And then there’s the fact that we’re talking about James Cameron. I think the man deserves the benefit of the doubt. Out of the six non-documentaries he’s directed (I’m not including Piranha 2 for obvious reasons), half of them are in the IMDb top 250 (each of which is a decent way up the list too), and one of them is tied for the most Oscars wins of all time, along with making more money at the box office than any other movie in history. That’s a pretty impressive career, if you ask me.

Point is, when your other article was written, I didn’t look at it too kindly, but I understood that such negative skepticism toward Avatar was understandable. But at this point, I think it’s better to just save face and wait for the film to come out. Some pretty big publications are saying some pretty big things about this. I’m not saying that you have to get excited for it, but being apprehensive doesn’t mean you have to actively attack a film that you haven’t seen.

I’m not only saying this because I’m getting a bit sick of all the cynical attitudes toward Avatar, but because it’s starting to sound like this movie might really kick ass, and it sure wouldn’t make the site look too smart if they got caught taking cheap shots at what could still end up being the event movie of the year.

Have you watched a Uwe Boll movie with the director’s commentary turned on?

1) I highly recommend this experience. Uwe Boll is every bit as unintentionally hilarious as his movies are… but, more relevantly,

2( No one in the history of filmmaking has been more concerned with commercial concerns than Uwe Boll. His commentary is riddled with exposition about how he saved $50 by doing a shot in this particular manner, and how he took advantage of subsidy X in country Y. It’s quite astonishing that he doesn’t see how horrible the end product is when he is this concerned with all of this.

To that end, I think Shyamalan would have rather the book didn’t come out — but ultimately, it was his idea to have the writer document the process, so the fault rests with him. I think he knows his movie was a failure, so he can’t feel too burned. You get a good sense of that from the book.

If anything, I think the movie is a failure not because Shyamalan had absolute power to make what he wanted… but because he saw it as a “message” movie — and that message was, “How DARE you people think I’ve lost my touch as a filmmaker?! I’m one of the most innovative writer-directors working today!” It was a movie about settling a score against the people who didn’t think he walked on water any longer after THE VILLAGE disappointed. I mean… it was a RIDICULOUS act of hubris to not just make the hero of the movie a dispirited but ultimately miraculous Indian-American writer living outside Philadelphia… BUT TO CAST HIMSELF IN THE ROLE. We get it, Night… we get it.

Look at it this way: an art film only has a responsibility to be arty. Given what passes for art these days, that’s a pretty easy target to hit. Even if you make something awful, just so long as it’s confusingly awful or controversially awful or even just looks pretty, you’re in the clear.

A blockbuster has a responsibility to be entertaining. And while so-bad-they’re-good movies can muddy those waters somewhat, being entertaining is usually much tougher to pull off than being arty.

I can’t really get behind the idea that publicly funded international filmmakers never make nonsensical vanity projects. Relative to the expectations of a mainstream audience, they make more nonsensical vanity projects than anybody else – they are just held to different standards and are not as publicly flayed when their projects come up just short of spec. As Matt wrote in his article, when art rather than entertainment is the goal in itself, this whole discussion of vanity and pleasing the audience is kind of moot.

But more seriously, I think it’s a matter of selection bias – it’s easy to praise bergman, especially to people who have maybe seen a few of his movies. But would the Cremaster Cycle, as much as we all love it, really not benefit on at least some level from being, oh, 12 hours shorter?

Frankly, I think we hold hollywood to a higher standard than we hold art films. Art films can be boring or muddled or lose the thread of what they’re talking about, or be derivative of other movies, and they might just get dismissed. Make a hollywood movie that is based on another hollywood movie too closely, and you get derided as a hack and villainized. I mean, people _hate_ george lucas because of what he did to star wars, episode 1. Heck, they hated him for making greedo shoot first. People are much, much harder on Ang Lee for Hulk than they are on him for any of his other movies.

I think it’s wrong to say that it is irrelevant whether an audience likes a movie. I think that it is incorrect to say that commercial success is zero indication of quality. Sometimes it indicates quality very well. I think studio leadership is much more savvy and well-informed in its choices than you think they are, that they add more to the movies than you think they do, and that they are far less capricious than you make them out to be.

I know you’re no big fan of Shakespeare, but remember that he wrote almost every one of his great works for primarily commercial reasons. He did it for money. And I think if you delve depper into how foreign films are funded, you’ll see more money talking behind the scenes of a bergman or almodovar movie than your would expect. Not Money Talks money talking, but talking money nonetheless.

And it doesn’t seem quite fair to demonize studio heads for being profiteers and lionizing direectors as auteurs just by nature of their job titles when both work for money in the same film business and are often drawn from similar pools of people – and where it is not uncommon for one to become the other or vice versa. The relationship is not a one-way street, itls a negotiation. There are plenty of producers who care about making good movies, and even if they only cared about making entertaining movies audiences will pay to see, I fail to see why this is without value.

The mistake Hollywood makes is one that we are warned against in financial products – past performance is not an indication of future performance. No-one knows why that first film was a success, perhaps it was a fluke. Even if they have stumbled across a talented director who could churn out a bunch of these movies, they then make the “fundamental attribution error” – believing that the ability to do so in a small budget context translates to the ability to do it with a large budget (hello Kevin Smith!).

This poses a dilemma for the studio trying to find a successful blockbuster. There is so much money involved, that they will be risk averse and make a safe movie – witness almost every blockbuster of the last 10 years. If what they want is the mega-success, they can’t play safe, but need to adopt the mindset of the “small budget ecosystem” where some big budget films with creative control fail, and the odd one succeeds beyond expectation. The difference with big budgets is that we notice the failures as well as the successes – i.e. we have a cognitive bias in the small budget films, corrected in the big budget market.

What this means is that I applaud the studios willing to take this risk, even if it does lead to Waterworld, Avatar etc, because 1 in every 10 will be THE film. Otherwise our alternative is a world of McGs churning out safe blockbusters designed by focus group. This is why private equity is an interesting model for film makers. They can take this portfolio approach, and even create funds with appropriate risk profiles – “indie film” – risky, “rom com film” – safe, “safe blockbuster” – moderately risky, “creative control blockbuster” – highly risky. This takes the risk decision away from studio execs who have a naturally risk averse attitude due to the potential loss of their jobs. Explicit risk profiling will alter the expectation level placed on them.

Yours, looking forward to investing in IndieFund soon,
Chris