PicoBlog

We used to be a country, a real country, where romantic comedies were a film genre that was a pillar of Hollywood and not its punchline, where they were made with the finest, award-winning caliber of talent. We had writers like Charlie Chaplin and Preston Sturges and Dalton Trumbo, James L. Brooks and Richard Curtis pen them. We had the some of the best cinematographers like Charles Lang and Michael Ballhaus, Sven Nykvist and László Kovács beautifully and inventively shoot them. We had some of the greatest directors helming them (and a lot of them wrote them, too): George Cukor! Howard Hawks! Billy Wilder! Stanley Donen! Peter Bogdanovich! Mike Nichols! and several other great men before the girlies got to take a crack at it, greats like Joan Micklin Silver, Cheryl Dunye, Nora Ephron, Sofia Coppola (remember how she won a screenwriting Oscar for very-much-a-romantic-comedy Lost in Translation?), and Nancy Meyers! Remember what they took from you.

Because like all art that becomes a product subject to the capitalist machine, romantic comedies were successful until they weren’t, until the corporate powers that be saw the high returns and instead of continuing to invest in quality, said “do it more, do it faster, and do it cheaper” and oversaturated the market with garbage, taking down an entire genre and a group of highly skilled filmmakers with it. And, such is the capitalist machine, the Man tried to tell us for a very long time—us, the moviegoing population—that the audience for romantic comedies was gone. Where did they go? Did they all just up and die? No, they were just simply gone. No one seemed to really have the answer to that, other than “people are not going to the movie theaters to watch these movies we are not making or releasing in movie theaters.” Every few years post-romcom death, of course, there would be a few sleeper hits that broke through—and promptly looked at with wide eyes before being dismissed as flukes—until streaming platforms like Netflix looked at their data and realized “huh, people love to rewatch Pretty Woman. Seems like there’s white space in this market right now…wouldn’t it be so crazy if we made our own romcoms haha?” thus breathing new life into the romantic comedy with cheaply made, promising, but ultimately underwhelming, films like Set It Up and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. 

As streaming giveth, streaming taketh away. Netflix is full of cash (what’s a $300 mil deal with Ryan Murphy here and $200 mil to make a Ryan Gosling movie you’ve never heard of there) until it decides it isn’t. This week, the streaming behemoth shut down their deal with Nancy Meyers to produce what would be her first directing vehicle in almost a decade—tentatively titled Paris Paramount—reportedly over budget disagreements. Meyers was reportedly asking for $150 million; Netflix was refusing to go over $130 million. In reports of the deal gone south, it’s not the troubling pattern of cancelations Netflix has been engaging in or their souring relationships with filmmakers they once courted drawing the majority of criticism. It’s the amount of money Meyers was asking for that’s drawing the ire of fans and professional critics alike, with no context or critical thinking attached at all, no one considering how much it costs to make a movie (especially taking inflation and a potential WGA strike into context), and everyone contributing to the swell of uninformed, bad faith reporting and unoriginal and yawningly unfunny jokes without seeing the inherent sexism (and ageism!) in their argument that Nancy Meyers is a filmmaker undeserving of that kind of budget. What is Nancy Meyers going to do with $150 million for a movie?, you ask. Pay the people making it.

Wouldn’t $150 million make it the most expensive romantic comedy of all time?

Sure. But you know what movie would have cost around $133 million to make today once you adjust for inflation? Something’s Gotta Give, which was shot in 2002 on an $80 million budget and went on to make $266 million at the box office in 2003 and earn Diane Keaton a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Also: Who cares? 

God, what kind of kitchens was she planning on building? Can’t she cut the turtleneck budget? 

I am down on my knees begging you to come up with better jokes than these. Please. They’re so stupid, lazy, and dull that they don’t even deserve to be called out for how brazenly sexist they are, especially in the year 2023. Nancy Meyers is a talented writer and director with an extensive knowledge of film history and the genre in which she works, whose films are well-crafted and arguably made better by their indebted callbacks to beats and gags from the classics. They’re more than cashmere turtlenecks and beautiful kitchens; they’re studies of women—often middle aged and older women, a demographic who are often woefully neglected and written out by the studio system—whose stories are rarely told on screen in dignified ways that show the humor and pathos in their lives. Their production design is a signature flair of hers, but it’s always in service of the story, and always tells us something about these characters, as any thoughtful production design should do. Weird how no one seems to reduce movies made by male directors who have gorgeous set design down to tropes, but…

Right, but why does that cost $150 million?

For starters, Paris Paramount was set to star four A-listers—Scarlett Johanson, Penélope Cruise, Michael Fassbender, and Owen Wilson—and at least $80 million of that budget would go to above the line costs (salaries for the stars and director/writer/producer) alone, leaving $70 million to actually make the movie, which is…not a wild sum!

Well, Ticket to Paradise only cost $60 million and that starred Julia Roberts and George Clooney.

Right, and that was released theatrically, so we can assume that Roberts and Clooney negotiated their salaries the way many stars of their caliber would on a studio theatrical release: Perhaps they bet on an up-front pay cut by negotiating for points on box office returns (i.e. getting a cut of the movie’s profits if it did well), in addition to being guaranteed the usual additional pay in the form of residuals from home VOD sales and rentals and royalties for television broadcasts. Netflix, however, does not operate on this form of backend. Talent gets paid once. And because these A-listers know the worth they bring to streamers—and also to cover for what is a deeply unfair and exploitive labor practice—they’re asking for more money upfront. (This isn’t taking into account paying the crew, who, in Meyers’ case, are likely industry veterans she’s frequently collaborated with who have higher earning power than younger, greener counterparts, but still don’t make nearly as much money as stars and were still subject to streamers’ unfair revenue share practices. See: the recently avoided IATSE strike in which negotiating fair contracts with streaming services was a sticking point.)

Also, Ticket to Paradise was essentially a shitty 104 minute infomercial for Bali that was probably paid for in part by its tourism board and it looked like it was cheap to make, too. So!

It’s not like she’s doing special effects. This is a romantic comedy; can’t she just stick some beautiful actors in front of a camera in nice cashmere and let them go?

Yes, you’re right. Movies just make themselves. Those actors are hired directly by the filmmaker herself, not by a casting director courting their agents. They just show up to the director’s house—a set that already exists and is not built by anyone or in need of any kind of location fee, since the director owns it—in their own clothes and hair and makeup that they’ve bought and styled, and then get in front of the director’s iPhone—that’s a good enough camera, and it can just be set on a tripod so no one has to be paid to operate it!—and then they block the scene themselves. (But who cares if they go out of frame! That’s art, baby!) There is no lighting—daylight through one window should be enough!!!—and they recite lines they come up with on the spot. (Loudly, because there are no sound people!) No one has to worry about legal fees for music licensing or location releases or insurance in case someone gets hurt or sick, and the movie just edits and distributes itself. Hahaha making movies is so cheap and easy! Anyone can do it!!!

Okay, okay, okay. I see your point. But $150 million!? That’s Marvel money. 

And Marvel films 90 percent of their movies in front of a blue screen and makes the rest up on a computer before they dim the brightness on the whole thing so much that the picture is too muddy for you to really see how awful it looks. You’re really going to sit here with a straight face and argue that that is worth $150 million but storytelling, time (your favorite movies used to have rehearsal periods built in before cameras started rolling, which matters but has since been viewed as expendable!!!), cinematography, and real sets aren’t? 

I’m not saying that there can’t be good movies made for small budgets, or that no expensive movie is bad. What I’m saying is that certain talent—not just the A-list stars, but longtime proven crew members who are highly skilled at their respective crafts—does not come cheap. What I’m saying is that you can always tell when a studio expects more for less, or learned quality from inexperience. What I’m saying is that when a large-scale studio production is made with the expectation to turn out top quality on a shoestring budget, you can—if you’re a smart and discerning viewer—tell. It looks bad. You can see the seams showing, you run into the jaggedly cut corners, you notice when details fall by the wayside. It’s the difference between Book Club’s unhinged (we love it though) use of Photoshop to mock up a digital scrapbook of its characters in their youth versus Something’s Gotta Give’s art department actually sourcing real photos of a young Diane Keaton, printing them with historically accurate detail, and creating a physical scrapbook for Jack Nicholson to flip through. A bunch of these little details snowball and make up the differences between fine movies and great ones.

But romantic comedies still aren’t doing well at the box office, anyway. Marry Me only made $22.5 million domestically on a $23 million budget and Bros only made $14.8 million on a $22 million budget. It’s not a good investment on Netflix’s behalf.

Those movies, also, were bad. The writing was bad. Like, I don’t know what you want me to say here. You want me to tell you those movies should have succeeded? They were schlocky and operating as if it were still 2006 and we let everyone and their mother who wanted to do so write romantic comedies despite having little grasp of the form without relying on hackneyed clichés and absolutely cringe dialogue. I am once again saying: You get what quality you pay for.

I am also saying: Word of mouth matters. You cannot simply bank on star appeal bringing people to a theater anymore. The the movie star era is dead. A celebrity is not going to bring in an audience when the movie they’re in doesn’t look good, and then turns out to be not good. If your movie is not well-made, and early critical and audience responses to films are “this is mediocre, wait until it’s on VOD,” people are not going to pay to see it. Story matters more in an era when stars don’t. At least with Nancy Meyers, you have an established guarantee: People know exactly what kind of movie they will be getting, regardless of who’s in it. There’s a reason why her films have consistently performed well despite the market trends—even 2015’s The Intern, which I am sorry to say is her most meh movie (but even her worst movie is still more enjoyable than most people’s best attempts), and released when romantic comedies were absolutely in the morgue, had a fair showing. Do you really think people were sitting at home thinking, “I can’t wait to see a romantic comedy co-written and directed by the guy who made the great films like Storks (2016) and Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019)! That sounds like it will be amazing!”

I really don’t know what to tell you!!! Studios keep making bad, cheap movies then arguing that no one wants to see their bad, cheap movies to validate why they can’t make good, well-invested-in movies!!! Come on!!

Yeah but you have to admit that’s a lot of money.

Yes. It’s a lot of money. You know what’s also a lot of money? The Willow Project’s proposed $8 billion environmentally disastrous plan to drill for oil in Alaska. The $324.2 billion in profits UnitedHealth Group reported earning in 2022. The more than $200 billion in assets Silicon Valley Bank had when it failed and the government decided they’d bail out investors above the $250,000 federally protected limit. I need you to be so fucking for real here: This is the money you need to spend your time thinking about, not what sum Nancy Meyers is asking for from Netflix to make a movie.

What does the cost of a Nancy Meyers movie matter to you? Why do you care? What difference will that $150 million make on your daily life? Do you think Netflix was going to use that money to donate to abortion funds, or pay off school lunch debt, or build affordable multifamily housing? It’s so funny how everyone’s a studio head and everyone knows how to make a movie and everyone suddenly cares how much money a filmmaker gets to make something! I won’t tell you what it costs for a single half-day shoot to make a single three minute YouTube video with a barebones crew of one gaffer, one sound mixer, and one DP/cam op—we’re not even taking into account the cost of the producer, director, editor, or even studio space because those are all salaried positions/a given resource in this case that are lumped into an annualized budget—because I’m not going to give away work information like that (I like being employed!), but I promise you, it would make your head spin. Now imagine that cost spanning to a month (or months!)-long production with at least a hundred people on the payroll.

Where’s this uproar when it’s Ryan Reynolds’ fake movie’s sequel or more seasons of Stranger Things getting this kind of money thrown at it? Why is Nancy Meyers getting the brunt of this criticism, and why is she worth any less? And this isn’t even getting into the bigger picture complications: If a privileged white lady can’t get what she’s asking for from Netflix, how, exactly, do you think their deals with Black women are going?

The whole dunking on a movie because of its cost thing smacks of the gleeful beating that Elaine May’s Ishtar took from the moment it was announced until the moment it was released, dead on arrival. How is it that in 36 years and countless “this sucks, don’t do this” thinkpieces later, we’re still participating in this, still finding that the house of cards has been stacked so audaciously high—all those stars asking for so much money! a (female) director who hasn’t worked in nearly a decade! all that money for a comedy! a too-big-to-fail studio that just lights money on fire—that people are rooting for it to fail, and cracking jokes about it when it does? Yes, it’s an expensive movie, but it’s not coming out of your pockets; it’s coming out of Netflix’s, and let’s be honest here. Corporate America’s money is about as real as Monopoly money. If we want to resent high paychecks, babes, turn your fury toward the studio execs who make ungodly annual salaries to do nothing but sit around and be bad at their jobs, not Nancy Meyers who is asking for salary to pay herself and her crew fair wages for jobs making an actual product, who don’t have the same kind of security.

I’ll leave you with Elaine paraphrasing an argument Charles Grodin made often on Ishtar’s behalf. She had it right in 2006, and she’s still right today: “What do you care? It’s not like you're going to get the money. It’s not like if the movie were $20 million, you’d get 10 of it. You’re never going to see it. What do you care how much money it is?”

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