Audience-ology

How Moviegoers Shape the Films We Love

Kevin Goetz,Darlene Hayman

• Verlag: S&S/Simon Element
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982186784
• Thema: Media & Performing Arts
• Thema: Film History & Criticism

Discover the fascinating and secretive process of audience testing of Hollywood movies through these firsthand stories from famous filmmakers, studio heads, and stars. Audience-ology takes you to one of the most unknown places in Hollywood—a place where famous directors are reduced to tears and multi-millionaire actors to fits of rage. A place where dreams are made and fortunes are lost. From "the best in the business" (Sacha Baron Cohen), this book is the chronicle of how real people have written and rewritten America's cinematic masterpieces by showing up, watching a rough cut of a new film, and giving their unfettered opinions so that directors and studios can salvage their blunders, or better yet, turn their movies into all-time classics.Each chapter informs an aspect or two of the test-screening process and then, through behind-the-scenes stories, illustrates how that particular aspect was carried out. Nicknamed "the doctor of audience-ology, " Kevin Goetz shares how he helped filmmakers and movie execs confront the misses and how he recommended ways to fix the blockbusters, as well as first-hand accounts from Ron Howard, Cameron Crowe, Ed Zwick, Renny Harlin, Jason Blum, and other Hollywood luminaries who brought you such films as La La Land, Chicago, Titanic, Wedding Crashers, Jaws, and Forrest Gump. Audience-ology explores one of the most important (and most underrated) steps in the filmmaking process with enough humor, drama, and surprise to entertain those with only a spectator's interest in film, offering us a new look at movie history.

1. FINDING MY “AND”

In February 2010, I pulled my car into a Staples parking lot and asked myself, How the fuck did I get here?

This wasn’t a literal question. By then my skills navigating the 405 Freeway were pretty well honed. Rather, it was existential, like something you might say a moment after leaping off a cliff, when you first realize that you’re airborne and only two options exist: fly or go splat. That was the kind of day I was having. This Staples parking lot became my setting for some deep self-reflection.

For the previous seven years, I’d been working at a company called OTX. It was the premier film-testing company in the world, and I’d helped make it that way. I was brought in to build out their nascent Motion Picture Group and was responsible for everything from orchestrating the film screenings to soothing A-list directors and studio heads when the results weren’t great. The job came with the usual perks, including a big salary.

The OTX job was a good job. A great job. But just a few days earlier, I had given it all up. I’d said goodbye, turned in my corporate AmEx card, and walked out the door into the wild unknown of Hollywood.

As great as things had seemed on the surface, OTX had changed. The owners had sold the company to a billion-dollar conglomerate. Everybody’s job was up for renegotiation. And while the conglomerate wanted me to stay on and offered me a fair-enough contract, I knew I was facing a “now or never” moment to see if I had what it took to start my own firm. So I gave up the comfort and cushiness of that job, liquidated all my bank accounts, emptied my 401(k), and started my own film-testing firm out of my living room. I called it Screen Engine.

There’s an oft-quoted line in Field of Dreams—“If you build it, he will come”—and indeed, people came. I’d spent years developing relationships with directors and studios, and when I established my new company, they stood with me. The vast majority of my clients followed me from OTX to Screen Engine.

Within two weeks, Screen Engine had outgrown my living room (much to the delight of my labradoodle, Kugel) and we moved into a two-hundred-square-foot shared office space on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It had that crucial 90210 zip code. We were a team of six at that time, writing emails on the floor, taking meetings in the hallway because we didn’t even have a suitable conference room. We were overworked and under siege. Because, in addition to trying to serve all the clients that it had taken a much larger firm to serve, someone else showed up at our door: lawyers.

You see, big companies don’t take too kindly to losing clients, and they’ll fight—often with an army of attorneys—to keep you from taking them. Fortunately, I had never signed a noncompete and was legally free to work with my old clients (I play hard, but I play fair). But that didn’t stop my former employer from serving me with a stack of paperwork so big that there’s now probably a soccer field somewhere in Brazil that used to be a lovely rain forest.

My job as CEO was to put on a brave face for our team and keep them focused on doing great work for our clients. But the truth was, I was scared as hell—scared of losing my company, my savings, and the respect of my peers that I had worked so hard to build.

But if I’m being honest, the risk and uncertainty were also thrilling. After getting bored working in an increasingly corporate environment, every day at Screen Engine was a shot of adrenaline. I was exhausted, but I leapt out of bed every morning ready for battle.

Even everyday tasks like buying office supplies for the new company seemed like a thrilling adventure.

Which is how I ended up in that Staples parking lot in the winter of 2010 with that all-important question: How the fuck did I get here?

Oh, and on which aisle does Staples keep the printer ink?

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I’ve never wanted to buy into astrology, the whole idea that how the stars align when you’re born dictates who you become. But I do think that’s why I am the way I am. I don’t have a better explanation. I really don’t.

I was born in Brooklyn in 1962, a year and a place where the stars aligned. It was the year that Lawrence of Arabia hit the big screen, when Cape Fear premiered, and when Stanley Kubrick took on the Hollywood censors and turned Lolita from a book into a film.

Brooklyn was where Mel Brooks was born, where Eli Wallach, Rita Hayworth, Barbra Streisand, and Woody Allen all grew up, just to name a few. Eddie Murphy was born not far away—and just over a year before me.

Years later, in college, I would have an argument with a sociology professor who claimed that behavior was learned—that you grew into your passions, you weren’t born with them. “Au contraire,” I said. I’d known that I belonged in show business from my first moment of consciousness.

When my mom went to buy clothes for us kids, I always asked for something that looked like a costume. When my brother locked himself in his room and pretended he was a baseball announcer, I retreated to my room, which was outfitted with a dance barre and mirrors, and practiced my Oscar acceptance speech. I have only one memory of the third grade: playing the garage mechanic in the school play, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (Did that role even exist in the movie?)

Indeed, if there’s one element of my early life that foreshadowed who I’d become, it’s this: an urgent, overwhelming desire to perform.

My parents didn’t exactly encourage my passion for acting, singing, and dancing. Far from it.

But in the early 1970s, my dad took me to see Pippin on Broadway and I remember thinking, “This is what I want to do.”

A year or two later, we went to see A Chorus Line and I knew, “This is what I have to do.” It was life changing.

While my father was somewhat supportive, my mother wasn’t having any of it, and early on, I’m sure she hoped it was a passing obsession. I can’t exactly blame her; she certainly didn’t envy the lives of parents of child actors. Who wants to take a day off work so they can take a kid to Manhattan so he can belt out “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line to some power-drunk casting director? Not my mother.

When I was in elementary school, my parents moved us across the Hudson River to what they called “the country,” but was actually just the town of East Brunswick, New Jersey. Unfortunately for them, the move outside New York didn’t change my show business aspirations. It didn’t dampen my desire to be under bright lights. It only intensified it.

Our new house, it turns out, was located a few blocks away from some young aspiring actors, like my friend Metoka Singletary and the Munk brothers: David, Jonathan, and Robbie. All three Munk brothers regularly appeared in commercials (and Jonathan would eventually land a significant part in Annie Hall, playing the child version of Woody Allen’s character). This immediately made them my idols, and even better, they introduced me to their manager, Delores Reed, who wanted to sign me.

I was once told that the great Shakespearean actor Laurence Olivier said something like, “It’s not enough to have talent. You must have a talent for talent.” Even at an early age, I instinctively understood that to get what you want, you have to be both talented and aggressive. Maybe even a little reckless.

This is how, when my mother refused to sign the papers allowing me to work with the manager, I made the most fateful decision of my fifteen years. I pursued the only option left for a minor who had saved every dollar he ever earned: I ran away from home.

Well, I ran away… for the day.

During the summer of 1977—the Summer of Sam—I left my house without telling my parents and hopped a bus to New York. I found a photographer to take my headshots and signed up for a “turn class,” which literally taught you how to turn like a dancer—or “spot,” in the parlance of choreographers.

Let me tell you something: nonstop spinning is a terrible thing to practice when your only ride home is the Suburban Transit bus on the potholed Jersey Turnpike. (Luckily, my school Spanish teacher, Ms. Mark, happened to be on the bus, too, and she took care of me and my spinning-induced nausea.)

When I returned home that evening, I found my parents worried and pissed off. But they were also resigned. They now knew that I was serious about this “performing thing,” that it wasn’t just a passing phase. And it wasn’t long after that I asked my mom to sign papers from a new talent manager who wanted to represent me.

I remember it clearly: it was 6:30 a.m., before school, when I walked into my parents’ bedroom, after weeks and weeks and weeks of nagging my mother to sign the contract. She lifted herself from the bed, grabbed the papers out of my hand, and signed them without looking. The signature was almost illegible; it went up the side of the page. But it was enough.

That’s how I became a professional actor: with the signature of my half-asleep mother who’d made me earn it. And in retrospect, I’m grateful to her for that.

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By the time I’d reached my late teens, I was acting like I was breathing. I just did it. All the time.

My manager was a tough old broad named Barbara Jarrett. She represented young actors like Brooke Shields, Lori Loughlin, and Elisabeth Shue, and with her representation, I landed all sorts of commercials.

There was Stridex, the pimple medication, which thankfully was a radio spot. (“Oh, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” “I’m here… but I’m with pimples!”)

There was McDonald’s. (To my buddy, regarding the pretty cashier who’d given me extra fries: “I think she likes me!”)

Then, there was Sure deodorant, and on and on.

My parents had changed their tune, too. Their reluctance to let me follow my passion was long gone, and they were now my staunchest supporters, loving that I balanced being both a student and a working actor. What parent doesn’t want their kid to learn the value of a hard-earned dollar?

When it came time to think about college, I was more interested in going to Broadway. My parents insisted that I continue my education. Fortunately, my high school mentor, Elliott Taubenslag, suggested that I do both by applying to the prestigious Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, which coincidentally was only thirty minutes away from my home in East Brunswick. I figured that at the very least, I could keep my parents happy and skip class whenever I wanted to head into NYC to audition and get to work.

Mason Gross was, and is, one of the finest schools for acting in the country. Prospective students don’t only send in an application, they audition—and I’ll never forget mine. The late William Esper, the legendary acting instructor, watched my performance, and after it was done said, “You know, Kevin, if you come here, you won’t be able to audition in New York.” The curriculum, he said, was so intense that there’d simply be no time to even hop the train from Rutgers to Manhattan. I rolled my eyes—or at least, I thought about rolling my eyes—as I said, “Sure, I understand,” in a way that sounded a lot like, “Oh yeah. Right, buddy.” But it turns out that Bill was right.

Mason Gross was an intense place, full of competition, which only served to heighten my determination to be the best. In my junior year, for example, I lost out on a part in a mainstage production. The play was Crimes of the Heart. I’d lost the lead to a sophomore, and I recall tracking down Kathryn Gately, my acting teacher. Kathryn was a master instructor who was to become one of my lifelong mentors, and I vented to her about not getting the lead, not knowing what she might do next. She marched into the office of the administrative head of the Theater Department and told her, “I don’t think this school wants to make an enemy out of Kevin Goetz!” (This didn’t help me get the part.)

Rutgers also introduced me to like-minded people, like Lorraine Gauli. She had grown up forty-five minutes north of me in a little New Jersey town called Glen Ridge. She was a marvelous actress, and like me, she was already a professional by the time she’d reached college.

Lorraine also had a sharp eye for new talent. At her high school, she saw a production of Guys and Dolls featuring a friend of hers who was also on the wrestling team. Lorraine had been a cheerleader and knew the kid was a quality athlete, but when she saw him on stage, she instantly recognized that he had serious talent and introduced him to her manager, Tobe Gibson.

Later on, the young wrestler-turned-actor would thank Lorraine in her high school yearbook, which she showed me. “Good luck in your career! I know you’ll make it. I hope to be seeing you up there in lights one day. Good luck. Love ya, Tom,” he wrote right above his name, Thomas C. Mapother IV.

A couple of years later, Tommy Mapother would make his way to California and change his last name to Cruise.

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By the time I was twenty-one, I was out of college and living in Manhattan. I had almost a decade of acting under my belt, and while I still loved show business more than life itself, performing does lose some of its shimmer once you’ve faced down one thousand different casting directors and learned that your career really is in their hands. I didn’t like giving up that kind of control. Plus, coming home to a roach-infested West End loft was not the kind of life I’d aspired to.

I had first moved in after college with an actor, PJ Wilson, a supercool guy who had recently landed a part in the Broadway musical Oh! Calcutta! which was performed completely in the nude. Thankfully, PJ was kind enough to don a robe while rehearsing in our tiny studio apartment, but the robe still left little to the imagination (his balls were basically swaying in my face). Between that and the endless roaches, it was enough to make me find a new place to live.

This is how I landed my apartment on the Upper East Side.

More important, it’s how I found the video store.

I had queued up a steady stream of auditions during most of my weekday hours and was acting regularly, but I still needed a part-time job to make rent. One night, I saw that Video Hut near my apartment was looking for a weekend manager. It wasn’t exactly my dream job, but it was convenient, and at least I’d be surrounded by movies while I worked there. I walked into the store that night and walked out with the job.

Most of my time was spent restocking shelves and rewinding copies of Trading Places and Gremlins. Not exactly intellectual work. But after about a week, I had a revelation: I decided that if I was going to work at that video store, I was going to be the greatest goddamn video store employee the world had ever seen. In fact, I wasn’t just going to work there. I was going to try to buy the store.

My logic was sound. Customers liked me. I always had a good movie recommendation, and I thought I could juice business more than the current owner, who was largely absent. He showed up just long enough to pay me and make sure no one had stolen from the register. Plus, I always had an entrepreneurial streak. In high school, I became the youngest member of the East Brunswick Chamber of Commerce when I opened my own after-school dance studio, Jazz Arts Studio, which was first located in a preschool and then in the local Unitarian Church. At one point, we had dozens of students. I taught classes, hired instructors, made payroll, had insurance, everything.

I used those skills to write a business plan for the video store. I surveyed customers to learn how I could improve the service. I had grand designs about what a movie rental place could be, and I thought that when I told the owner of my plans, he would be so impressed that he’d accept my offer on the spot.

Here’s what happened instead: He fired me. He snickered at me and kicked me out the door.

It turns out I had become an expert on the business, and my offer was so well thought-out that he didn’t want me around anymore. I went from being just another employee to being a threat.

But I came away with a lesson, one far more valuable than the ownership stake in a mom-and-pop video store, which went out of business just a few years later. (Thanks, Blockbuster!)

I loved the thrill of be...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Finding My “And”
• Chapter 2: Locked Doors, Severed Heads, and the Early History of Test Screenings
• Chapter 3: The Lights in Minneapolis
• Chapter 4: The Girl in the Black Cocktail Dress
• Chapter 5: Know Thy Audience
• Chapter 6: From Straight-to-DVD to Five F*cking Sequels
• Chapter 7: Scores Settle Scores
• Chapter 8: When Bad Things Happen to Good Movies
• Chapter 9: It’s Like Seeing Your Lover Naked for the First Time
• Chapter 10: Spock, Laddie, and Lessons in Managing Highly Emotional Individuals
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Film Index
• Name Index
• Copyright