Depending on personalities, however, has not proven to be a surefire formula for movie producers. Guzzetti specifically cites the example of director Michael Cimino, whose 1978 film “The Deer Hunter” earned millions of dollars at the box office and five Academy Awards. This showing motivated producers at United Artists in 1980 to offer Cimino what Guzzetti described as a “carte blanche” to direct “Heaven’s Gate.” The movie was a critical and commercial flop of historic proportions, and it helped to bankrupt United Artists. “Many people look at that and think: how can we keep that from happening?” Guzzetti says. “Deal with known quantities—buy a book, deal with a director who has always made money like James Cameron, have something that’s more predictable.”

Cimino’s failure, then, demonstrates that celebrity culture is a fickle assurance in attaining financial success. The most reliable formula for making a profit in the film industry may lie in retelling a popular tale.

CINEMA OF THE SPECTACLE

Unlike conventional material products, a film’s performance is dependent on its critical reception and marketing figures such as its initial box office sales. Most commercial products, such as cigarettes, are not highly dependent on these factors. For a given brand of cigarettes, financial success isn’t determined by sales during its first week of distribution or reviews in popular literature. A film’s success, on the other hand, is subject to these external factors. “It’s like a sport,” Guzzetti says. “People root for movies. Audience members not only follow whether a movie is good, but how the movie is doing. People identify with the business end of movies ... in a way they never did in classical Hollywood.”

In other words, the film industry represents much more to culture than the sum of the products that it produces—it is a spectacle in which fans become personally attached to the commercial and critical reception of particular shows. This is why the Academy Awards is regularly one of the most widely watched annual television events: people not only enjoy watching the content of a movie, but the commercial route that the movie itself takes from the beginning of development to the end of distribution. The possibilities for profit in a well-liked movie are therefore magnified by a surrounding consumer culture that increases the gap between success and failure. The risk for a flop becomes untenable.

BRAND ABILITY

Documentaries might seem immune to the hackneyed plotlines and characters that constitute so many popular movies—in order for a documentary to exist, it must be making an original argument. The pressures of Hollywood, however, have infected the genre with many of the symptoms of the economic squeeze that have plagued studio films. This change proves the extent to which the Hollywood studio system is limiting the creative and argumentative possibilities of major films in wholly new ways. Simon believes there has been an increase of so-called “branded” documentaries. “After filmmakers such as Michael Moore demonstrated that they could draw crowds to the box office,” Simon says, “movie producers began to think about the profitability of documentary films and began to finance large projects such as ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ and ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’”

These large budgets have allowed documentaries to experiment with filmmaking techniques previously reserved for Hollywood studio films, including polished visuals, special effects, and original soundtracks, all of which make widely-distributed documentary films in line technically with studio pictures. This trend has been especially apparent in documentaries of the last year such as “Inside Job” and “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” which have used enormous budgets by documentary standards in order to create a Hollywood feel.

This overdone approach to documentary filmmaking has increasingly taken what used to be an observational account of event and increasingly inserted the voice of the director. Celebrity culture within documentary filmmaking may allow people to come to anticipate the content of a documentary in advance, just as Conley suggested they do with studio pictures. “You know what you’re going to find in a Michael Moore documentary before you even get there,” Simon says. “In fact, the reason you’re probably even going is because you agree with his political viewpoints.” In the modern economic reality of popular cinema, the standard issue has a growing dominance.