The
Hollywood Economist
The
numbers behind the industry.
Pushing
The Reality Envelope
On
September 4, 2005, the New York Times printed the
following intriguing correction:
An article last Sunday about film piracy included incorrect
revenue data supplied by the Motion Picture Association
of America. Hollywood’s global revenue in 2004 was
$44.8 billion, not $84 billion. Of the total, $21 billion,
not $55.6 billion, came from sales of DVDs and Videos.
The correction was the result of a Times reporter, Timothy
L. O’Brien, asking the Motion Picture Association
of America (MPAA) to furnish the combined global take of
the major studios in 2004. The MPAA receives the revenue
reports from the six majors and compiles the total profits
received from theatrical distribution, video sales (now
mainly DVD), and television licensing. This data is then
circulated among top executives in the “2005 All Media
Revenue Report.” But instead of supplying the New
York Times with the actual numbers, the MPAA sent it bogus
figures. Hollywood’s DVD revenue alone was inflated
by over $33 billion, possibly to make the MPAA’s war
against unauthorized copying appear more urgent. Of course,
the reporter had no way of knowing these impressive-sounding
numbers were inaccurate and published them in an otherwise
accurate story on film piracy. Such are the perils of Hollywood
reporting. Since Hollywood is an industry dedicated to perpetrating
illusion, its leaders often assume they have license to
take liberties with the factual elements that support the
movies they make. This practice is euphemistically described
by marketing executives as “pushing the reality envelope.”
Consider, for example, Twentieth Century Fox’s creation
of an “Extraterrestrial Highway” in Nevada.
In 1996, in preparation for a publicity campaign for the
movie Independence Day, Fox executives persuaded
Nevada Governor Bob Miller to officially dedicate Nevada’s
Highway 375 as a safe haven for extraterrestrials who landed
their space ships on it. Fox then placed a beacon on the
highway near the town of Rachel, Nevada, pointing to “Area
51”—which it described in a news release (sent
via Fox news) as the place where the U.S. military operates
“a top secret alien study project.”
To
make sure that the story received wider circulation than
just on Fox, the studio arranged for busloads of reporters
to see the putative periphery of “Area 51.”
Even though there is no such military base or “Area
51,” the “Extraterrestrial Highway” resulted
in hundreds of news stories about alien visitors. Not only
did this help publicize Independence Day, but it
fed into the long-standing paranoid fantasy about government
machination to conceal space invaders from the public. (A
fantasy that Steven Spielberg, for one, has brilliantly
mined in such films as Close Encounters of the Third
Kind, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Men in Black, and
the alien-abduction miniseries Taken.)
The way in which Hollywood crosses the boundary between
the make-believe and the real world takes myriad forms.
It can range from a studio creating a fake corporate web
site, as Paramount did with the Manchurian Global Corporation
for its remake of The Manchurian Candidate, to
counterfeiting a film critic, as Sony Pictures did with
the non-existent “David Manning.” It’s
a given that studios will alter the off-screen lives of
stars, as in the case of the unmarried actor Raymond Burr,
whose official biography included two imaginary dead wives
and a dead child. There’s also the common practice
of scripting fake anecdotes for stars to recite on talk
show, as, for example, Lucy Liu’s vivid description
of her co-actress Drew Barrymore clinging to the hood of
a speeding car going about 35 miles an hour without a safety
cord during the making of Charlie’s’ Angels:
Full Throttle.
Nor is it surprising that the culture of deception is so
deeply entrenched in Hollywood. The industry, after all,
derives much of its wealth and power from its ability to
get audiences to suspend their disbelief in movies and television
programs—even so-called “reality” shows.
Further, to realize their full profitability, these illusions
must be convincing enough to be sustained in other products—such
as videos, theme park rides, games, and toys—for years,
if not decades. So pushing the reality envelope is seen
by the entertainment press and the players themselves as
just part of show biz. It’s second nature, so to speak.
I
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