Starless Movie’s Starry Night
WEST HOLLYWOOD — There were plenty of happy faces at the Governors Ball on Sunday night, right after the Oscars. Bill Condon and Laurence Mark, the men who produced the show, stood near the center of the room, soaking up compliments about their efforts, while Sean Penn made time for a stream of well-wishers.
Out in the lobby there were yet more questions and photos for many of the winners, including a few who were up past their bedtimes. The kids from “Slumdog Millionaire,” flown in just a few days before from India, moved as a posse, and the director Danny Boyle placed the statue on Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail’s head for one photo and took turns holding it with the others. He said that although he had managed the children on screen, “I am not going to be the one to tell them it’s time to go to bed.”
It was a little grimmer at some of the tables where studio executives worked their way through dinner and an evening dominated by a little film shot in India that none of them wanted. Tender as it was, the slow-braised short rib must have seemed a little on the chewy side: there is nothing nice to say about being a bystander at your own party.
Although the triumph of “Slumdog Millionaire” had been writ for most of the season — it won eight Oscars over all, including best picture, director and adapted screenplay — it was still breathtaking to see a starless, partly subtitled film from halfway around the world sneak past so many carefully confected and well-financed studio efforts.
Despite all the planning and guile of production executives, directors, producers and marketing executives, movie magic is still something that occurs in the space between the audience and the screen at the front of the room.
American film is one of the last remaining exports, a kind of bejeweled software that the rest of the world clearly loves. More than half of the money American movies make at the box office comes from elsewhere in the world, and given the downward trajectory of DVD sales domestically, those global markets are only going to grow in importance.
But global imperatives go both ways. When a film with a British director, Indian actors and French co-financing goes home with eight Oscars, it’s hard not to see a message.
“I think it demonstrates that a good story well told, whether it is about someone in Mumbai, China or around the corner, will find an audience,” said Nancy Utley, chief operating officer at Fox Searchlight, the division of 20th Century Fox that found Oscar (and box office) gold after picking up “Slumdog Millionaire.” She added that the studio specialty division knew it had a winner on its hands when it screen-tested the film in Orange County, Calif. — sort of a ground zero of a conventional American audience — without any marketing or explanation, and the room loved it.
On the way in to the Kodak Theater on the red carpet, Mr. Boyle said there was no way to game your way to an audience. You have to make something worthy, he said, and then hope for lightning to strike.
“The cinema has to always be able to come up with a surprise, to do something that is unexplained, to do something that none of us expected,” Mr. Boyle said. “That’s why what is happening with this movie is exciting for the whole industry. We still have got to be able to surprise.”
Of course surprise is just another name for risk, and studios working into a recession where financing is tough to come by need to find as many sure things as possible. The ascendance of “Slumdog” comes at an awkward time in other ways.
Studios like Paramount and Warner Brothers have downsized or eliminated their divisions for smaller films, crippling the apparatus that enables talented directors and aggressive producers to create challenging work. The big studios are best at making movies with established stars or concepts, and then pounding them into public consciousness with blunt-force marketing.
When Warner Brothers found itself with “Slumdog Millionaire” (the studio had closed the indie division that owned the rights), it quickly realized it didn’t have the expertise to market a small movie, one whose audience needs to be nurtured over time. Warner then turned to Fox Searchlight.
After the box office success of “Juno,” “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Slumdog,” it is clear that Fox Searchlight is making its own luck. But because there are fewer options, it is the de facto first stop for a certain kind of smaller movie.
Yet there remains a maddening alchemy to this business of making movies that refuses to be pinned down. You can be a complete hero on one weekend and tagged as an idiot the next.
Think about it. People were laughing up their sleeves at Warner Brothers for letting go of “Slumdog.” But those same Warner executives took the Batman franchise and gave it to a talented director (Chris Nolan) who reinvented it by painting with a very dark palette and an even darker view of human nature.
“The Dark Knight” just passed a billion dollars. And those geniuses at Fox and Fox Searchlight? Keep in mind that they passed on “Slumdog” in the first place and spent much of the past year on a can’t-miss, star-infested, Oscar-confected movie called “Australia,” a film that was so bereft, come awards time, that its star, Hugh Jackman, had to host the Oscars to earn a seat. (He told that joke on himself Sunday night, to big laughs.)
Over the past few years the Oscars have been kidnapped by independent productions and foreign stars and directors, leading some to whine that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has become too tasteful for its own good. But when Hollywood executives look at the winners’ circle, what they are really seeing is a reflection of their better selves.
The mash-up between Bollywood and the classic Hollywood conjured by Mr. Condon and Mr. Mark worked — ratings were up 13 percent, to 36.3 million viewers, over last year’s miserable performance — because while “Slumdog” might have been conjured elsewhere, its DNA is Hollywood to the core. A big chase to start, lots of star-crossed love in between, and a hug at the end, including a dance number that would not have been out of place at the Kodak last night.
And there’s more where that came from. The winner of the documentary short category, “Smile Pinki,” was filmed in India as well. Working the carpet, I spent time making nice with its young subject, Pinki Sonkar, radiant after a cleft palate repair and a film about her journey. At the end of the interview with her and the film’s director, Megan Mylan, I awkwardly folded my hands together at my chin and bowed, as I had when the kids of “Slumdog” came through.
“I’m going to have to learn how to do that,” said a reporter next to me. It will be clumsy for everyone. Hollywood’s efforts to globalize its content as well as its business have been a train wreck for the most part, but for a stagnant industry under duress at home, the rest of the world is waiting for their stories to be told as well.
First of all, I am kidnapped by fantastic headline of this article.
I uttered that headline again and again. Starless movie's starry night.
What I like this phrase most is it can picture a beautiful dark night with one star in my mind.
It sounds beautiful enough to make me have a light smile with my face.
Teaching me that Samll can be great, the movie will catch my eyes when spring comes here my home.
