ORIGINAL: obvert
Great film! Even a better book.
I've been asking a colleague with more knowledge of the film industry where to find breakdowns of film budgets. Seems tough to find CGI numbers, but since I'm doing a stop-motion unit with students I thought it would be interesting to bring it to the contemporary and get into what happens now with CGI.
Did you find a good resource for the breakdown of film budgets into categories?
As to the above, and whether Band of Brothers is Hollywood, it certainly seems Hollywood when HBO and Dreamworks are the main players, even though the BBC did pay in $10 million of the $125 million budget, and it was shot in the UK. A lot of films are now multi-national and multi-company productions, but it would be hard to argue it's not a Hollywood production. The Pacific was all Dreamworks, HBO and Playtone, with no BBC contribution.
The real idea I'm trying to put forward is that trying to be historically accurate is a choice, not a sliding scale where the more accurate something is, the less marketable it is. A tension filled ride through German flak filmed well, with more realistic CGI, lots of intense noise and fighters darting down out of clouds to hit the bombers with tail-gunner POV shots would certainly be dramatic and action-filled enough to play well in a trailer. It's kind of a mystery to me why bad films are made at all with as much money on the line as there is these days between success and failure.
The film makes me a little scared of the book. [:)] My understanding is the book has the six stories in chron order, then an ending that weaves them. I thought the power of the movie in large part came from the interactive weaving and juxtaposition. And not without humor. SPOILER!!! The Jim Broadbent scene where he escapes from the old folks home and goes trotting down the sidewalk yelling "Soylent Green is people!!!" is already an obscure movie and book reference for most of the audience. But then they put it against the horrifying fabricant scheme . . . Wow.
I don't know of a site that breaks things down, but I'm sure there are some in movie-Web-land. There's a lot of issue with Hollywood "above the line, below the line" accounting schemes that mask true costs. My impression had ben that CGI is much cheaper than it used to be, but maybe it's just faster to render. I think one reason, of several, CGI has taken over so many movies is it allows schedules to be flexible on the back-end. The prime talent can come and go for principal shooting and then the movie can be finished over a period of years and released to fit perceived market conditions. There's a lot less reliance on keeping so many of the on-set people around for months eating groceries. Some of the CGI can even be done before principal shooting. IT works the assets harder from the money peoples' POV.
As before, I think BOB is a different genre of art than a movie. A movie is a short-story, BOB was a novel. What would "Saving Private Ryan" have been a s a mini-series ten hours long? Different for sure. Pacing different. Harder to stay focused on the goal, which was a human story and not to show the first month after D-Day. They're both great, but they're different things.
As for trailers I agree with you that you could show a tail-gunner's POV, but if that's all you showed, and no 3rd person POV from outside with the sky, and smoke, and fighters, and 50 planes, you're going to get push-back from the money people. They have to live in a marketplace where the other guys are doing the 3rd person POV. As I said, over her you get one weekend. This past weekend (it's Monday) "Hunger Games" made $161 million over the weekend. The second-place movie made $16 million. I think it was "Thor." Three weeks ago "Thor" was making centi-millions. I think I saw that the third made $14M. The "Hunger Games" trailer wasn't slow panning shots of the heroine's face for sixty seconds with a voice-over. It was action, big shots of future cities, fire, crowds, evil villains, and archery. In that sense I think it was an honest portrayal of the product. That's the product that makes $161 million in three days. Just the reality of the big theater, big budget business. Fortunately we have the HBOs to stay small and make Swiss watches.
