Formula for a Hollywood blockbuster
No bowling alleys, no summoning demons, and no troubled superheroes
Topics: Pacific Standard, Hollywood, Media, Algorithms, New York Times, Business News, Entertainment News
There is a relatively uninteresting story in The New York Times today. Or, at least, it’s a story that’s been told before. Long-standing people in an industry are getting annoyed by an outsider who’s trying to change the way they do things with a scary new tool: statistics. It’s seemingly happening everywhere, and that it’s now happening in Hollywood—a place where “making money” is pretty high on the list of priorities—isn’t all that surprising.
This is how it works:
A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese—“the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer—has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?
As Matt Yglesias pointed out at Slate, $20,000 is almost nothing in terms of production costs for a movie. So, the story’s kind of predicated on this “mad scientist” who’s toiling away in his lab, rather than actually causing any legitimate outside waves. If it’s “as much as $20,000,” studio heads aren’t really taking Bruzzese all that seriously. And, beyond that, the idea of using statistics to build the perfect movie script isn’t necessarily something new. For now, then, Bruzzese is a funny character—the manifestation of Long Island, basically: “‘All screenwriters think their babies are beautiful,’ he said, taking a chug of Diet Dr Pepper followed by a gulp of Diet Coke and a drag on a Camel. ‘I’m here to tell it like it is: Some babies are ugly.’”—without all that much sway, but that doesn’t mean his ideas are totally uninteresting.
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