A recent New Yorker profile of Hollywood dealmaker Roy Lee makes the movie biz sound like it's no fun at all. Read it for the gossip about Lee, including the cut-throat way he conducts his business:
He can be a formidable antagonist; several of his former enemies became alarmed at the mention of his name. "I have made it hard for someone who's an enemy to get a job," Lee told me. "I'd have friends call the potential new boss and say, `Call Roy for a reference.' And then I'd unload. Or I'll go to X-rated Web sites and type in my enemy's e-mail address, so they'll get spam from those sites forever. If I were rich enough, I'd pay someone forty grand a year to be on staff and just do dirty deeds. His car would block yours on your way to an important meeting, or he'd heckle you on the street. Not really a hit man, but an annoying man."
But read it also for what it reveals about the next level in the international movie biz.
The system's besetting inefficiency, of course, is that studios never know what moviegoers will want to buy. So films are tested in front of preview audiences, revised according to the audience's suggestions, tested again, and then marketed with a vigor directly proportionate to the test scores. There are two problems with this approach. The first is that the test-sample size is minuscule -- two hundred mall walkers in Canoga Park, California, can determine a movie's fate. The second is that by the time the Canoga Park test audience sees a film it's too late to change it very much anyway, particularly when twenty, fifty, or a hundred million dollars has already been spent.
Roy Lee's Asian initiative enables Hollywood, in effect, to test fully realized cinematic ideas in front of millions of people, and then go forward with remakes of movies that are already proven hits.
Meanwhile, a sympathetic June 30 profile (unfortunately not online) of The Hulk director Ang Lee makes him sound in every way like the anti-John Lee: artistically rather than commercially driven, demanding of his actors without being imperious, and accustomed to having a rare degree of autonomy from the studio suits. I thought The Hulk was a sad failure in so many ways, but it was a grand one. I'm so glad there's still a corner in Hollywood in which an Ang Lee gets the chance to shoot for success and fail.
The Ang Lee profile also included one odd assertion which I wonder if any of you can clarify for me.
Lee's emphasis on framing and background is not unusual, given his origins. "Westerners and Asians literally see different worlds," Richard Nesbtt, a social psychologist, writes in "The Geography of Thought". "Modern Westerners see a world of objects -- discrete and unconnected things... Modern Asians are inclined to see a world of substances -- continuous masses of matter.
Say what?