Bonfire Euphoria - and Failure
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You work on a team to create a movie. The team does its best work. Things go wrong, yes. But things also go right. Who is to know whether it will all come together in the end?
Bonfire of the Vanities was a Tom Wolfe book about the breakdown of New York City during the eighties. If Wolfe is good at anything, he is good a portraying a time and the people in it.
They made the movie some years later. Salamon was able to watch closely as Brian DePalma tried to make his masterpiece under all sorts of constraints.
The book's big. It tells a lot about movie making. What about the strategy in it all?
Who does strategy? Let's assume it is senior management's job to put a team together, go away, and put a simple plan down on paper. Then they come back, articulate the strategy to their team (hopefully in a manner that everyone understands what they mean) and, then, sit back while other implement their plans.
The management team provides guidance, advice, critiques along the way, and, if it is normal, gets so involved in the day-to-day that they forget that a plan even exists.
The Bonfire team did the same thing. The constraints of the movie business are huge and the odds of success are not so huge. The management team watched, cajoled, screamed (especially over budget) and, when things were all done and they were shown the final cut, applauded - loudly - about the "masterpiece" (Salamon, 340) DePalma had created.
The first weekend's revenues for Bonfire were $3.1 million (Salamon, 405), a bomb by anyone's standards.
First question: Is movie production art or business? If it is business, what do you do when things are going wrong?
There are points along the way when you have a feeling something is going wrong. It happens in your business. DePalma and his team certainly recognized things were going wrong when they couldn't find film locations, or their actors weren't performing up to expectations.
They never thought about pulling the plug on the production. Too many big names were involved, and, once things got started, to pull back would have wasted too much capital.
They had to absorb their losses and move forward. Sometimes you have to do that. You just wish that you had responded earlier when things just didn't feel right.
Reference
Salamon, Julie. The Devil's Candy. The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1991.