Pixar and the Goldman Aphorism

Peter Suderman, riffing on the issue of whether critics matter:

If movie reviewers are such good predictors of financial success, why hasn’t some studio caught on and put a bunch of them on the payroll? It’s not as if the studios aren’t actively pursuing every conceivable formula and strategy to predict what will and won’t work at the box office. As Malcolm Gladwell reported in The New Yorker a few years back, they’re all spending an awful lot of time and money searching for something like a guaranteed success, an answer to the movie industry’s longest standing problem, put famously by William Goldman: Nobody knows anything. (emphasis mine - RD)

Here's a Wall:E-related thought: How gaga you go over the Pixar oeuvre, I think, depends on how much stock you put in the Goldman take on hit-making. If you think making a really good, really popular film is a mysterious, alchemical process that nobody can consistently wrap their minds around, then each Pixar movie looks like nothing short of a miracle. But another way to look at it - the correct way, in my view - is that Pixar's track record of putting out one excellent, crowdpleasing movie after another (they're up to nine and counting, assuming you include the just-okay Cars and accept the critical consensus on Ratatouille) ought to at least partially disprove Goldman's aphorism. Like Jeffrey Katzenberg's run at Disney or the entire careers of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, the lesson of Pixar is that the formula for making hit movies is relatively simple: Find talented people with an instinct for high-quality middlebrow entertainment (i.e. John Lasseter, not David Lynch); let them do their thing without too much interference from people whose primary talent is rising to the top of a cutthroat corporate culture; sit back and enjoy the box-office bonanza.

Don't get me wrong: I love Pixar, and I mean this observation as no slight on what they've accomplished. I just think that their success shouldn't be treated as some sort of cosmic miracle that can't possibly be repeated elsewhere, but rather as a blueprint for how the movie industry as a whole could stop force-feeding bad movies to the public, and start making better ones.

Comments

The other Pixar advantage - no actors, no auteur directors. How many bad movies are made simply to stroke somebody's ego? Or simply to make sure that stars get face time?

Posted by vanya | July 7, 2008 2:16 PM

How, um, can you tell before giving somebody a movie that they posess "an instinct for high-quality middlebrow entertainment"?

Posted by S. Tarzan | July 7, 2008 2:24 PM

I think goldman's comment has more to with popularity than quality. nobody knows what people are going to go for...so Ratatouille can't get in just on critic's say-so.

Posted by Ian | July 7, 2008 2:35 PM

I wouldn't be surprised if the movie industry does decide to hire a bunch of critics. The video games industry has been doing that recently. Video games that are critically acclaimed and marketed well always sell and I am not sure the same is true of movies.

Posted by Craig | July 7, 2008 2:46 PM

I think you're right Ross.

I also wonder how much of their success is due to their particular creative process. Being based in Northern California (as opposed to LA), they have a tech-industry style of making movies that's slow and methodical (4 years!).

Also, when you're making animated movies (as opposed to live action), the producer can drop in on the creatives any time of day and get a feel for how it's going, without having to trek out to, say, New Zealand or Vancouver or wherever a live-action movie is being shot.

Obviously there are other animated film companies that haven't had Pixar's success, so it doesn't explain everything.

Posted by Frank | July 7, 2008 4:31 PM

I think that you thinking that creativity can be so easily repeated and maintained might be the reason why you haven't done amazing in Hollywood yourself.

This reminds of Artie in Larry Sanders: "executives who think creativity is an accounting problem".

It also has a huge base of survivor's bias: it mentions Katzenberg's Disney slate, but ignores the Dreamworks animation, which is variable to say the least - as indeed was Disney for many years after Walt and before Katzenberg.

And finally, 'Steven Spielberg'. Who are the other directors who have retained a relatively high critical acclaim whilst grossing billions?

And if it could be so easily replicated, then why isn't it already?

Posted by James | July 7, 2008 5:02 PM

As usual, missed the far more obvious point.

Doesn't your post on the Star Wars prequels contradict this post?

Posted by James | July 7, 2008 5:39 PM

A friend who worked at Disney Animation during its silver age of 1988 to 1994 says that during the "Little Mermaid," "Aladdin," and "Beauty in the Beast" peak, the animators were just a bunch of guys in a dumpy warehouse in Glendale trying to impress each other.

Then "Lion King" made a billion dollars and the animators were given a palatial new architectural masterpiece of a building at headquarters in Burbank. They got private offices and instead of hanging out together working, started having their secretaries book meetings with each other and a the boys from marketing and finance to ponder the implications of each idea they came up with.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 7, 2008 11:07 PM

Frank Capra had an amazing run in the 1930s making a popular classic every year, then went off to war, came back and topped them all with his masterpiece in 1946, It's a Wonderful Life, and then ... fell into a funk and didn't do much for the rest of his life. Artists are complicated.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 7, 2008 11:09 PM

One way to be fairly consistent in the quality of films is Woody Allen's path: be a singles hitter. Don't swing for the fences. Make variations on what you already know how to do and keep them within budget and on schedule.

In contrast, David Lean evolved in the second half of his life into a homerun slugger who swung for the fences on every pitch: Bridge over River Kwai was great, Lawrence of Arabia was even greater, Dr. Zhivago was maybe not so great but made a huge amount of money, but then Ryan's Daughter didn't. And then it took him 14 years to get his next movie, A Passage to India, made, and that was pretty good but then he never got Nostromo made before he died.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 7, 2008 11:17 PM

How much is Pixar's success built on having a competitive advantage in technological prowess? After all, they largely invented 3d animation with Luxo Jr in the mid-1980s and have typically had the best looking 3d features ever since.

This is not to say that Pixar would succeed without all their other virtues, but their continuing technological edge gives them the confidence to know that they don't have to rush, that they don't have to try to ride the waves of fashion, that they don't have to put in a bunch of pop culture references that will be outdated in a year. They just don't have much competition at the high end of children's movies, so they can build them to last.

In contrast, the rest of the movie business is more like the fashion business where everybody has the same sewing machines.

Say you're the Farrelly Brothers, who are basically screenwriters so they have zero long-term advantage over the competition (everybody has three hole punch paper and those little brass doohickeys you put through holes to bind your script together), but they start out with a perspective that's pretty new. By their third or fourth movie, There's Something About Mary, they've hit their stride and the public is ready for it, so it turns out to be a huge box office hit. But after that, everything strikes people as "just another Farrelly Bros. movie." So a nice little movie like "Stuck on You" with Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as Siamese Twins, which might have astonished people if it had come out first, now is just another grotesque but sweet Farrelly Bros. laff riot about the handicapped. Ho hum.

In summary, Goldman didn't mean that nobody knows how to make a decent movie. There are a huge number of people who know how to make a perfectly adequate movie. If you put "Dude, Where's My Car" in a time machine back to 1920, audiences would worship it as the greatest artistic masterpiece in human history. If you put "Prince Caspian" in a time machine and took it back a decade, before Lord of the Rings, it would wow people.

But, not many people know how to make a movie that will strike audiences as significantly better than the norm. And soon that will become the norm, so the number of people who can beat the norm again and again becomes progressively fewer each time.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 7, 2008 11:50 PM

Agreed that "It's a Wonderful Life" is Capra's best and a truly great film, but it was a huge flop financially. Its current popularity stems as much as anything from the fact then when its copyright lapsed, it was shown over and over on TV until it built an audience.

Likewise "The Princess Bride" was not a success in theaters, but years of word-of-mouth have made it a classic.

Why weren't these two successes to begin with? Nobody knows. Anything.

Posted by Mike | July 8, 2008 1:32 AM

Another reason few have super-long winning streaks is the large role of manic-depression in filmmaking. For example, producer David O. Selznick went through about a five-year manic high in which he made Gone With the Wind, Rebecca, and a few other fine movies. And then he was pretty much depressed for the rest of his life.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 8, 2008 2:03 AM

"One way to be fairly consistent in the quality of films is Woody Allen's path: be a singles hitter. Don't swing for the fences. Make variations on what you already know how to do and keep them within budget and on schedule."

What makes him a singles hitter? He hit a few home runs and then stopped doing anything right. By the mid 90s he was done.

Posted by Asher | July 8, 2008 2:06 AM

Well, he started making movies in the mid-1960s, and averaged almost one per year, so "being done" 30 years later is a lot longer than almost anybody else.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 8, 2008 3:26 AM

It's a shame you have such repugnant views racially Steve, as some of the posts above are very good - esp re with Pixar's technology and Woody Allen.

Though by essentially completely refuting Ross's post might result in him linking to your 'other stuff' less frequently.

Posted by James | July 8, 2008 10:42 AM

If movie reviewers are such good predictors of financial success, why hasn’t some studio caught on and put a bunch of them on the payroll?

Is this meant to be an argument, or just a rhetorical sneer?

Critics analyze a final product; that has nothing to do with deciding whether a script would make a good movie, whether a particular actor would work in a particular role, whether a director is right for the material, etc. So why pay critics to do something they've shown no particular talent for doing?

As for gleaning insights about future projects from the comments of critics, again, it's hard to figure out how comments along the lines of "This movie is a mess, the script's bad, the lead role is miscast" will prevent a large bureaucracy of narcissists and creative types from making similar mistakes in the future. And, in any case, studios can benefit from critics' insights for the price of a newspaper or magazine (or for free online), so why pay them a salary to do the same work?

Posted by JB | July 8, 2008 1:20 PM