In Hollywood, at the height of a crucial but volatile summer at the box office, the subject of budgets and grosses is taking took second place last week to the commercial potential of the Versace murder story. It's anyone's guess as to quite how many screenplay treatments on the killing made the rounds of the agents and studios over the past fortnight. With the wall-to-wall media coverage adding a succession of speculative embellishments to the basic elements of the story that were known to be factual, the race was on in Hollywood to get projects into development without delay. One excited producer relished the prospect of a pursuit thriller that would be "even bigger than The Silence Of The Lambs" - the story of a homosexual prostitute who snaps when he learns he's HIV-positive and takes lethal revenge on men who may have infected him. It seemed immaterial that there was no evidence whatsoever of the HIV status of Versace's killer Andrew Cunanane - and none was found in the autopsy last week - just as there was little to back up the claims that Cunanane was dressing in drag to avoid detection.
As ever, every producer in Los Angeles is looking for a hit movie, and as ever - even after 100 years of movies - in the succinct conclusion of screenwriter William Goldman, "nobody knows anything".
Many of the big, bloated blockbusters which had been expected to clean up at the summer box-office have under-performed or failed to deliver, causing shockwaves in Hollywood. And with an ever-increasing public appetite for fly-on-the-wall "real-life" television programmes, factually based, character-driven movie projects are moving higher and higher up the priority lists of the Hollywood studios.
Summer is the longest, most lucrative film-going season of the year in the US, and the time traditionally to release the popcorn pictures, the big action movies and sequels; the more upmarket large-budget pictures are reserved for the Christmas period when they may reap the benefit of end-of-year awards, critics' lists and the imminent Oscar nominations.
"There's an understandable nervousness in Hollywood these days," observes Variety reporter Leonard Klady, "as industry honchos try to resolve the following question: What if bigger isn't better?"
Benedict Carver, Los Angeles correspondent of Screen International, concurs: "As the twists and turns of this summer's box-office become even harder to follow, Hollywood is experiencing the downside to one of its sacred cows - the `event opening'. A lesson being learned this summer is that the bigger a film's start, the quicker its box-office drops off."
Look at the sequels. Even Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park follow-up, The Lost World, has proved a relative disappointment. It opened in the US in mid-May with massive takings in excess of $100 million in its first 10 days, but over the next eight weeks it added not much more than the same again, and its present takings of $222 million have fallen far short of the $390 million made by Jurassic Park.
Qualified as its success is, The Lost World is a cast-iron hit, in sharp contrast to another sequel, Speed 2: Cruise Control - in six weeks it has taken just $44 million, less than half of what Speed made - and with a budget in the region of $125, Speed 2 cost around three times its predecessor. Yet everyone scoffed at Keanu Reeves, the male lead of the original, when he turned down the sequel last summer to go on tour with his band, Dogstar.
Despite a marketing and merchandising blitz - and paying Arnold Schwarzenegger a reported $25 million for six weeks' work to play the villain, Mr Freeze - the mega-budget Batman & Robin has fallen well short of expectations. As anticipated, it delivered an "event opening" with a $43 million first weekend, but it struggled for five weeks before finally attaining the $100 million mark last week. Yet the film's budget, added to the prints and advertising costs of releasing it in the US, came to an estimated $140. Of all this summer's cynically packaged blockbusters, none was as lazy and uninspired as Batman & Robin, and word-of-mouth soon counteracted the mass of publicity pumped into its opening.
Commenting on the off-target performance of many of the "event opening" movies, Arthur Rockwell, chief financial analyst for Capital Yeager Markets, told Screen International: "It reflects a desire for instant gratification which is self-destructive and can't be helping the business. The policy almost seems to be - if you have no faith in the film, then open it big." Another investment analyst, David Davies, believes that the trend of $100 million-budget movies is fast coming to an end. "There is simply no way to justify it economically," he told Variety. "The studios are attempting to orchestrate success and envisioning an ancillary merchandising bonanza that happens maybe a couple of times a year. There's no question that a couple of studio film divisions will get into serious financial trouble, and that's always been the most salient agent for change."
There have been lesser disappointments, such as producer Jerry Bruckheimer's high-octane action movie, Con Air, starring Nicolas Cage, which is closing in on the $100 million mark but falls over $30 million behind last year's Bruckheimer-Cage movie, The Rock. Cage's other summer 1997 release, the John Woo movie Face/Off, has passed Con Air at the US box-office and is holding steadily. A spectacular, adrenalin-pumping action movie, the immensely stylish Face/Off operates from the clever, brilliantly sustained proposition of a psychotic bomber (Cage) and an FBI agent (John Travolta) exchanging faces. The relentless excitement of the movie left me reeling from the cinema.
Disney's new animated feature, Hercules, has made a healthy $85 million, but well short of the $317 million taken by The Lion King. However, with international takings now regularly accounting for more than half a Hollywood studio picture's box-office, movies such as Hercules could well earn substantially more outside America.
To Hollywood's relief, 1997 has yielded some very pleasant surprises, too. Wes Craven's low-budget horror pastiche, Scream, astonished the industry by taking over $100 million since it opened at Christmas, and a sequel is already in production. Further evidence of Tom Cruise's box-office allure is the huge success of the romantic comedy, Jerry Maguire, which made $153 million in the US alone. Eyebrows were raised when Jim Carrey was paid $20 million to star in Liar Liar, a simple comedy custom-built for Carrey's outsized personality, but the investment has paid off with the movie showing extraordinary staying power and earning $178 million - a total surpassed this year only by The Lost World and Men In Black.
The very entertaining aliens comedy, Men In Black, which went on Irish release last week, was one of the most slickly packaged pictures of the year, with the best and most enticing trailer, and it is set to streak ahead of Lost World within weeks to make it the number one movie of 1997. Not that Steven Spielberg should be too worried - MiB was made by his company, Amblin, and he is its executive producer.
Another success is a more serious-minded alien movie, Contact, based on the Carl Sagan book and the first film directed by Robert Zemeckis since Forrest Gump. Playing to queues and packed houses when I saw it at the Beverly Centre in Los Angeles last week, Contact is an over-earnest and long-winded exploration of different responses to the prospect of extra-terrestrial life, although it benefits from a number of imaginative ideas and the sturdy central performance of Jodie Foster as a fiercely committed astronomer.
As in Forrest Gump, Zemeckis plays digitally with images of real people, this time dropping another president, Bill Clinton, into the picture, not once but twice - and without any prior consultation with the president. Clinton responded by expressing his "annoyance". His mild rebuke has triggered a lively debate on the Internet newsgroup, alt.movies.specialeffects, on the ethics of digitally placing people in the frame.
On the other hand, President Clinton has been forthright in his endorsement of Wolfgang Petersen's tight, pacy action movie, Air Force One, set aboard the presidential plane when it is hijacked by Kazakhstan terrorists led by a heavily accented Gary Oldman. The fictitious president is played vigorously by Harrison Ford as a steely, determined Vietnam vet - a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Steven Seagal, said one commentator, or as another put it more aptly, between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Clint Eastwood. Glenn Close is the vacillating vice-president in this taut entertainment which re-affirms director Petersen's flair for working in confined spaces after his submarine-set Das Boot.
Stepping off the real Air Force One in Los Angeles last month, President Clinton told reporters that he had seen the movie twice. "I thought it was great," he said. The movie had an "event opening" in the US, taking in $81.2 million in its first 10 days on release, but unlike so many other summer blockbusters, it has the staying power to maintain that momentum for weeks to come.
Still holding on very firmly in the US box office top 10 is the medium-budget romantic comedy, My Best Friend's Wedding, starring Julia Roberts as a food critic who recognises a major missed opportunity when her ex-lover (Dermot Mulroney) invites her to his wedding, which she promptly decides to wreck. The movie opened on the same June weekend as Batman & Robin, but while the latter fades from sight, My Best Friend's Wedding has taken over $100 million and continues to earn over $3 million a week.
This witty, disarming comedy is directed with panache by P.J. Hogan, the Australian who made Muriel's Wedding and this time employs Burt Bacharach music as effectively as he used Abba songs in his earlier wedding picture. Its success marks a dynamic comeback for Julia Roberts, who is on terrific form, and features a spirited and appealing Cameron Diaz as Mulroney's fiancee. However, the movie's scene-stealing star is Rupert Everett as Julia's gay mentor. At 38, Everett has been re-discovered by Hollywood and already there is much talk of a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for his performance. That would be a first for an openly gay actor playing a gay character. Julia Roberts and Rupert Everett are to reunite for Martha And Arthur, a topical story of a Hollywood marriage of convenience in which Everett plays a gay actor who marries to disguise his sexuality.
Gay is good in Hollywood's books at present, following the huge success of The Birdcage, one of last year's highest-grossing releases. This year the coming-out episode of the TV sitcom Ellen - art imitating the real-life coming-out of its star, Ellen DeGeneres - attracted the highest ratings of the series. Kevin Smith's romantic comedy, Chasing Amy - dealing with the relationship between a lesbian (Joey Lauren Adams) and a heterosexual (Ben Afleck) - is, with $11 million in the bank, much the biggest US art-house hit of the year to date. And Tony Vitale's slight but appealing comedy, Kiss Me, Guido - with model Nick Scotti as a naive Italian-American would-be actor who moves in with a gay man in Greenwich Village - opened two weeks ago to very strong returns on limited US release. Quite how a major US studio would handle the infinitely more serious scenario that is the Andrew Cunanane story is a moot point given Hollywood's dubious record of gay movies in the past. Nevertheless, such has been the mass of coverage and speculation in the US over the past few weeks that one can begin to visualise the movie even now: Keanu Reeves, say, as Cunanane stealthily shadowing Versace (Anthony Hopkins, anyone?) as he makes his way in slow motion along Ocean Drive after his last breakfast at News Cafe . . .
Speed 2: Cruise Control will be released in Ireland on August 15th; Air Force One on Sept 12th; My Best Friend's Wedding on Sept 19th; Contact on Sept 26th; Face/Off on Nov 7th; and Chasing Amy on Nov 14th