There’s an old Hollywood maxim that if you do a film for the studio you get to make one for you too… We look into the back-scratching myth of the movie industry.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #50.
It all started with Martin Scorsese. While making Boxcar Bertha in 1972, a few years before Mean Streets and later Taxi Driver would cement him as a key player in the ‘New Hollywood’ system, Scorsese was given a copy of Nikos Tazantzakis’s controversial novel The Last Temptation Of Christ – an adaptation of which he soon sought to make. Scorsese’s films were already riven with Catholic guilt and reasoning with faith, and since childhood, he’d wanted to tell a story about Jesus.
Almost inevitably, getting such a cultural atom bomb made turned out to be a decade-long struggle for Scorsese, who instead parlayed his art into films that made him: the above pictures, Raging Bull, The King Of Comedy and so on. The Last Temptation Of Christ almost happened in the mid-1980s, before Paramount got cold feet. Yet in the end, Universal agreed to Scorsese’s promise that he could make the film in two months for a $7 million budget, and only thanks to his previous film The Color Of Money having been a commercial success. There was one condition: he had to make a commercial, mainstream picture for Universal down the road.
In Martin Scorsese: A Journey, he described this trade-off as simply: “Do one for them; do one for you. If you can still do projects for yourself, you can keep your soul.”
The project Universal eventually received as ‘payment’ for allowing Scorsese to make his passion project was his 1991 remake of J Lee Thompson’s pulp thriller Cape Fear, based on the John D MacDonald novel The Executioners and released in 1962 with Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck in the lead roles. Although riven with Scorsese’s individual cinematic touches, with a vibrant take on movie monster Max Cady by Scorsese favourite Robert de Niro, few would suggest Cape Fear is amongst Scorsese’s best work.
Fair trade?
From this trade-off came the well-known Hollywood dictum of ‘one for me, one for them’, in which directors, performers and indeed sometimes writers are given the opportunity (and sometimes even carte blanche), to indulge the stories and ideas they truly believe in, if they also make for studios commercial pictures that are built, first and foremost, to make money. The central idea posits that a film such as The Last Temptation Of Christ would almost never naturally be produced due to a studio belief it would lose money on it, whereas Cape Fear might be the opposite.
With these examples, and Scorsese’s own experience, do we see this borne out in reality? The Last Temptation Of Christ, even as a Scorsese movie in 1988 by the point he was well-established and critically venerated, was not widely released and garnered a worldwide box office of $33.8 million. For a film that cost little, this could be considered a modest success. Cape Fear, by contrast, cost $35 million to make (five times the budget of The Last Temptation of Christ) and brought in just under $183 million globally, marking it as an unqualified success. It remains to date Martin Scorsese’s third biggest commercial success, behind only 2006’s The Departed and 2013’s The Wolf Of Wall Street.
What does this tell us? Firstly, that studios are inherently risk averse. No surprise there. Commercial factors have dominated the Hollywood system since time immemorial, and particularly since the age of rampant commercialisation of Western culture in the post-war era. Hits can happen entirely by accident.
Take Star Wars. Nobody in Hollywood expected George Lucas’s revival of science-fiction adventure serials, married to archetypal fantasy tropes, and backed by the kind of classical score that had largely died with Alfred Newman, to become the most iconic and profitable franchise of the second half of the 20th century. And yet…
Art, therefore, is always a secondary concern. Scorsese talks in his quote about preserving the soul, which feels key to any discussion of this trade-off maxim. Almost all his films are driven by his deep engagement with not just religion but the history of cinema itself, and of the culture he grew up in. Cape Fear is no stranger to this, even if it works as heightened melodrama to capture audience attention. Even The Color Of Money was commercially driven, a sequel to 1961’s The Hustler with two icons: the ageing Paul Newman and the emerging Tom Cruise. Yet nobody could accuse Scorsese of ‘selling out’. He didn’t go off and make a fourth Star Wars film, say. He managed to preserve his essence as a filmmaker while giving Universal the hit it required.
As with other forms of artistic expression, this places cinema in a space of reacting not to what filmmakers create, but what studios believe the audience craves or demands. Even the best filmmakers, directors such as Scorsese, serve at the whims of trends, earlier box office receipts, and audience reactions. Many such examples pre-date Scorsese’s popularising of the ‘one for me, one for them’ term. Richard Attenborough had to make A Bridge Too Far and Magic before Gandhi would be funded. Clint Eastwood has long had with Warner Bros a relationship that would see him make, for instance, The Dead Pool, a final Dirty Harry picture, in exchange for getting to film his pet project Bird. Even Steven Spielberg in 1993 only saw Schindler’s List, for some his greatest achievement, made if he first directed the immediate hit that was Jurassic Park.
Role reversals
The maxim doesn’t simply apply to directors, but actors too. John Cusack has stated he will appear in more lucrative popular or schlocky fare if it allows him to make smaller indie projects that he’s more invested in. Stellan Skarsgård is on record admitting similar sentiments. Apparently, Jessica Chastain made the rather underwhelming The Huntsman’s Winter War to nab a starring role in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak.
Back even further, both Richard Burton agreed to star and John Boorman direct Exorcist II: The Heretic – infamously among the worst rated sequels of all time – if Warner Bros would finance their passion projects – Equus and Excalibur, respectively. There are many, many such examples across decades of cinema.
One of the more famous concerns Sean Connery’s return as James Bond in the early 1970s. After unceremoniously leaving the role in 1967 after You Only Live Twice, refusing a hefty pay packet to reappear in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (which led to George Lazenby’s one and only appearance as 007), United Artists chief David Packer decided after Lazenby’s decision to not reappear in the role that Connery was James Bond. Despite screen-testing others for the role in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, no substitutes would do.
Packer’s deal was simple: in return for reappearing as Bond, Connery would get the enormous wage for the time, $1.2 million (which he would later donate to the Scottish International Education Trust to fund arts in his home country) and, crucially, United Artists would fund two projects of his choosing. It’s worth noting that Connery, in the early 1970s, was a waning star entering middle age and past his glory years of iconic 007 success. He couldn’t make anything else he did a hit. Audiences wanted Connery Bond, not Connery the actor.
In the end, despite flirtations with making numerous projects, including a big screen Macbeth, only one of the three films Connery made in return for Diamonds Are Forever came together: 1973’s The Offence, his third film with Sidney Lumet. It contains one of his finest cinematic performances as a troubled British detective consumed by his demons. It’s an excellent film but nevertheless a gigantic flop, one which took years to regain critical appraisal. Connery ended up veering eventually back to Bond and indeed popular mainstream blockbuster entertainment, at which point his star rose toward the end of his career once again.
Equations
The lesson here is that the ‘one for me’ in the equation is not always one the audience want. Does this mean the ‘one for them’ is not indeed for the commercial studio, but for the mass audience at large? Is that who artists are pandering toward in their attempt to make deeper work that a select audience want to see? Perhaps.
Not always. You can point to the aforementioned Spielberg example as one that provided fantastic returns both for the film ‘for him’ and the film ‘for them’. The two are not mutually exclusive. Directors and actors can develop pictures ‘for them’ which both resonate with audiences and are creatively rich, without compromising their artistic integrity.
We see this with modern filmmakers to perhaps a greater degree, some of whom simply want to stay in touch with their roots. James Wan, for example, who made the strange Malignant following the success of Aquaman and the expectation of what became Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom. As he told Entertainment Weekly: “I honestly just miss my Saw days, my Death Sentence days, and my Dead Silence [days], and I wanted to go do those again. My career has kind of dictated what kind of film I should be doing now.”
James Mangold, known for dramatic fare such as Cop Land or Walk The Line, agreed to follow up The Wolverine with Logan, thereby remaining a while longer in the comic-book movie realm, in exchange for funding to develop Le Mans 66. Other directors seek to indulge their own internal fanboy, as Duncan Jones did with the critically panned Warcraft after creative successes Moon and Source Code. His was an example in 2016 of a passion project which failed, although the film was eventually going to get made either way.
