world’s best pitchman for its message.
 
The message itself was shrewd. The ad copy identified Chrysler with classic American can-do spirit, with the sandpaper-voiced Eastwood saying: “This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again, and when we do, the world’s going to hear the roar of our engines.”

If you believed that Obama was somehow the beneficiary of this uplift, it hit a raw nerve, because in politics, the candidate who usually wins is the one with the most optimistic message, which is why Ronald Reagan, propelled by his “Morning in America” maxim, won a landslide reelection victory in 1984. But the candidates in this year’s GOP presidential primaries have painted a gloomy portrait of America, presided over by Barack Obama, as a nation in decline.

The Eastwood ad sketches a different story line, arguing that America, led by embattled Detroit, is ready for a comeback. It hit an especially sensitive spot, since most conservatives have been on the other side of the bailout issue — after all, it was Mitt Romney who penned a 2008 op-ed article for the New York Times saying, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”  

In fact, Chrysler has already paid back nearly 90% of the bailout funds it received from both the Bush and Obama administrations. That’s a little-seen factoid that may have been glossed over in the Super Bowl ad media onslaught, but I suspect it had an impact on Eastwood’s decision to do the ad. When we talked in November, he said he was against bailouts, but he also expressed admiration for people who, in economic hard times, found a way to succeed.

“When people are forced to figure things out,” he said, “it makes you more creative at what you do.” In simplified form, that’s what has happened to the American auto industry, which is perhaps why Clint was happy to lend his grizzled gravitas to its turn-around saga. Whether it’s in the movies or real life, people love comeback stories. And when it’s Clint Eastwood telling the story, it’s awfully hard to argue that he’s put politics ahead of principle.

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Photo: Clint Eastwood speaking with reporters at the opening of the Warner Bros. Theater at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington.

Credit: Cliff Owen/Associated Press

Graham King on 'Hugo's' box-office woes: 'It's been painful'

Last weekend I hosted a panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival that featured five producers whose films were Oscar best picture nominees. At one point I asked everyone how many shooting days they had to make the film. After everyone else answered, Graham King, the producer of “Hugo,” got a big laugh, saying “I think our shooting schedule was longer than everyone else’s put together. After 100 days, what are you going to do — call an ambulance?”

When it comes to King’s investment in “Hugo,” it’s probably time for a healthy dose of gallows humor. The Martin Scorsese-directed 3-D film is a cinematic marvel, taking us on an amazing journey through 1930s Paris back to the formative days of moviemaking. The critics swooned over the film’s technical wizardry. The academy gave it 11 Oscar nominations, the most of any film this year. If I had an Oscar ballot, it would get my vote for best picture.

But the film has been a financial meltdown for King, a bigger-than-life movie impresario who has either produced or helped finance an impressive array of prestigious movie star-propelled films, including “Ali,” “Gangs of New York,” “The Aviator,” “The Departed,” “The Tourist” and “Hugo.” King sold off some foreign territories with “Hugo” but is otherwise on the hook for the rest of the film’s losses.

Originally budgeted at roughly $100 million, the movie spiraled out of control during production. King puts the film’s cost at $156 million, thanks to some tax rebates and additional British financing, but others say the film’s budget ended up at $170 million. So far “Hugo” has only taken in about $62 million domestically and last weekend it wasn’t on the box-office top 10 list.

It’s been a sobering experience for King, an ebullient man who is usually the life of the party. On an artistic level, King has much to celebrate, having accomplished the rare feat of producing best picture and animated feature (“Rango”) nominees in the same year. Yet when we had lunch last week, King had the slightly shellshocked air of a stunt pilot who’d barely survived a crash landing in a cornfield.

“I’ve completely changed my way of thinking about making movies, maybe from hitting my head too hard a couple of times,” he told me. “Now when I read a script, I think — what does the audience want to see? In the past, I was only thinking about what I wanted to make. But I’m changing my ways. I’m too old, too tired. I don’t want to live on the edge anymore.”

Of course, living on the edge is what makes King, 50, such a fascinating showbiz character. Born in London, he was a big Chelsea soccer fan whose dad would take him in the middle of the night to a local theater to watch the great Ali-Frazier fights. When he was 18 he moved to Los Angeles to attend college, but instead took a job as a temp at 20th Century Fox, where he ended up as an executive doing international TV deals. By 2001 he’d been nicknamed “The Suicide King” for investing in films that everyone figured were long-shot gambles, like “Traffic” and “Gangs of New York.”

The bet King was really making was on his ability to build relationships with star talent. King has made four films with Scorsese. He’s made two films with Angelina Jolie, including her recent directorial debut, “In the Land of Blood and Honey.” He also has a production company with Johnny Depp, who costarred in “The Tourist,” was the lead voice actor in “Rango” and is starring in the upcoming Tim Burton film “Dark Shadows,” which King also produced. King has a Brad Pitt film, “World War Z,” due out this fall and is prepping a second film with Ben Affleck, who directed the King-produced film “The Town.”

In many ways, King is a throwback to men like Sam Spiegel and Joseph E. Levine, mid-20th century producer titans who made Oscar-drenched films like “On the Waterfront,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Lion in Winter” and “The Graduate.” Like King, they were men of epic ambition who often courted disaster when their films didn’t hit pay dirt. King stands out even more today, especially since today’s studios have grown wary of making $100-million films with costly A-list talent, preferring to cultivate star-free superhero franchises.

When you don’t have studio backing, having talent on your side is your best insurance policy, since the top stars are magnets for the hottest scripts in town. King believes that his willingness to back his stars’ passion projects will end up giving him access to more commercial projects. Depp’s “Rum Diary,” which King produced, was a flop, but their next film together, “Dark Shadows,” has the look of a big moneymaker. King is also a regular patron of screenwriter John Logan, who wrote “Hugo” and “Rango” and is now writing a film adaptation of the “Jersey Boys” musical, which King is producing.

Still, “Hugo” is a thorn in his side.

“There’s no finger pointing — I’m the producer and I take the responsibility,” he said glumly. “Budget wise, there just wasn’t enough prep time and no one really realized how complicated doing a 3-D film was going to be. I went through three line producers because no one knew exactly what was going on. Do I still think it’s a masterpiece that will be talked about in 20 years? Yes. But once the schedule started getting out of whack, things just spiraled and spiraled and that’s when the avalanche began.”

He laughs uneasily. “Let’s just say that it hasn’t been an easy few months for me — there’s been a lot of Ambien involved.”

King isn’t taking the hit alone. His partner is Tim Headington, a Texas oilman who, according to Forbes, is worth $1.5 billion. Not long after they first met, King told Headington, a longtime film buff, that he should invest in a company, not individual films. Headington took the advice and became King’s partner. “It’s a handshake deal,” says King. “It’s been painful lately but he’s seen the change in my thinking about making commercial movies.”

By the end of lunch, King almost began to sound like his old self, touting his latest projects, which include a big-screen biopic of Queen singer Freddie Mercury. “Being a good producer is all about self-confidence,” he said. “When I’m on the set, I try to make sure that everyone has a real faith, not just in the movie, but in themselves. It’s a lot like being a good baseball manager or a soccer coach. Sometimes the only thing that helps you handle adversity is believing in yourself.”

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Photo: Graham King, right, with Johnny Depp on the set of "The Rum Diary."  Credit: Peter Mountain / FilmDistrict-GK Films

 

Showbiz swamis: Do the Oscar pundits know too much?

If you read even half as many stories, blog posts, Facebook entries and tweets about the Oscar nominations last week as I did, you already know that there was hardly any shocking news involving the nine films that earned a best picture nomination. As Kristopher Tapley, the resident pundit at the In Contention blog put it the morning of the nominations: “The nominees are in and the surprises are few and far between.”

Why were the army of breathless Oscar prognosticators so underwhelmed by the news on nomination day? Because they’d long ago made a dead-on forecast of the best picture lineup. Amazing, but true.

Go back and look at the Gurus of Gold, a collection of Oscar experts from various media platforms who make weekly predictions on the Movie City News website. When the Gurus offered up their picks on Dec. 13, a full five weeks before the nominations were announced, their top nine films were the exact nine films that made the cut last week.

They were not alone. Over at Tom O’Neil’s Gold Derby website, his group of Oscarologists (who include Elena Howe, my glamorous, globe-trotting editor here at The Envelope) published a group of picks on Dec. 19 that were also perfectly aligned — nine for nine — with the academy’s picks. Even if you went back to mid-November, nine full weeks before the nominations, each of the two groups had accurately picked eight of the nine best picture nominees.

If you’re an Oscar pundit, this is a good thing, because it makes you look like a true swami. But if you are the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, this should be cause for concern, especially in an era when the majority of people who tune in to watch live television events are looking for, ahem, a bit of suspense and surprise.

How unusual is this easy predictability? Let me use a sports analogy: If you assembled a group of equally brainy baseball experts and asked them, in the middle of June, to predict the eight teams that would make the MLB playoffs in October, you would end up with a lot — and I mean a lot — of wrong answers.

When it comes to unpredictability, you could say almost the same thing about the NFL or the NBA, or, for that matter, Newt Gingrich’s chances a month ago of winning the South Carolina presidential primary. It’s why TV networks pay untold zillions to tie up sports broadcasting rights while ABC is quietly tearing its hair out about the flat Oscar ratings, which seem to get a bump only in years when the best picture category is crowded with box-office successes.

Unfortunately, with only one of this year’s best picture nominees having topped the $100-million mark (“The Help”), the academy is more in need of some big picture curveballs than ever. It raises the question: Why is it so ridiculously easy to predict the nominees?

In short, a movie has to satisfy a series of pretty narrow aesthetic requirements to qualify for Oscar glory. Most important, it has to have a seriousness that symbolizes its high artistic ambitions. Comedies, family pictures and action films are rarely best picture nominees because today’s academy views those genres as sullied by commercial goals. Steven Spielberg is one of the premier filmmakers of our age, but of all the films he’s made, the only one that has ever won best picture is “Schindler’s List,” a Holocaust drama that pretty much fit all of the academy’s requirements for artistic ambition.

With rare exceptions, best picture nominees must be set in the past, be it the recent past like “Moneyball” or a more distant time, like “The Artist,” “Hugo,” “Midnight in Paris,” “The Help” and “War Horse.” History is like gauze over the lens of the camera, allowing filmmakers to deal with prickly or unsettling subjects that were controversial in their time but are now largely culturally settled issues, making them safe for academy consumption.

And, oh yes, the films need a relatively high bar of critical acclaim to make the grade: Since “Forrest Gump” in 1994, no film has won best picture with less than a 75 Rotten Tomatoes score.

Because the academy has such predictable tastes, the Oscar pundits have a pretty easy time figuring out which films meet the minimal requirements of best picture awards heft. And until academy voters widen their artistic horizons, I suspect the pundits will continue to nail their predictions. If you’re making best picture picks, stick to a safe formula: Expect the expected.

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Photo: From left, "The Artist" director Michel Hazanavicius with the film's costars Berenice Bejo and Jean Dujardin in Los Angeles last fall. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times

 

Prince Fielder's megabucks contract: Is sports the new showbiz?

In the sports world last week, everyone was talking about Prince Fielder, the Incredible Hulk-sized free-agent first baseman who signed a nine-year, $214-million contract with the Detroit Tigers. The deal, the fourth richest in baseball history, is still being noisily debated on baseball blogs and sports talk shows along with an even bigger contract that Albert Pujols signed last month with the Los Angeles Angels.

But the signings put a wholly different question in my head. Why do we live in a time when sports salaries are such a hot topic, but hardly anyone cares anymore what movie stars make? The fact is that sports is the new show business, and the interest (or lack thereof) in salaries is one reflection of that.

When “Underworld Awakening” opened earlier this month, the box-office stories were full of info about its budget — $70 million — and the percentage of moviegoers who saw it in 3-D — 59% — but no one bothered to mention how much Kate Beckinsale was paid to star in the film. Even the salaries of the most mega-wattage stars don’t come under that kind of scrutiny anymore. When “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” was released, virtually every story mentioned the film’s budget, but not the fact that Robert Downey Jr. was paid a $15-million upfront salary.

This is a sea change from the go-go days in the mid-1990s, when movie star salaries were a front-burner concern. When then-Columbia Pictures chief Mark Canton paid Jim Carrey an unprecedented $20 million to play the lead in the dark comedy “The Cable Guy,” it was headline-grabbing news, especially because rival studio chiefs were apoplectic, seeing the salary hike as a sign of approaching apocalypse.

In hindsight, the doomsday talk was a tad melodramatic, even though Columbia took a bath on “Cable Guy,” despite Carrey’s presence on the marquee. It took studios at least a full decade to realize that movie stars were, by and large, a lousy bet.

Some in Hollywood see the lack of curiosity in movie star salaries as a sign of the star’s fading relevance in our culture. One studio chief speculated that we live in an era where moviegoers are more interested in characters than the people who play them. “We used to build movies around the stars,” one studio head explained. “But now we develop characters and superheroes — and then figure out which actor best fits the mold.”

If you look at the upcoming aspiring blockbusters, they are largely movie-star-free extravaganzas. With the exception of “Men in Black 3,” which has Will Smith front and center, the films are driven by concept and character, whether it’s Disney’s “John Carter,” Universal’s “Battleship,” Warners’ “The Dark Knight Rises,” Fox’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” Sony’s “The Amazing Spider-Man” or Paramount’s “G.I. Joe: Retaliation.”

With stars no longer at the nexus of the deal-making decisions, their salaries have lost a lot of news-worthy luster. In fact, if there is any one key reason why baseball signings are making news while movie star salary stories have dropped off the charts it’s that baseball salaries are skyrocketing while Hollywood salaries are in decline.

In sports, business is booming because the biggest value in today’s media world is live sports entertainment. The NFL just concluded a new round of billion-dollar TV deals, which in turn will generate higher salaries for football stars. The same goes for the NBA and MLB.

When Frank McCourt bought the Dodgers in 2004, he paid $430 million. Today, with the team being auctioned off to the highest bidder, insiders say the new owner could easily pay $1.5 billion for the team. The Dodgers are worth it because the new owner will reap a bonanza from a rich new TV deal. The TV money is fueling all the salary inflation. The Angels were able to sign a 10-year, $240-million deal with Pujols in December because the team signed a lucrative new TV deal with Fox.

The parallels between the two businesses are striking. Knowing they had tons of cash pouring in from their new TV deal, the Angels used it to buy the biggest star in the business. The same thing happened in the 1990s and early 2000s when the studios, flush with cash from home video and DVD revenues, used the money to chase after big-name talent, prompting a series of bidding wars. Now that star salaries are in decline, the media has turned its attention elsewhere. When it comes to sexy business stories, a XXXL-sized ballplayer getting $214 million has a lot more heat than the news that Tom Cruise, who made $70 million for “MI3,” is getting less than a fifth of that for “MI4.”

When stars make less money, the media’s sources also dry up. CAA was famous for leaking its star salary numbers in the ’90s, and every dazzling new salary breakthrough sent a telling message to stars signed to a rival agency — why isn’t your agent raking in all that moolah for you? When salaries are in decline, as they are now, you rarely see the likes of Kevin Huvane or Ari Emanuel feeding any information to the press, as today’s salary news only offers another instance of the scaling down of A-list actors’ earning power.

Today’s Hollywood is a buttoned-down place, a tiny cog in the showbiz sector of most media conglomerates. It’s the sports team owners who are like the studio moguls of yesteryear — fierce competitors with a burning desire to win. It may be a huge gamble to spend $200 million on a pudgy first baseman. But if it takes the team to the World Series, it’s a wager worth making, one with a lot more sizzle than the safe bets in today’s risk-averse Hollywood.

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Photo: Prince Fielder, who signed a $214-million contract with the Detroit Tigers last week, celebrating after hitting a double against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field last September. Credit: Benny Sieu/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/MCT

 

Oscars 2012: Are the nominations ready for prime-time TV?

If the motion picture academy is really serious about improving its sagging TV ratings and transforming itself into a 21st century brand, it needs to start by giving a radical facelift to Oscar nomination day.

It’s hard to believe that in an era when nearly every media event imaginable is presented on prime-time TV that the Oscar nominations — which in many ways offer far more snubs and surprises than the actual awards — are still being announced at 5:30 a.m. before a sleep-deprived scrum of wisecracking reporters and anxiety-ridden publicists in a presentation that had all the pizazz of a middle school assembly.

This year we saw academy president Tom Sherak, with actress Jennifer ("Winter's Bone") Lawrence at his side, taking turns reading the names of the nominated writers, directors, actors and actresses, as well as the nine nominees for best picture. Any suspense that might have been in the air was over in five minutes flat -- meaning nearly 25 minutes less than it took LeBron James to finally say that he was taking his talents to South Beach in his, yes, prime-time ESPN special, "The Decision."

The presentation provided several nuggets that got tongues wagging. The big news was about the losers, notably Leonardo DiCaprio, who didn't get a best actor nod; Albert Brooks, who didn't make the supporting actor cut, and "Cars 2" and "Tintin," two high-profile animated films that didn't qualify for best animated feature. But was it must-see TV, seeing Sherak and Lawrence reading names off a teleprompter? Hardly.

The whole exercise raises the question: Why is the academy still announcing its much-coveted nominations in the kind of stilted, totally unphotogenic style that makes the organization look firmly anchored in the media equivalent of the Dark Ages? The idea of having the Oscar nominations unveiled before the sun has even hit the horizon in L.A. made sense 20 years ago, when it was vital to get good play on East Coast morning TV outlets like “Good Morning America” and the "Today' show.

Hollywood on black culture: Should it be looking forward not back?

Like most parents, I’m always trying to find ways to get my teenage son interested in history, so it was sort of a slam dunk that I’d take him to see “Red Tails,” which opened over the weekend. A longtime passion project for George Lucas, who bankrolled the $58-million film, it tells the inspiring story of an African American squadron of World War II flyboys who demonstrated in a time of rigid segregation that black airmen were just as cool and courageous as their white counterparts.

Inspiring, however, does not necessarily mean good. The reviews have been dismal, dinging the film for being clumsy and oversimplified. As the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern put it: “This isn’t contemporary entertainment, it’s antiquated kitsch.” Still, considering Lucas’ track record, it’s amazing that not one studio showed the slightest interest in backing the project. When Lucas, who declined to speak to me, set up a screening at one studio, none of the top executives even showed up.

“Red Tails” is being released by 20th Century Fox, the studio that released Lucas’ “Star Wars” films. The film, which benefited from a big marketing spend — also financed by Lucas — easily bested its pre-weekend estimates, making $19.1 million at the box office.

Seeing the film raised a more troubling question. Hollywood has made a slew of films about the black experience, from “The Help,” “Ray” and “The Great Debaters” to “Amistad,” “Remember the Titans” and “Malcolm X.” But those films have one thing in common — they’re all set in the past. Even “Precious,” which earned a host of Oscar nominations in 2010, took place in 1987.

“There are too many decision makers in Hollywood today that look at the modern black experience and you can tell it’s a big mystery to them,” notes John Ridley, who co-wrote the script for “Red Tails.”

It’s easy enough to understand why — the present is less comfortable, while the past offers the opportunity to show the struggles and hurdles for people of color. But where are the movies that chronicle today’s African American experience? Or for that matter, films that offer any kind of serious look at any people of color, be they Asian, Latino or black?

Hollywood has no problem making African American comedies, often crammed with cringe-worthy racial stereotypes. We also get an occasional romantic comedy or a hip-hop biopic like “Notorious.” But a real movie with real black people? Apparently films such as “She’s Gotta Have It,” “Boyz N the Hood” and “Soul Food” come along once every generation.

“I just had the exact conversation with a studio executive today,” John Singleton said when I called to ask the “Boyz N the Hood” filmmaker why there were so few contemporary stories being made. “Hollywood wants to divorce itself from what’s going on in any ethnic culture right now. They’re making fantasies — movies about wish fulfillment.”

It has also gotten to the point where the world of black filmmakers is almost a separate and not entirely equal universe, often operating far from the commercial mainstream. Ridley told me that even though he’d been working in Hollywood for 15 years, it was clear in his first meeting with Lucas that he had no idea who he was.

Ridley, who’s written seven novels and is a frequent commentator on NPR, has spent most of the last decade writing for television. He says it’s partly because TV is more immediate. “But also, if you’re black, it’s a fact that you don’t get called to do ‘Thor’ or ‘Transformers.’ I’m being a little sarcastic, but white people can have the Oscars. I was more excited about Halle Berry getting a Razzie than the Oscar. After all, how many times do we get to make the $100-million crap that everyone else does?”

Ridley isn’t knocking the experience of working with Lucas, who he said was gracious and intelligent. But Lucas’ aim for “Red Tails” wasn’t especially sophisticated — he saw the story as a black version of the kind of gung-ho war movies Lucas grew up watching. Ridley is fascinated by more complicated characters, which is why he is working on a pair of HBO projects, one about former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry, the other a series loosely based on the early career of boxer Mike Tyson.

Singleton, who has been making action films lately, says Hollywood still has a narrow expectation for people-of-color projects. “They still look at the black audience as a specialty thing. I don’t want to be stereotypical, but I always feel like asking executives, ‘Do you know any real black folks, not just the ones who hang out at the Soho House?'”

The harsh reality is that black stories rarely travel anywhere outside of the U.S. We live in an era of cultural specificity. The comedy “Welcome to the Sticks,” the biggest hit in French film history, has barely made a dent anywhere else in the world. Zhang Yimou’s latest historical epic, “The Flowers of War,” is a huge hit in China but hasn’t hit pay dirt anywhere else. The only films that transcend all barriers are the ones that rely on easily digestible action and visual effects.

In today’s environment, if black filmmakers want to tell their stories, they need to be as entrepreneurial as their peers in the music business. Not wanting to deal with any studio interference, Spike Lee is up at Sundance screening his new film “Red Hook Summer,” which he entirely financed himself. Ava DuVernay, a veteran publicist turned filmmaker, is also at Sundance this week with a new contemporary drama, “Middle of Nowhere,” which she made for less than $1 million through private equity financing. (It costars David Oyelowo, who also plays a leading role in “Red Tails.”)

DuVernay already has a distribution network in place thanks to the newly formed African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement. “I don’t think we should demonize the studios for what they’re not doing,” she says. “After all, it’s hard to get a drama about nonblack characters made too. So we’ve created an alternative system, one where we get our films into theaters all on our own.”

George Lucas may lose millions on “Red Tails,” something he can easily afford. But if the film ultimately fades at the box office, it will be a big setback for the next film aimed at African Americans. It’s why black filmmakers need to build their own business models, big or small, so they can tell a story that doesn’t need a simplified superhero to find an audience.

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Photo: a scene from the new film "Red Tails" with, from left, David Oyelowo, Elijah Kelley, Leslie Odom Jr., Michael B. Jordan, Nate Parker and Kevin Phillips. Credit: 20th Century Fox