ALAN HORN, president of Warner Bros Entertainment, sent a shiver round
expatriate Britons working in Hollywood when he publicly relegated Guy
Ritchie’s forthcoming gangster drama RocknRolla to art-house status,
shipping the film only to the minimum 800 cinemas required by their contract.
“It’s funny in spots, but I don’t think it’s broadly commercial. It’s very
English,” said Horn, damning with the faintest of praise, and daring Mr
Madonna to walk out of their deal and release the $18m (£9m) film elsewhere
in America - maybe straight to DVD.
This denouncement was regarded as a shot across the bows for all Tinseltown
Brits. He seemed to be saying: Don’t go back to the introverted 1980s. Wake
up and smell the global audience.
The warning signs grew more brutal last month. Fox Searchlight, a mini-studio
run by Warwick University graduate Peter Rice, walked away from a remake of
The Sweeney, fearing it would not play beyond the sound of Bow Bells.
And yet for a glorious moment last month Britons were on top of all the four
main US entertainment charts.
In film, there was The Dark Knight, written and directed by the Nolan brothers
from Hertfordshire, and starring Welsh-born Christian Bale, Sir Michael
Caine and Gary Oldman. It could make even more money if it wins Treasury
recognition as a “British” film and allows Warner to claim back tax. This is
just the sort of thing it needs to topple Titanic as the most lucrative film
ever made.
On television, there was Gordon Ramsay, who won over the key audience aged
between 18 and 49.
In pop music, Coldplay topped the charts. And in video games, there was Grand
Theft Auto IV, devised by the Edinburgh company Rockstar. Video games earn a
third of Britain’s £14 billion of cultural exports and the sector is growing
at 6% a year, vastly outpacing the rest of the UK economy.
This cheered up the Sunday Times Reel Britannia jury, five US entertainment
“names” who met this month at the Bel Air estate of Peter Guber, the
producer behind £3 billion of films, including Rain Man and the 1989 Batman.
Their brief: to discuss where 80,000 Britons employed in the American fun
business are going, and to vote on who had made the biggest splash over the
past 12 months.
The five agreed that Britons were doing well as producers, directors and
actors, even if many Americans did not realise that some of the stars of
House, Lost and Prison Break were born in Britain. But Britons made their
biggest mark as television innovators.
“Maybe it was due to the vacuum left by the writers’ strike earlier this
year, but this summer was dominated by British-originated pro-gramming,”
said judge Barry Josephson, whose production credits include the television
series Bones and the films Enchanted and British-written They came From
Upstairs.
“Entertainment 19 [run by former Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller and
presenter Simon Cowell] were smart when they rebooted Pop Idol for the
American audience with texting votes.
“We had a similar old show, Star Search, but nothing that drew television
audiences like that. Idol is still the juggernaut,” said Josephson.
Then Fuller’s other partners in Entertainment 19 - “Nasty Nigel” Lythgoe
and his Liver-pool school chum Ken War-wick - launched So You Think You Can
Dance.
Over the summer American Idol is estimated to have generated $100m in
advertising revenues. This month Lythgoe, 59, announced he would be stepping
back from Idol to “get a life” - which involves adapting half a
dozen more British formats for US television.
“Mark Burnett [a former British Army paratrooper] may have started the
American reality craze with Survivor, but right now Entertainment 19 are the
biggest Brits in American television,” said Guber, baseball team owner and
chairman of Manda-lay Pictures, which is retooling the Alfred Hitchcock
classic The Birds.
“The mark of power in Hollywood is getting your phone calls answered, and
there are few in this town who will not take a call from Simon Cowell - no
matter what you think of his on-screen persona,” said Guber. Idol now
indirectly employs 7,000 people.
Britain’s funnymen have also stepped over the line from performing into
dealmaking. Five years ago writer Steven Moffat walked away from an NBC
adaptation of his television comedy series Coupling. It was so awful that it
is now regarded as a turning point for British comedies in America.
When NBC adapted The Office, it listened to Ricky Gervais and discovered
Americans relished Britain’s greatest comedy export - embarrassment.
Gervais, and NBC’s new Anglophile boss, Ben Silver-man, have opened the doors
to the cringing horrors of everyday life immortalised by Steve Coogan, Simon
Pegg and Sacha Baron Cohen – the “sexiest man alive”, according to jury
member Lynda Obst.
Now the Hollywood writers’ strike is over, and a looming actors’ strike deemed
unlikely, the pace of Britcom remakes is picking up - Pegg’s Spaced, The
Vicar of Dibley and Little Britain USA are in the pipeline.
Some feel doomed. Life on Mars has been switched from Los Angeles to New York,
recast, recast again with heavy-weight Harvey Keitel as Gene Hunt and, a
month before its television debut, online critics are still complaining.
“They don’t get the joke. They have dead-handed it into just another cop
show,” raged one blogger.
Critics compare the remakes with originals on BBC America, founded in 1998 on
a shoestring budget to sell the best of UK television in the US. Today, due
to endless repeats and low broadcast quality, it is in danger of outstaying
its welcome.
“Watching BBC America on a high-definition wide screen gives me a headache. I
import my Britcom DVDs rather than wait two years for the censored
versions,” said one jury member. “Even Dr Who is shown on other American
channels before it reaches the BBC.”
The corporation missed a big opportunity with children’s television, said the
jurors. Disney scooped up Lauren Child’s Charlie and Lola, the animated
adventures of the naughty girl and her older, sensible brother. “It’s great.
Keeping the British accents just makes it better,” said juror Sharon
Lawrence.
Lord Alli’s company, Chorion, which owns the media rights to several
children’s characters, has just moved into sleek offices in New York’s
fashion district after Nickelodeon ordered 26 episodes of its animated tale
of Olivia the Pig.
At the posher end of the television spectrum is Colin Callender, the president
of HBO, which, despite lacking a mass hit such as The Sopranos, is still the
“coolest” television network.
Callender said he was most proud of the 23 Brits who are up for Emmy TV awards
next month.
These range from Ralph Fiennes to Melanie Oliver, editor on the mini-series
John Adams. “Brits bring focus and intelligence – and they stick
within budget,” he said.
Carrie Stein, LA producer for London-based Alchemy Television, said that
British co-production partners were known for “unAmerican global
sensitivities and the freedom to make fast decisions, unlike the strictly
hierarchical US studio system”.
Stein, a former talent agent at ICM now working on a remake of Ben-Hur, did
not need to add that, despite the low dollar, Britons were cheap - the
director of a mini-series will get £200,000 for a year’s work for which a
Los Angeles director would expect £500,000.
Rice, the boss at Fox Searchlight, the speciality film division of Twentieth
Century Fox, owned by News Corporation, the ultimate owner of The Sunday
Times, succeeds by keeping his prices down and his standards high, said our
jurors.
“He has extraordinary taste. Every year there is another hit out of the blue,
like Juno, that rocks the world,” said Obst.
Another said: “He has bad years but overall he dominates low-cost smart
movie-making like Harvey Weinstein used to do. But, unlike Harvey, you never
see him mouthing off in the press.”
If only more Brits were so entrepreneurial, said Graham King, Martin
Scorsese’s Oscar-winning financier on The Departed. “They have to come to
Hollywood to learn how to take risks. Back in Britain the culture is still
risk-averse,” he said in his LA office last week.
King knows what he is talking about. He is putting £40m of his own company’s
funds into Mel Gibson’s acting comeback. “No studio attached: yes, it keeps
me awake at night,” said the burly producer.
Gibson’s comeback is based on the 1985 BBC series Edge of Darkness, which
starred the late Bob Peck. The Massachu-setts version will be less gloomy -
a common negative used by American commissioning for television, along with
“bad teeth” - but even grittier, said King. He had to fix a few
wrinkles in the new script. “One character asks if it was time for a cup of
tea,” he said. Not in Boston, where it was thrown overboard.
Its only rival among next year’s big-screen thrillers may be another old BBC
series, State of Play, with Russell Crowe replacing John Simm.
Leaving aside the freak event that is The Dark Knight, where ratings were
distorted by the death of actor Heath Ledger, Britons have fared less well
on the big screen this year than last.
With the mysterious delay of the latest Harry Potter chapter, and a quiet year
for Ridley and Tony Scott, British films could show a 10% drop in receipts.
A lot is resting on the shoulders of Daniel Craig - a fine James Bond but “not
somebody I would like to be stuck with in a hot air balloon”, said Guber.
Producers are not fond of actors who promote their films only reluctantly.
“Craig should learn to relax and enjoy being 007,” advised Obst, who has
produced hits such as Contact.
Craig is among the brooding leading men that the Reel Britannia jury felt are
currently Hollywood Hot. Bale and Daniel Day-Lewis, soon to shatter his own
grim image by singing in the musical Nine, also feature highly.
“It’s cyclic. Last year it was Kate Winslet and [Dame] Helen Mirren, and they
could be back next year. Or maybe it says something about our brooding
times,” said Lawrence, who works in the Women in Film lobbying group.
James Ulmer said many Brits were now “undercover” in American productions,
from the Battlestar Galactica leading men to Gerard Butler, the overbuffed
Scot of the swords-and-sandals epic 300, who could be “the next Sean Connery
if he can get the right role”.
There are expats who face testing times. Orlando Bloom (“Men hate him,”
quipped one juror), Dance presenter Cat Deeley and Lost’s Naveen Andrews
(“Adored because he dates older women,” said Obst) must stretch themselves.
Catherine Zeta-Jones’s determination to star rather than act has weighed
against her.
The biggest British flop of the year in Los Angeles?
That, say the jurors, would be the Beckhams. Angelinos mock Victoria for her
inability to dress down in a city where Julia Roberts wears flip-flops.
David is mocked for, well, just about everything.
When the Beckhams landed in July last year, they thought they had time to
build their brand, codenamed by their Entertainment 19 advisers Plan B. But
a year in Hollywood is like a decade in any other industry.
TOP BRITONS BEHIND THE CAMERA
THE British Film Council produced a list of 100 British actors, directors and
others principally employed in the American film industry. The Sunday Times
jury, made up of significant Hollywood “players”, voted on five criteria:
past contribution, current status, talent, future prospects and liability
(how easy they are to work with).
This year’s all-American judges were:
Peter Guber, panel chairman: He has produced $3 billion of films,
including Midnight Express, Rain Man and Michael Keaton’s Batman. He is also
a sports entrepreneur and university lecturer.
Barry Josephson: Produces both television series (Bones) and hit movies
(Enchanted).
Sharon Lawrence: Broadway and TV actress. Leading member of the Women
In Hollywood networking group.
Lynda Obst: Producer of Sleepless in Seattle, Contact and How to Lose a
Guy In Ten Days. She is also author of the memoir Hello, He Lied
James Ulmer: Publisher of The Ulmer Scale and The Hot List, which ranks
actors and directors worldwide.
