Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (13 page)

Then they spread the word at the malls: what the movie is about, who is in it and what other movies it is like. Often they hire outside companies such as Kevin Goetz’s Screen Engine or OTX to help bring in the audience and run the preview. Pretty much everything is at stake: the advertising budget, the release date, the entire destiny of the picture.

That’s why I arrive at the theater looking like a deer caught in headlights for the first test preview of any movie, after driving during crushing rush-hour traffic for at least an hour and a half on the 101 freeway in the Valley. I then stare closely at the line waiting outside. I say to these people, but not out loud—at least, not very loud—
You are the most powerful people in my life. Please be kind. In fact, be wonderful
. Then I smile like an idiot at all of them. And somehow I believe this behavior will affect their test scores. Sometimes it works. Sometimes, oddly, it doesn’t.

The test-preview process is the horrifying reality show we live through right after the first cut of the picture is delivered to the studio. So I’ve developed some superstitions. I always request Kevin Goetz to run the preview, to keep both the focus group and me focused. Everyone is there, including my director, whose feelings I am more worried about than my own. Also present are various divisions of the studio whose moods I have to discern. It’s here that we find out if we are a hit or a flop and what we can do to make us closer to the former. This is a do-or-die process, as we find out through this thumbs-up or thumbs-down roller-coaster night whether we have a shot in the marketplace.

We arrive at the preview with the big marketing issues unresolved and on the line. But then something consequential happens: We begin our dialogue with the audience. Before this moment, the movie was all ours. We knew what worked, what we loved, what was funny, what was moving. Until this moment, we knew our
movie. But once we share it with the audience and we feel them in the room, in our bones, our subjective experience becomes a joined experience. We see the picture with new eyes now, both ours and theirs. To me, more important than what we read later in the audience preview cards is what we feel in our gut, especially with a comedy, but also with a drama. Where were they laughing? Where were they bored, twitching, rustling in their seats? After this, we never see the movie in exactly the same way. The audience owns it with us. And this isn’t all bad.

If we are sane, we realize that we’ve fallen in love with our movie during shooting. During the cutting process, some of our thousands of choices have become ingrained. We may have lost some objectivity. This is inevitable when the filmmakers are alone together in a small, dark room eight hours a day for eight weeks. This is our last chance to regain that objectivity, as well as an opportunity to go Zen and just listen.

This is a wise posture, because there is often a combination of ego and interpretive conflict about what the audience reactions on the cards say. At times, the written comments are so random they are uninterpretable. Conversely, a picture can get better, or at least improve its numbers, from very clear and consistent notes that the cards reveal. (This happens more often than not.) Sometimes the process devolves into an ideological battle about whether the audience, marketeers and studio suits should be factored into the filmmakers’ decision-making process at all. But now that show business has become business business as the cost of movies and marketing has exploded, there is little if any patience for these debates; or, when they do happen, they take place among the filmmakers on the ride home, where we strategize as to what we are willing to do and where to hold the line.

Certain “arty” and “indie” movies get to avoid this fate altogether: Nonstudio movies can’t afford this process, and even if they could, the point of independent production is to allow the
filmmaker his final cut. That’s what independent means. Even at the classics divisions inside the studio system, they will test for marketing purposes, and A-list filmmakers get their pick of which notes to listen to and which to ignore; that’s the price of working with these kinds of directors. For example, Alexander Payne’s
About Schmidt
did not test well at all. Movies like this cannot randomly recruit a target audience in malls, because that’s not where educated grown-ups who love Payne’s movies hang out on weekends. When filmmakers like Payne work inside the studio system, as with
The Descendants
—a delicious dramedy starring George Clooney about a dysfunctional family becoming functional—they make only the changes they approve. (It helps that
The Descendants
was released by Fox’s Searchlight division, which specializes in smaller, specialty films.) This also happens if the movie tests over 90, which is terrific, believe me. The same goes for Darren Aronofsky, Paul Thomas Anderson, etc., when they are working outside of the studios. I highly doubt Anderson previewed
The Master
. But when Darren makes
Noah
—about the biblical flood—for Fox for over $100 million, he will be testing, because that is the fate of tentpoles.

Our call-and-response begins at this moment in back of the dark cinema as the first audience watches the picture. Testimony is given right after, in the recruited focus group, filmmakers and studio silent in their hidden seats, as the righteous speak of obvious mistakes, confusions, backstory problems, jokes that fell flat, continuity mistakes and problems or confusions with the ending. Hands are raised for numbers. Hearts sink or soar. You get an instant A or F (Cs are Fs, by the way). Our dialogue with America has begun.

This is not new. I found preview cards used by David O. Selznick, director of the 1939 movie
Gone with the Wind,
in the Fox vaults. These cards asked virtually the same questions we ask today. Based on some of my past focus groups, I imagined what Selznick might experience in the San Fernando Valley if
Gone with the Wind
were coming out now, and he had recruited the wrong audience—which happens all the time.

KEVIN:
Hi, everyone. I’m Kevin! What’s your name?

THE FOCUS GROUP:
(
In sequence, raising their hands
) I’m Cindy! I’m James! I’m Donna! I’m Billy! I’m Andrea! I’m Diego! I’m Joe the Plumber!

(Everyone laughs.)

KEVIN:
You can be honest with me. I had nothing to do with making this film. You won’t hurt my feelings. It’s only a print. It’s not finished or color-corrected. They have lots of work yet to do. And much of the Civil War footage is still waiting for effects. So, what worked for you? What didn’t work?

DONNA:
(
Raises her hand
) Well, Scarlett is a total bitch. She tried to steal Melanie’s boyfriend. And she was a terrible mother. I hated her.

(David O. slouches in his chair.)

KEVIN:
Who agrees with Donna?

(All the girls shoot up their hands in agreement.)

KEVIN:
(
Trying another tack
) Who was your favorite character?

DONNA:
Ashley Wilkes. He was dreamy.

KEVIN:
Okay, Donna. And Joe the Plumber—what did you think?

JOE THE PLUMBER:
I thought he was a pussy.

DIEGO:
Yeah, I liked Rhett. He was a gunrunner. Cool.

CINDY:
Me too. I liked him. I was glad he turned that bitch out.

ANDREA:
Rhett is way cooler than Ashley.

DONNA:
No way. He’s a drunk.

KEVIN:
(Sees this quickly devolving into a catfight)
Girls? What do you think the theme of the movie was?

ANDREA:
If you string the guy along, you’re gonna lose him.

JAMES:
(
Derisively
) God. It’s not a romantic comedy. It’s a war movie.

KEVIN:
Good. Guys? What do you think the theme was?

JOE THE PLUMBER:
The South will rise again!

(The studio head can no longer see David O.)

KEVIN:
How many of you would recommend this movie to your friends?

(Half the hands in the room go up.)

KEVIN:
What would you change about the movie so that you would recommend it to your friends?

CINDY:
I think Melanie should come back to life and get revenge.

(Girls agree, all cheer.)

(Filmmakers cringe in the back, looking at one another in dismay, and at Kevin hopelessly.)

KEVIN:
What if I told you this was based on a famous book and we can’t bring Melanie back to life?

(Girls are deflated.)

BILLY:
I know that book! My mother loves it.

Sometimes you leave the focus group and want to shoot yourself or the person who recruited the focus group or the focus group itself, deploying a mental firing squad. Sometimes, a point Joe the Plumber makes is a point that the director made in an earlier debate. At that moment in the focus group, he glares at the studio exec in his seat. Or sometimes a point Donna makes is a note that the studio exec had been pushing, so he smiles at the director. But often so many points are made that it’s a jumble, and everyone just rolls their eyes.

While all this drama and annihilation of our hard work is going on, a little man who sits pretty low down on the totem pole is standing in a hidden dark booth in the theater somewhere where no one can find him. He is frantically counting the critical numbers marked in the boxes on the preview cards that the recruited audience has just completed, trying to arrive at The Number.

THE NUMBER! THE TOP TWO BOXES!

When it’s all over and the audience has written and spoken its critiques, the whole team meets in the same small, dark projection booth like a bunch of outlaws and grabs at the little man in possession of the papers with the numbers. Someone has calculated the bottom line. Nuances are for tomorrow. First, are we a hit? Are we a disaster? Do we have work to do? And will it be easy, or hard, painful lifting?

The “everything” number is decided by how the audience rates the movie on their preview cards. There are five options: “excellent,” “very good,” “good,” “fair” and “poor.” The Number is the percentage (out of the total number of cards) of viewers who check one of the top two boxes, rating it as either excellent or very good. Good doesn’t count. Fair is bad. Poor is terrible.

The point of these tests is to find ways to push the “goods” into “very goods” by analyzing those “goods” and seeing what the issues are.

Another question asks whether you would recommend the movie to your friends. The top two boxes are “yes, definitely” and “yes, probably.” Again, only these boxes count in gauging a Number, and again we try to push the “yes, probably”s to “yes, definitely”s. The lesser options are “might or might not recommend”; “no, probably not”; and “no, definitely not.” Anything other than the top two translates to “I’ll watch it on TV or when it comes out on Netflix, or forget about it altogether!”

Everyone prays that their number is over 80. Then they’re safe. Most movies tend to test in the 60s. Average is low 70s. Mid-80s to 90 and up is a potential hit; 50s or worse, hide.

The data on the cards that we are interpreting in the dark booth are this: If you’re not recommending the movie to your friends, why not? It is interpreted through questions like: If you could change one thing about the film, what would it be? What
will
get
you to recommend this movie to your friends? (This question is asked in the focus group, often.) Who is this movie for? What was wrong or right about the ending of this movie? (Read: How much will reshoots cost us to fix it?) What characters did you dislike most? (Read: Off with their heads!) What did you not understand? (Read: Cuts? Or reshoots?)

Sherry Lansing was the best I’ve seen at leading these meetings. Calm and focused, never domineering or overriding anyone else, she could read and interpret the cards in four minutes flat, figure out how to fix existing scenes, what to reshoot and how to do it all for a price. And she knew how to make the filmmaker think it was his idea.

Years later, Sherry told me her secret: She actually had all her notes while she watched the movie and took little of the cards into account. She shared her notes privately with the filmmaker so he knew that she was saying what she really thought, not what the audience was saying. It worked, and quickly.

You can sometimes gain upward of ten points by fixing a bad ending, or clearing up confusions and muddles, with judicious editing. Sometimes a movie is just too long in places, and cuts and trims help. This is what we hope for.

Sometimes a reshoot is called for. This costs big money, but it’s a drop in the bucket if it makes a movie work. Particularly a movie that cost a lot to begin with.

The Number is the bottom line, the whole point of the evening, what we leave with. If it’s great, we have great spin, we soar. If it’s terrible, if we have a flop, we keep quiet. If it’s in the middle, we go to work and spin that it’s great and inflate the number by ten points. It’s kind of like someone’s age or weight in an online dating profile: No one believes the Number.

Constant studio test screenings in the San Fernando Valley have turned locals into mini-Roger Eberts—they are by now expert critics, writing as though they had their own
Chicago Sun-Times
column, TV show and blog, because every studio is testing their products in the same ten malls, and the same gene pool is getting all the action. The call-and-response with the audience is therefore a multilogue between these anointed geniuses (standing in for America) and the filmmaking team of directors, producers, marketing gurus and studio heads anxious for feedback. After we get the Number, the purpose of the meeting in the dark is to Figure Out What the Audience Is Saying and then to Figure Out What to Do. It is a song we have all learned to sing, some of us better than others.