Young Directors: A Cautionary Tale

Here’s the story: young, promising film director scuffles around for a few years, finally gets his shot and makes a low-budget, critically acclaimed movie.  As a reward, the powers that be hand him the keys to a mega-budget franchise tent pole movie that will make him millions of dollars and set him for life.  The film is released and . . . you fill in the rest.

If the young director is named Colin Trevorrow (previous film Safety Not Guaranteed), the result is Jurassic World,  one of the three biggest grossing films of all-time, critical praise, commercial success, and a future doing pretty much whatever he wants.  If the name of the director is Josh Trank (previous film Chronicle), the result is Fantastic Four, humiliation, a 9% Rotten Tomato score, self-immolation with a pathetic "My vision would have been great!" tweet, and losing a chance to direct a film in the Star Wars franchise.

The entertainment business is about risk and reward.  This has always frustrated corporate studio heads who think that producing reliable movies should be as simple as producing reliable cars.  Marvel had a good run with 12 consecutive #1 openings, but that streak had to end sometime, and it did with Fantastic Four’s opening at #2 (I will refrain from making a number 2 joke).  The rebooted Fantastic Four opened at $26 million, which sounds like a lot until you realize that Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which was a bad sequel to a bad origin movie, opened at $58 million. 

Would it reduce the amount of risk if directors were required to have a little more experience before being given the keys of a potential franchise?  I saw Safety Not Guaranteed and liked it, but I wouldn’t have thought the director possible of managing an epic like Jurassic World; the artistic vision may be there, but can he work with union-represented crews, high-tech special effect houses, ego driven stars who care more about their lighting than their lines, and studio execs delivering notes like they were the word of God?

As summer releases racked up record grosses (three of the top six grossing films of all time were released in 2015), I have been waiting for the train wreck (which, ironically, turned out NOT to be Trainwreck).  Terminator: Genysis was a disappointment, but not a disaster.  I suspected that eventually audience fatigue with special effects and explosions would culminate in a big budget film epically failing at the box office; Fantastic Four is that train wreck.

Suspicions around Fantastic Four have been buzzing around the internet for months.  I think everything you need to know can be gleaned from Miles Teller’s blank expression on the Fantastic Four poster (he looks like someone desperately trying not to reveal that it was he who just farted); he can’t even work up enthusiasm for the POSTER, so what is his performance going to be like? It didn’t help that the previous two Fantastic Four films (I won’t count the Roger Corman produced effort that was not made for release) weren’t very good and were still fresh in people’s memories despite Fox’s attempt to erase them from history. 

Despite all the blame being spread between the director, the cast, and probably the craft services people, some blame is being aimed at the studio for greenlighting a Fantastic Four reboot so soon after the initial two films went off into the sunset.  The recent (less-than-successful) reboot of Spiderman so soon after the Tobey Maguire series has some thinking that franchises need to lie fallow before getting re-invented for a new generation.  Of course that theory ignores the fact that The Amazing Spiderman and the rebooted Fantastic Four simply weren’t very good movies.

I am somewhat buoyed by the announcement that the re-rebooted Spiderman will NOT feature an origin story; I refused to sit through another exposition of how radioactive spiders can cause teenaged boys to stick to walls and sense when danger is coming.   I also approve of casting Marisa Tomei as Aunt May;  if she is a teenager’s aunt, shouldn’t she be in her 40’s or early 50’s and not her 60’s of 70’s?  It’s about time we had an Aunt May who was also a MILF.

One wonders if the fate of Fantastic Four will give Marvel pause about its multi-year, multi-universe plan of launching franchise films in the future.  As the old saying goes, “Man plans and God laughs.”  All it would take is one mis-step and the first Marvel film that does “less well than expected” could topple the rows of dominoes that have been set up (I suppose the gross for Age of Ultron, $1.4 billion, could be considered disappointing in that it was expected to surpass the original The Avengers).

Who knows how long the superhero fad will last in movies; maybe next year a bunch or Anime features will crack $1 billion in worldwide grosses.  In the meantime Marvel will continue to churn out its product, presumably without any additional help from Josh Trank.

I just want to add a quick addendum: I am boycotting the film version of The Man From UNCLE.  A year or so ago I watched the first three seasons of the TV series, and the thing I was most impressed with was the fact that at the height of the Cold War they created a Russian character who was not a stereotypical Commie-loving, duplicitous Russian (see Checkov on Star Trek).  So in the movie they make Illya Kuryakin  a KGB spy.  I haven’t been this upset about a change in adapting a TV show to a movie since [Spoiler alert!] the first Mission Impossible film made Jim Phelps the bad guy.  If you’r going to do the show, just do the show.

playing to be bad

The old saying when I was growing up was, “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”  Never has that bromide been less relevant than today.  Now a days you either try to win, or you try really hard to lose, but no one cares about playing the game.

Doug Whaley, the GM of the Buffalo Bills recently lamented his team’s quality at quarterback by saying they were “almost in QB purgatory” because they never finished so poorly as to warrant a top two draft pick where they could acquire a quality quarterback.  So being mediocre is bad, it pays to be really, really awful and lock up a high draft pick.

Really?  Quality quarterbacks are all taken by the third pick?  Tell that to the Seattle Seahawks, who selected Russell Wilson in the second round.  Tell it to the Oakland Raiders, who used their #1 pick on Jamarcus Russell.  Colt McCoy was a #1 pick; Tom Brady was picked #199.  So Whaley is seriously arguing that Colt McCoy, once his career is over, will be considered more successful than Tom Brady?

Whaley’s rumination that it pays to be deliberately bad has been wholeheartedly adopted by basketball teams.  The phenomenon of “tanking” has been epidemic in the NBA in recent years, with the team from Philadelphia not only tanking, but basing their first round picks on what rookie will help them the least so they can get a first round pick again the following year.  Under their philosophy, they should have the next 10 #1 picks in the draft and come in last every season; that would be success.

The league’s response to tanking has been to dilute the draft process, so instead of being assured a #1 pick a team only has a better chance of getting a #1 pick.  The problem with this strategy, as I've written before, is that bad teams still get rewarded with better odds of a high draft pick, while teams experiencing an off year sometimes get a shot at a college player who can transform their team.  So the Sacramento Kings can be terrible for ten years and never get a really good draft pick (save for Boogie Cousins, and his status as a transformative player is still a work in progress after five years), while the LA Lakers can be one of the league’s premiere teams for several decades but get a #2 pick when they fall on hard times.

The recent baseball trade deadline was a study in psychology, with the Tigers deciding to blow up the store and trade major players like David Price and Yoenis Cespedes for prospects, while the Toronto Blue Jays, with nearly the same record, going all in and acquitting not only Price but also Troy Tulowitski.  Only four games separated the two teams in the standings, but one decided to sink to the bottom while the other decided to aim for the top because anything is better than staying in the middle (okay, their respective divisions played a role, since the Tigers are in the competitive AL Central while the Jays reside in the mediocre AL East).

Can anything be done to prevent teams from deliberately trying to tank in order to be better at a later date?  Clearly the NBA’s strategy of not guaranteeing a losing team the #1 pick is not working.  The only hope is that newer GMs that are better versed in statistical analysis will realize what a crapshoot the drafts are and place less emphasis getting a high draft pick.  Yes, high draft picks work out occasionally, as when the Colts picked Andrew Luck, but that is an exception.  Since 1990, only two NFL number 1 draft picks have appeared in more than 4 Pro Bowls: Peyton Manning and Orlando Pace.  Picking #1 is not a recipe for success.

Of course basketball is different than football or baseball as rookies can have more of an impact.  But even there the impacts are often overstated.  Jim Boeheim, basketball coach at Syracuse, once questioned the efficacy of teams tanking for college prospects who were not of the same caliber as, say, LeBron James.  Now that most college hoopsters are one-and-dones, there is little suspense over the talent level available for pro teams debating whether to tank.  Also, a college player with one year of experience is less likely to be an impact player than four-year college grads used to be.

Maybe this is the result of parity; the bottom and the top aren’t that separate in most sports, so that makes it easier to decide whether to sink or aspire to what passes for greatness.  With the second wild card team in baseball, mediocre teams have a reason to believe they can win even if they are below .500 in August, but only if they pick up a #1 starter at the trade deadline.

The final responsibility is that of the fans.  Never accept your team telling you “there is a process” as an excuse for losing.  But wait; both the Cubs and the Astros are succeeding after years of relying on a process of developing prospects.  Ahhh, never mind.

Jon Stewart, we hardly knew ye

This week marks the passing of the torch in fake journalism as Jon Stewart steps down from his anchor desk at The Daily Show for some well-earned rest.  Doing a daily show like, um, The Daily Show would be grueling if you were just mailing it in, but under Stewart’s leadership the show set an unprecedented standard for craftsmanship.  Reports about well-known full-time comedians like Amy Shumer or Chris Rock replacing him were absurd, as hosting The Daily Show would preclude any other work these people were doing.

Of course the gig had to go to a relative unknown, Trevor Noah, just as Stewart was relatively unknown when he replaced Craig Kilborn (who? Look him up on Wikipedia).  Noah not only has to replace Stewart as the on-air face of The Daily Show, he also has to manage to staff responsible for supporting it.  Few people have the combination of skills needed to hysterically take down world leaders and also ride herd over a staff of comedy writers.

The most brilliant thing about Jon Stewart is that he can do three things at once: he can be angry, he can be smart, and he can be funny.  It is hard enough to do any TWO of those things simultaneously; people are rarely angry AND smart, or funny AND angry.  But Stewart manages all three; he can be hysterically funny while brilliantly pointing out why the Congress, or CNN, or Fox News, or Barack Obama, is really pissing him off.

My favorite of his take-downs was when he covered the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology vainly trying to punch holes in the pro-climate change arguments of White House Science Advisor John Holdren.  Holdren was a Stanford educated Ph.D. who had taught at Harvard and UC Berkeley; the Republican members of the House Committee obviously hadn’t had a science class since 6^th grade.  Yet that didn’t stop them from trying to refute his warnings about the ice caps melting and raising the sea level by pointing out that ice cubes melting in a glass of water don’t cause it to overflow.  Stewart's explanation was far less polite, and far funnier, than Holdren’s response had been.

Fox News (the word “news” should really be in quotation marks) regularly assails Stewart for being a liberal, but what Jon Stewart really hates is stupidity.  Unfortunately for the Bush administration, that usually meant that his ire was focused on Dubya.  But he has had other targets.  His status as “the most trusted newsman in America” was cemented by his appearance on the CNN show Crossfire in 2004 where he accused hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson of “hurting America” with fatuous arguments and false dichotomies.  Several months later the show was cancelled.

Many years ago a series of books came out whose titles were “Something [Seinfeld, Baseball, Woody Allen, etc.] and Philosophy.”  Philosophers had finally found a way to make money, by commenting on popular culture.  I own several of these books including “The Daily Show and Philosophy,” in which virtually every chapter asks the same question—how can a “fake news” show be the most trusted source of news in America?  I think that question is best answered by pointing out that the next election will probably be another Clinton versus another Bush, unless Bush is upset by Donald Trump.  With reality this absurd, fake news starts to look more appealing.

The real answer is that journalism has lost its way.  Journalist became convinced that to be trusted they had to be “objective” and being objective meant never pointing out when someone was telling an obvious lie. The first time I came across this truth was in the book Playing to Win by Jeff Greenfield.  Greenfield pointed out that a New York Times story would never begin with the words, “Senator Smith lied again today when he said . . . .”  So you could get away with telling a fib because it would be reported as a fact, and readers would be none the wiser.

With news organization hamstrung by their obsessive desire to appear objective, it was left to a comedian to show clips of a politician asserting something as fact, followed by several minutes of clips proving the exact opposite.  The major news outlets would never run a clip of a candidate saying, “I never said . . .” and then show numerous examples of that politician saying EXACTLY that; The Daily Show would (this is how Stewart made Mad Money’s Jim Creamer look like a bigger fool than usual).

Comedy Central is in a precarious place right now.  Stephen Colbert has already left his Emmy-winning spin-off of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, in order to take over David Letterman’s gig at The Late Show.  John Oliver wasn’t available to succeed Jon Stewart because he has his own show at HBO, Last Week Tonight (where he has proven tremendously effective; after a tirade about net neutrality the FCC received so many complaints they re-examined their position).  Key & Peele have announced their show will be ending after the current season.  Heaven knows how much longer they will be able to hold on the Amy Shumer as her movie career takes off.  That is a huge brain drain for a relatively small network.

Time will tell if Trevor Noah will be able to fill Jon Stewart’s enormous shoes.  I hope so, as America needs a beacon of light as we head into another election cycle.  After 16 years behind his anchor desk, Jon Stewart deserves a break, even if his quitting means that he, and not CNN, is hurting America.