It was a conversation on a tennis court.
Not mine. Oh no, not mine. Let’s be clear. I don’t play tennis enough to own a court. Or own any land to speak of that I could place a court on. The court in question belonged to someone else. Someone who may or may not have been involved in the making of The Mighty Ducks. 1
We were planning a reunion with all of us Duckeroos and ‘catching up on life’ — which is code for trying to not freak out and beg powerful friends for favors and act like it’s all normal while having iced teas on a tennis court. That was when my friend turned to me and said, “Matty, they couldn’t even make The Mighty Ducks today.”
And this was before the strike. Before the pandemic. Before the entire industry drank the Silicon Valley magical-thinking-Kloud-based-Kool-aid and imploded while diddling on Netflix’s engorged member.
“It just isn’t in the financials.”
I’ve heard legends like William Goldman (who wrote the gold standard, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid) echo the same sentiment while he was alive. That classic movie would cost a couple hundred million and it would therefore never get made — if it could even get across an assistant’s desk with a RECOMMENDATION. Which is also equally as unlikely.
The late great Martin Landau shared a story with me that an accomplished screenwriting colleague of his was sending around a redacted version of Casablanca with the names and places changed but the script exactly like it was. It was circulated through recommendations and referrals to get into the pipeline at A list agencies.
And the result?
A straight pass across the board (which means it went into the bin). What makes this even harder to swallow, was that no one noticed it was the best script of all time.
Hard to say if that experiment was a success of a failure?
But all of these concepts remained abstract till I heard the same perspective expressed from my friend with the tennis court.
“Wait, you mean, there wouldn’t even be a Mighty Ducks today!? That’s just sad.”
As many of you probably know, mid-level budgeted movies - between 15 and 75 million just don’t exist. Everything costs everything, or nothing at all (sound familiar, huh?).
Yeah, Matt, but what about the independent lane?
Yes. These big conglomerates have departments that purchase up independent darlings making a splash on the festival circuit, but without any fiscal investment. 2This forces the bad ass ninjas of that world to get super creative selling their product, farm-to-table style. True creative warriors.
But there is a whole lane of films - often comedies, family movies, anything character driven, crime stories, that are never even optioned because they are not high concept enough and based on existing Intellectual Property with a proven track record in the market place.
In other words—
There’s Marvel and Oscar bait and nothing in between. But most of America likes that in between. Those are the films they watch again and again. Films like The Mighty Ducks. Which again, wouldn’t be made under today’s studio models.
The middle is vanishing everywhere, I know. We are reaping what has been sowed since like Reagan, everywhere and all at once.
And that’s why we are out there in the streets, every day for well over a hundred days in a row. My shoes are beat up. And they aren’t the only ones.
Outside of our bubble, I don’t think people are really aware of what we are fighting for. We are fighting for a living, and to future proof that living, yes; but mainly we are fighting to make it possible for the kinds of projects I’m talking about here to be seen as viable financial enterprises worth the risk again.
I can only speak for myself, but I am doing my tiny tiny part to uplift a referendum to wake us up from this insanity and help the powers that be see the fiscal wisdom in making things more robust, sustainable, and based on bio diversity.
Yes, I said biodiversity.
Our industry is a mono culture. Like shitty fake corn.
We mass produce shitty fake corn, again and again, without crop rotation, no matter the long term health of our soil. All our celebrities line up to cash in on that shitty fake corn. And meanwhile there are fields that are fallow, soil erosion, and people who eat that shitty fake corn are getting dumb and forget what real good film making is about.
Our economic ecosystem needs to have cover crops, bio diversity, a variety of wild animals grazing and shitting, and - wait for it - ducks walking around. Then, the butterflies will come back, once the ducks and the hogs poop on everything.
There will be a circle and a cycle and it will be sustaining. I see bio-diverse projects that originate from the studios- not just get poached from festivals - that come in under every tier of the budget agreements. Models based on a company investing in ten different 25 million dollar movies - that employ and train leaders who are our next generation of artists - instead of ONE five hundred million dollar movie you hope does not flop. That kind of modality is not only sustainability incarnate, it is DIVERSITY, EQUITY, and INCLUSION by design and definition and in action. It feeds the people who feed the pipeline and feeds the soil that feeds us all.
And all it takes is one of these studios - ONE - to realize the economics and try. Our history has proven that kind of break with the past happens time and time again, since Lasky first came out here and bought up an Orange Grove.
We need One. So who is it going to be?
I suspect it will be MGM. Probably because they are already doing it. Have the least to lose. The least physical foot print. All that James Bond money. And they are rebranding entities like ORION. et al.
But we need one studio to stand with us, wake up, and realize they could revolutionize our whole industry. And stop feeding everyone nothing but shitty fake corn. The agents will get in line. But first they probably need to step out of the way and realize - short gains from corn profits have fucked us, and by fucking us has caused this impasse. It is about the long game with farms based on these principles, that will feed our whole industry, from top to bottom.
If you enjoyed reading, please join me for five bucks a month and help this Creative stay in the hunt, on the line, making shit and keeping his husky fed. Five bucks helps way more than me and the pup.
The OG trilogy, not that disastrous reboot I couldn’t say anything bad about. But since it got scrubbed from a platform, I figured I could say, WTF? I met a dude who works at Dodger stadium who recognized me and we struck up a talk and then he came over in the third inning and was like, “yo, that series, they did you guys dirty.” And I couldn’t have said it better.
Of course they invest much in publicity, depending upon whether they want to pony up for a Oscar hunt or not.