THE OSCARS: Richard Brooks
RUPERT MURDOCH’s studio, Twentieth Century Fox, was originally due to shoot The English Patient, the movie that went on to pick up nine awards including best film at Monday’s Oscars, but Fox did not want to spend R140-million on a film without a star actress. He demanded that Demi Moore replace Kristin Scott Thomas as the female lead.
British writer-director Anthony Minghella and American producer Saul Zaentz, who has already tasted Oscar success with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, refused to budge and were triumphantly vindicated. Scott Thomas, who also starred in Four Weddings and a Funeral, was even nominated for Best Actress. ”It shows how much Fox knew,” Zaentz said. ”They thought we’d bow to pressure. They were so wrong.”
Minghella has spent the past two weeks ensconced in Beverly Hills’s Four Seasons hotel being fted by the Hollywood which once spurned him. ”Fox simply squeezed our budget and made it impossible to do the movie,” he recalls.
Most of Hollywood still has little idea who he is. ”They think I’m some Italian because of my name and because so much of The English Patient was shot in Italy.” In fact Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom.
The English Patient was eventually made by Miramax, a US independent film company, which put up four-fifths of the budget with Zaentz raising the rest himself. It is expected to rake in at least R875-million worldwide – particularly after its sweep of the Oscars.
The course of the production is typical of today’s Hollywood. Big studios have little faith in intelligent, writer-director movies and increasingly prefer so-called event movies, like Twister and Independence Day, because their marketing and distribution divisions can only think big.
”The big movies are dumbing down even further,” bemoans Tom Pollock, former chairman of Universal Studios and head of the American Film Institute. Studios brag about the size of a movie’s budget as if it were some machismo totem. ”Hollywood is also much more concerned about take than make,” says Eric Fellner, co-chairman of Working Title, the British company responsible for the double Oscar-winning Fargo.
At least 10 Hollywood films coming out this year will have budgets of about R420- million. These include Volcano (R392- million,) Speed II (R455-million) and Titanic, James Cameron’s new film whose R800-million budget will make it vie with Kevin Costner’s Waterworld as the costliest film yet made.
These great whales of movies may have star names over the title but the real show- stoppers are the special effects. Studios actually consider them less risky because they can be sold and merchandised internationally.
But this year’s Oscars have left them with a bloody nose. Four of the five best picture nominations were made by small independents. The fifth, Tristar’s Jerry Maguire, was not initiated by the studio but brought in by its star, Tom Cruise. Even more galling for Hollywood, three of the four – Secrets and Lies, The English Patient and Shine – were directed by Britons Mike Leigh and Minghella and an Australian, Scott Hicks. ”Studios are horrified by the Oscar nominations,” says Fellner.
David Aukin, head of Channel 4 Films, whose recent successes include Trainspotting, Shallow Grave and Secrets and Lies, has research which shows why such films are doing better overseas: ”Focus groups say they are a pleasure to watch because they have no special effects.”
The big studios show no signs of changing their ways, but one way to combat the rise of the independents is simply to buy them up or to establish separate small film divisions. Miramax is now owned by Disney, while Warners has Fine Line and Fox has set up Searchlight. October Films, the American company which distributed Secrets and Lies in the States, is being eyed by Universal.
Jane Scott, the English-born producer of Oscar-nominated Shine, went to both the big studios and the independents in her trek round 39 companies and studios to raise R20-million to make her movie about the pianist David Helfgott.
In the end, the Paris-based Pandora gave her and director Scott Hicks the cash. In America it ended up being distributed by Fine Line, which had turned it down three years ago. ”One of the studios could have financed Shine out of its small change,” Scott says. ”Studios would not back Shine because they didn’t know how to make such a movie, and they didn’t want Geoffrey Rush in the lead as they had never heard of him.” They’ve heard of him now – Rush won Best Actor this week.
Connected to the rise of the independents was the size of the British contingent at the Oscars. Sixteen years ago Colin Welland, scriptwriter of the Oscar-winner Chariots of Fire, prematurely declared: ”The British are coming.” This year they have at last arrived.
Minghella puts much of it down to the rigorous apprenticeship in Britain, often through radio, television and the theatre. He himself worked in all three before his first film, Truly Madly Deeply, in 1991.
Meanwhile in LA the Brits are celebrating. Minghella is being sent bundles of new projects. ”They are all for big movies,” he says. ”They assume I only do epics, because of The English Patient.” Last week he had a call from Billy Wilder, the last of the great old-style directors, who left Europe in the 1930s for Hollywood to make classics like Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. Wilder told him how much he had enjoyed The English Patient. ”It was such a nice sentiment from such a great director,” says Minghella.
The English Patient opens on circuit in South Africa on April 4