THE BIGGEST FINANCIAL FRAUD IN MOVIE HISTORY
(The full text of this expose can be found at: http://www.angelfire.com/un/lyonheart)

Everyone believes that movies are very successful now, but an enormous fraud is being carried out against the owners and stockholders of these companies. The shocking truth is that even when you allow for income from sales of DVDs and TV showings, nine out ten films released in 2004 were financial failures. With a 90% failure rate, is it any wonder Hollywood is facing the worst financial crisis in its history? But this shocking truth is being carefully hidden from the public, the stockholders, the media, and even the men who actually own the studios. (The following analysis will finally explain to Ted Turner how he was swindled out of his studio, and he never knew his own employees were knifing him in the back.)

And I will prove that not only has fraud and swindling been going on that amounts to tens of billions of dollars, but I will prove that George Bush’s re-election was irrevocably tied to the lack of morals in Hollywood. Because there is a conspiracy that involves racketeering on the biggest scale in the history of America. But I must first explain how Hollywood REALLY works because, strange as it seems, this fraud was originally begun to hide Hollywood’s lack of morals, and things went financially out of control.

For example, if you ask Peter Jackson he’ll tell you that The Lord of The Rings trilogy would have been a flop if the major studio’s executives had their way. They would have lowered the heroic characters’ morals to match their own, and the film would have failed. It was precisely because Peter Jackson was wise enough stick to Tolkein’s 1950s morality that the film was so huge, and for once, the “suits” couldn’t muddy the waters morally (which they were dying to). Everyone good in the LOTR films is noble and true and pure of heart, to an extent that frankly embarrasses the average studio executive (because he is none of those things). That’s why every studio in Hollywood turned it down, and Jackson had to go to an independent outsider (New Line) to get financing for his trilogy. The major studios thought LOTR’s Morals were too old-fashioned, but they don’t understand the audience desperately wants morally old-fashioned heroes, precisely because we ARE so immersed in a period of war, fear, violence, and very little morality.

Why else would the American people re-elect George Bush, after four years of destructive policies, except to send Hollywood a message? Clean up the morals of your heroes until as they’re as clean as Aragorn, Frodo and Sam’s in the LOTR films. But in Hollywood circles such morality is too “old-fashioned”, so Peter Jackson had to make his films at an independent studio, and the other potential blockbusters that could be just as big lie untouched by the dozens, because the studio executives can’t get it through their thick heads that the audience doesn’t want the hero to behave in a morally ambiguous way, even for one moment.

Look at the heroes in the annual top ten box-office films for the last decade and the one constant you’ll notice is that the hero is 100% pure, with no morally ambiguous scenes, no matter how “cute” or “cool” the director thought the scene was. The box-office keeps speaking loud and clear, but no one is listening because it doesn’t match the attitudes that are admired in chic Hollywood circles. So, as always, it’s the moviegoer who really pays, and yet so rarely gets what they want, just because arrogant, immoral Hollywood executives refuse to understand their basic needs. The audience likes happy endings, power by proxy, lots less violence, and they hate everyday gritty reality. Today, we need a lot more directors like Alfred Hitchcock, who wisely observed, “Some director’s films are slices of life - mine are slices of cake.”

In today’s high cost market, any film costing more than $150 million HAS to be one of the 100 top-grossing films of all time just to start showing a profit. (And I’m including all projected income from DVDs, TV sales, etc., for the first three years - and today’s stockholders don’t care if a film will eventually make money on TV ten years in the future - they want it now.) If you count only the income that movies make from being shown in movie theaters, only about five percent of our films still make a profit.

Remember when you hear what a film has cost at the end of filming, that it doesn’t include the massive interest compounding on the film’s $150 million cost, while a perfectionist director slowly edits his three hour “masterpiece” for months on end. Then you find your $150 million has quickly escalated into $175 million. Add at least another $100 million for worldwide advertising costs, tens of millions for the prints shown in each theater, the enormous wallop of studio overhead (usually 30%, added to every in-house budget), as well as many other costs I’m not even touching on. Then add an enormous surcharge from compounding the interest every day on all of these costs, and you see how hard it is to make a profit. And many of these costs will start all over again when you begin manufacturing and distributing the DVDs. Financing a $150 million dollar film actually ends up costing a lot more than you’ve been tricked into believing, doesn’t it?

To make a profit from a film these days, a film has to earn about three times the cost you hear on TV, and then bear in mind that when you hear those big impressive box-office figures on TV, half of that goes to the theater owners before the studio gets a penny. This means a film worldwide must gross at least three times it’s final cost before you can expect a profit (and I am including all projected income from other media.) It’s very hard for a film to make a profit, when everyone spends too much on their films simply because they don’t understand how huge all the ancillary costs are once their film is finished.

And young directors are the last people to be taught this lesson. I’ve tried to teach dozens, but they haven’t been brought up by the movie industry to believe that making a profit is of any importance compared to receiving Oscars and artistic acclaim from the critics, and they learn this from the current crop of studio executives. And if this isn’t true, then why doesn’t everyone know that 14 of Martin Scorsese’s last 16 films lost money? And in some cases we’re talking mega-losses, as with Gangs of New York and The Aviator - or “career killers”, like the way he trashed Liza Minnelli in New York, New York.) Yet, instead of noticing that his films obviously repulse the audience (as shown by his 88% failure rate), the industry gave Scorsese an Oscar for Gangs of New York. So don’t pretend for one second the young film-makers aren’t learning this contempt for profit and the bottom line from the film industry itself. Is it any wonder the whole industry is self-destructing?

What’s hilarious is that Woody Allen is suing the producer of his last few films for “stealing the profits”. This makes it clear that Mr. Allen feels it’s beneath him to worry about trivial matters like the box-office, or he’d have noticed that there has been no box-office to generate any profits from, for many, many years now. In fact on their initial release, all of Woody’s films since 1980 have been box-office flops (with one minor one exception in 1986), so how could his producer have embezzled profits, when they’ve always been non-existent?

Woody Allen is so out of touch with the facts, and so in love with his own “genius” that he obviously has never spent even one single minute actually looking at the box-office returns on his own films, not even before he begins suing, or he’d know he has set the all-time flop record for directors with 24 box-office failures out of his last 25 films. Meanwhile the critics endlessly shout at the audience that this delusional, pathetically neurotic, child molester, should be the role model for the next generation of film-makers - so the critics were even more guilty than the studio executives for leading young film-makers astray. And they don’t even have the excuse that they did it to be wealthy, like the studios. The truth is the critics don’t like the audience being happy any more than the studios, which is why they keep screaming at you to love Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese. But we in the mass audience never will, you poor dumb critics, because the mass audience can see what you can’t. That both Scorsese and Woody Allen, and their films, are disgusting.

It’s no wonder few films make a profit, because the amounts being spent are out of control, for the simple reason that no young directors are being taught any of these business realities before they get to the sound stage. Therefore, none of them has a chance to understand just how enormously profitable their mega-budget film has to be in order to succeed. And never forget for a moment that every time you hear a film has taken in $100 million at the box-office, half of the that gross goes immediately to the theater owners, and the studio actually only gets about $50 million, which only starts to pay a fraction of the costs on a $150 million film.

These are the reasons why Peter Jackson is now suing New Line over the profits on “The Fellowship of the Ring” because we teach young directors everything about film-making except the hard truths of the box-office. You can find out everything about a film on every movie web site, but the statistics that REALLY need to be there - “How much did it take in at the box-office (both domestically and internationally)?” “Did it make a profit on its original release?” “What number box-office film was it for that year?” are never anywhere to be found. Not just on websites, but in film books, too, and God knows I’ve tried every conceivable way to get these statistics published - but all any publisher ever wants is another book on Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen - the two directors with the worst box-office average in the history of sound films.

No one wants to face the bitter fact that we have a brought up an entire generation of directors who have no respect for the box-office, because we have not taught them it matters by even giving them this information about the classic films of the past. I truly believe I am the only person in the world who knows how the all the great films of the past actually performed at the box-office, but it’s only because I’ve been compiling these statistics constantly for thirty years, as you certainly won’t find the accurate ones in any book or on any web site. (And, of course, the studios would be the last to tell you the truth, or I wouldn’t have to be writing this, would I?)

This is why young film-makers don’t have the information they desperately need to know, such as many of the so-called “classics” like The Treasure of The Sierra Madre were big box-office flops. In that case it was because the audience loathed seeing Bogart turn immoral and insane. That lunatic, paranoid, thieving Bogart, was not “our” Humphrey Bogart, and the audience showed their distaste at the box-office. (And Sierra Madre was a very expensive film, that had to be a blockbuster to break even.)

I am constantly shocked when I hear young wannabe film-makers talk, because the films that were deservedly rejected by the audience on their original release, are always described as having been big hits (Like The Wild One, Raging Bull and Memento), when they were actually notorious failures. This is one of the main reasons young film-makers are so confused about what the audience wants. Conversely the real monster hits of the past stay locked in the vaults because the studios think their morals are too “old-fashioned”, when if selected and marketed correctly by someone who truly loves them, the studios could be making tens of billions of dollars off those films. But they must be selected by someone who understands that the box-office success or failure of a film always means something - it’s the only voice the poor, abused audience has. Instead, we teach movie-lovers that box-office performance is the last thing you need to know about any film. And now we’re getting exactly what we deserve at the box-office, with flop after flop after flop after flop.

If we want hot young directors to give us big hits, then they have to be learning every day exactly which film of the past was a hit, and which was a flop. There is ALWAYS a reason why a film flopped, and it’s always very simple for someone like me to see, but only because I’ve studied the box-office figures for thirty years with a concentration and intensity that would terrify the average studio executive.

In 2004 Hollywood achieved the highest failure rate in the history of films, and the main reason is simple ignorance on the part of the new young directors, or they couldn’t respect Martin Scorsese so much (and deliver so many flops trying to imitate him) if they knew that of the sixteen films Scorsese has directed since 1977, fourteen of them failed on their original release, which means 88% of his films were unable to attract enough of an audience to even pay for his costs. How can we be surprised that 9 out 10 films fail, when the director who is the most honored, is also the man who (along with Woody Allen) has the highest failure rate at the box-office among major directors in the entire history of films?

When I was fourteen I began taking a long bus ride to the library every day to copy down by hand the box-office report in Daily Variety, and for thirty years I’ve studied and pored over the box-office, and the box-office always speaks loud and clear. Hollywood today is confused because “geniuses” like Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen have led a whole generation astray, when the industry itself should have been sending Scorsese back to low budget art films, and giving the awards to the directors who brought audiences back.

This would include Peter Jackson, who never should have had to wait until the final LOTR film before he won his first Oscar, when he had given the whole industry a huge morale builder and the box-office a mega-shot in the arm, right when we needed it most. Instead they gave the Oscar to Martin Scorsese for “Gangs of New York” a film that cost at least $175 million, and which (much too predictably) laid a huge stinking rotten egg at the box-office. I doubt if it even earned enough to pay for its advertising, yet the industry gives Martin Scorsese an Oscar for embarrassing them with a mega-flop while, Peter Jackson has no Oscar, after already earning two billion for the industry with just the first two films of his immortal trilogy (and that’s only the income from theaters.)

Is it any wonder young film-makers don’t understand that’s it’s important for a film to return its costs when the industry itself gives their Oscar to a man who keeps giving them flops, just so he can masturbate his ego all over the screen? Is it any wonder young directors have no understanding of the industry’s financial crisis, or concerns about costs and profit? Hollywood keeps giving their Oscars to the artists with the most failures, and naturally the wannabe directors are getting the wrong message from this.

The monumental struggle must begin NOW to take the movies back from the Scorsese’s and the Woody worshippers, and I am not just thinking about the financial crisis the industry is facing. I am (as always) thinking most of the poor audience, who are so sick and tired of the kind of crap they are constantly being asked to pay for. Instead, the poor, bewildered audience is being assaulted with everything EXCEPT the very things the audience really wants. It’s a magic box-office formula that has never changed, and it never will.

They like happy endings. They don’t like to pay to see disease, suffering and misery. They like “boy meets girl, boy gets girl”. They like to feel empowered because they feel so helpless in their job (which is why movies about frustration and impotent rage are such consistent box-office bummers.) Most of all they hate films in which the characters experience even the slightest financial hardship, because that is just what they came to the movies to get away from. People with lots of money don’t go to theaters, so if you’re going to make a mega-budget film you have to accept that you must appeal to the middle and lower classes, as well as the cinema elite.

The audience likes to feel happy and rich and beautiful, because they are none of those things, and it’s Hollywood’s job to make them feel all of those pleasures. But because Hollywood is no longer doing it’s job right, mega-budget films are flopping all over the place. We’ve forgotten our job is to fulfill and make real the audience’s illusions, and instead we give our Oscars to directors like Scorsese, a man who delights in shattering every one of the audience’s illusions. And all he’s succeeded in doing is chasing away the audiences for everyone because his influence over new directors is so enormous. But Scorsese is the exact opposite of everything the audience wants to see, because they have to genuinely pay (everyone in Hollywood sees every movie for free), and they’re starting to wish they had spent their money elsewhere, rather than see the depressing, disgusting, foul-mouthed, sadistic movies the industry is currently vomiting into the audience’s face. That’s why nine out of ten films are failing.

For example, if you just look at the top box-office films for the last five years, you will see that in every single one of them the hero has morals as old-fashioned as Andy Griffith in 1960. But today it’s fashionable to give your hero “flaws” - whether it’s neurosis, poverty, being antisocial, or (very popular with mega-budget flops lately) a former criminal. And yet if you look at the top ten films for the last ten years you’ll see the audience is clearly screaming that they want Hollywood (onscreen) to clean up its morals.

Even the children want this. This is why young kids made Nick At Nite the number one channel in their age bracket for so many years because they wish they could live back in the 1950's and early 1960's when morals and decency really meant something. And since the kids know they can’t get that in today’s corrupt, selfish world, then they at least want to see it onscreen.

The fact that 90% of our movies are failing is a pretty clear indicator of just how far out of touch Hollywood is with the mass audience, and even that figure is increasing. If you plot the curve of the steadily mounting failure rate since the 1980s, you can see that in 2005, about 92% of all films released will be failures at the box-office. What would we in the industry say about another field (like car-making), where 90% of their product failed? Wouldn’t you say that industry clearly has not the slightest understanding of who their target audience is, or what product to make?

Yet I’ve tried desperately to get this information out for two decades, but as you move up the executive ladder, sooner or later you have a meeting with a “Scorsese” obsessed executive who won’t let you see anyone higher up because he doesn’t like special effects pictures, or happy endings, and he has a deep contempt for the mass audience. That man always keeps you from quite reaching the top, so the people who really pay for all these flops, never know how many huge box-office blockbusters are being kicked out of their doors every day. Peter Jackson only survived it because he has the strength of a hundred men, and yet even he was insulted and kicked out of every major studio, because Hollywood has been taught by the critics to hate the very films the audience loves most.

This morals issue is enormously important financially for films, because the morals issue was the major factor in why an incompetent Jerk like George Bush could be re-elected, because EVEN THOUGH IT WAS PHONY, he at least showed enough respect for the mass audience’s values to not mock or belittle them. His people wisely understood that the majority of Americans want to return to that safer, more loving, more optimistic, and morally correct time. The old moguls who built such huge names like Darryl F. Zanuck and Louis B. Mayer understood this, even though they themselves did not follow the same moral code in their private life.

The real problem today is that too many men in power in the industry don’t want to put a hero onscreen with any higher morals than their own, because they’re so bitter about the way they’ve been criticized by their own friends and family over their personal lack of morals. It was that very lack of morals that probably got them to the top, so they don’t understand the audience’s desperate need to believe in the illusion that “good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior is punished”. And this desperate need of the audience’s never changes. Back in 1936 (seventy years ago) the almost too-brilliant film critic, Otis Ferguson, wrote of the mass audience that,

“They want their hearts in their throats, tears in their eyes, to be excited, dazzled, flattered, full of power by proxy, and abandoning themselves to the great love of their life. “Boy Meets Girl” - did anybody think that was only a gag? And in this popular desire for a good Lift easily bought, there is not much finicky choosing - so long as its clothes have the cut of the day’s fashion, the subject is closed.”

I beg you to please read that over three times, as every word should be tattooed on the heart of every film executive, director and star. It is the most incredibly brilliant insight ever written about the mass audience’s needs, and how those needs will NEVER change, and he wrote it back in 1936 - but as always, no one in the industry was listening. (I’d be willing to bet that not more than one or two of the overpaid people in the entire industry have even heard of Otis Ferguson, when “The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson” should be one of their bibles.) Now consider how many big budget films in the last few years did NOT deliver on these very areas he is describing, and consequently flopped at the box-office. If you think about it you’ll realize about nine out of ten films are not using any part of Otis Ferguson’s magic formula - and that just happens to be the exact failure rate in films today. Mere coincidence? Poirot would know better!

Now look at the list of the top 50 films of all time and the top ten box-office films for each year for the last decade. Notice that these films succeed mightily in delivering on Otis Ferguson’s magic box-office formula - and in at least two or three areas. Of course the more of these elements you can get into one film, the more spectacularly it will perform at the box-office, as witness The Sound of Music and Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone, both of which were absolutely, totally flawless in the way they incorporated the maximum number magical elements - and it showed at the box-office, didn’t it?

Notice that The Lord of The Rings was such a huge success precisely because Tolkein established its morals in the pre-Andy Griffith period, and fortunately for true movie-lovers, Peter Jackson with all his incredible force of character, made sure the morals weren’t tampered with. Like all heroes in the top five box-office films of the last ten years (even Harry Potter), Aragorn in LOTR is always stalwart, honest, trustworthy and true, and the mass audience will never want any other kind of a hero. And the last thing they want to do is “look in a mirror” or confront drab reality, as shown by Martin Scorsese’s truly disgraceful record at the box-office (he couldn’t give the audience a truly happy ending if his life depended on it.)

If you want a really big hit, that will gross in the mega-budget class, then you must remember this issue of morals, and how it even enabled a stupid blowhard like George Bush to be re-elected, because THAT’S how strongly the mass audience feels about it, and still Hollywood doesn’t understand that the “red” states must like your movie too, if you’re going to make a profit on a big budget film.

Now start looking back at some of the recent megabudget flops such as Hellboy, League of Extraordinary Men, and Van Helsing, and you’ll see they failed primarily because the hero was established early on as being morally ambivalent, antisocial, or a even criminal - and the mass audience already has one pain in the ass like that in their family already. Why should they want to pay to see the very kind of person they went to the movies to avoid seeing?

They want the hero today to be the exact same hero that Cecil B. DeMille (still by far the greatest box-office director of all time) described in brilliant (but coded) detail in his autobiography. He put that same exact hero (with no variations) onscreen for decades, and the mighty Cecil blew the lid off the box-office with one blockbuster after another for 42 years!

The real bedrock truth is that Hollywood refuses to get this morals message because most directors who succeed today were a pain in the ass when they were young, and they want to validate that behavior retroactively. They also want to send the message to young kids that “You should be free to be a pain in the ass like I was!”. And they feel the proof of their philosophy is in their Hollywood success over the kids back home who “minded their manners” and didn’t get into trouble.

What these poor men don’t understand is that their family may smile and say I love you, but they still think these directors are a pain in the ass! (I know from absolute first-hand experience.) These directors want to validate the wild, anti-social behavior of their youth, to make their disapproving relatives and the kids at school who insulted them at school, admit they were wrong. What these dumb directors don’t understand, is that for their relatives and the mass audience, it doesn’t matter how many mountains of success you’ve conquered, if you haven’t taken every step of the climb honorably and morally.

This seems hopelessly naive to those who have succeeded in Hollywood in the last twenty years, because if they were forced to played the game decently, most of them would be back in their hometown with the people they laugh at for staying in their hometown. But it turns out those other people actually understood how tough it is to make it in Hollywood, AND STILL BE MORAL, which is a major reason they never tried. And it’s also why your relatives and friends back home will never fully applaud and embrace your super-stardom, as you wish, if they don’t think all of your actions were as decent and upright as was humanly possible.

You stars are supposed to be ROLE MODELS, and finally realize just how many young people are modeling themselves on someone like that pathetic car-crash of emotions - Angelina Jolie. I loved the first Lara Croft movie (on the big screen only), but by the time of Lara Croft 2, both I, and the audience, had realized she was no longer just acting “hip” and “cool”. Everyone in America, except Hollywood, could see that poor, sad Angelina was badly in need of psychiatric help, and she desperately needed to start listening to the genuine wisdom that her loving father, Jon Voight, has been trying so terribly, terribly hard to get her to listen to, so she won’t repeat his mistakes.

Now it’s too late, because Angelina Jolie has willfully ripped her stardom to shreds with a parade of box-office flops which seem designed for no other purpose than to spit in the audience’s face (as she did her father’s). Yet everywhere I read, on all the “entertainment” shows, everyone holds her up as a role model for young girls. And what’s so heartbreaking is that the audience was ready to make Angelina a very big star after Lara Croft, but like most stars today, she lost control and self-destructed because she assumed the older generation had nothing to teach her.

Those relatives and friends that you stars have ignored, back home, are your target audience. If you can’t handle that, then you better get a job where you’re not so ridiculously overpaid, and yet do such a poor job of providing entertainment - WHICH IS YOUR JOB!. And if you can’t make the people “back home” give you the love and respect you want, it’s because they’ve had to apologize to their friends too many times for why their famous relative would appear in a movie that was not only disgusting and embarrassing - but a humiliating flop.

Those very people you brush aside, Hollywood, as you climb the ladder of success, are actually your target audience, and its about time you got to know a few of them and heard what they REALLY think of your movies. After all they are the ones who really had to pay financially for your stardom - shouldn’t they have some voice? We in Hollywood must stop speaking only to one another, isolated by too much wealth and power, because we’ve lost the common touch. Hollywood must start being more than just a High School clique where outsiders aren’t allowed.

And we in the industry must understand that our target audience will never feel any different about the climb to success. And thank god! Can you imagine a nation in which we all had Martin Scorsese’s complete lack of moral values? And the audience (which as a mass is always very wise, no matter how stupid they are as individuals), instinctively feels this about Scorsese’s films. Yet Hollywood doesn’t, which is one of the major reasons both the nation, and the world, are growing so contemptuous of Hollywood, as this attitude shows so clearly their lack of morals.

The audience must always have the illusion of universal goodness and their belief in all the simple virtues, or they couldn’t face what a rotten, stinking place we’ve let this world become to raise our children in. But making depressing movies and then expecting these poor, depressed, angry people (and even children!) to pay for it, is just stealing from someone’s pockets after you’ve beaten them to the ground.

If you want to improve the world, put your work where it will reach the right people - on the 24/7 news channels, documentaries, or go on talk shows, but when people pay go to the movies they want to be genuinely entertained, and not lectured to. Nor do they want to be assaulted and brutalized just because the director can’t think of any other way to create “non-stop suspense.” (More and more the ceaseless action in our films just makes the audience tune out and disconnect through sheer disbelief, and the “non-stop suspense” film is one of our most common breed of super-flops, at present.)

How often at movies these days do you find yourself thinking “What in the world could the people who made this movie have been thinking of? Do they even live on this planet? This isn’t how human beings behave!” Is Hollywood’s desire for fame and fortune so great that they can’t see we moviegoers are deeply embarrassed by what a man like Scorsese reveals in his films? The mass audience can see clearly what Hollywood can’t - that Scorsese hates women. And the audience has learned the hard, expensive way (at the box-office) that Scorsese has nothing but contempt for their entertainment needs. They know he’s only out for Oscars, and he’s making them pay heavily for his monstrous ego-trip. What’s odd is that the studios, and Scorsese’s financial backers haven’t realized what a huge price he’s making them pay, just so he can win awards, with no compensatory box-office reward. He’s become box-office poison - and anyone who claims he isn’t, simply doesn’t know that Scorsese’s failure rate is 88% on 16 films just since 1977.

The industry is in the worst financial crisis of its history because it just can’t figure out what the audience wants, when what the audience wants is so ridiculously simple. THE AUDIENCE WILL ALWAYS WANT WHAT THEY DON’T HAVE, BUT ARE WISHING FOR. And those wants will never change. The audience in the dark wants Love, happiness, safety, freedom from financial worries, friends, power, and adventure without physical or mental harm. How many of these magic pushbuttons to the audience’s happiness did you see in last year’s releases (2004)? In thirty years of monitoring the audience I have never seen the mass audience so dangerously fed up with films, because Hollywood just can’t seem to get the simple needs of this formula right.

In the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's the five Best picture nominees averaged a box performance of #14 for their respective years. But by the first four years of this decade, things had deteriorated to where the five Best picture nominees averaged a box-office position of only #30 for their year, which means the majority of the Best Picture nominations have gone to films that lost money at the box-office.

Every decade the Academy (and then the industry) moves dangerously further away from the audience. In the 1960's the average box-office position of the Best Actress winners was #16, but in the first four years of this decade, the average was an alarming #61. There aren’t anywhere near sixty hit films a year, so the average Oscar WINNER is in a film that lost quite a bit of money. Is it any wonder we have hardly any new female stars left, because they all want Oscars - and they don’t know what the audience knows - that the name of Oscar is becoming synonymous with FLOP.

And what is the real problem? Our egos! Everyone in Hollywood has gotten so egotistical, that no one wants to put any hero onscreen with a higher moral standard than himself. Consequently, every hero has to have his morals “modernized” by making him morally ambiguous in at least one way, and because of that, the film is a disappointment at the box-office. I can’t stress enough that if you get out the list for the top-grossing films for the last decade you’ll be shocked that in all the blockbuster box-office films, there is NO moral ambiguity about the hero AT ALL! He is eternally good, no matter how he appears, and that is the first essential step for reaching the mega-audience.

In the most successful film of all time “TITANIC” James Cameron brilliantly, but instinctively, understood that it was essential for Leonardo Di Caprio’s character to be so flawlessly virtuous and endlessly noble, that he would fulfill every young girl’s dream. And since he did just that, it paid off at the box-office with almost two billion dollars just from movie theaters alone. You see, the great secret that girls don’t tell anyone is the silent majority of them absolutely hate what MTV and Rap music have done to their boyfriends, as most of them now look and behave like slobs, so they are longing to see a sexy, handsome man who treats a woman with respect and dignity and good manners. They’re DYING to pay for it and we keep giving them anti-social slobs, just because that’s what the people in power were when they were young, or their children are now. And like everyone these days, they want to validate their life choices - regardless of how disastrous they turned out.

Well, Hollywood film-makers, the audience has a message for YOU for a change. If you had an unhappy childhood - GET OVER IT! Just like the rest of us with miserable childhoods had to do, but without the enormous cushion of fame and fortune you had. The audience will NEVER feel sorry for you, stars, because whatever may have happened in your past, right now you make a lot more money than they do. And when you’re in financial trouble - like most of the genuine paying audience always is, especially in places like the midwest - it seems as if money will solve all of your problems. And no one will ever convince the poor that they’re foolish in this belief, as that hope is all that keeps them going. (Don’t you love how Hollywood always says it cares about the poor, but now they’re trying to take away even the last fragile hope to which the audience clings.)

If women and girls want to see a coarse, immoral slob, all they have to do is turn their head and look at the guy they’re dating, sitting in the next theater seat. But they don’t want to see the hero ever, even for one second (not even if it’s “cool”) violate this moral code. Moviegoers are bewildered as to why Hollywood doesn’t understand that the very thing which always distinguishes the hero and makes him different from other men, is that there is absolutely nothing ambiguous about his moral code. And nothing will ever change that in the future, despite how desperately some neurotic film-makers wish to validate their sordid life. And if the young men in the audience wanted to see someone who is morally ambiguous, cowardly, neurotic, and a slob, most of them would only have to look in the mirror, so why should they pay nine dollars for the privilege? (And they aren’t paying.)

If you think back about almost any mega-budget film that flopped, you’ll see at once that the major reason the film failed is because the film-makers portrayed the heroic characters as being morally ambiguous. Primarily because they have been overwhelmed by the Scorsese mentality and think it’s “modern” and that therefore the audience must want it. But the mass audience hates it and ALWAYS will hate it. Most people pay their taxes, stop for red lights, and don’t steal - and they don’t want to see the hero or heroine do anything immoral either - even if it’s supposed to be “cute”. Anyone who doubts this for a second has not studied the heroes of the top-grossing films of the last decade, as the audience’s voice is loud and clear about what they want, but thanks to poseurs like Scorsese, almost no one in Hollywood is listening, which is why nine out of ten films are failing, and the rate is still increasing past the 90% failure rate!

Once you accept the importance of morality in the hero to the audience, you will see at once why mega-budget films like Collateral with Tom Cruise, The Chronicles of Riddick with Vin Diesel, and Lemony Snicket with Jim Carrey, were doomed at the box-office before a camera ever started shooting. And the true owners of the studio, who actually pay the bills, have no idea how desperately hard someone like Peter Jackson has to fight to get the rows of executives who worship Scorsese to keep their muddy feet off of his hero’s morals, because they always want to “make his character more realistic,” which is exactly the point at which they always lose the mass audience.

The audience doesn’t even want to see the hero SPIT in public, and if a director can’t handle that kind of moral clarity, then he’d better not be directing a big budget film, because that’s what the mass audience has always wanted in a hero, and they’ll still want it 500 years from now in another galaxy. It will never change because the silent majority who pays at the box-office understands instinctively that we are all supposed to be evolving upwards as a civilization to ideally become Walt Disney, and not deconstructing our whole society downward to the sordid level of Martin Scorsese.

The studios are dying just as the most ridiculously oversize dinosaurs became extinct - because their brains were too far from their body, and they reacted to slow to danger. The men at the very top don’t know that the people they’ve hired are actually weeding out and casting aside the very people who could deliver their next smash hit. And why? Simply because he’s TOO commercial, and he doesn’t kiss Scorsese and Woody Allen’s asses at the first meeting. I know for a fact there are dozens of super hot properties available right now, dying of neglect, but the Scorsese mentality has taken over the studios, and anyone who doesn’t think the same as they do is quickly weeded out, almost like a science fiction horror film. (“The Invasion of The Film Executives With No Brain.” Coming soon to your local bankruptcy court!)

I have seen this very process happening constantly in the major studios, in which the employee who likes big box-office hits gets fired to keep the one who worships Scorsese, so that no one who actually thinks about the audience is ever allowed into the studio’s upper hierarchy. It is sinister and frightening in its implications, and I am going to do everything I can to get the industry back to their job - which is movies for the audience. Someone has to remind the stars and directors that we did not make them rich and famous just so they could win Oscars and thereby prove to the people back home that they weren’t a loser after all. But starring in as many box-office flops as Meryl Streep will never impress them, because the only thing that impresses the people back home is when you create a whole long career of big fat box-office hits. And they must be movies that their friends have actually heard of for a change.

The audience wants movies with bright colors, beautiful things to look at, pretty people, and big special effects. I know some Scorsese-worshipper is protesting “but all special effects films aren’t hits!” and you’re right. But if you think back you’ll realize it’s almost always because of the hero’s lack of 1960s-style, Andy Griffith morals, remember? And if not, you can be sure the film has some equally repugnant quality for the audience - like when Tom Cruise had his eyes removed in Minority Report. If Spielberg had left out the whole subplot about Cruise carrying his eyes around in a bag, and the child-molesting subplot, it would have been a very big hit instead of a flop, as it is a truly brilliant film without them.

There is a very dirty, very dark secret that Hollywood has always kept hidden, and they’ve kept that shocking secret securely buried, until right now. In 1967 Hollywood foolishly imagined (as it always hopes, in vain) that the mass audience was now “grown up”, so that year censorship was demolished, and it was “anything goes”. Within months, nudity, profanity and violence, were rampant in the films from every studio except Disney. Hollywood has always pretended that this increased business - but the sinister, shocking truth, is that in 1967 the number of tickets sold fell by 50%, and (allowing for the difference in a doubled population), that audience has never come back. (Check the facts for yourself in Cobbett Steinberg’s FILM FACTS.)

That vanished half of the audience is mostly older film-goers who would LOVE to pay for movies, but they, more than any group need the film to fit the formula I described by Otis Ferguson, or they’ll at stay home. So Hollywood’s dirty, disgusting secret is that instead of attracting viewers, sex and violence permanently lost them half of their market and all the accompanying profits. If they hadn’t demolished censorship, the older moviegoers, who would have kept going to the movies all of these years, and all of the studios would have made at least twice as much money if we’d only remembered what Walt Disney taught us again and again - that morality and goodness are always the hottest ticket at the box-office.

Broadway went through this EXACT dilemma in the 1960's, debating whether the theater should be “Art” or “Entertainment”. The elitist “art” clique won, and thirty years later Broadway has been left in broken ruins, a mere ghost of its fabulous days of glory. Where dozens of new comedies, musicals, and very serious dramas opened on Broadway every year, now it’s nothing but bloated musicals and revivals of old hits. They’ve had to give up completely on attracting the audience back with new plays, and the sad result is that now a show on Broadway has to be one hundred percent commercial to possibly survive. This is why Broadway is now nothing more than big over-produced musicals to attract the tourists, because the Broadway of exciting new plays and musicals coming out every week was murdered by the avante garde branch of the theater.

It was killed by those who insisted that the theater must be “art” - and ONLY art. Edward Albee, Harold Pinter and Stephen Sondheim led this self-destructing revolution, and predictably, look what happened to their very sad careers, after such promising beginnings. Instead, they killed the theater completely and now (ironically), it is exactly what they most feared: a purely commercial enterprise.

By fighting so desperately hard against “commercialism in the theater” and never worrying themselves about things like profit and loss, the “Art At Any Cost” crowd killed not only the commercial theater dead - but like the French Revolution, the very people who led the revolution were among the first to find their careers guillotined. They refused to let Broadway be even a little bit commercial, and because of their thoughtless rebellion they’ve left Broadway with NO artistic goals, and ONLY commercial ambitions. Ironic and horrible, oui?

But that is what happens when you have such an expensive art to create as films, and the theater, and yet the creative artists have only contempt for making a profit. Hasn’t anyone explained to them that is precisely what killed Opera, Ballet, The Broadway Theater, and countless other forms of entertainment through the centuries? Young film-goers have no understanding of this, and they are starting to kill off films for audiences just as happened with the theater, but this time it will be Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen are leading the exodus into destruction of the mass art. (And anyone who doesn’t know that film is a mass art, has never spent much time in a film accounting department - where the buck stops, and the bankruptcy begins.)

The percentage of films that make a profit has been dropping dramatically in the last two decades since the industry foolishly gave its honors to Martin Scorsese, instead of to George Lucas - who has several times brought huge audiences back into theaters when business was bad, and gave every studio’s current films in release extra oomph at the box-office. But instead they give their awards to Martin Scorsese, who has the second worst box-office record of any major director in film history, with an 88% failure rate during the last three decades.

No wonder nine out of ten films are failing at present, and if you just look at the path of how each year the percentage of flops keeps creeping higher, no one can deny that if the industry doesn’t change course immediately, in another generation the American Film will be in the same broken, ruined condition as the American Theater. And ironically, all that will be left are the absolute surefire films, and just as in the theater, everything else will have stopped production because of how much the audience is beginning to realize the miserable level of the films they’re being offered. In a generation films will have to be one hundred percent commercial to survive, and absolutely nothing else, unless this trend is completely reversed immediately. Take a good look at Broadway, and realize that within a generation, movie-making will be in the exact same parallel state.

Today’s film-makers only want Oscars (which means concentrating on misery, unhappiness, or neuroses), yet the audience is paying for entertainment. These two disparate viewpoints are getting farther and farther apart, and if the industry doesn’t start getting the formula right very, very soon, the audience will stop going to anything but the most absolutely mindless and commercial of movies. That’s just what happened to Broadway in the last three decades, isn’t it?

Hollywood became infected by failure in the 1980's, when the most admired and honored film-makers were Meryl Streep, Robert de Niro, and Martin Scorsese. I remember clearly how almost every young person in Hollywood said during those years that one of those three was their role model. Do you think it’s a coincidence that each of them is also the one in their profession with the most flops during the that same decade (the 1980s)?

Meryl Streep may have surpassed the incandescent Katharine Hepburn with her number of Oscar nominations, but Meryl also starred in more box-office flops in one decade than any female star in the history of sound films. The same was true of Robert De Niro, and it took the mass audience almost twenty years to get over their distaste for him. Even then, it was only when he appeared to finally understand their needs, and deigned to appear in a funny mainstream comedy. Martin Scorsese, predictably had the worst box-office career of any director in the 1980s, although Woody Allen has surpassed him since then.

So Hollywood showered awards on the three biggest losers of the decade, and the result is that since the 1980s all young people have followed Meryl, Robert and Martin (with the approval and urging of the industry) and thereby led Hollywood into its suicidal financial crisis. I’m sure the main reason Jack Valenti quit is that he could see the disaster coming, and he didn’t want to be caught at the helm, since no one was listening to his ominous warnings.

The studios are hiding their enormous losses by dumping their DVD catalogs of older hit movies at cheap prices, to cover the huge amounts of money they’re losing, but as they found this holiday season, even that well is starting to dry up on them. Their losses were so huge this year, that to sell enough DVDs to hide these mega-amounts, many studios cut the prices on their catalog DVDs by 50%. That helped them hide their losses for one year, but now they’ve permanently undercut the value of their whole library by 50%, just to make extra money so the stockholders won’t know how incompetent they are at their job of satisfying the audience. Over the next five years alone, this fraudulent tactic will lose the studios tens of billions of dollars, and now it’s too late to reverse course and somehow get back those lost future profits....

thats way too long for me to read.

my attention span just doesn't last that lon....*stares at the birds outside*

what was i saying?

errr do you think you could summerize it =P ..soo long

... yeah, you want to summarize that for us?

*SCROLL SCROLL SCROLL*
SPAM.

.. Is there any actual content to your post, or did you just copy and paste everything?
Because to some degree, your original post could be considered spam.

Yes, I believe I'm going to have to agree with everyone else.

That is entirely waaay too long for these tired eyes heh.

On a second note though, if you did write that yourself.. I bet it's very well written :)

i agree with everyone. SUMMARIZE please? that is..if its not some stupid story...whatever it is. i thought i saw the name peter parker in there though.

Unlike the others, I skimmed through the article.


It was actually pretty interesting to read; some of what was said I really never though of before.

Thanks for posting it. (whether or not it was spam.)

hehe i read half of the first paragraph and got tired

I like movies! My favorite is Chicago! now thats corruption.

you mean there's more

Since when do we take our information from an ANGELFIRE website ...

I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble .... but I honestly have a real problem with this guy. His information is extremely inaccurate (Yes, Scorsese has yet to win an Oscar .... No, he did not win one for Gangs of New York).

idk

i read about half of that last night, then skimmed through the rest right now. it was pretty interesting, but i don't agree on some of your points.

ehh..too long buddy >_z

I read half, then got bored. I agree with veve, though - how authentic is this information coming from an Angelfire website...?

O__O SO MANY WORDS! O__O

okay. thanks for the informatin?

exactly what i was about to point out

I skimmed up to half of the post. then got tired.
A quick summary would be nice.

I made it to the tax part.. summarize.. then.. i may comment.. not that you prob want my comments anyway