That's the title of the NY Times article, anyway.
Here is the rest of the opinion-piece, with original link here.
Here is the rest of the opinion-piece, with original link here.
Buyers of B-Films Demand A-Minus
By ROSS JOHNSON
SANTA MONICA, Calif., Nov. 3 - Thirty years ago, when he was running a drive-in theater in his native Tel Aviv, Avi Lerner, a film financier, learned a time-honored rule of show business: Find out what the customers want, then give it to them.
This week, as he and 300 of his competitors in the independent film business hunkered down in suites at the Loews hotel here for the opening of the 25th annual American Film Market, Mr. Lerner, who is now co-chairman of Nu Image, a Los Angeles film sales company, is still listening to his customers.
"The days of buyers wanting to pay by the pound for movies with actors rented by the day are over," Mr. Lerner said of attendees looking for foreign theatrical, television, DVD and other rights to feature films largely made by independents like himself. "Nowadays, if the film doesn't look like it's getting a studio release in America, you are in huge trouble."
Whereas the Loews hallways were once festooned with posters advertising the collected works of B-movie stalwarts like Michael Dudikoff, Lorenzo Lamas, Richard Grieco and Shannon Tweed, small foreign independent distributors at this year's market are more likely to be buying studio-backed films featuring the likes of Bill Murray, Ethan Hawke, Cameron Diaz, Ralph Fiennes and John Cusack.
Mr. Lerner, for his part, is selling the forthcoming "Edison," which, since it stars Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey, seems a good prospect to find a studio that will put it in American theaters, thus bolstering its foreign sales potential. That's clearly a step up for a player whose company once relied on straight-to-video fare like "Lunarcop," a science fiction thriller that featured Billy Drago and Michael Paré.
A number of sellers at this year's busy American Film Market said that the upscale push has been driven mainly by the DVD revolution. As disc sales have been replacing video rentals, globe-spanning media conglomerates have begun using "specialty" film wings like Disney's Miramax, Sony's Screen Gems, News Corporation's Fox Searchlight and Warner Independent Pictures to fill the demand of foreign markets with their own products, leaving less room both for independent sellers and for the small local distributors who traditionally come to this annual event.
The DVD boom has also operated to the disadvantage of second- and third-tier actors like Mr. Lamas, the former Harley-driving star of the syndicated television show "Renegade." The appearance of studio-made indie films also explains why there is no current replacement for Ms. Tweed, who, at 47, is now spending time with her two children instead of making erotic thrillers.
"Studios and their indie divisions and their DVD's killed the video star," said Pascal Borno, president of Conquistador Entertainment, an independent foreign-sales company.
Low-budget action pictures that were bought at film markets for television outlets and video stores around the world were once Mr. Borno's bread and butter; but this week he is pushing "Illusion," a film starring Kirk Douglas. Mr. Borno described it as " 'Cinema Paradiso' meets 'It's a Wonderful Life.' "
At this year's market, the luxurious eighth-floor corner suite with the best Pacific Ocean view was rented for the week not by an independent sales agent, but by Focus Features, a unit of NBC Universal.
Focus, which is only two years old and scored a hit last year with Sofia Coppola's Oscar-winning "Lost in Translation," came to the market with 21 new titles starring casts that make up a Murderers' Row of currently hot actors: Mr. Murray, Meryl Streep, Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell, Mr. Fiennes, Mr. Cusack, Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Dennis Quaid and Ms. Diaz.
On the lower end, Focus also has its own genre division, Rogue Pictures, which, in a sign of the times, has stars as substantial as Mr. Hawke and Laurence Fishburne in a forthcoming remake of "Assault on Precinct 13."
An action film set in a besieged police station, "Assault" was originally made on a minuscule budget by John Carpenter in 1976, back when he was a fledgling director. Mr. Borno sees the casting of Mr. Hawke in the new version as dirty pool in the once-low-cost action arena. "In the old days, they put an action guy in an action film," Mr. Borno said. "Nowadays, why should anyone pay to see Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal try to pretend he's an actor when they can see a real actor like Ethan Hawke?"
Mr. Lerner said that independents who don't snag hot stars or coveted studio theatrical distribution for their pictures can survive by making their cheap films even cheaper: he's now shooting $700,000 horror movies in Bulgaria and doing the post-production optical effects there also - or by making their more expensive films look like studio films, while cutting production costs to the bone.
Under the second model, Mr. Lerner and others devote the bulk of their budgets to pay stars who are well known but somewhat out of favor - people like Wesley Snipes and Mr. Seagal - as much as $6 million for pictures on which the total cost is kept to perhaps $8 million; a director may be paid as little as $125,000.
"That's a very dangerous game," Mr. Borno said, referring to the way that a star like Mr. Snipes can wind up appearing simultaneously in an inexpensively produced film market property like his forthcoming "7 Seconds" against a far bigger production like his "Blade: Trinity," from Time Warner's New Line Cinema. "Fans see him in big action movies with a lot of support, then they see him in these independent action films, and it's like, 'What happened?' "
Richard Gabai, an actor-director-producer, whose credits include two "Assault of the Party Nerds'' movies, said that low-rent producers and stars aren't about to disappear, despite the push toward richer fare.
"If you go to any film market in the world, you will find buyers who need product but who can't afford studio prices," Mr. Gabai said.
But Mr. Gabai, who has also done his time on pictures like "Virgin High," is enjoying a Tiffany moment: He recently completed "Popstar," a film starring the teenage singer Aaron Carter, who also appears in 20th Century Fox's forthcoming "Fat Albert."
"Popstar," whose budget was pegged by Mr. Gabai as "under $2 million," didn't have an American theatrical distributor as of the opening of the film market. But Mr. Carter's presence in the film gives it a quasi-studio aura, which can add to its potential value abroad.
"It's 'Pretty Woman' meets 'Notting Hill' for teens," Mr. Gabai said.
