Eastwood report: Joe Kidd
The two hats of Joe Kidd.
The other day I noted the sheer number of Clint Eastwood movies I hadn’t seen, an odd lapse for me regarding a filmmaker I admire so much. So I harnessed the power of the internet and bought an abnormally large number of Clint Eastwood movies. I set my budget at no more than $3 per movie and had no trouble keeping it through Amazon.com. As I stroll through this forest of Eastwoodness, I will report in to my loyal readers.
Joe Kidd hits at an odd place for Eastwood — it’s in between Dirty Harry and High Plains Drifter. The Outlaw Josey Wales, which I think of as Eastwood’s first inarguable masterpiece, is still four years off. It’s directed by John Sturges, but it’s produced by Eastwood and is obviously tailored to fit his established persona — it all but winks at us as it sets up its Eastwoody goodness. It has an "Old Hollywood" Technicolor look about it, with bright, saturated colors (the blood looks like tempura paint) and only occasionally pays attention to light in the way I associate with Eastwood. It’s got Robert Duvall in it (concurrent with The Godfather but after his bad-guy part in the John Wayne vehicle True Grit) as a rich white guy, which makes it feel very modern, and John Saxon as a Mexican, which makes it feel very old-fashioned. It’s got a screenplay by Elmore Leonard, and even bears signs of his leanness of narrative — little is explained in Joe Kidd, and the story is extremely simple.
The State of the Art
On the one hand, it’s nice to know that I’m not crazy. On the other hand, man, I hate being right.
There was a panel discussion at the WGA Theater, where a couple of screenwriters, a couple of producers and a couple of studio executives gathered to talk about development. Ace screenwriter John August reports. Over the years, I’d figured out on my own a lot of the things that were talked about, but it was both bracing and a little scary to hear my own doom-and-gloom suspicions reflected back at me.
The headlines:
Fewer movies are being developed, which means there are more writers competing for each job, which means that the very few people in Hollywood who actually pay money to writers for writing screenplays pretty much get to ask for whatever they want to: free development, multiple free treatments, free screenplay drafts. The screenwriter who objects to working for weeks, or months, or years for free (my record is two years on one project) is labeled "difficult" and is out of the running. The great screenwriter who isn’t "good in the room" is passed over for the mediocre screenwriter who makes everyone laugh at the pitch meeting.
The studios are in the control of the marketing folk. That means that any movie idea that can’t be summed up in five words is suspect and anything that takes more than a sentence is rejected outright. Italso means that screenwriter’s "ideas" are less valuable than ever, since they haven’t been "pre-sold." (My favorite story from the discussion is from Jonathan Hensleigh, who had an idea for a movie he couldn’t sell, so he bought the rights to a comic book that had a similar idea, because "the fucking idiots need a pre-branded thing to look at."
One would think that the success of Slumdog Millionaire would mean that every studio is out looking for the next Slumdog Millionaire, right? Wrong. Slumdog Millionaire has, if I’m not mistaken, four different studios and production companies’ names at the front of it — it’s obviously a movie that had a very hard time finding its financing. That was true when it was made and it would still be true tomorrow. Because, as successful as it is, there was no way to predict that. If the producer walked into a studio executive’s office, x years ago, with the script for Slumdog Millionaire in his hand and a report from the future that it would make over $100 million and win the Best Picture Oscar, complete with Variety reports and video footage, the executive would still turn it down: it has no stars (which is bad for international sales), is mostly a grim story about the difficult lives of Mumbai orphans, is a hard sell, and can’t be summed up in five words. "Mumbai Orphan Wins Game Show Through Miracle" is the shortest I could compact the story, and that’s two words too many, sorry, what about a movie based on Shamwow?