Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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Chapter 13 - The Wastefulness of Hollywood

The production side had its hierarchy. At the top, theoretically, sat the studio chairman. Below him was the president of production. Below her were the senior vice presidents of production, each overseeing a slate of projects. Below them were the vice presidents, the directors of development, the creative executives, the junior executives, the readers, the assistants. Each level performed a function. Each level also performed the secondary function of justifying its own existence to the level above it, which required the generation of opinions, notes, concerns, and questions that demonstrated engagement with the material.

This meant that a script which Eisner had personally approved, which Marvin had written in great detail with a structural precision that a UCLA graduate student could not have bettered — this script, upon entering the studio system, was read by approximately eleven people who had not been involved in its development, all of whom had opinions.

The opinions were not, in every case, useful.

”They want to add a talking animal,” Nancy said on a Wednesday in mid-October, her voice carrying the specific flatness of someone who had decided that genuine expression of her feelings was not appropriate to the setting.

Linda looked up from the counter.

Marvin looked up from his notebook.

Grant, who had come straight from the bank and was still wearing his coat, said, ”I beg your pardon?”

”One of the creative executives — third year, very enthusiastic — left a set of notes suggesting that the narrative could benefit from a comedic animal companion. A dog, possibly. Or a raccoon.” Nancy took a sip of her coffee. ”He cited *The Parent Trap* 1961 version, in which there are also no talking animals, which suggests he may not have read it.”

The kitchen was quiet for a moment.

”What did you say?” Marvin asked.

”I thanked him for his input and told him we’d take it under consideration.” She looked at Marvin. ”Which is what you say when someone in a building you need access to says something you have no intention of doing.”

”And that was sufficient?”

”For now. The notes go up to his VP, who will decide whether to escalate them or let them die. I’ve already had a quiet conversation with the VP. The notes will die.”

Marvin wrote something in his notebook. Nancy watched him do it.

”What are you writing?” she asked.

”Names,” he said. ”And what they want and what they’re afraid of. It’s useful to know both.”

---

Beyond the creative side, there was the physical production apparatus, and this was where the inefficiency became not merely political but material — measurable in time, in money, in the slow accumulation of days that passed without visible progress.

The location scouting process, for instance.

The film required several key locations: a summer camp in northern California, a San Francisco neighborhood that could pass for a slightly heightened version of itself, and several interior sets that would be built on the Disney lot in Burbank. The location department — a small, dedicated team whose job was to find, assess, and secure real-world shooting locations — had been given a brief and a budget in early October.

Nancy had already identified the locations. She had driven them herself, in late September, over two days, with a digital camera and a notebook and the experienced eye of a woman who had spent fifteen years watching movies and knew intuitively what played on screen and what didn’t. She had put together a twelve-page document with photographs, notes on natural light, assessments of logistical access, and preliminary conversations with two of the property owners. The document had been given to the location department on October third.

The location department sent its own scouts anyway.

This was not irrational, from an institutional perspective. Their job was to scout locations. They had a process. The process involved site visits, reports, comparative analysis, and a formal recommendation to the production designer and the director of photography, who would then assess the options and provide their own input before anything was approved. The process existed for good reasons. The process had been developed over decades of collective experience and was designed to catch problems that could derail a production. The process was sound.

The process also cost over forty-seven thousand dollars over three weeks to confirm, with minor variations, what Nancy had already determined in two days and twelve pages even after Marvin proceeded with the exact locations.

Marvin received this information from Nancy in the second week of November, delivered with a calibrated brevity that suggested she had decided exactly how much of her actual reaction to share.

”Forty-seven thousand dollars,” he repeated.

”To look at the same locations I’d already looked at from your suggestions.”

”And the result was—”

”Broadly consistent with my assessment, yes. With a recommendation to consider one alternative option for the camp sequence, which has merit and which I’m evaluating.”

Marvin was quiet for a moment. ”Is this typical?” he asked.

”For a studio of this size? Yes.” Nancy set down her pen. ”Each department has its own budget and its own process and its own professional standards. The location department doesn’t take my word for anything because their job isn’t to take anyone’s word for anything. Their job is to do their own assessment. Which is correct, professionally. It’s just — expensive.”

”And the forty-seven thousand comes out of the production budget.”

”Which is our budget, yes.”

Another quiet moment.

”When I have my own studio,” Marvin said, with the same mild, conversational tone he used to note that it looked like rain, ”the director’s preliminary assessment will be given formal weight before a secondary process is initiated. The process will be triggered by gaps in the preliminary assessment, not run in parallel to it.”

Nancy looked at him for a long moment.

”Make a note of that,” she said. ”Somewhere you’ll find it again.”

”I already did,” Marvin said.

---

The script consultants arrived in the third week of October.

This was perhaps the clearest illustration of the studio’s institutional metabolism — the way a large organization, confronted with something it hadn’t originated, felt compelled to run its own validation process regardless of what had already been validated at the top.

The script had been approved by Michael Eisner. This was a fact. Eisner had read it, found it exceptional, and said so. The paper trail was unambiguous. The approval was documented.

Nevertheless — inevitably, inexorably, in the manner of a process that was going to happen because the process always happened — two consultants from the studio’s story development group were assigned to review and provide notes on the script. These were competent professionals. They had good instincts and genuine experience. Their notes were not without merit but not much useful either.

They were also, in significant part, suggestions to fix problems that did not exist, generated by the professional obligation to generate something to justify their jobs.

The notes arrived in a twelve-page document. Nancy reviewed them overnight and appeared at the Meyers kitchen table the next morning with the document, a coffee, and the expression of someone who had made peace with the situation at approximately three in the morning and was now operating in a state of calm, functional acceptance.

She slid the document across the table to Marvin.

He read it. All twelve pages. Without expression, without comment, with the focused, unhurried attention he brought to anything written. When he finished he aligned the pages carefully and placed them on the table in front of him.

”Six of these are legitimate,” he said.

Nancy nodded.

”Three are stylistic preferences that reflect the consultant’s taste rather than structural issues.”

”Agreed.”

”Two are suggestions to add material that would expand the running time beyond what the story requires.”

”Yes.”

”And one—” Marvin paused, looking at page eight, ”—is a suggestion to add a scene between the two leads that already exists. On page forty-three.”

Nancy allowed herself a small, tired smile. ”He may not have read to page forty-three.”

Marvin placed the document to one side. ”The six legitimate notes — I’ll address them. The others I’ll incorporate into my response in a way that acknowledges the concern without adopting the solution.” He looked at Nancy. ”Is that the right approach?”

”That’s exactly the right approach,” she said. ”You take something from every set of notes, even if what you take is minimal. It makes the person feel heard and it closes the loop without inviting a second round.”

Marvin nodded. He picked up his pen. ”I’ll have the revision done by Thursday.”

Nancy looked at him across the kitchen table — the boy in the school clothes with the fountain pen and the precise, level attention — and felt, not for the first time, the particular vertiginous sensation of being in the presence of something she didn’t have adequate language for.

”Thursday is fine,” she said.

---

If the script process illustrated the studio’s cultural inefficiency, the budget process illustrated its structural one — and structural inefficiency, Marvin was learning, was the more expensive of the two.

The production budget had been established in the contract. A number had been agreed. That number was not small. It was, by the standards of a mid-range Disney live-action family film in 1996, appropriate and sufficient. Nancy had reviewed it. Holt had reviewed it. Grant had reviewed it. Everyone had agreed it was adequate.

The budget, once inside the studio system, became something different from a number. It became a territory.

Every department that touched the production had a budget line. Every budget line was owned by a department head. Every department head had a professional interest in the size of their line — not necessarily to expand it, but to protect it, to control it, to ensure that their portion of the resource was not eroded by another department’s overrun, which happened as a matter of course and which everyone knew would happen and which was, as a result, preemptively anticipated and pre-compensated for by everyone simultaneously, in a self-fulfilling cycle of defensive over-allocation that was one of the great invisible engines of Hollywood excess.

The art department wanted more. The costume department wanted more. The camera department had submitted an equipment request that included three Panavision Platinum cameras, two Panavision Gold cameras, a full complement of Cooke S4 prime lenses, a Technocrane, a Louma crane, a camera car with remote head, and a Russian arm mount that Nancy had looked at for a long time before asking, very carefully, what sequence required a Russian arm.

It required, it turned out, no specific sequence. It was on the list because it was frequently useful, and because not having it available when it became useful would cost more than having it available when it wasn’t needed. This was logical. It was also the logic of an industry where equipment requests were not submitted in response to specific needs but in anticipation of possible needs, which meant that the equipment budget for a film bore only a loose relationship to the equipment the film actually required.

Grant Meyers, reviewing the line items that Nancy shared with him in the second week of November, spent a long time looking at a single page.

”This is the lighting budget,” he said.

”Yes,” Nancy said.

”For a family film.”

”For a family film being shot on location and on stage, with a director of photography who has strong opinions about natural light augmentation.”

”The lighting budget,” Grant said, ”is larger than the annual operating budget of the smaller of the two branches I oversee.”

”Hollywood accounting is its own discipline,” Nancy said, with a dry equanimity that suggested she had made her own peace with this information some time ago.

”I can see that.” Grant set down the page. ”Is there any of this we can push back on?”

”Some. The department heads have submitted wish lists. The co-line producer will negotiate them down. That’s the process — everyone asks for more than they need, and then there’s a negotiation, and what you get after the negotiation is approximately what a reasonable person would have budgeted in the first place.” She paused. ”The inefficiency is baked in. It’s not dishonesty, precisely. It’s just — how the numbers move.”

”We’re paying for the negotiation as well as the outcome,” Grant said.

”Yes.”

He looked at the page again for a moment. ”My father would have had something to say about this.”

”I imagine he would.”

*****

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