When Donna Langley was appointed co-chairman of Universal Pictures last week, making her the first Briton to run a Hollywood studio since David Puttnam’s brief stint at Columbia in the 1980s, the first reaction was one of relief.
“Donna is the queen of no drama, and right now we need to keep it low key,” said a fan.
Yet the cheer was short-lived as water-cooler conversation turned to the huge financial, institutional and cultural challenges that face the slight woman from west London.
Ticket sales have proven recession-resistant: 5% up on the year, boosted by higher prices for 3D family movies. But Universal, beset by adult-orientated flops such as State of Play, Frost/Nixon and Bruno, is in the dumps. And it’s far from alone: across the board, Hollywood is running hot, expensive and out of capital.
The industry is facing its biggest threat since television in the 1950s. Can insiders, however cool and popular, bring change radical enough to save the industry from itself?
Nobody doubts that Langley is a smart and safe choice: unlike Puttnam she knows Hollywood inside out, and respects its codes, feuds and barbarian profit motives.
She is the daughter of a Civil Aviation Authority engineer from Staines and an ecowarrior mother. Langley turned up in Los Angeles at the age of 22 with a letter of introduction to a literary agent — a first rung on the ladder.
In 1993 she joined New Line, then a punk independent studio best known for repackaging the 1936 anti-cannabis film Reefer Madness to hooting college audiences.
“It was a small company, maybe 150 people. I did everything from hand-shooting Atlanta rappers to reading profit-and-loss sheets, working on films like The Mask and Boogie Nights. Moving over to Universal was a culture shock. Suddenly, there were all these meetings, corporate thinking. But it was the right thing to do.”
So it has proven. A mixture of work ethic — in June, Langley gave birth to her first child, Paolo, but was back on the BlackBerry three hours later — and social skills has earned her credit for the Bourne thrillers and Mama Mia, which she championed against dismissive male colleagues, delivering a $600m global hit.
Shortly before she was appointed co-chairman, The Sunday Times asked Langley, 41, what she wanted in the future.
“A franchise,” she answered without pause. “You get a Pirates of the Caribbean or a Star Trek and you can take all the creative risks you want.”
That is freedom, Hollywood-style, but is it enough?
Once upon a time, Hollywood made movies and showed them in its own cinema chains with stars it also owned.
Now A-List stars no longer sell films: Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe have lost the box-office magic they once had unless they do Richard Curtis romantic comedies, Mission Impossible IV and Gladiator 2, respectively.
They have been eclipsed by special effects that were sold by technocrats as cheap “actor killers” but have turned out to be staggeringly expensive.
Hollywood costs have continued to soar: summer blockbusters now routinely clock in at $200m — double the cost of a decade ago.
Hollywood is running out of cheap money. Last year Dubai was expected to pick up the tab, and this year Steven Spielberg, who has grown too expensive for the locals, is being bankrolled by Indian interests but few expect that romance to last.
Today’s films have to be made to perform in a three-ring media circus: initial ticket sales, which account for a mere quarter of revenue; DVD sales; and “downstream” sales to television in a myriad of cut-up versions and foreign markets. The formula is getting trickier, and quality television is once again stealing much of Hollywood’s thunder.
The sucker-punch has come from the sudden collapse of DVD sales.
“The money that rushed in from 2000 to 2007 in DVD sales papered over cracks in the business, but it was a temporary phenomenon,” said Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture: the New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood.
Sales are plummeting, as people realise they have run out of DVD space and they can rent them for $1 a night from Red Box, a DVD kiosk operator. The studios are attacking Red Box, holding back titles, but it may be too late: the silver disk, or even the Blu-ray disc, has lost its lustre. And that is without the cost of piracy, and before Wal-Mart’s announcement last week it was cutting the shelf space for DVDs.
The answer, hopes Hollywood, is internet downloads but Epstein warns them that in this brave new world they may be swapping “analogue dollars for digital pennies”.
He says that last week’s sacking of co-chairman David Linde and Marc Shmuger at Universal, to be replaced by Langley and new chairman Adam Fogelson, following similar changes at Disney and MGM, are unlikely to be the last.
“The studios are firing the heads and saying everything is going to be all right. But the problems are so enormous they can’t be solved even by making better movies. We are going to see many more studio executives lose their jobs in the coming months.”
He points out that Dick Cook, the veteran chairman of Walt Disney Studios, was fired last month even though he oversaw the successful Pirates franchise, which, like Disney’s Hannah Montana, could be spun off into sequels, toys and video games — the kind of multifaceted profit centres the studios crave.
Langley and Fogelson, both adoptive Californians, are learning to stand on quaking ground — two more years of making pricey Russell Crowe movies commissioned by their predecessors as General Electric negotiates to sell 51% of parent company NBC Universal to the telecoms giant Comcast. Everything could shift again tomorrow.
In the uncertain days ahead, critics suggest, Langley and Fogelson may have to take the gloves off to slip in a bona fide hit with their names on it.
“Donna gets on well with directors like Clint Eastwood and Judd Apatow, but right now they are not making big money,” said a former colleague.
“Forget adult movies: go for cheap horror at one end, and special-effects popcorn at the other. Donna needs fresher, cheaper talent, a radical web delivery policy that defeats pirates and a few blockbusters that can be turned into endless toys and theme-park rides.”
There is a glut of product: last year more than 1,000 movies were released in the United States, twice as many as in the 1980s, with only 30 making serious money.
Quite how long Tinsel Town can glitter on is not only a question for Langley, but a universal one across the industry.
Your Comments
Order By: