Easy Money

Hollywood sticks to the formula...and rakes it in

By D.K. Holm

For the first time since probably the end of the classic studio era, it’s now easy to plot out just how to make money-making movies. Just put together a sappy comedy with a big star. Or mount a prestige thriller with some big stars in it. Or offer up a horror film with some franchise ancestry behind it.
 
For example, Saw IV, the latest gruesome example of so-called torture porn, was the number one movie over the last weekend of October, extorting $33 million dollars from the public. The previous week, the cleverly-premised vampire movie 30 Days of Night took a $15-million-dollar bite out of the audience. The week before that Tyler Perry’s latest feel-good comedy, Why Did I Get Married?, made $22 million. And the first weekend in October The Rock surprised pundits by making a hit out of The Game Plan, an unoriginal feel-good tale of a mismatched father and daughter.
 
If this doesn’t provide a clue as to what the American public typically wants to spend its movie money on come Friday night, nothing will. And the trend will continue. The first weekend in November offers up the new Ridley Scott crime thriller, American Gangster, though all the audience will care about is that Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington are in it. The film will have a huge opening. Though whether word of mouth will sustain it the way word of mouth hopped up The Departed remains to be seen.
 
The mass audience likes formulas, which they get on the small screen, and have been acclimated to also seek out on the big screen. But what movies always offer that TV can’t seem to are mega-stars, exotic and captivating people such as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, and in the modern era Julia Roberts and Will Smith. They like movies that have Oscar winners in them, but those movies cost money, and actors with the statuettes (such as Crowe and Washington) are in the enviable position of being able to associate themselves with the best movies on offer.
 
American Gangster had a long, difficult gestation period that need not be recounted here, as it is easy to research on the net, and which in any case is irrelevant to its value as entertainment or art, but it is pertinent that the movie would have been different without the participation of Crowe and Washington, or of Scott (whose third film with Crowe this is; Washington usually makes movies with his brother Tony).
 
So on a purely surface level, American Gangster is realistic, gritty, gripping, and intricate. If the discerning viewer remains unsatisfied, however, that issue falls in the lap of director Scott. Here, the director is in Sidney Lumet territory, and his film can only seem to be a pale reflection of Lumet’s Serpico and Prince of the City. William Friedkin’s The French Connection is cited explicitly, and mimicked a couple of times, but Scott just doesn’t make that kind of movie. While Friedkin will get in your face with vigorous clashes of ages, races, and social classes, Scott prefers a more languorous approach, looking for opportunities for beautiful imagery. The film Scott should have mimicked is Mario Van Peebles’s 1991 New Jack City, which tells much the same story but focuses on the new cocaine era, not the old heroin phase of New York life.
 
American Gangster charts the rise and fall of real-life hood Frank Lucas (Washington), a ruthless crook who came up with an innovative way to import heroin into the United States in the late 1960s,  and who essentially made even more money by cutting out the middleman. In pursuit of him is Richie Roberts (Crowe), offered up as the last honest cop. Lucas eschewed the ostentation of NY “pimp” culture of the early 1970s, and though he was making millions a week, he managed to fly well under the radar of the authorities. He only came to light after Roberts was promoted to leader of an anti-drug task force out of his home base of New Jersey. During a routine reconnaissance trip to a boxing match, Roberts catches his first sight of Lucas, receiving deferential treatment from the likes of boxer Joe Lewis and top Mafia leaders.
 
But that is the closest that Roberts gets to Lucas (and Crowe gets to Washington) for most of the film’s two-and-a-half-hour running time. The two Oscar winners only really have about two scenes together, at the end of the film, when they finally meet up in person and Roberts attempts to turn Lucas into an asset in the war on drugs. In addition, certain plot points concerning Roberts’s relationship with his fellow cops are not clearly stated, and the whole film has the feel of a special needs younger brother to the much more articulate Serpico, Scarface, and other great similar crime films.
 
None of this will matter to the first weekend audiences, however. They will have their Denzel and their Russell and their vicarious pleasure in Lucas’s high life, however brief. The current laws of theatrical success for movies dictate that the big stars and the simple, familiar tales will be more than enough to rob the public of its opening weekend budget.