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Celebrities
change the world.
by Massimo Amici |
This year, a meaty Toronto International Film Festival screened over 400 films. Emerging artists, past masters, short films, documentaries... the quantity and diversity was impressive. However, it surprised me to see that local Toronto TV stations focussed mainly on the attending celebrities - and their latest love affairs - rather than on the cornucopia of films participating in the festival.
Many young filmmakers would like well-known actors for their movies. Quite simply, putting a star on a film project makes it more attractive to everyone: producers, investors, distributors and audiences alike. It makes it al easier. Easier, that is, to make money.
This rule applies moslty to advanced markets like North America, where the “star-system” is as fundamental to the business as sliced bread in the refrigerator. The nice thing about this is that stars sometimes use their celebrity status to launch smaller, more artistic films, and their filmmakers. This exposes a large number of people to films and stories that would otherwise get lost in the thousands of film festivals going on around the world. And many of these are ground-breaking, positive, constructive, good films.
Occasionally, the opposite occurs, where I go to the movies to see the latest film starring my favorite actor, and then this movie turns out to be less than great.
Making a movie is a complicated thing to pull off, and you never really know what’s going to come out of the oven. But sometimes it feels like not enough attention has been put into the recipe. Sometimes, it feels like we’re expected to enjoy a lasagna meal just because two huge steaks have been thrown in.
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Margot at the Wedding - by Noah Baumbach |
The movie industry is about mass-production, a kind of factory, if you will, especially where Hollywood is concerned. And just like in a lasagna factory, ingredients and proportions are optimized to meet a variety of tastses, so often the same ingredients are used over and over again. The tricky part of filmmaking, however, is that you can’t keep making the same film over and over. It has to be different each time. That’s where the thick, juicy steaks come in.
Beautiful and uplifting big films with big stars are out there. This happens when the star is placed inside a rich story, rather than when a banal story is crafted around a star. These films are great, and on top of that, they make more money than the others :)
Therefore, the more art you put into a successful business model, the more successful that product will be. But artists need businesspeople, and sometimes businesspeople are not as creative as would be good for their own pockets.
Celebrities have the power to make big changes come about. Some, like Nicole Kidman, invest their image in films that are more "artistic". And the world becomes a richer, wiser place when this happens, in turn, making larger audiences start appreciating and demanding deeper films as they become hungry for more truth. At the end of the day I, too, enjoy a good steak, but it’s more enjoyable medium-rare, accompanied by the right wine and a meaningful conversation.
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