Picture

"Picture is great. I’m a huge fan. This a book about the making of one movie, which can tell you a tremendous amount about how movies are made and what goes wrong when a movie goes wrong. The movie is one not many people talk about anymore, Red Badge of Courage , directed by John Houston. Ross shows that movies are the result of a combination of idiosyncratic personalities and chance decisions. It was the first book ever about the making of a single movie. Many books since have tried to shed light on the industry by looking at the making of a particular movie but fail to give readers a good sense of the larger picture. Picture succeeds in showing you everything you would ever want to know about Red Badge of Courage and you also learn so much about the world in which the movie was made. The idea of films as brands is recent. The incredible expense involved in marketing movies has given marketers greater say in the movies that studios make and has led to people who know how to sell things, rather than people who know how to make things, becoming the people who run studios. That is a relatively recent phenomenon that you can trace back to the mid 1980s. Studios live and die based on their franchises. Movie delivery dates and release dates are planned years in advance. Before movies are cast or written, or even conceived, there will be a slot on a release schedule saying, ‘August 7th, 2024 untitled event film from Universal.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Now it’s almost impossible to get a mid-budget movie that isn’t based on a piece of existing intellectual property made at a studio. With rare exceptions, legacy studios are out of that business now. They don’t have, in their executive ranks, people who are trained to find intellectual property, shape them into movies and develop scripts. Happily, people still want to watch those movies, so they are made by places like Netflix, Apple and Hulu. Having an eye for material that would make a great commercial movie, which wasn’t based on a franchise, used to be key to advancing at studios. Now, if you want to run a studio, you develop expertise in selling a franchise."