An HBO series reveals the face behind the industry mask.
I also think that by its very nature, Greenlight devalues filmmaking itself, treating it, in a roundabout, subtle way, as an afterthought to hype?as the end product of what amounts to a multiweek infomercial. The poster for the first Greenlight movie, the coming-of-age drama Stolen Summer, said it all: Project Greenlight was plastered across in enormous, "Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor" font, followed, in tiny script, by the words, "Stolen Summer."
At Sundance, the movie got a, "Well, it's not quite as bad as I'd heard" reaction, then bombed in theaters. Its likeable first-time writer-director, Pete Jones, took the whole thing in stride and is working on another movie. But I still feel sorry for him; it will take years, and several movies, for him to crawl out from under the Project Greenlight label and be judged apart from it, and even if he'd made a damn-near perfect debut film, the TV series' shadow still would have obscured any of the movie's artistic accomplishments.
You think that's bad? Consider this: Despite having the picture's production chronicled at great length, often in unflattering detail, the end product occupied more or less the same cultural place as one of those awesomely stupid big-budget blockbusters that are foisted on the public one after the other each time the weather gets warm?six to 10 weeks of relentless hype, followed by a movie that basically amounts to two hours of air conditioning. The failure of Stolen Summer was compounded by the series itself, which made every day of production look like an epic convergence of incompetence, dishonesty and bad luck. Infomercials for Hollywood blockbusters are criticized by people like me for foisting off circle-jerk praise as documentary insight, but I can understand why the studios do it. If you've ever been involved with a creative endeavor of any kind, you know that at certain points, they all seem doomed. It doesn't make any logical sense to show the public how sausage is made, then offer them sausage. (It would make better creative sense to release the movie on the same weekend that HBO debuts the first episode of a new Greenlight series?but because the series is more about commerce than art, that'll never happen.)
The new Greenlight is another sausage factory. In an attempt to spice things up?or, in the words of hack screenwriters everywhere, "raise the stakes"?Miramax and HBO picked a writer, Erica Beeney, and a team of directors, Efram Potelle and Kyle Rankin, presumably hoping that their inevitable arguments would make for great TV. They have. Beeney embodies the classic stereotype of the sensitive writer chewed up in the gears of Hollywood. Despite being promised input on the production, she's becoming more marginalized by the week, and has repeatedly endured the same familiar indignity: being informed after the fact that the directors rewrote her dialogue, probably for the worse. Potelle and Rankin, whose winning reel of David Letterman-esque gag movies looked to me like the weakest of all the directing finalists, are portrayed as insular, shortsighted, impulsive home-movie-makers who obsess over perks, make last-minute changes in the shooting schedule that throw the project into overtime, and wait to defend their vision until it's too late to do anything but harm the project further. They seem like the most unsubtle filmmakers alive. In the script, the teenage hero, Kelly, drives a Jeep called "Hot Lips," so they ordered the vehicle fitted with a vanity plate that says "Hot Lips." A seemingly pivotal, very emotional moment between the hero, his mother and his drug-addict dad (Shia Labeouf, Kathleen Quinlan and William Sadler), mutated from honest emotion to melodrama when the directors spontaneously decided to have the dad join the boy and his mother in a group hug. With days until production and no cast on board, Miramax offered a key part to a capable actor they didn't personally like, and the directors threatened to walk; they were like a couple of desert wanderers dying of thirst in the Sahara who were offered a Sprite but insisted on holding out for a Coke. "Every movie I've ever made," said producer Chris Moore, "there were actors in it who weren't the director's first choice"?a statement that clarifies what Greenlight is really about. It was sold as a dream come true for unknown filmmakers, a storytelling-for-fun-and-profit vehicle that would give new voices a chance to tell a story their way, with help from a studio; but both Greenlight series are more like so-called "reality" shows?crackpot social anthropology experiments in which unsuspecting citizens are thrown into a desperate situation whose rules they don't understand.
I'm told the infamous group hug has since been cut from the movie, but when people watch Shaker Heights in the theater, they'll be thinking about it, and it will take them out of the drama. The whole experience will be like that; most viewers who go to Shaker Heights will go because they watched Project Greenlight, and they'll spend the whole running time thinking about how the sausage was made. They'll think about producer Chris Moore parachuting onto the set to remind everyone of how badly they're screwing up instead of taking corrective action ahead of time; they'll think about the time that Potelle sabotaged his chances of hiring a top cinematographer by criticizing his tone during an interview; they'll think about how a couple of top-shelf character actors, Jane Kaczmarek and Gary Cole, passed on offers to appear in Shaker Heights, and wonder if they did it because they sensed the project was troubled, or because they really didn't feel like appearing on the filmmaking equivalent of Big Brother. (Like all reality series, Greenlight avoids acknowledging how human behavior is altered by the presence of cameras; I wonder how many actors and crewmembers have turned down gigs on Greenlight films because they didn't want to be embarrassed on national tv.)
Worst of all, Greenlight furthers the misconception that Hollywood is a big casino where some talented people hit the jackpot for reasons that have more to do with luck than skill or persistence. The show's creators further this impression with a national talent search that invites viewer input (talk about filmmaking by committee) and a climactic awards show in which the winners are announced before an adoring crowd and the losers are photographed trying very hard not to look crushed. And no matter how badly the system is rigged against these filmmakers?I confess a part of me roots for Potelle and Rankin as they passive-aggressively manipulate their rich and powerful bosses?the editors will always make them look like lucky greenhorns who were handed a great gift and, in their clueless ambition, nearly squandered it. In a roundabout way, Greenlight suggests a sadistic fantasy dreamed up by movie stars, producers and studio bosses who were tired of hearing the system criticized by the unknown, unwashed masses, and wanted to show everybody that Hollywood is so fucked-up it's a miracle anything gets made at all.