This Year, the Safe Bets Are Off

Most of the nominees aren't even classic outside-the-system indie movies. They're artistic gambles financed by entrepreneurs. If you want serious cash on the barrelhead for an Oscar picture today, you have to find yourself a cinematic sugar daddy willing to foot the bill. "The Aviator," though released by Miramax, was financed largely by Graham King, who was responsible for roughly $80 million of the film's $116-million budget (the rest coming from Miramax and Warner Bros. Films). "Ray," which earned six Oscar nominations, was financed by real estate tycoon turned media baron Phil Anschutz, who put up the entire $40-million budget after every studio in town had passed on the project.

Even Clint Eastwood, who's been making movies for Warner Bros. since before many of his rival best actor nominees were born, couldn't persuade the studio that spent $85 million on "Scooby-Doo" to put up $30 million for "Million Dollar Baby." So Hollywood's most revered actor-director went begging. When no other studio would make the film, Eastwood persuaded another entrepreneur, Lakeshore Entertainment's Tom Rosenberg, to put up half of the budget, with Warners kicking in the rest.

So how do good movies get made these days? Luckily, in Hollywood, some people just won't take no for an answer, which might be bad if you're a waiter trying to take someone's lunch order but good if you have a yen to see ambitious movies.

Take as an example "Sideways," which earned five Oscar nominations Tuesday. The film's writer-director, Alexander Payne, took the project to a slew of studios with his cast already in place. He got a chorus of noes, not because the studios didn't like the script but because they wanted Brad Pitt or George Clooney instead of relative unknowns Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church in the leading roles. By the time Payne and producer Michael London took the movie to Fox Searchlight, which agreed to make it for a meager $16 million, they'd gotten a yes from only one other studio, Paramount Pictures. One studio told London it was full up with special-effects thrillers -- "We've already done our one movie about people."

From the studio point of view, the goal these days is to make movies that have the kind of easy accessibility that allows them to perform well in international markets, on DVD and in all the other ancillary revenue streams the studios love to boast about to investors. Without the marketing momentum of Oscar nominations, it was hard to make a safe bet -- the emphasis, of course, being on "safe" -- that any of these films would turn a profit. Anyone in Hollywood could recite the excuses the filmmakers heard wherever they went, whether it was "Ray" (sorry, but African American dramas do zero business overseas), "Million Dollar Baby" (geez, too old-fashioned and downbeat), "Sideways" (how do you sell a movie about wine-tasting slobs with two actors no one's ever heard of?) or "The Aviator," which looked like a bad bet being a $116-million movie directed by Martin Scorsese, who had always gone over budget and never directed a movie that made close to $100 million in the U.S.