Big Bucks Lead Hollywood Pack Mentality

What’s wrong with this picture?

Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, announced recently that the average cost of making a Hollywood picture - let me underscore average - had risen to $50 million in 1994. That’s $34 million to produce, $16 million to market. Further, he predicted it would probably rise to $59 million by the end of 1995.

Well, 1995 has ended and Variety has published its annual tally of which movies earned how much money. Of some 320 pictures released somewhere in the United States last year, only 32 earned more than $50 million. More than 100 films earned less than $10 million.

What’s wrong with these pictures?

It’s tempting to bash Hollywood … again. Especially when “The Scarlet Letter” earned $10,378,982 and “The Brothers McMullen” earned $10,246,592. That difference is more pointed when you consider that “The Scarlet Letter” probably cost more in one day than “Brothers” cost in its entirety.

But what happens when Hollywood does take a chance? Two of last fall’s best and most original films, “Strange Days” and “Unstrung Heroes,” topped out at a little under $8 million. “Funny Bones,” a quirky comedy picked up by Buena Vista, made a number of best-of-the-year lists. At the box office, it made a paltry half-million dollars.

Part of the problem is Hollywood’s “pack mentality.” That mentality says: If “Casper” hits $100 million, let’s find another special-effects-laden kiddie comic. Make that a dozen others.

Here’s the sad thing. The pack mentality has taken over the independent scene. It’s the Tarantino-izing of the art circuit. Everyone wants a piece of “Quentin the Mighty.” If they can’t get that, they’ll settle for Quentin-esque (“Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead,” opening nationally Feb. 2).

Or for Quentin and Friends - which suggests something you could order at the International House of Pancakes but is, in actuality, an appalling bit of “alternative” movie-making called “Four Rooms.”

“Four Rooms” is an anthology film set in a hotel serviced by a single bellhop on New Year’s Eve. The four directors, one for each “room,” are Tarantino, Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell and Robert Rodriguez. The segments run from bad (Tarantino and Rodriguez) to unwatchable (Anders and Rockwell).

Yet, this is Hollywood (specifically, Miramax Films, the muscular “art” arm of the Disney empire) attempting to do something different, to bring audiences something that’s not Demi or Van Damme.

And it stinks.

I can’t imagine what the moguls at Miramax did after their first full screening of “Four Rooms,” but I know what I did. I went back to see “Persuasion,” just to take the taste of “Four Rooms” out of my mind.

And to give myself some small flicker of hope for the movies of ‘96, I reread something director Agnieszka Holland said recently: “In the film industry right now, money is everything. There is so much pressure to deliver a hit … that the pressure finally affects every aspect of the filmmaking process in a negative, corrupting way.

“But there is another force, almost as powerful, working against this stifling pressure. This is the need that filmmakers feel to create something lasting and good. And, in the end, this force is more powerful than greed. … It’s the artistic impulse at work and it may be our salvation.”

Of course, her most recent film was the abysmal “Total Eclipse.” So maybe salvation is relative.