When I walked out of Transformers 2 the other day, I had an epiphany. Or more precisely, I had an extension to another epiphany that I had had a few days before.

My revelation was about art, how to be an artist in the Bahamas and most importantly, how to make a living while doing it. Yes, it’s that big a deal.

I’m working out the ideas a little here first and then I will probably put a full, fleshed out essay on Mental Slavery when I’m done. Hopefully, you the audience, will correct me when I go wrong and extend and help transform these ideas in the process and in the end we may all end up somewhere that we didn’t expect. If you consider yourself to be any kind of Bahamian artist, I am talking directly to you; so please, everyone, comment away!

Revenge of the Formulas…

Ok. Let’s start with Transformers. It was bad. Gloriously bad. But having been suckered in by the first film hoping for something grand, I already knew I was going to see action trash.

The amount of money that this thing has grossed in spite of its God-awfulness is nothing short of amazing. As I write this it’s approaching 400 million dollars worth of box office. This qualifies it for top ten all-time honors. And that is only the North American box office, it has made close to a Billion dollars in total world-wide grosses. That, my friends, is a lot of money.¹

How can a mediocre movie gross so much money? This is the typical question in response to a report of such astronomical amounts of money. But I think the question misses the point. I believe the more interesting question really is this: How much more would it have made were it a good movie?

Such hypotheticals are difficult to answer. But let’s say that it might have made a little bit more. But how much more? Another 100 million in worldwide gross? This is unlikely considering how much this version has already made. So, lets just say that a Transformers 2 with pathos would gross another 50 million dollars. Not bad you say.

Now, the first thing to consider is that a better film would probably have taken longer to make. Give the writers maybe another year to pass around scripts and rewrites until Michael Bay was satisfied that he had a coherent and water tight plot with character development and all that good stuff.²

Now I’m not sure how much extra money this longer development process would cost the studio, what with a reported production cost north of $200 million dollars, it’s difficult to imagine them spending more. But I would imagine that if everyone decided they were making art and not just a movie, the attention to detail might increase the production cost a bit. Maybe another 10 – 25 million?

So, I’m basically arguing that as far as a Hollywood studio is concerned the extra time and money needed to make a good movie great, in most cases, is not worth the trouble.

Transformers 2 was good enough. They had a surefire formula. They were making a sequel to an enormously popular film, that built on the fan base of an enormously popular toy line from the 80s. They had a popular director helming a special effects extravaganza with *the* Steven Spielberg attached to the project as executive producer. Added to that they had arguably the two hottest young actors in Hollywood starring in it. In other words it was a blockbuster before the first letter of the screenplay was typed in a word processor.

We tend to forget that the Hollywood movie system is more like a factory than anything else. They produce a product, namely movies partly because they have an extensive and expensive distribution system to maintain. The major studios have to keep movies showing on the screens of your local cinema or the whole system will stop working. In other words, new movies that people want to see have to be released every week of every year or the system will collapse.

With a film like Transformers 2, where the release date is known months, even years in advance, they can’t waste time making art, they have an ironclad deadline to meet. Once the script is good enough, they go into pre-production, then onto principal photography and so on and on until the thing comes out on DVD… The system exists to feed itself and also to make obscene amounts of money for the people in charge of it.

But! It is these very same god-awful, yet popular films that give Hollywood studios the financial flexibility to produce great movies. If they only produced works of art, the types of films that usually don’t make much money, they would soon be out of business. So the next time you watch a great movie, like oh, lets say American Beauty, remember the bad and mediocre money-makers that made it possible.

Unfortunately you can’t have one without the other.

Bringing it back Home…

Now in the Bahamas we have no indigenous system comparable to Hollywood. There are movies and cinemas, but these exist as simple extensions of the Hollywood machine.

The closest we have come was probably during a period between the mid 90s and into the late 00s, when a string of Michael Pintard productions ruled the local theatre box office.

Interestingly enough, Pintard started out with poetry; which is about as far from a commercially viable literary product as you can get in the Bahamas. He worked that poetry in the schools, reading it to kids at assemblies, and at other events, slowly building a brand name. Then he took that poetry and fashioned a semi autobiographical one-man play out of it that ran in 1994.

Pintard followed this hit with another play / sketch comedy called “Men Talk” – a production that promised to take audiences behind the scenes to find out what men really talked about when no women were around.

Then came the sequel to “Men Talk”, the almost too obvious, “Women Talk” which promised the same thing but in reverse.

In 2002 he produced “Election 2002″ a satire / sketch comedy on the recent defeat at the polls of the FNM party that had governed the Bahamas for 10 years. The play was a Bahamian mega-hit. I have heard Pintard say that that play grossed him over a quarter of a million dollars.³

Then Pintard went back to his repertoire and re-produced “Men Talk” and “Women Talk”. Now I was around in Nassau for these productions and were it not for the recent corrections of Nicolette Bethel, I would have said that the productions I saw in the 00s were the first time these plays were run.

I saw Election 2002, Men Talk and Women Talk and I was there for the ‘show’ that accompanied the release of his book ‘Politricks’, so I can attest that these performances were successful, with sold out shows even when performed in a 500 seat auditorium like the Rain Forest Theatre out on Cable Beach.⁴

Pintard continued, and two years ago he co-wrote and produced the sequel to his über-successful Election play called, surprise, surprise, Election 2007: Count it again man, Count it again.

So, with a catalogue of only five plays, Pintard created over a decade of prosperity. He ran his plays methodically, allowing each to feed off of the momentum of the last and then re-staged the old material, and in the process created a minor Bahamian miracle.

I say ‘miracle’ because Pintard created a profitable art-based industry in the Bahamas where none previously existed and where it is believed that none can exist. And he did it with little to no attention paid to the tourist market. Make no mistake, this is the Bahamian burning bush. I call this miracle, “the Pintard system” and I think that it has valuable insights for anyone interested in making a living off of art in the Bahamas.

Are you listening yet?

*****

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT —>The point® is this:

• We often complain about the silly, formulaic crap that comes out of Hollywood, but the reality is that these popular clunkers pay the bills and end up financing the great movies.
• Hollywood is an elaborate art-based factory.
• This is the first in a series of posts where I will argue that this factory concept can help you make it as an artist in the Bahamas.

Stay tuned for part 2 coming your way next Wednesday.

 

1. Of course we have to forget that ticket prices have risen so dramatically over the last few years that its actual admissions, i.e. the amount of people who went to see it, is around that of “Men in Black” from a few years back. But this point is irrelevant. [↩]
2. I am talking, of course, about a parallel universe where he actually cares about such things. [↩]
3. I believe that these are conservative figures, partly because he tends to insert a very specific qualifier into this statement. i.e. “after x amount of shows we had y dollars.” Maybe I’m just a cynic and the whole run did actually gross $250,000, but it doesn’t matter; what we know for sure is more than sufficient for my purposes. [↩]
4. As an aside, I was actually approached for a role in “Men Talk”, but was too stressed out in COB (college) to capitalize on the opportunity… [↩]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Art, Musings, Reviews, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.