Keep it Simple Stupid

Hollywood has been notorious for helping the everyday citizen escape into the movie theater to avoid the conflicts played out in the world theater. Only a few contemporary wide releases, such as Michael Moore's anti-Bush doc Fahrenheit 9/11 and Paramount's The Manchurian Candidate, have delved into any of this year's serious political or militaristic issues.  Studios are, instead, dead set on using big stars and big grand themes to help the average moviegoer forget not only the war in Iraq, but also a recent recession and an election.

Instead, studios are gearing up their writers and producers for a battle at the box office, and using the good ol' B-Movie as ammunition. There hasn't been a better way to boost the ticket-buying economy than to recycle plotlines and properties from what the last two generations watched in the old movie houses or on pre-cable TV, or read in pulp novels and comic books. As the world around us gets grimmer, studios are dusting off more and more dumbed-down genre fluff to turn into the new breed of bright mega-budget studio blockbusters.

The biggest upcoming example is a big-budget redux of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg. A decade ago, it would have been career suicide for such an A-List actor to star in such a big budget B-Movie. What's next? Julia Roberts getting green-lighted to star in a remake of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman? With seemingly outrageous deals such as Worlds becoming more commonplace, it might not be as far around the development bend as one might think.

The truth is, ever since Jack Nicholson made $60 million - including salary and back-end money - for pasting up his face with Joker make-up for Batman, Hollywood's A-List is quickly learning a new lesson:  They might have to spend a few more hours in wardrobe and make-up and turn to remakes and stylistic revivals of B-Movies in their quest to stay fresh in the eyes of the average mainstream moviegoer.

And when the $35 million man and the top moneymaking director in film history are on the bandwagon, it's time to jump on board.

B-Movies were, historically, an attempt of the film studios to put more butts in the seats during the depression, with double features.  In October of 1935, two of the big New York theater chains, RKO and Loews, adopted the double feature in all of their principal theaters.

The B-feature was a low-budget film that acted as added value before the bigger budget feature. All of the films had one common thread: simplistic plotlines everyone could relate to with an everyman hero overcoming adversity. Soon everyone could count on a trip to the cinema to escape with their favorite matinee idols instead of dealing with their everyday hardships.

The Phantom of the Opera of 1943, starring Claude Rains, had its disfigured musical genius hiding away in the Paris Opera House, longing for the acceptance and love of a beautiful, young singer. The film's straightforward troubled-guy-wants-girl plot has stood the test of time with six theatrical incarnations, the latest directed by Joel Schumacher to be released for the 2004 holiday season.

The heyday of these creature features, sci-fi send-ups, and hard-boiled film noirs came to an end when anti-trust legislation was passed 1948 stopping studios from owning movie theatres. The B-Movie was soon transplanted to the little moving-picture box that cropped up in everyone's living room, in the form of Westerns and thrillers.

Fast-forward 50 years and a similar trend is occurring. Studios are hungry for butts in the seats, with strong competition from DVD sales, video games, cable and satellite TV, and other ancillary streams.

Truth be told, studios have never really stopped making B and genre movies with talent on the rise or fall. In fact, that trend still lives and breathes in the halls of AFM. And studios, agents, producers, and managers are emerging on a major roadblock, having difficulty finding fresh and original material to lure the A talent.  

So, major studios such as Paramount are turning to B-Movies to rescue themselves again. And not only are they promoting the B-Movie of old as the top bill, but they're placing A-List stars in the driver's seat. They are viewing films like their $80 million CGI (computer generated images) extravaganza Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow as more of a sure thing than a gamble. Director/writer Kerry Conran pays homage to the old '40s serials and touts Academy Award winner Gwyneth Paltrow, Academy Award nominee Jude Law, and Academy Award winner sexpot Angelina Jolie on its poster.

Entities such as Intellectual Properties Worldwide, founded by attorney and CEO Marc Toberoff, have also sprouted up as a result. The company's unique structure allows it to represent, as well as own in whole or in part, the underlying rights to almost 250 film and TV properties, with their research department monitoring over 2,000 more. They try to package talent, producers and writers with the properties in an attempt to exploit these titles as feature films.

"Queen Latifah wants to do Police Woman but we haven't got a screenplay yet, and currently Julian Fellowes and Michael Hoffman want to work on Grand Hotel," says J. Todd Harris, president of production for IPW.

"In seeking a platform as a producer, [Toberoff] was attracted to the softest of software - the underlying rights to brand name properties," says Harris. "He came up with a legal strategy for getting feature rights back to TV creators and underlying copyrights to the original creators."

Horror throwbacks like Piranha (being courted by director Chuck Russell), It's Alive, and C.H.U.D. are just a few of IPW's potential B-Movie cult hit goldmines. The brand name recognition of these multi-sequel cult franchises among the genre's fans has put them on a faster development track.

TV properties popular with the last generation are also finding heat in the B-Movie boom.  

"Ironically, some of our TV titles we're working to adapt as features would've been considered B-Movies around the time The Brady Bunch Movie was made. But now, with the Mission: Impossible series, Starsky and Hutch, and the upcoming The Dukes of Hazzard, many studios treat these types of projects as A level, if not outright tentpole pictures," says Corey Witte, executive of production and development for IPW.

Two million-dollar men of the industry who have been way ahead of the curve on the widening B-Movie road are director Robert Zemekis and producer Joel Silver. They shared a passion for the old spook shows and partnered on the aptly-titled Warner Bros. production shingle Dark Castle Entertainment.

The Burbank-based production company has souped-up old eerie clunkers like House on Haunted Hill and 13 Ghosts into CGI spectacles so MTV generation moviegoers can enjoy their scares onscreen instead of in the frightening world outside their windows.

The company's latest will be a complete-with-3-D revisiting of the 1953 Vincent Price spooker House of Wax, currently filming for release in 2005.