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"The Artist"

A

Aspiring Mogul

I have been reading "Filmmakers and Financing" by Louise Levison, who I know personally, and who helped produce "The Blair Witch Project". Every time I read it, I uncover a gem. This time, I found out a silent film recently made money - she didn't say what that movie was, but, after some digging, I found out "The Artist" was a silent film released in 2011 which cost $15 million and grossed over $133 million.

As she asked, who would have thought a silent film can still make money??? Truly, no one knows anything.
 
The thing about the The Artist is that it's a silent film about the silent film era. If you make a silent film that has nothing to do with the era, audiences might not be so interested. I know a guy who wants to make a silent indie film set in modern times, with no silent films themes to it, and shot in a modern way, with colors and all. Don't know know if it's a good idea though.
 
Aspiring Mogul said:
I have been reading "Filmmakers and Financing" by Louise Levison, who I know personally, and who helped produce "The Blair Witch Project". Every time I read it, I uncover a gem. This time, I found out a silent film recently made money - she didn't say what that movie was, but, after some digging, I found out "The Artist" was a silent film released in 2011 which cost $15 million and grossed over $133 million.

As she asked, who would have thought a silent film can still make money??? Truly, no one knows anything.
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You just heard of the movie ? After 5 Oscars, including Best Movie, Best Actor and Best Director ?

Watch it and you'll know why it did good. It's not exactly a silent movie. That's Hazanavicius touch, he mixes old and modern in such a way (the OSS movies are so fucking cult in France, and rightly so).

PS : My nickname has nothing to do with the movie ! I picked it up before !
 
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Aspiring Mogul said:
Truly, no one knows anything.
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Especially apparently Louise Levison!! The Artist is NOT a silent film, far from it. At a guess, the lowest price the producers paid for the sound (music mainly) on The Artist was $300k, although double or triple that figure is much more likely IMO.

I'm also not sure where you got your figure of $133m gross, IMDb lists the gross as $44.7m. Not that IMDb is accurate in these matters but nearly $90m is a pretty serious discrepancy. The other main point to consider is how much this movie is likely to have grossed had it not won a fistful of Oscars? I would wager that without the Oscar wins it would not have broken even. The story I heard was that The Artist is the lowest grossing "Best Picture" Oscar winner for many years, not to mention that its the first "silent" (so called) film to win the Oscar in over 80 years!

From the little I know, the lesson from The Artist (if there is one) is: If you're not going to have conventional dialogue or sound design you'll need to compensate with an Oscar winning music score and make it work to create such a superlatively good film overall that it sweeps a bunch of Oscars. The Artist is not a useful precedent or good role model IMHO, especially for the lo/no budget film maker.

G
 
AudioPostExpert said:
Especially apparently Louise Levison!! The Artist is NOT a silent film, far from it. At a guess, the lowest price the producers paid for the sound (music mainly) on The Artist was $300k, although double or triple that figure is much more likely IMO.

I'm also not sure where you got your figure of $133m gross, IMDb lists the gross as $44.7m. Not that IMDb is accurate in these matters but nearly $90m is a pretty serious discrepancy. The other main point to consider is how much this movie is likely to have grossed had it not won a fistful of Oscars? I would wager that without the Oscar wins it would not have broken even. The story I heard was that The Artist is the lowest grossing "Best Picture" Oscar winner for many years, not to mention that its the first "silent" (so called) film to win the Oscar in over 80 years!

From the little I know, the lesson from The Artist (if there is one) is: If you're not going to have conventional dialogue or sound design you'll need to compensate with an Oscar winning music score and make it work to create such a superlatively good film overall that it sweeps a bunch of Oscars. The Artist is not a useful precedent or good role model IMHO, especially for the lo/no budget film maker.

G
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All true. The Oscars was part of the marketing of the movie. The whole movie is made by French people and should have fallen under the "Best Foreign Movie". But they made it an American movie (forget the details) to widen the audience.
 
AudioPostExpert said:
The Artist is NOT a silent film, far from it.
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Nit-picking.

A "silent film" is generally understood as a film with no spoken dialogue.
Films made from the late 1800's through around 1929 have been called
"silent films" even though they all had music and many had sound effects.
Okay, okay, you are technically correct because one definition of silent
film in a film without synchronized recorded sound and "The Artist" had
that, but you are deliberately missing Mogul's point. In 2010 no one in
the business would have thought that a black and white film with no
recorded dialogue using intertitles (a silent film) would make money.
 
directorik said:
In 2010 no one in the business would have thought that a black and white film with no
recorded dialogue using intertitles (a silent film) would make money.
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And that is largely my point. Without the music The Artist could not have even been nominated for Best Picture (or obviously best music). Without the publicity of all those Oscar nominations and then the publicity of actually winning them, The Artist would only have achieved a fraction of it's distribution, let alone it's eventual gross! The huge amount of time, effort AND budget which were put into The Artist's synchronised recorded sound were instrumental (excuse the pun) in it's financial success. A point I thought worth mentioning because as you say, there is some confusion over what exactly a "silent film" actually is and, The Artist does not even demonstrate, let alone prove that filmmakers can skimp on sound, even in a "silent" movie!

I think those people in the business you mentioned were broadly correct and are still broadly correct. The Artist (and a handful of other films) that almost anything is possible in the film world under highly exceptional circumstances, in this case, being nominated for and winning a bunch of Oscars. Relying on Oscar nominations/wins to make a profit is risky in the extreme and therefore I don't believe The Artist represents a workable model.

G
 
I think we all agree, just in different ways.

And, yes, this film could be a one-off. But, as William Goldman says, there are always one-offs, to the point that there can be no fixed rule. And if this was NOT a one-off, but part of a larger trend, then, of course, the business becomes predictable, which is isn't.

Reading about the Artist making all this money has got me totally blown away - I truly don't know anything.
 
All right, Greg. I just don’t know how you got from the original
post that Mogul was suggesting that a movie with no soundtrack
at all made money. By general understanding a “silent film” was
never a movie with no soundtrack. “The Artist” is called a silent
film.

Seems like you are nitpicking to me.

AudioPostExpert said:
Relying on Oscar nominations/wins to make a profit is risky in the extreme and therefore I don't believe The Artist represents a workable model.
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And not Moguls point. No one believed a black and white "silent film"
would make money or win Oscars in the 21st Century. The original
post was not about a workable model for future, independent films
- it was about the business in general. No one knows what is a
"workable model" for success. And "The Artist" demonstrates that.
Who would have thought a silent film would make money?

Sometimes filmmakers who think in the extreme succeed. Perhaps that
turns you off - it excites me. I think that was Moguls point.
 
directorik said:
By general understanding a “silent film” was never a movie with no soundtrack. “The Artist” is called a silent film... Seems like you are nitpicking to me.
Click to expand...

Whatever you believe the general understanding to be, a silent film (a film made in the silent era) by definition has no soundtrack/s. The soundtrack was first employed in a feature in the 1926 film "Don Juan" and was invented to distribute synchronised music and a few sound effects and signalled the beginning of the end of the silent film era. In 1927 "The Jazz Singer" had a soundtrack which included not only far more sound effects but for the first time dialogue. These "Talkies" were the final nail in the coffin of the silent era. As I'm sure you know, before the soundtrack was invented, music and occasionally some sound effects were often performed live by musicians but before films with soundtracks and the talkies, the filmmaking process and the films themselves were silent (completely without sound).

With a highly sophisticated sound mix, The Artist is as far from a silent film as it's possible to get, while not being a "Talkie". Sorry if this seems like nitpicking. Koyaanisqatsi is also a silent film which has made millions, if by silent film we mean not a talkie, and to an extent Mr. Bean also falls into this category and has taken many millions.

directorik said:
No one knows what is a "workable model" for success... And "The Artist" demonstrates that. Sometimes filmmakers who think in the extreme succeed. Perhaps that turns you off - it excites me. I think that was Moguls point.
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I think lots of people know what a "workable model for success" is. That is why the big studios still exist and why they keep churning out the massive budget sequels. While I am excited by and indeed have been personally involved with filmmakers who think in the extreme, the sad fact is that they succeed extremely rarely. And, almost without exception those who do succeed do so by making sure that the production values in many/most/all areas of their film are superlatively high. For me, The Artist just confirms this observation.

G
 
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