Annals of Hollywood JANUARY 11, 2016 ISSUE
The Mogul of the Middle
As the movie business founders, Adam Fogelson tries to reinvent the system.
BY TAD FRIEND
In a market suffused with pricey superhero films, Fogelson is betting on stories on a human scale. But he says, “If you ask, ‘Can we make something great once or twice a year that violates a rational business model?,’ the answer is no!”
CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY ANGIE SMITH FOR THE NEW YORKER
Adam Fogelson, the chairman of Hollywood’s newest studio, listened to a pitch for a film called “Unmanned” with an encouraging smile. Hollywood pitches are jolly, elaborately courteous affairs. So on this sunny afternoon the filmmakers—two producers, the director, and the star, Keanu Reeves, whose black suit and black T-shirt and black beard gave him the look of a stylish sexton—had cheerfully trekked over the hill to STX Entertainment’s offices in Burbank, and STX’s executives had cheerfully welcomed them with a bottomless supply of bottled water....
...Fogelson looks at comps, too, but then he applies a three-part test. First, can the film be great? (By “great,” he means “distinguished within its genre.” When he green-lit “The Boy,” a horror film that STX will release this month, he hoped merely that it could be “a great blend of two beloved subgenres of horror: the spooky doll, and the house haunted by a ****ed-up child.”) Then, Do we know how to sell it? And, Can we make much more in success than we lose in failure?
“Yeah, I could walk all the way to Egypt. Or you could just free them yourself using magic.”
Modest profit doesn’t suffice. STX is now filming “The Foreigner,” which stars Jackie Chan as a former assassin who comes out of retirement to hunt the I.R.A. terrorists who blew up his daughter. Fogelson was confident that he could sell it, and that it was a “free play”—that it would earn enough in China alone to recoup its costs. The low-risk strategy would be to bring in a pliable unknown to direct. “We could have got a three-hundred-thousand-dollar director,” he said. “But we worked hard to get a Martin Campbell to give it a chance to be great.” Campbell, the director of “Casino Royale” and “GoldenEye,” got paid about two million dollars, which means that STX spent an extra $1.7 million to play the greatness lottery.
However, Fogelson noted, “If you ask, ‘Can we make something great once or twice a year that violates a rational business model?,’ the answer is no! It’s not a painting—it’s tens and tens of millions of dollars. Also, none of our movies are being made with the idea that they have to turn out great. Because eighty per cent of movies don’t.” When I mentioned a number of superb films that failed at the box office, and asked whether better marketing could have saved them, Fogelson said he wouldn’t have made them in the first place. He’d have scotched “Blade Runner,” because “darkness and sci-fi is really hard”; “Fight Club,” because “watching people beat the **** out of each other is a tough ask”; and “The Shawshank Redemption,” much as he loved it, because the obvious sell—an innocent man trying to escape from prison—was a huge spoiler...
...Later that week, Fogelson drove his Tesla to Beverly Hills to meet Jackie Chan in his suite at the Montage Hotel to discuss “The Foreigner.” Noting the brutality of the story, Chan said, “We need a happy ending. Otherwise the audience leaves, and—” He stood and shuffled off, shoulders bowed.
“Otherwise, it’s not sufficient reward for the journey you’ve asked the audience to go on,” Fogelson agreed.
Chan then suggested that a female character who got killed off in the script be kept alive. “We save her for No. 2,” Chan said. “Now the I.R.A. goes after her—and that’s the story.” Fogelson grinned and shook the actor’s hand.
Chan was just the kind of brand-extension expert that Fogelson needed to crack the Chinese market—and to attract wayward American viewers. Television has posed what might be called the “Game of Thrones” problem: once cinematic sex and violence, complete with dragons, are available on your phone, why pay a sitter and drive to a mall to see them? Even as the studios seek to distinguish their franchises from television, they have begun to shape them according to television’s dictates. A sequel like last May’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” from Marvel, is less a self-contained film than a loose amalgam of ongoing stories. The film lays track for two future sequels and allots significant screen time to each of the film’s fourteen main characters so they can serve as calendar reminders of forthcoming spinoffs and other ancillary products, including, of course, TV shows. The film is essentially a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar episode of a television drama that airs every few years.
To Fogelson, this Scheherazade sensibility makes both financial and creative sense. Driving back to the office after meeting with Chan, he remarked, “A few years ago, thinking about the sequel that way would be characterized as a lazy, greedy *******ization of the creative process. If you said that now, you’d be telling the entire world that they’re wrong. Sequels have become a duty—a form of storytelling that, thanks to great television, audiences have grown accustomed to. You can aspire to create six two-hour movies that develop your concept across multiple resolutions—which makes movies easier to sell, and creates a more predictable business model. Half the films we’ll say yes to will have sequelable potential.”
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