Notes From D. R.

Walk A Thin Line

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.

Bait-And-Switch Tactics?

The Wall Street Journal says a new film about anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce is being deceptively matrketed to Christians.

UPDATE: More from Rich Lowry and Stanley Crouch.

Hart And Soul

Hey, why doesn't somebody make a movie about the fascinating life of Dolores Hart?

The former actress' life would make for a compelling film. In the late-1950s and early-1960s, Hart was a rising star in Hollywood, playing Elvis Presley's love interest in two films and delivering a memorable performance in 1960's Where the Boys Are.

As her popularity increased, her dissatisfaction with Hollywood also continued to grow. By the mid-1960s, she felt a profound sense of spiritual emptiness, an emotional ache too powerful to ignore. Feeling a deep religious calling, she abruptly ended her film career in 1963 to become a Benedictine nun.

Hart's journey from Hollywood to holiness is a captivating story; it would be an ideal role for either Renee Zellweger or Reese Witherspoon. In this post-Passion era, it's unlikely that the film would be a box-office failure. Not only would a Hart biopic make a great family film, it would also stem the tide of criticism Hollywood receives for not creating enough good roles for women. Talk about laying two birds to rest with one stone!

If they can make a movie about '50s pinup-star-turned-born-again-Christian Bettie Page, why not a biopic about Hart? If it's well-written, well-acted, and well-directed, it would be the sort of movie a lot of folks have been praying for.

UPDATE: An April 2006 AP profile of Hart.

Timing Is Everything

So why did The Nativity Story underperform at the box office?

In order to answer that question, one must look to the reason 2004's The Passion of the Christ was such a success. When The Passion was released, many Americans believed that Christianity was under assault in the United States--not only from Islamofascism overseas, but from "secular progressive" Democrats at home. The Passion thus became a cultural event, a way for Christians to reaffirm their faith and tell those opposed to Christianity to stuff it. 

Now, however, the culture has changed. In the early-winter of 2006, most Americans apparently no longer believe that Christianity is in the crosshairs; in fact, on November 7, they voted to give control of the US House and Senate to the same "secular progressive" Democrats who were once seen as leading the charge against Christianity. The Nativity Story, therefore, is not seen as a cultural event (though the central aspect of the story certainly was).

Sometimes, in order to become a blockbuster, a movie has to be in the right place at the right time. 1970's M*A*S*H came out when the controversy over America's involvement in Vietnam had reached its zenith. As Hollywood producer Mike Medavoy pointed out in his memoirs, 1990's Dances With Wolves became a hit because it was released during a time when many white Americans felt a strong sense of "collective guilt" over the historical treatment of American Indians.

The Nativity Story may well be a hit on DVD, and could become a Christmas classic in the future. However, just as The Passion of the Christ became a $370 million domestic hit because of what was going on in American culture at the time, The Nativity Story underperformed for the very same reason.

Mona Lisa Smile

A Vatican official condemns the upcoming film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code in no uncertain terms. I can understand why people of faith would find fault with a movie based on a book built around the ludicrous idea that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and had a child with her. However, I worry that critics of the upcoming movie might be "feeding the monster" a little bit, by stimulating so much curiosity about the flick that a large amount of moviegoers will be interested in seeing it.

In its own way, Brokeback Mountain also mocked deeply held religious beliefs, by subtly attacking societal opposition to same-sex relationships and, by implication, the religious entities who believe that gay and lesbian relationships should not be accorded equal status with heterosexual relationships. However, as the New York Times pointed out several months ago, there was never any organized religious boycott of Mountain in the US, largely because religious groups feared that such a boycott would "feed the monster" and encourage people to see the Best Picture contender. I worry that religious entities opposed to the Code movie will end up doing the same thing that the atheists and "secular progressives" did with The Passion of the Christ, that is, actually promote the film via staunch condemnation.

Some religious entities may conclude that moviegoers may be tempted to see the film anyway because it stars Tom Hanks and was directed by Ron Howard. However, the involvement of Hanks and Howard does not guarantee box-office success: Hanks is no longer Mr. Untouchable at the box office, having made such recent flops as The Terminal and The Ladykillers, while Howard hasn't had a hit since A Beautiful Mind. Even though the source material was a bestseller, Code is far from a sure-fire hit. After all, back in 1990, Hanks starred in the film version of Tom Wolfe's chart-topper The Bonfire of the Vanities; the film was critically reviled upon its December release, and was out of the theatres by mid-January 1991.

Code might suffer a similar fate--that is, if intense religious protests don't spark curiosity.

Faith No More

A bizarre, sad account of a haphazard attempt by Columbia Pictures to capitalize on the success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. William Goldman was right: "Nobody knows anything." Gibson's movie was successful with Christians and Catholics because it was made by a man who clearly took his faith seriously, and it was successful with secular audiences because it was a flat-out good movie. The Passion wasn't thrown together like this movie appears to be, with a budget that's less than half of Gibson's film and washed-up, has-been actors like Louis Gossett Jr. and Kirk Cameron--and since this film looks like a total hack job, I doubt it's going to come anywhere close to the success of Gibson's epic. Quality, people, quality!

UPDATE: Hollywood blogger David Poland weighs in.

SECOND UPDATE: A legitimate attempt to appeal to Christian moviegoers.