After several decades in the movie business, producer David Brown is back in the Hollywood spotlight with Chocolat, which has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Brown tells Hollywood.com’s Sandy Kenyon about the evolution of the movie industry, the Academy and his latest movie.
Sandy Kenyon: How did the material [for Chocolat] cross your threshold?
David Brown: I am the proprietor of a small production company called The Manhattan Project. … In this office, The Manhattan Project, there is a young lady named Kit Golden, who came to me and said, “I have a manuscript I want you to read. I like it. It’s called Chocolat. Since she previously had come to me with another manuscript titled Angela’s Ashes, I listened to her. Not only did I listen to her on Chocolat; I made her the president of my company and had her produce the movie with me. And she’s done a great job. She’s out of the New York University Film School. That’s how it came to me. We developed a script; we brought it to Miramax. Miramax had a deal with a director, a wonderful Swedish director, Lasse Hallstrom. He embraced the project; casting started, budgeting started. At first we were going to shoot it in Quebec, but I said no, it has to be in Beynac. It was Beynac and for the interiors the Shepperton Studios in England.
Kenyon: How good did it feel when you finally located that wonderful village which is the centerpiece of this movie?
Brown: Obviously, it’s a thousand-year-old village, Flavigny, and it felt good. Here’s the drawback: it is so beautiful, it is so typically French that I thought it was the back lot of MGM in the forties. Because we used to copy villages like that so beautifully that you would never know. After all, Casablanca was made in California. So I said to David Gropman, our production designer, “Can we degrade it a little bit, so that it doesn’t look as though we are shooting a set. Well, we couldn’t degrade it; it is a real village, and our crew outnumbered the people who live there.
Kenyon: When you look at the original manuscript, the priest is the bad guy in the original book. That was a crucial change. Tell us about that.
Brown: That was a change — I have to credit Harvey Weinstein with the idea. He thought that the priest as the adversary was kind of stereotypical; it’s what you expected. What you didn’t expect is the mayor of the town, an aristocrat, having the priest as a surrogate. The result was we had a very fresh character played by a wonderful British actor, Hugh O’Conor, who sings Elvis Presley songs and whose sermons were dictated by Alfred Molina, who plays the mayor. And that seemed fresher to us then what was in the book. There are other things that Bob Nelson Jacobs, the screenwriter, created, invented. But he couldn’t have invented the characters. That’s the virtue of a novel.
Kenyon: You are an interesting person to ask this next question to. Jaws is heralded by film people as the first true blockbuster, the one that set the tone for the rest of the movies that came after it, particularly in the summer. Given what you wrought, how do you take a movie like Chocolat and make it stand out within the blockbuster mentality?
Brown: Well, first of all, we had the good fortune of being sponsored by Miramax. Miramax specializes in making the public aware of a film, however small. They cannot influence the Academy. I wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times just the other day on this subject. As an Academy voter of 50 years’ standing, no advertiser can make me vote for a movie, but it can make me see a movie that I might have otherwise passed by. And that’s the virtue of marketing.
I have made many small movies. One of them on my wall is The Player. Robert Altman‘s movie was a small movie — one of my best movies, I think. I’ve made movies you have never heard of called Watch It. And still others called Canadian Bacon, Michael Moore‘s movie about America declaring war on Canada to bring America back to work. Anyway, the answer is I make movies that I personally want to see. Richard Zanuck and I had no idea what Jaws would do. We thought our careers were going to the bottom of the Nantucket Sound when our artificial shark sank on its first trial voyage.
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Kenyon: That piece was very interesting in the LA Times; I read that piece online. How has the Oscar game changed in your years in this business? Compare and contrast.
Brown: You know the Academy was started as kind of a substitute for labor unions. It was started by all of the big moguls. As it became an artistic society in its early years, when it was a dinner at the Ambassador Hotel, everybody knew the results before they sat down for dinner. It was published by the LA Times. Later on during the big glory years of the major studios, there was a tendency of the studios to encourage block voting. You work for MGM, you and five thousand others; you know where your bread is buttered. These are the pictures you gotta vote for, even thought it’s a secret ballot.
Now, nobody owns anything or anyone. We are all independent. The very few people who are on studio payrolls are not necessarily Academy voters: lawyers, accountants, etc. So the Academy is a much more eclectic, if I may use a word like that, diversified many-sided electorate. And that’s why movies like Shakespeare in Love can make it, or Life is Beautiful as well as blockbusters. It’s changed for the better in my opinion, because there is no pressure on the part of employers to influence voting. Not that they could, because nobody knew who voted, nobody could say, “Hey, you voted against us, you’re outta here.”
Kenyon: It’s interesting. I’m a relative newcomer; I’m doing my 18th Oscar this year.
Brown: That’s not a newcomer!
Kenyon: It’s a newcomer compared to the company that I’m keeping right now. It does seem that the amount of dollars spent, the marketing effort after the nominations, has grown quite dramatically. Is that a good thing, a bad thing, or neutral?
Brown: Well, advertising costs have risen across the board, and in the old days, the trade papers were rather subservient. Today they are not. They can wrap an Oscar nominee, they can speculate on who’s doing what, on what’s good and what’s bad. Because the trade papers are now owned by multi-national companies, not hometown newspapers, they can afford to take a boycott. Yes, there’s a lot [of advertising]. But there was always pressure. The trade papers were full of ads. The difference is the Oscar nominations are a big marketing tool. They get people out to see a movie. People go and see nominated films or Oscar winners. And if your picture comes out late enough in the year, it hasn’t used up its business, so you have a good time.
But the other answer to your question is that marketing has become a science. In the olden days, movie companies had no sense of marketing. Movie advertising people could only work for movie people. Now they are very sophisticated: they use exit polls and awareness polls, and they tailor their advertising for the market for the film and the media that is aimed at that market.
Kenyon: What have these five Oscar nominations meant for Chocolat?
Brown: They have meant everything. I was in London with Kit Golden and her husband, and we had no belief that we were going to win the Best Picture nomination. When we heard that first word, Chocolat (the first one in alphabetical order), we went crazy. I telephoned my wife instantly. Others have asked me what I said to her. I said, “Now you get to wear the dress that you bought for Angela’s Ashes.” Which is true! That’s the first thing that I thought of: Helen gets to wear the dress that she bought for Angela’s Ashes, but we didn’t make it.
Kenyon: This has meant more business.
Brown: Yes, oh yes, we are doing extraordinarily good business. We just opened up in Europe to phenomenal figures, and in Asia, the South Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, and the U.K. — we are in previews; the signs are good. And of course in the United States we’ve now passed over $40 million in box office in about 1100, 1200, maybe 1800 theatres now, which is very good since we’ve been out for 12 weeks.
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Kenyon: I spoke to Gil Cates a couple weeks ago in his office and he says that the Oscars are global. He cites Chocolat. This strikes me as a big change from when I first started nearly 20 years ago. When you go in the pressroom, you hear all kinds of languages being spoken. Talk a bit about that. How this ceremony has become more important around the world.
Brown: The Oscars are broadcast around the world. The distributors and sub-distributors of movies, of Hollywood movies, their tentacles reach around the world. Hollywood has always been able to capture the international market because it appeals to families, unlike many national film groups, who are more focused to a smaller niche audience. The technological globalization of the industry and the media has benefited the film industry, so that today no film can really make money without being an international success. That’s why we are very careful about making films about baseball or cricket, or some other purely national sport, although there have been some great films on those subjects.
Kenyon: At risk of asking the obvious, what makes Chocolat an international film?
Brown: We don’t know. The point is that films, until they’re put together and seen by the audience, either have a certain magic, or they don’t. Chocolat has a certain magic. And I think that when we researched it, in Kansas City, we thought sure, we can get NYC or Los Angeles, or Toronto, and San Francisco, but what about the Heartland of America? It scored just as high in Kansas and in Missouri as it did in New York or in San Francisco.
What makes it global? Everybody lives in a village, as [Hillary Clinton] has said. And even if you live in a neighborhood in New York City as I do, that’s a village — I know the laundry guy; he sends me Christmas presents. I know the local butcher and all of that. The world is very much a village-oriented society. And Chocolat is about the village, and villages are rather tribal. I am vamping the answer because I really don’t know the answer.
Kenyon: We talked about longevity. To me, one of the keys to that is keeping the excitement. And I was amazed when I found out how old you are.
Brown: I am 85 this year.
Kenyon: Part of the secret to keeping the excitement is keeping the thrill of the material, keeping the thrill when you see it on the screen.
Brown: And the anxiety. I always thought that when Time magazine did its cover story on Jaws, which Dick Zanuck and I produced, and Time said that Zanuck and Brown would never have to work again. I thought that I would never care. But every movie that comes out is like my first film. I am worried about it; I can hardly get up the morning the reviews come in. I always believe the worst reviews but never the best. The anxiety, the pain, is still with me. It’s still with my partner Dick Zanuck; we just haven’t been able to overcome that. Fear is my ally, as well as longevity. I am afraid, every movie.
I’ve got a new movie coming out, Along Came a Spider, from Paramount [with] Morgan Freeman, Monica Potter — it will be out in April. I’m starting with the projectionist, starting with the secretary who types the scripts (I used to type the scripts). I ask the projectionist, “How do you like it?” and on to global audiences, what do they think?
Kenyon: I want to end with two questions…. Who is in the Academy? Who votes for the Awards?
Brown: There are about 5500 voters, as I recall. The largest component, the Academy of the actors, I think there are about 1300. The directors are a big category; I’d say the producers are one of the smallest constituencies. The way it works is that each of us in our respective crafts votes for nominees. Then when the nominees are all determined, we vote for everything. Except for documentaries and foreign films. We have to prove to the Academy that we saw them. They keep a record. So those films are voted on by people who saw them. As far as the others go, we hope everyone sees them.
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But it’s tough to get into the Academy. You have to be associated with good movies. And you have to be voted on by a membership committee. It’s much more than paying your dues.
Kenyon: You really have to be a name in the industry. It’s really one of the most exclusive clubs in America.
Brown: You have to be associated with good films, whether you are new, young, or whatever it is. There’s a theory that we are all old and aging. But if you are inactive, your vote goes away. You can be a member and get cassettes, but you can’t vote. You have to be active.
Kenyon: There is only one sure way in, still. What is it?
Brown: If you are a producer, you have to be voted on by the producers’ branch, and you have to file an application indicating that you have at least three producing credits. And by producing credits, it’s produced by; not executive producer, not in association with, not associate producer. Three producing credits. If you have nine credits with three people, that counts for three. Or three solos. That’s the way it works.
Kenyon: As I understood it, the only sure way in is to be a nominee.
Brown: All nominees for Best Picture are eligible for membership, I believe. We are trying desperately to make nominations an honor. As you can see behind me, there are three nominations on the wall. Now we have a lunch for the nominees, and we get a certificate, and we feel as though we won something.
Kenyon: There is an old adage that I was wondering if you can prove at this point: that the more trouble the production, sometimes, the better the film. The easier the production, where everybody is friends and so forth, the worse the film. Is that b.s., or is that the truth?
Brown: Partly so. Sometimes when pictures fall together rapidly, they don’t work as well as when you have the people driving, dropping out. I remember on The Sound of Music, the people who were in before Julie Andrews — troubled sets, to a degree. There has to be a certain amount of tension in this process, and God knows there is, in order for the picture to develop an energy. A happy set and cheering at the dailies, which is the film that we shoot the day before, sometimes is a bad sign. Sometimes the dailies are kind of not good, and when they are all put together, they spell Mother.
Kenyon: On that, we’ll end.
