WHY HOLLYWOOD LOVES A DEATH STORY

By Brian Hannan

AT least you know the ending! The three-hanky weepie The Fault in Our Stars was a big hit in America, outgrossing Tom Cruise blockbuster The Edge of Tomorrow on its opening weekend.

Getting audiences to cry is no mean feat, especially in these cynical days when cinemagoers tend to be a lot more savvy about movies manipulating their feelings.

When I tell you the characters meet at a cancer support group, you might be already reaching for the sick bucket. But fear ye not! Based on a bestseller (natch) by young adult author John Green, the movie does not go down the soppy route, using a combination of acerbic wit and unconventional characters to win over hearts, minds and credit cards.

Bearing in mind how Hollywood has played the crying game in the past, the movie makers need not have worked so hard at trying at keeping the movie fresh. Even so, this movie does employ some well-known tricks.

Love Story, the king (queen?) of the soppy stories worked because neither Ali McGraw nor Ryan O’Neal had achieved stardom. They had not acquired annoying tics, nor had we pored endlessly over their love lives.

Hence, they appeared more real. Both were real cute. Heaven-sent looks, though, do help the heaven-bound as Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort can testify in The Fault in our Stars.

It was all a far cry from socialite Bette Davis in Dark Victory in 1939, which started off the whole rollercoaster of lucrative sorrow.

Davis was not first choice - Greta Garbo chose Anna Karenina instead. But Davis provided the sharp-tongued template.

Sweet November got made twice – in 1968 with Sandy Dennis and 2001 with Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves – unfortunately, it was not Reeves who died, although sometimes his acting was so stiff you could not tell.

Leo McCarey liked his 1939 Love Affair, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, so much he remade it 18 years later as An Affair To Remember with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant.

Sometimes the box office bell rang so loud the audience just switched it off – Julia Roberts was riding very high when she came down to earth with a bang in Dying Young (1991).

Men are good at dying, too. Tough guy James Caan (The Godfather) got his big break in a made-for-tv movie Brian’s Song (1971) as a football player on the way out. Robert DeNiro did the baseball version in Bang The Drum Slowly (1973).

Of course, some guys can never take dying seriously. Think of Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List (2008). Or the Pythons in Life of Brian – taught from an early age that if they get strung up on a crucifix to burst into song.

Even John Wayne (himself dying of cancer) got into the act in The Shootist (1976), but audiences stayed away, preferring the big man to go suddenly like he did in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and The Cowboys (1972). Hollywood preferred the first – giving Duke an Oscar nomination.

Like any other genre, you have to shake it around a bit, so the twist in The Doctor (1991) was having William Hurt as an icy example of the species warming up a bit when he became a patient.

In My Sister’s Keeper (2009), the protagonist realised she has been born to keep alive her afflicted sister and decided (greedily) she wanted to keep all her organs to herself, thanks very much.

Sometimes all you had to do is put two charismatic stars in a film and keep the audience guessing which one was under a dark cloud; witness Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey in Beaches (1988), confusing the audience as to who was in the premature departure lounge by having Midler sing the theme tune.

The twist in Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) was that the candidate for the hereafter was an ordinary bureaucrat who had already had every ounce of charisma surgically removed.

But death might yet do us all a good turn. Hollywood is always one trend away from financial stability, and the success of The Fault in Our Stars might spell the end of super-heroes and lowest-common-denominator comedies.

Who knows? We might get a decent drama.

A DAY TOO FAR: HOW THE HUBRIS OF HOLLYWOOD BURNED FINGERS

TODAY, No Grey Areas introduces another important signing -  one to excite film buffs everywhere.  Brian Hannan is author of The Making of Lawrence of Arabia, The Making of The Guns of Navarone, Hitchcock’s Hollywood Hell, Hitchcock at the Box Office –  all of which are available in print from Amazon and Kindle. In his timely opening blog, he reminds us of how things can go wrong, even for the most famous of Hollywood executives.

IMPORTANT anniversaries have been usurped by marketers.

Accompanying last week’s 70th anniversary remembrance of the D-Day landings was a wide scale revival of The Longest Day, featuring an all-star cast including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Sean Connery.

A Glasgow company, Park Circus Films, which is behind all those occasional big-screen showings of old favourites, has been promoting Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One, starring Lee Marvin.

More cynically, a 50th anniversary showing of Zulu has been shifted from January (when the film originally premiered in the UK) to June 9 to take advantage of the sentiment surrounding soldiering.

War is partly to blame for what appears now like an incessant rash of movie anniversaries. The first movie to take major advantage of the celebration of a historic military event was Gone With the Wind.

In 1961, to mark the centenary of the beginning of the American Civil War, MGM reissued the Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh classic.

It wasn’t the first time the movie had been reissued. It was the fourth. It had already been re-released in the US in1942, 1947 and 1954, each time sending the public back to the box office in droves.

The gap between showings was based on a Hollywood notion that a new generation of filmgoers popped up once every seven years. The film was a much bigger hit than anyone expected, one of the top ten films of the year at the box office.

Hollywood being that kind of place, everyone wanted to jump onto the reissue bandwagon with exceedingly mixed results. The idea – prevalent nowadays - that a film being ten, 25 or 50 years old was sufficient reason for a box-office rematch lacked marketing heft back in the 1960s.

But there was one significant historical event that could generate exceptional hype – D-Day. The 20th anniversary of D-Day would take place in 1964. There was only one problem. The Darryl F. Zanuck picture The Longest Day had just been released in October 1962.

It was the number three film of the year in America in 1963 and was so successful there, held over so long in the bigger cinemas, it still had not played in hundreds of small theatres.

But Zanuck thought the anniversary too good an opportunity to miss. So he curtailed the film’s release, cancelling contracts for future showings, withdrawing it from cinemas in February 1964.It had been shown in 4,400 cinemas, less than half of the expected final number.

He was not the only one to sniff the lucrative potential of the summer anniversary. One of the three main television networks offered a record $4m for the movie if it could premiere it on June 6.

Zanuck reckoned his movie was worth more and started a massive build-up to anniversary celebrations climaxing in a special showing on June 6 to a select audience of military and civilian leaders as a large-scale reissue got underway.

It was set for major cinemas in New York and Los Angeles. Nearly 500 cinemas, some of which had shown it on initial release, backed Zanuck’s judgement.

The public, it turned out, was not waiting with bated breath. Zanuck had gone a “day too far.” In all his arrogance, he had overlooked three things.

Firstly, a different perspective had been cast on war by Carl Foreman’s grittier The Victors, starring George Peppard and Albert Finney. Secondly, it went head-to-head with another reissue – David Lean’s multi-Oscar-winning Bridge on the River Kwai, which pummelled it at the box office.

Thirdly, the American public saw the tub-thumping for what it was – marketing hype. In one of Hollywood’s most catastrophic misjudgements – file under “hubris” – a film that was racing ahead of the box office pack trailed home with its tail between its legs.

The reissue barely grossed $2m, half of the box office of The Victors and Bridge on the River Kwai.

Strangely enough, that did not stop Fox taking another punt at a reissue in 1969, the 25th anniversary of D-Day, where, even more curiously, it brought in far better returns.