THE 'SCIENCE' OF WHO SITS IN THE MOVIE SEATS

CHICAGO TRIBUNE / Mark Caro / October 15, 2000
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Director Joel Schumacher said he owes his career to movie audiences but fears their growing clout in the filmmaking process."I'm firmly convinced today that if they made GONE WITH THE WIND, they would shoot two endings and test them, and I'm positive that a lot of people in the audience would want Rhett to come back to Scarlett, and I'm afraid that's the ending we would have on that movie."

They're the most powerful people in the movie industry as well as the most exploited. Their opinions are as highly valued as their intelligence is underestimated.

Their name is invoked when a studio tries to dictate how a filmmaker should craft a movie, yet a filmmaker who tries too hard to please them is most often doomed to fail.

They're scrutinized perhaps more closely than anyone in the entertainment world, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent annually to tell them what to think and millions morespent analyzing what they actually do think. Yet they remain as elusive as ever.

Such are the power and the puzzle of the movie audience.

"I think they know what we don't know," said Tom Sherak, a top executive at the fledgling Revolution Studios. "Before we even tell them what to see, they know what to see."

Hollywood sure would like to figure out the audience's secrets, given the high stakes. The average cost of making a major-studio release in 1999 was $51.5 million, while the average marketing cost was $24.5 million, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

The North American box office hit an all-time record gross of $7.5 billion last year, yet the audience continues to reject far more movies than it embraces, leading most of the studio-owning corporations to claim that their film divisions lose money each year. (Some dispute the studios' accounting procedures, but that's another story.)

So ever-increasing amounts of money and energy are being devoted to the would-be science of studying the audience. One studio executive, who asked not to be identified, said the studios typically spend $250,000-$300,000 per movie on test screenings, focus groups and other measurements of audience reactions to films and marketing campaigns.

Does Hollywood finally know what the audience wants?

"No, not at all," said Schumacher (the last two BATMAN movies, THE CLIENT). "I think a lot of people who finance films and make films live in a bubble. They watch movies in private screening rooms. I don't think they're in touch with the audience at all."

Who is this audience, and what kind of influence do they have on filmmaking? What kind of influence should they have? Can the audience even be considered "the audience," as opposed to just lots of people with widely diverging tastes?

The film industry deals with such questions every day. Let's break them down.

Who is the audience?

"The movie audience is anyone who wants to go out of their house to sit in the dark with people they don't know and laugh and cry at something that's unfolding in front of them on the big screen," said Sherak, until recently 20th Century Fox's movie chief.

"I think we started with the notion that there was an audience, and one of the refinements that has come about is that there are many, many audiences even among what seem to be the same kind of people," said Joe Farrell, co-chairman of the National Research Group, the Los Angeles company that conducts test screenings and audience studies for most of the studios. "Adult women, for example, are very interested in thrillers, but in another regard they love romances."

True or false: More people are going out to see movies than ever before?

False. The North American movie audience remains less than half of what it was 50 years ago: The total 1999 attendance was 1.48 billion, compared to 4.23 billion in the peak year of 1946.

"It's not like it was right after World War II when you had about 80 million people a week going to movies," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co., which tracks box office figures. "I don't see how we could ever get to that point again. There are too many other entertainment options available."

Then again, people now watch movies on network and cable television, videocassettes, DVDs and airplanes, and the international market has grown as important as the domestic one.

Which demographic groups are driving the industry?

"From the marketing standpoint of movies, there are two huge populations, and their taste is wider apart perhaps than in prior generations," Farrell said. "There's the Boomers, who are roughly 35 to 55, and then there are the teens. That teen group is swelling; it's a huge population, as large probably as the Boomers have been."

Because the Boomers tended to wait longer to have children than previous generations, Farrell added, the age gap between the largest adult and teen audiences is especially pronounced.

"What's happening is you've got the Boomers' taste, which is an adult taste, and you have the teen taste, which is by definition a very adolescent taste," he said. "And that's quite a difference. And that boom of population in the United States of teens has not occurred in Italy, has not occurred in Germany, has not occurred in France, not in Europe, and it's not occurred in Japan and a lot of the Asian countries."

As a result, many of the teen flicks don't cross over to the growing international market like the star-driven mainstream movies do. Meanwhile, few movies are aimed for that in-between age group, and those that are, like HIGH FIDELITY, often struggle.

How do the moviegoing habits of these younger and older groups differ?

An MPAA study found that last year 49 percent of teenagers (ages 12-17) attended movies "frequently" -- that is, at least once a month -- compared to 28 percent of adults 18 and older.

"The conventional wisdom is your most voracious moviegoers are between 12 and 24," Dergarabedian said. "They're the ones who rush out to catch a movie on opening weekend."

"Older audiences -- and a great example of this is SPACE COWBOYS -- tend to discover a movie over time. SPACE COWBOYS has had a steady run at the box office since it opened. The audience that is most interested in that film, they're the ones who come out over the long term."

Who controls the box-office bucks, males or females arrell said NRG studies indicate that boys dominate the teen market, while women more often make the moviegoing decisions among adults.

"The studios themselves are emphasizing more where the more frequent moviegoer is, so there are more adult female movies made than there are adult male movies," he said.

Still, the MPAA classified 30 percent of adult males last year as "frequent" moviegoers, compared to 25 percent of adult females.

How much of the audience does a movie have to attract to become a blockbuster?

No movie attracts everyone, but the studios aim to hit all demographic groups with their wide releases.

"We break everything up into what we call quadrants: males under 25, males over 25, females under 25, females over 25," Sherak said. "For a movie to have real success or better that just good, you need to have at least two quadrants. If you get three quadrants, you can really get good, you can have a really big hit. If you have all four quadrants and the movie works, you have a home run."

"So when you look back at THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, we started out with two quadrants, we quickly went to the third quadrant, which was older males, and then, lo and behold, the older females started to come, and we had a huge hit. ME, MYSELF & IRENE, was a three-quadrant movie: We got younger males, we got older males, we got young females, but we never got the older females."

How does Hollywood's desire for blockbusters affect filmmaking?

"They would be happy if they could get everyone, and so the product has to be like television, when you're talking about that size of audience," said director Neil LaBute (NURSE BETTY, IN THE COMPANY OF MEN). "There's a blanding effect of 'We have to make it the least offensive as possible for such a wide market to get those viewers to tune in.' It's dangerous."

Also, at least half of the potential audience lives outside of the U.S. now, so filmmakers report increased pressure not to include cultural references that don't translate overseas. Writer-director Cameron Crowe said that issue was the basis of clashes he had with DreamWorks over some scenes in ALMOST FAMOUS.

"I have to think internationally, too," agreed cult filmmaker John Waters, "which is the hardest thing. To get a comedy in every country, [you think] will they get that here? I write this long thing that I give to the translators explaining every slang and everything for the subtitles."

How does the audience figure in a filmmaker's approach?

The role of the audience is a central issue for all kinds of artists, but with filmmakers it tends to be especially pressing.

"This is not a painting that cost me a hundred dollars in oil paint and a week of my time," director Harold Ramis said while doing post-production work on his upcoming comedy BEDAZZLED. "A major corporation will have staked $80 million on this movie. A lot of people's time and effort will have been wasted if you can't sell it."

Still, Ramis and other filmmakers warned of letting presumed audience reactions override their creative instincts.

"It's dangerous to play that game of 'I'm going to put in a little something for everyone,'" LaBute said. "I don't think you can outguess them. You think of yourself as a moviegoer and think, I'm not a freak, I like all kinds of movies, I'm going to make a movie that I would like, and hopefully there will be enough people who feel like I did."

Some filmmakers pointedly aren't after a mass audience. Director Darren Aronofsky's purpose in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, which opens later this month, is to assault viewers with the nightmares of a son's and mother's drug addictions.

"REQUIEM was always about a roller-coaster ride into a brick wall," he said. "It's just like music. People go to see classical concerts. People go to see easy-listening concerts. And there's people that want to get into the mosh pit and they want to go slam dancing and they want to become involved in it."

How does a movie find its appropriate audience?

This is where NRG and other audience-surveying companies come into play, often to the dismay of filmmakers. NRG was launched in 1978 as a company with just a handful of employees and now, Farrell said, boasts more than 1,500 full-time workers.

Studios hire NRG to test advertising materials and various concepts, to track public awareness of movies before they open, to gauge responses to the films through test-screening questionnaires and focus groups, and again to solicit viewers' reactions after the movies open.

"I think we're much more sophisticated in applying our methods," Farrell said. "I think it manages to expose more of the audience's thinking to the filmmaker than when we first started -- and get more and more of the targeted audience to him to get reactions to him."

Ramis said identifying the right audience is a key purpose of test screenings.

"If an audience doesn't respond, I don't say, well, therefore it's a bad movie," he said. "I say well, therefore we're not in touch with that audience. Then either you go out and look for the audience you are in touch with or you try to reshape your work to fit the audience you've got, the general audience."

"The worst situation is where you've made a movie where you can't reconcile the audience to the movie. When I made STUART SAVES HIS FAMILY with Al Franken, the most accurate review we got said that people who see this movie won't like it, and people who will like it won't see it. And that's death for marketing a movie."

How do test screenings affect the movies?

The most famous example is when Paramount, a studio known its faith in the NRG gospel, ordered the ending of Adrian Lyne's FATAL ATTRACTION changed after test audiences objected to the original conclusion, in which the Glenn Close character committed suicide.

More recently, test audiences were so keen on the Rupert Everett character in P.J. Hogan's MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING that the comedy's tail end was reshot to beef up his role. And Ramis wound up chopping a lengthy segment from BEDAZZLED -- one in which the Brendan Fraser character is transformed into a Sid Vicious-like rock star -- at the behest of test audiences that found it too dark; never mind that the movie is about the pitfalls of making a deal with the Devil.

The idea of audiences voting on a movie's content is a chilling one for many filmmakers. Schumacher, who has final cut on his films, recalled the first time BATMAN FOREVERwas shown to a research audience in San Diego:

"Women over 55 were offended that Nicole Kidman's character was so sexually overt. This was brought up to me in the meeting [with Warner Bros. executives]: `Well, women over 55 were uncomfortable with Nicole Kidman's sexuality.' I said, `You know what? Chances are that armies of 55-year-old women aren't rushing to Batman movies anyway, so why don't we just pass by that note.' But some directors don't have the power to do that."

Is the test screening process evil?

Some filmmakers think so.

"Under the current structure, they're hellish," actor-filmmaker Kenneth Branagh said. "They're illusory."

"Look, I'm not against seeing a movie with an audience," Waters said. "I'm against the [questionnaire] cards. The cards are b.s., and the focus groups have become b.s. Suddenly these rich studio heads listen to some shmo in a shopping mall? They sure don't in anything else. They wouldn't be caught dead in the shopping mall with these people."

The problem for filmmakers without "final cut" is that sometimes the studio sets numerical goals for how well a movie should "score." If it doesn't reach that mark, the studio can take over.

The process, however, has its filmmaking advocates. Francis Ford Coppola is often credited with launching the modern test-screening phenomenon with APOCALYPSE NOW, and Ron Howard is known as an enthusiastic participant.

Mark Gill, president of Miramax's Los Angeles operations, called the test-screening process "much maligned but extraordinarily valuable in the same way that out-of-town previews are valuable for plays." Gill said test screenings are particularly useful in settling arguments between the studio and filmmaker.

"It's probably the most reliable voice in any conversation," he said. "That doesn't mean it's always right, but it's the most reliable."

What's the biggest change in the audience over the past 20 years?

There's a consensus that today's moviegoers are much more savvy to the business's inner workings and resistant to overused formulas: Goodbye, slasher movies; hello, post-modern deconstructions of slasher movies (SCREAM, SCARY MOVIE).

"The difference has a lot to do with how much they are exposed to everything about the movie and the entertainment industry now, through the Internet, on television, through all kinds of ways," Farrell said. "Years back we used to leave L.A. to find audiences who were not part of the `industry.' Today there's nowhere you can go to have people who are fresh and uninformed or untainted."

Do the studios underestimate the audience?

Ah, the eternal question. You think "yes" when audiences embrace a smart movie like AMERICAN BEAUTY, and "no" when they rush to some brainless summer dud like GONE IN 60 SECONDS.

"These summer audiences who go into a mediocre movie that cost a billion dollars, they don't know they don't have the option to not like it," Waters said. "I'm jealous. That's brainwashing. I want to know how to do that."

Schumacher said, "I think [the studios] have a tendency to think the audience is stupid and very unsophisticated. I think there's a notion in a lot of people's minds in Hollywood that there's New York and L.A. and then there's this thing in between, and everybody's like the people in DELIVERANCE. [They think,] `This won't play in Biloxi,' unaware that everybody gets the joke."

But Sherak said he considers the audience, whether in the cities or the boonies, "very sophisticated" and getting smarter all the time.

"It's becoming harder and harder to keep secrets from them," he said. "Everybody seems to know everything whenever they want to know it. So it's going to be an interesting new century."

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