Notes From D. R.

A little common sense could have saved New Line Cinema.

The forty-year-old film studio effectively died last week, when Time Warner announced that New Line (which had been owned by Time Warner since the mid-1990s) would be turned into a de facto production company and that Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne, who founded the studio, would be relieved of their duties. The end of New Line is devastating news for those of us who enjoyed the studio’s offbeat product: like Miramax Films, New Line became famous for producing movies outside of the traditional Hollywood format.

New Line gave us A Nightmare on Elm Street, Rush Hour, House Party, Menace II Society, Boogie Nights, Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, Hulk Hogan in No Holds Barred, Austin Powers, About Schmidt, Friday, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Snakes on a Plane. It was a studio for the unusual, the eccentric, the out-of-nowhere. What other studio would make a Robert De Niro film like 15 Minutes, a Johnny Depp film like Blow, an Adam Sandler film like Punch-Drunk Love?

New Line reached its peak with the Lord of the Rings series, three box-office hits that established the studio as an entity capable of both artistic and financial victories. So what happened?

The studio, which has had few post-Rings successes, dropped the ball right through the floor with the decision to produce The Golden Compass, the first film in a planned trilogy based on Philip Pullman’s pro-atheism children’s novels. Compass did well outside of the United States, but New Line did not reap the financial benefits because the studio sold off foreign rights to offset the film’s monumental budget. In order to turn a profit, Compass needed to be a tremendous success in the United States. However, it only grossed $70 million in this country, thus making the film the Heaven’s Gate of the 2000s.

Looking back, it’s impossible to understand why New Line thought the film would be an American hit. Pullman’s books had been criticized for years for mocking Christianity: it was inevitable that the movie would be attacked in America on the same grounds. So why did New Line even bother producing the film? Did Shaye and Lynne assume that the American religious right had lost all influence, and thus could not possibly affect the film’s domestic performance?

From a business perspective, hoping that Compass would become a domestic hit made no sense.  America has a large Christian population. Not all of these Christians are conservative, but many of them are quite concerned about the way Christianity is treated by the popular culture.

These Christians went to see Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in overwhelming numbers four years ago because they believed a positive treatment of Christianity in Hollywood was long overdue. When these Christians learned that Compass was based on a series of novels attacking Christianity, they apparently decided not to bother seeing the picture.

Perhaps the success of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code convinced Shaye and Lynne that Americans would see a film based on a novel mocking religious belief. This was the wrong conclusion to draw. The Da Vinci Code was a phenomenon that played by its own rules, exploiting America’s fondness for conspiracy far more than it exploited America’s desire for atheism. The success of Brown’s book did not necessarily mean that Americans would line up to see a movie based on a similarly controversial literary work.

I will resist the urge to attack Shaye and Lynne as Hollywood secularists intent on mocking traditional values. They are brilliant businessmen who built a studio up from nothing and became entertainment titans in the process. Say what you will about individual New Line movies, but both men were ultimately a force for good from a creative standpoint.

Yet they clearly made a mistake by deciding to produce Compass, and one has to wonder if their decision was based in part on being isolated from certain aspects of American culture. Do Shaye and Lynne know anyone with red-state tastes and sensibilities? If they did, perhaps they would have figured out, before it was too late, that it was impossible for a film with Compass’ pedigree to be a domestic success.

It’s interesting that Shaye and Lynne also decided to produce the 2007 dud Rendition, a film strongly critical of President Bush’s antiterrorism efforts. Rendition is another example of a film that simply would not have been made if Shaye and Lynne understood that not everyone in the United States views things the way folks in Hollywood do. Who did they think was the target audience for that particular film?

I feel sorry for Shaye, Lynne, the New Line executives and employees who are about to be displaced, and movie lovers who embraced New Line as one of the few studios that provided something different. I feel sorry for them, because a crucial misjudgment on the part of New Line has led to the studio’s self-destruction.