So is this why The Alamo tanked????

[doubletrouble_vb]

Originally posted by newarknut
I just don't think people wanted to see a movie about the Alamo.

Bingo!

 

[Another Voice]

"No one wanted to see a movie about The Alamo".

Conventional Hollywood wisdom said that no one wanted to see a movie about two kids on a great big boat, no one wanted to see a movie about a lost fish, and that absolutely, positively, no-way no-how, no one wanted to see a movie about some guy getting nailed to a tree.

The subject matter of a movie is never a problem – it's how the historical background is woven into the story that makes or breaks a film. If you present a well made movie, with a clear and interesting story you will have a hit. Make a movie that lacks a engaging story or that doesn't appear to have anything interesting to say and you have a complete failure.

Historical movies are never about the actual event itself. All movies, even documentaries, are about today. The past can only be seen through the distortions of the present, yet at the same time people look to past to gain insight to what affect's them in the present.

Disney's Alamo failed not because no one cared about the event, but because Disney didn't show how that event was relevant to us today. When you think about the state of the world right now, that's a rather stunning creative failure. Of events with historical event with meaning for the post 9/11 world, The Alamo is towards the top of the list.

In the hands of a better studio, The Alamo could have been a tremendous success. But Disney went cheap and they went soft; soon all they'll be able to do is watch the box office for Troy grow.

 

[crusader]

The Alamo failed because nobody wanted to see it right now. Blame it on content and timing. You can't release a serious film about a bloody war while our soldiers are being killed overseas and expect it to do well.

You also can't release a serious film about war right after your audience viewed a very graphic film about the barbaric crucifixion of Jesus.

drdelsol said it best:

Right now I would prefer something more uplifting or pure escapism.

I can appreciate the significance of what they did, but they die ine the end. With friends I have known for 30 years in Baghdad, no thank you.

I couldn't agree more. Disney probably should have sat on this given the climate or did exactly what they decided to - take a chance and basically cut their losses.

On a lighter note, for the past two weeks, Home on the Range has placed 5th. That's very interesting. I'm curious how well the DVD campaign for Brother Bear did. I believe the sales were excellent.

In the hands of a better studio, The Alamo could have been a tremendous success. But Disney went cheap and they went soft; soon all they'll be able to do is watch the box office for Troy grow.

Tell that to the producers of Master and Commander. They obviously went cheap and mishandled that film. Why else would they be forced to broadcast to us every 20 minutes that the DVD is on sale right now. You're way off base.

If I were WB I'd be a little more concerned about Van Helsing right now before touting a blockbuster is about to be released. The Passion already holds that coveted title for the year.

 

[DancingBear]

Just read an article in Smithsonian magazine, a pretty reliable source for historical info, which touts the Disney Alamo as a much more historically accurate depiction of the events (such as they can be established).

Also saw another article recently which said John Wayne's Alamo wasn't a very big success at the time, particularly given that Wayne was at the top of his success at the time, and had assembled a big name cast. That article suggested that a story about a losing battle just wasn't very appealing.

 

[Planogirl]

The Alamo fight was a losing battle but in reality we all won. I don't think that Disney necessarily made a point of that.

People will see what matters to them IMO. I think that people usually want characters that they can relate to or that somehow interest them. Billy Bob Thornton may have been excellent as Crockett but who really cared to see his portrayal? If Russell Crowe was Crockett, would more people have cared? Also, what if someone well-known and popular would have starred as Travis? Travis is extremely vital to the Alamo story and I can't help but think that a focus on him could have been very interesting.

Anyway, if character isn't of interest, what about the epic appeal? The ads did not portray The Alamo in such a manner IMO. Actually, the ads never really seemed to settle on a direction as far as I could tell.

As for Van Helsing, it's way too early to call that movie. The main character seems to be a comic book style character as presented and those can go either way nowadays. I do believe that the star will provide greater appeal.

 

[mikifan]

My daughter and I saw the movie over the weekend and really felt that it was better than what I had heard. If it is not totally accurate does not bother me. I know it was done as Hollywood, not as a documentary. The History channel did that one. It did tell a good story and might spark interest in books about the subject, as it did for my daughter. In the end, I think many people will enjoy it on DVD.

Jeff

 

[Grog]

Here's an interesting article from the Austin American-Statesman (Austin's daily newspaper) about why The Alamo might have bombed. It's long but interesting. I'm posting the whole article so no one here has to register to read it...

Still defending 'The Alamo'
Reasons for the epic tanking at the box office are plentiful
By Patrick Beach

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Monday, May 3, 2004

Once again, Texians, it's too late to save "The Alamo."

Like the Spanish mission that served as the staging ground for Texas' creation myth, director John Lee Hancock's epic movie, which opened Easter weekend, was up against overwhelming opposition, fiery and sustained attacks from all sides and a palpable sense of doom even before the thing started taking fire.

As of Friday, three weeks into release, the movie has grossed $19.7 million. In sharp and somewhat painful contrast, the chop-socky sequel "Kill Bill--Vol. 2" grossed $25.1 million in a single weekend.

So what happened?

Was "The Alamo" snakebit from the moment Hancock pushed back the release for more post-production work?

Hancock -- a Texas native and graduate of Baylor Law School -- largely blames the media for taking a negative tack and running with it, facts be damned. Others say Hancock's mistake was that, in attempting to be historically accurate, he violated the myth, what millions think they know about what happened at the Alamo in 1836.

Then there's the political climate. The last time the country was this polarized, North and South started lobbing heavy ordnance at one another. And with Iraq looking less like a beacon of freedom every day, a movie in which a couple hundred or so people get killed may not be what the popcorn-chomping public wants to see. Also, historical epics are a perennial box-office crapshoot, a lesson even megastar Mel Gibson learned with "The Patriot." And let's not get started on "Gods and Generals," the "Waterworld" of Civil War sagas.

Finally -- unpleasant-fact-we-need-to-face-up-to alert -- the Alamo isn't as big a deal to the rest of the world as it is to Texans. Probably hasn't been since Fess Parker mothballed his coonskin cap after a staggeringly successful run as Davy Crockett on TV's "Disneyland" in the mid-1950s.

Today's median movie-goer is 32 and slightly more likely to be female. She is also a product of an educational system that has managed to produce at least two generations fairly ignorant of history. As a result:

"Outside of Texas, it's not necessarily a story schoolkids know backwards and forwards," said Dade Hayes, a managing editor at the trade publication Variety.

"To everyone else in the country, this was just another movie," said Austinite Stephen Harrigan, the author of the acclaimed novel "The Gates of the Alamo" who "cashed a small check" for his consulting role on the movie.

The trio of leading characters are hardly icons. Director Hancock's Sam Houston is a drunk, William Travis has abandoned his family and fled to Texas, and Crockett is uncomfortable in the skin of his own legend. The characters and the situation are complicated, not unlike history and real life.

Defending this approach, Harrigan said, "It's a much more nuanced sort of consideration of human frailty and political complexity."

Does that mean movie-goers demand simplicity?

"I don't think it's an indictment of the movie-going public," Harrigan said. "I do think somehow the media got a little too gleeful and got seduced by so much misinformation, so much ill-informed speculation about what the movie was about or what it was trying to say. Once the media train gets rolling, it's hard to stop it."

And, according to Hancock, the train left the station almost two years ago, when Hollywood heavyweight Ron Howard -- who wanted a bigger budget and a stronger-than-PG-13 rating -- moved from the director's chair to the producer's. When that happened, Russell Crowe, with whom Howard had worked on "A Beautiful Mind," was out as the rumored star.

"He was very much behind me as director," Hancock said of Howard. "(The media) wanted to play up the rift. And the second wave was the 'troubled production' angle when we delayed release (from December 2003 to April. I stand by that decision."

Then, on March 24, The New York Times ran a story about the movie's "long and dumpy road, from conception to release." The lead paragraph:

"When the dust finally settles, the Walt Disney Company may not want to remember 'The Alamo.' "

The piece went on to say the once-planned capper for Disney's banner 2003 year had instead become "an unintended emblem of the embattled media company's troubles." The piece also pronounced the movie itself "short on action and drama."

Hancock fumes about what he says were errors in the story, including one that put the budget at $107 million, $32 million over the original estimate of $75 million, a figure Hancock says he doesn't know the origin of.

"I came in $82,000 under instead of $32 million over budget," said Hancock, who put the budget figure at $95 million -- not including an additional $3 million for three extra months in postproduction. "It's just shoddy work."

Right or wrong, the story was chum in the water.

Harrigan, who wants "it to come through loud and clear that I like the movie," says, "I think people, critics and headline writers were just waiting for the chance to say 'Forget the Alamo' in their headlines."

From the time Hancock had hired on, there were questions about whether the director of just one other film, "The Rookie," could command such a sweeping story. Oddly enough, around the time of "The Rookie," a successful $22 million film, Hancock had enjoyed overwhelmingly positive press. "But then I was the little engine that could," he said.

After word that "The Alamo" would not be Disney's big Christmas release, there were reports in Texas Monthly and elsewhere that Hancock might have to reshoot battle scenes -- an expensive proposition and a sure sign of a project in trouble. In fact, Hancock didn't shoot a foot of additional film, but he spent three months shortening and re-editing the movie.

The movie opened in April, which "has never been a very strong month" for movie-going in Hayes' view. Immediately, Hancock said, things got political.

"The national press was miraculously able to convince the left that this was a film that was pro-Bush, pro war in Iraq, and convince the right that it was anti-American," mainly because Crockett, rather than dying in a blaze of glory, is executed after the siege ends. "We're such a divided country. We've got the left boycotting the movie because it's not about only one issue -- slavery -- and Pat Buchanan and Ollie North saying, 'If you go to this movie, you're un-American."

Hancock's sin appears to be attempted fidelity to what little is certain about the Alamo. (The director is fond of saying that a historian jokingly told him one can never use the words "definite" and "Alamo" in the same sentence.)

Traditional popular history casts the battle as the freedom-loving Texians' desperate struggle to win independence from an oppressive dictator. Revisionist, feel-bad history paints the fallen defenders of the garrison as nothing more than land-grabbing slave owners or wannabe slave owners.

In fact, their motives were more complicated than that, and the Alamo battlefield was almost farcically diverse, including Anglo Texians, Tejanos, slaves, freedmen and more. The war over why the battle of the Alamo was fought -- or whether, as Austin historian H.W. Brands argues, it was militarily defensible on either side -- wages on.

"Maybe the fantasy is more satisfying than realities that challenge perceptions and long-treasured myths," said historian William C. Davis, author of "Three Roads to the Alamo" and "Lone Star Rising." "My impression is (the movie) makes a champion effort to try to be open and understanding about the issues and all the ethnicities involved. Again, maybe that's too much subtlety."

Were there problems with the story itself? There's no romance, in fact little place for women except Jim Bowie's sister-in-law next to the frontiersman's sick bed. There's not one lead character but three, and it's necessary to spend time explaining why one of them, Sam Houston, isn't even at the Alamo. (Dennis Quaid spends most of the movie knocking back whisky, knotting his brow and dithering.)

Of course, the Alamo defenders' sacrifice was indeed heroic, but slaughter is by definition kind of a bummer. Then you've got to tack on the battle of San Jacinto, where the Texians defeated Santa Anna, so the movie doesn't end on a down note. Trouble is, San Jacinto was a blink-and-you've-missed-it anticlimactic rout.

Hancock said those challenges are precisely what drew him to the project. "Everybody tries to codify ideas into a McNugget," he said. "That doesn't do the story service. My idea was to present snapshots of the childbirth of Texas. It was violent, it was bloody, it was miraculous."

But the critics weren't convinced he overcame those challenges and complications. A New York Times critic, for one, called the result "oppressively solemn." Others see it as a solid, conventional Hollywood historical picture -- albeit one with violence that's maybe a bit too bloodless -- and find the overwhelming scorn just baffling.

Hancock's epilogue? "I've gotten so many calls from people who say they loved the movie and that it's the most wrongfully maligned movie they'd ever seen. I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I'm a kid from Texas who got to make an Alamo movie."

pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603

 

[Cheshire Figment]

As a minor aside, last week's "New York Magazine" stated that even this was the Disney Studio's largest recent film, Michael Eisner did not attend the premiere.