'Cannes You Dig It?' 

In praise of ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ a documentary by Alec Baldwin and James Toback.

This week I watched Seduced and Abandoned, part of the HBO Documentary season running on Sky Atlantic at the moment. Fronted by actor Alec Baldwin and screenwriter James Toback, the film is a fascinating peak behind the curtain of the Cannes Film Festival and acts as a ‘state of play’ snapshot of making movies in Hollywood in 2013 and the film industry in general. Baldwin, with Toback in tow, attends the festival for the first time under the pretence of rustling up financial backing for an original script he intends to star in, while also making a documentary film recording their efforts. Hitting countless brick walls and encountering many of the film industries great and good ( past and present) along the way, the film leaves you with the feeling that it’s a miracle anything other than sequels and franchise movies ever gets made.

 The pair’s idea to make a film set in Iraq that mirrors the (literally) balls-out, non-commercial spirit of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris - with Baldwin subbing for Marlon Brando and Scream star Neve Campbell as his female lead – is met with unanimous blank stares. Maybe these guys have seen the bedroom scenes from Baldwin’s ‘bonking divorcee’ comedy, It’s Complicated, or are trying to save Campbell from a lifetime of therapy and PTSD – or it could be they just think it sounds like a pretty terrible idea! Aware of the necessity for foreign investors and the need to secure overseas distribution and home entertainment rights upfront, Baldwin and Toback are looking to raise approximately $15-$18 million to make their movie, but based on the two actor’s ‘marquee value’ they are told that they will be lucky to bag anything near that amount. Several unconnected foreign investors quote a max budget of $4-$5 million with these stars attached and they suggest that Baldwin should stick to what he knows – the idea for a submarine based comedy, with lots of sex thrown in, featuring the star of 30 Rock and The Hunt for Red October is something that these guys can really get behind. It’s this incredibly blinkered and unimaginative thinking that prevails and at that point the first of several hard and fast rules surfaces – Money Follows Stars. The only names that seem to be on anyone’s lips at this year’s Cannes are Jessica Chastain and Ryan Gosling. With this in mind our pair of intrepid filmmakers set up interviews with both these actors and pitch their idea. As you can imagine it doesn’t exactly go down well, but both actors are gracious enough to say they’d need to read the script before they signed on – I imagine a waste paper bin with the words ‘In Tray’ printed on the side of it will be that script’s final resting place.

Next stop is trawling the adjacent marina for several lunch dates aboard the yachts of some of the world’s wealthiest men. The impression you’re left with is - Billionaires stay Billionaires because they like to keep a tight hold on their cash – protecting their money with the quiet, steely determination of a 1970’s BBC TV presenter sneaking into the auditions for Bugsy Malone.

This could all be very depressing and leave you despairing where your next Blue Valentine, The Descendants or Before Midnight is coming from, but our hosts are suitable aware and bring a wry smirk of optimism to the proceedings. Baldwin is quick to admit that, in terms of movies at least, his star power faded very quickly first time around and his new-found success as a TV comedy actor is a solid, if fleeting, platform from which to launch a second movie career. He also acknowledges the shift in power away from Director towards Actor that has occurred in recent years, stating that back in the late 80’s, in the hands of Mike Nichol’s, his director in Working Girl, he was just “a spatula he used to flip an omelette, I wasn’t the omelette...I was the salt that you might have sprinkled on it”. He sums up his inability to maintain a high profile career as follows, “The way you make it in this business is you have to become a real selfish mother-fucker”. He’s not kidding! And if to prove a point, he hooks up with Brett Ratner – the man who made his name directing the Rush Hour franchise and un-made his name by almost derailing the lucrative X-Men franchise with Last Stand and making dubiously sexist (and anti-gay) comments ahead of his abortive attempt to produce the Oscar Ceremony in 2012 – talk about making a target of your target audience.

As Baldwin and Toback’s vision appears to be slipping further and further from their grasp, the film takes several sideways glances at some of the most iconic films in cinema history, offering up behind the scenes anecdotes and insights into the making of Goodfellas, Chinatown, The Pianist, The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby and, of course, Last Tango In Paris. We are treated to interviews from the likes of Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford-Coppola and James Caan who reminisce about their experiences, the ever changing landscape of film and the true Hollywood legends (including Robert Evans - subject of the OTHER great Hollywood insider documentary, The Kid Stays In The Picture – well worth a viewing if you can squeeze it in).

In the end you are left with a fairly bleak picture of the major studios and the cinema industry as it stands – no one actually thinks it’s any harder to make films these days – in fact technological advancements and across the board access to all manner of affordable camera equipment has made the process easier than ever - but it is a hell-of-a-lot harder to rustle up the funding – it’s either $100 million plus blockbusters, franchise pictures or re-makes or $5 million Indies and very little inbetween. In an industry where senior executives are constantly looking over their shoulders at the ‘next guy’ with THE HIT under his belt coming up fast behind, where the wishes of the marketing executives and the projected sale of home entertainment rights are considered long before a script has even been written or a director hired, where everyone is fixated on ‘running the numbers’ and fearful of producing anything untested or with no in-built audience, It has never been more difficult to raise the money to produce a mid-budget film based on an original screenplay or anything like a unique, visionary concept. Ron Meyer, President and COO of Universal Studios and co-founder of CAA (Creative Artists Agency) sums it up perfectly, “In the Industry we make some shitty movies and we make some great movies...the real problem in this business if you make a great film that no-one goes to see, versus a bad film that everyone has gone to see, the way you keep your job is you make that bad film...you don’t get points for that good film.”

Toback’s highlights his fear that something remarkable and unrepeatable, the ‘auteur’ cinema of the 1960’s and 70’s, has withered and died with virtually no fanfare, aside from in the memories of some of the directors and actors who participated in those ‘glory days’, by quoting a poem, ‘Requiem’, by John Updike:

It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise – depth unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.

If nothing else the film gives insight into a world that may have passed, but will always remain in the work that was produced. What it fails to acknowledge is that fact that outside the Hollywood system and within certain genre’s things are different – ‘horror specialist’ Blumhouse Productions made their mark with Paranormal Activity. This was a small budget film – made independently for $15,000 – that grossed nearly $200 million dollars worldwide in 2009 when licensed for distribution through a Hollywood studio, Paramount. The company has gone on, under a strictly enforced ‘mission statement’ that caps budgets at the $10 million mark - with most coming in at around $3-$5 million - to make consistently high grossing horror genre films including The Purge, Dark Skies and Sinister. They have chosen their market, realise the potential built into that market and cater for it almost exclusively. Their ethos dictates that ‘the director is king’, encouraging inventive filmmaking, out-of-the-box marketing and a promise that the creative’s vision will be unaltered and remain free from ‘studio intervention’ if they stay under the afore-mentioned budget ceiling. They also attract relatively big name’s and quality actors such as Ethan Hawke, Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne by offering them percentage of back-end gross over up-front salaries – and when a movie makes over 130 times its budget, there’s plenty of ‘back-end’ to go around. Surely this model could be easily translated to fit films in any genre and work inside the studio system.

You would hope the news that the independently produced, Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa had passed the $100 million thresh-hold in the US this week would be a wake-up call. This is a comedy with no big stars (sorry Johnny! but with all the will in the world I can’t really bring myself to put you on the Hollywood A-list), with a price tag which puts it neatly into that ‘twilight zone’, mid-range budget that has been all but eradicated from our cinema screens. This little movie cost less than $15 million to make and has so far out grossed some of this year’s biggest studio turkeys at the domestic box-office, including The Lone Ranger (budget $225 million), Elysium (budget $115 million), White House Down (budget $150 million ) and Jack The Giant Slayer (budget $ 185 million). Unfortunately, with mega-budget sequels such as Transformers: Age of Extinction just around the corner, it looks like we might have to wait a while for that Baldwin/Neve political fuck-fest, Last Tango In Baghdad, to see the light of day...but put like that, maybe that’s not such a bad thing!