Studio Interference or Steering the Ship?

The power dynamic between the creative force of the filmmaker - be they a director, an independent producer, actor - or all three in one, and the Hollywood studio system, has shifted at key times in the history of cinema. Read any actor or director autobiography and you will often hear of horror stories of how studio executives have ruined a movie, held back vital budget etc., or even sabotaged a production in a sort of clash of the Titan egos. Conversely, if you read a memoir by a producer or studio head, you'll no doubt hear how these executive champions literally saved a movie's life, resuscitating it from a near death experience at the hand of the maverick, out of control director.

I have read all sorts of Hollywood (and independent film) books, so have heard both sides of this story, and, like many things, both sides can be right. Sometimes a studio does all it can to sabotage their own film and sometimes they literally do save it from a slow painful death.

Recently I have been hoovering up the second season of Netflix's superb series, 'The Movies that Made Us', and these incredibly revealing stories are packed with such occurrences. Forrest Gump is a really great example of how the studio chief (almost maliciously, the way it comes across in the episode) tried to sabotage this film. Sherry Lansing, who was the head at Paramount Pictures at the time, comes across almost like a pantomime villain for her part in trying to derail the creative process - so much so that the filmmakers had to secretly film Forrest (covered by Hank's brother as a body double) running all four corners of the USA - with the star and director forgoing $10m of their fees for points (clever in hindsight) and even self-funding chunks of the production. What were her motives I wonder? Lack of faith in the project and the creative team? Hard to fathom when they were Zemeckis and Hanks! And if you have so little faith in the project, why green-light it in the first place? It's a shame that she didn't get a chance to defend herself in the doc - or maybe there just was no defence, seeing as the film went on to win multiple Academy Awards and accrue such a massive international box office.

Another example in this illuminating series is 'Elf', which New Line had so little faith in that they attempted to re-position it as more of an adult comedy after Will Ferrell broke out as a lead actor in 'Old School'. It was only an overwhelmingly positive series of test screenings that saved it from such an unthinkable edit job.

These revelations seem to make a mockery of the executives in charge. It's embarrassing in hindsight, but there are also examples of how the studio executive saved a production. It is controversial, but Robert Evans, also studio chief at Paramount, albeit two decades earlier, claims that The Godfather would have been a disaster had it not been for his interventions. Francis Ford Coppola laughed off these claims at the time but looking back over his output since and it is fair to say that it hasn't aged particularly well, certainly not beyond this incredibly iconic film, its first sequel and Apocalypse Now. So perhaps Evans really did keep this particular kid in the picture, at least during the seventies. The director went on to be lauded almost like a God. How many times have creative individuals been universally held in esteem whilst being propped up in the background by talented, but anonymous faces?

Also from 'The Movies that Made Us', 'Pretty Woman' would have been called 'Three Thousand' had it not been for the studio, plus it would have been a much darker film with a very different, downbeat ending. On the theme of titles, 'Back to the Future' would have been called 'Spaceman from Pluto' had it not been for the studio!

These days, when I watch new movies landing on streaming platforms, I wonder if the streamer in question might have convinced the star, whose vehicle the film is, to make their movie with them in exchange for too much creative control, as I've seen several films over the last year or so that fall well short of the standards you'd expect of a major studio-backed theatrical release with a big name behind it. Often too long, or meandering aimlessly towards their conclusions, these films can leave one feeling underwhelmed. This issue doesn't seem to affect TV series for some reason, but on the whole movies premiering on streamers have not impressed me. So perhaps, in this case, there is a call for the interfering studio executive?

Ultimately, as this is Hollywood, the old adage of 'nobody knows anything' comes to mind. There was once a studio chief (I can't remember who it was) that said that if they'd green lit all of the films that they had red lit, and vice versa, they would come out just about even.

This is true of my own experiences working for studios and distributors. Universal passed Lost in Translation over to Momentum Pictures in the U.K. as they felt its theatrical potential to be too limited for them, and upon joining Universal, a couple of years earlier, Sally Caplan happily told us new recruits that she turned down The Full Monty. Hell, we are only human at the end of the day!