Joel Silver stands on the Warner Brothers lot and points to the remnants of a house where he filmed parts of four Lethal Weapon movies. “We blasted a toilet out of that window,” he says, smiling proudly. “Over there, we drove a car straight into the living room.”(There's a ton more here.)
Ah, the glory days.
Behind Mr. Silver, the flamboyant producer of some of the biggest action hits of the last thirty years, is the modest set for one of his current films, an R-rated comedy with no stars, almost no budget and, for now, no title. Not that Mr. Silver was ready to call the production small. “It’s a little movie, but it’s a big little movie,” he says.
And therein lies Mr. Silver’s challenge: How does a larger-than-life, free-spending producer fit into a movie business that has been tightening up and cutting some of its more grandiose characters down to size?
In the new Hollywood, stars count for less, whether in front of the camera or behind it. Financial firepower and technological wizardry matter more. And a generation of producers, whose principal assets were their industry connections and a remarkable degree of personal force, are having to adapt.
Mr. Silver, 58, has been a dominant studio moviemaker for over three decades, delivering blockbuster franchises like Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and The Matrix. The 59 movies he has produced have generated almost $10 billion in ticket sales, adjusting for inflation. The money he has made for Warner alone has won him lavish treatment from the studio, not just in compensation, but also in perks. To make him happy, Warner once went so far as to send movie props to his Brentwood mansion for his son’s birthday party.
Warner, at least in years past, has ignored Mr. Silver at its own peril. Six years ago, Jeff Robinov, then a top production executive at the studio, was hospitalized after a motorcycle accident. As he recovered, Mr. Robinov heard that Mr. Silver was exaggerating the severity of the accident, and telling people that Mr. Robinov was unable to function. When Mr. Robinov asked Mr. Silver why he was doing this, the producer said it was because the Warner executive hadn’t been returning his calls promptly.
Despite such antics, producers like Mr. Silver used to be able to count on one studio or another to support them in near perpetuity. So what if they fell on hard times — as Mr. Silver has, recently delivering a string of flops like Speed Racer (one of the biggest money-losers in Warner’s 87-year history), Ninja Assassin, Whiteout, and the aptly titled The Losers.
Studios no longer take such losses lightly. Bleeding from plummeting DVD sales and higher marketing costs, they’ve started reducing producer deals. Warner alone has cut the number of producers it carries by twenty percent over the last two years, and has said more reductions are on the way. The producers Warner now favors are mostly young and inexpensive or come with financial backing of their own from outsiders, like Legendary Pictures, which teamed up with Warner to make The Dark Knight.
Warner has also been building up the production companies of directors and actors like Zack Snyder, Ben Affleck and Todd Phillips, all of whom now challenge Mr. Silver in a pecking order that changed when old images of Hollywood producers— who survived by wit, will, and the occasional outrageous moment— began fading to black.
A particularly difficult point for both Warner and Mr. Silver is the cost of his production deals. In a frothier time, the lucrative arrangements struck by Mr. Silver allowed him to get a cut of the revenue from his films. That means he is entitled to about 8 cents of every dollar the studio takes in for his pictures, whether they are bombs or runaway hits.
Warner is also required to distribute films from Mr. Silver’s production company Dark Castle, which self-finances horror and other low-budget movies with $240 million in private funding. In theory, the deal gives Warner films from an experienced producer without risking its own production money. In practice, the arrangement has sometimes backfired, as it did earlier this year with Splice, a thriller about a pair of scientists who use genetic manipulation to create a monstrous child.
Mr. Silver acquired rights to Splice at little cost. But Warner spent about $26 million to market the film, only to see it come up short, with just $17 million at the domestic box office.
Against backdrops like this, Hollywood studios are nudging entrenched producers away from prized but risky projects, if only to avoid paying them millions of dollars in participation fees while the studio loses money. For instance, Mr. Silver was entrusted for years with developing Wonder Woman into a big-budget movie. Warner recently took the superheroine away from him, to exert more control and to allow other, less expensive producers to take a shot at it.
So even though Hollywood has always been the fabled land of comebacks and second acts— and Mr. Silver recently found success with Sherlock Holmes— the megaproducer also knows that his head may be perilously close to the chopping block. His deal with Warner, which provides for a staff of about twenty, expires in December 2011; negotiations for a new contract haven’t started. Mr. Robinov, now president of Warner’s motion picture division, declined to comment on whether the studio would renew Mr. Silver’s deal or simply pressure him into a more restrictive contract. “Joel is an incredible cinephile, who is incredibly intelligent and incredibly passionate about his job,” says Mr. Robinov. “That’s a lot to bring to the party.”
For his part, Mr. Silver is playing the role of the stoic. “Maybe I will continue with Warner and maybe I won’t,” he says over a dinner of goulash and brussels sprouts inside his trailer. “I hope I do.”
Still, some of his powerful friends seem worried. At the very least, they are rallying around him. “Warner’s is very fortunate to have Joel Silver,” said Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios. “Let’s hope he doesn’t take a bullet from anybody. He’s a good guy,” says Terry Semel, Warner’s former chairman. “Even home-run hitters have cold streaks. It’s the nature of sports and it’s the nature of movies.”
Bruce Berman, the chief executive of Village Roadshow Pictures, who has known Mr. Silver since 1979 when they worked together on Xanadu, says no producer working in Hollywood better understands the pull of mass entertainment. “That’s incredibly valuable,” he says. Even so, Mr. Berman allows that his pal “is a 20th-century man in a 21st-century world.”
Mr. Silver, burly and bearded, has been parodied in several movies, most recently by Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, but he is far from the only megawatt producer under pressure or needing to figure out a new way forward.
Rico says if anyone is interested in a much-cheaper producer & screenwriter (who, while he's produced no blockbusters, has produced no money-losers, either), they may contact one here:
Mark Seymour
Producer, Proofmark Cinema
mseymour@proofmark.com
215.866.6184
POB 79, Wynnewood, PA 19096-0079
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