Strike Landscape Surveyors,
I hope you've kept it together in my absence. I've watched some movies and thought about writing you. I've also worked a lot, and when not working, I haven't wanted to think about the business. But that's not because my outlook is doom-and-gloom! It's because I'm trying to carve out "Boundaries." And FWIW, I'm actually not certain there'll be a strike, let alone a prolonged one... though last night, I did shoot up out of bed wondering if a strike could lead to one particular deal I have getting force majeure'd????
A Thousand and One
I really dug several of the Best Pic noms, but looking back at the list, I don't know that any of them gutted me. I mean, I had a lot to say about The Fabelmans, and I could've written about institutional cowardice in Tar, plus I was won over by the spectacle of Avatar Deux. But it has been a minute since I've walked out of a movie theater destroyed. And that probably has more to do with me getting older, and maybe a little self-protective, than it does with the movies themselves.
But on Friday, I saw A Thousand and One, and it really got me. It's about a Black mom and son in New York City from the mid 90s to the early 2010s. While the political context is crucial, the mother-son shit here feels elemental. They need each other -- they are each other -- but they also need space, and they can only show their vulnerability so, so fleetingly. The movie allows both of them to be tender & rageful, and at all times, you know exactly how they feel. But ultimately it's the mom's story. Played by Teyana Taylor, who is arrestingly good, the mom comes out of her youth with ambition & appetite: for love, for risk, for sex, for nothing more than a chair in a hair salon, for her son's future. There is a simple tragedy here, of the unsolvable problem of a person who has too much to offer. Her world -- a whitening city -- just wants her to be smaller.
It isn't easy to show how a neighborhood gentrifies, because, well, the "before" doesn't exist anymore. So I've spoken with a few people involved here, above and below the line, about how they did it... and it was really by the skin of their teeth. The filmmakers had the backing of a specialty studio, which is to say, they had too much oversight and not enough money. An inch outside every frame, on all four sides, you would’ve seen new construction. Nonetheless, all the period exterior scenes felt so vibrant to me, with a roving camera that captures an impossible density of life. So, as fun & harrowing as it is to watch a Safdies' flick, I think A Thousand and One is the new state-of-the-art for making a movie that feels like New York City.
And with a naturalistic style and social realist concerns, you'd assume the story itself follows suit, with the only improbable, heightened events being the extent of the tragedy. But -- and I don't want to give anything away here -- this movie has cards up its sleeve. The narrative turns work brilliantly, not to keep you "hooked," but because they bring the characters' deep feelings into the open -- feelings that they never, ever would've expressed otherwise. With just the right amount of melodrama, the final shot elevates Teyana’s character into a kind of New York legend.
Airffleck
Ben Affleck has a new movie coming out called Air, about the Nike exec who signed Michael Jordan. It's the sort of pop culture history anecdote that I think should be confined to lesser magazine writing, maybe podcasting, but this subject doesn’t seem like the stuff of movies, eh? And with Apple lavishing the origin story of Tetris with big-budget treatment, has the medium ever felt more misused -- smaller in imagination, catered to the newsfeed, utterly disposable?
Nonetheless, there's a vastly more interesting meta-entrepreneurial fairy tale here on the press tour for Air. Affleck is buoyantly touting his new studio, Artists Equity, speaking to both the Hollywood and financial press as if his new Jordans will finally allow him to dunk. (Forgive me two asides here: 1. Affleck speaking at the New York Times' Dealbook Summit feels like a late-season Succession set piece. 2. I have it on authority he cannot play basketball, like really truly not for shit, which is why he never takes the court in The Way Back, despite holding a ball throughout the movie.)
Anyway, I really appreciate that his pitch for his new company celebrates the contributions of his collaborators. He's bragging about how his crew on the film has been paid, through profits on the sale to Amazon. So Affleck's plan is simply to finance more movies and sell them to studios & streamers. His secret sauce, he says, is stars, modest budgets & incentivizing his crew to work miracles with unprecedented upside in success.
His enthusiasm here has baffled me. Baffled. Because nobody else is rushing to finance movies, let alone big ones, on the assumption they'll be acquired for much. You cannot name a single enterprise that is running that business plan right now on any scale.
But now I know why he thinks he can pull this off, and I have a couple fun numbers to share that are not public. Air cost $40MM -- a pretty healthy sum for what it is, but not of Netflixian insanity. Amazon bought the movie for... wait for it... wait for it... $140MM. So that's a $100MM profit, which, I'd imagine, is a shot of pure adrenaline to a now-sober fellow who excels at poker (click "results" here to see who won the California State Championship in 2004).
Well, I've told you tales of Infinite Money People -- the whales who come to town eager to light money on fire to attend movie premieres, and the speed with which they are bled to dry. Usually, the arriving party is a chest-thumping scion, or the comptroller of a sovereign wealth fund, or just a bank executive gone rogue. So now Affleck & his backer, Gerry Cardinale of Red Bird Capital, who gels his hair like a hockey coach, have assumed the role. But even they aren't the real whales.
The men atop the world's largest companies -- Amazon & Apple -- have stepped into their slippers at the Bel Air Hotel to reward Ben (and what feels like a haphazard array of other folks too: I had never heard of this doc Amazon bought for $20MM...) Their profligacy has given a jolt to the town in otherwise grim times. But with the strike coming up -- a labor action against their politically-sensitive companies -- I can't help but wonder: How long is their stay?
Hollywood Forever Y'all,
Max