A Big Fat Indie Success Story? Press Discourses Surrounding the Making and Marketing of a “Hollywood” Movie

Alisa Perren

Alisa Perren

• Alisa Perren is an associate professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests include television studies, media industry studies, US film and television history, and media convergence. She comes to Austin after previously teaching in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University and the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University.
• Dr. Perren is co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Blackwell, 2009) and author of Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (University of Texas Press, 2012).

Media Narratives...

• Partial accounts?
• Inaccuracies and misperceptions?
• Reinforcing mythologies?

A Big Fat Indie Narrative

• “The publications wrote of a low-budget romantic comedy--a movie with neither Hollywood stars nor special effects--that defied the odds to become the highest grossing independent film of all time.”

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Vardalos, 2002)

Dissecting Claims

• Examines production, distribution, and exhibition history to complicate assertions that the film can be labelled the “most successful independent film of all time.”
• Challenges the assumption that films like MBFGW aren’t made anymore by Hollywood
• Problematizes the notion that the marketing for MBFGW was some kind of grassroots, Bottom-up triumph.

Purpose

• “Ultimately, I encourage media analysts to cease from viewing My Big Fat Greek Wedding as an example of one woman and one film defying the odds. Instead, we should consider this film as an example of the uniformity of journalistic discourses, the complexity of the operations of contemporary Hollywood, and the continuing ideological power of the so-called American dream.”

Discussion Question:

• If journalistic discourses “are every bit as ideological as the media products generated by the media companies themselves,” then how should we think about our personal engagement with the news media?

Methodological Concerns

• How can you critique discourses generated by the mainstream press about the entertainment industries when you rely heavily on these same sources to construct an argument?
• Historians have archives, but analysts of contemporary media industries are often limited in their access to corporate materials and must “rely on trade documents and mainstream publications, with interviews serving as a means of supplementing knowledge and checking facts.”
• Perren deals with this by:
• Employing a wide range of sources
• Situates the articles within the context of research on “the structure, conduct, and performance of the entertainment industries.”

What makes a film “Indie?”

Debunking: What’s Indie?

• What counts as an Indie film?
• Source of financing?
• Industrial affiliations of the film’s distributor?
• Sites where the film is exhibited?
• Status of talent in relation to Hollywood?
• The “spirit” of the film?

Production: Backstory

• $5 million (average for low-budget film)
• 50% Gold Circle Films (Norm Waitt - Gateway)
• 50% HBO (AOL Time Warner subsidiary)
• Brought to HBO by Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson (Playtone)
• HBO secured domestic cable and video rights--Thus, the “majors passed on the project from the outset.”

Distribution: Backstory

• “Thus, it was a combination of aesthetic and industrial factors that made the film unattractive to top theatrical distributors.”
• IFC picks up MBFGW in a “service deal”
• IFC’s theatrical film division is a spin-off of the basic cable channel (Independent Film Channel)
• “Independent” Film Channel?
• IFC was a division of Rainbow Media Holdings
• Joint venture of Cablevision, GE/NBC, and MGM
• “... it becomes clear that the ‘independent’ in ‘Independent Film Channel’ is more of a brand name than a description of its industrial relationships.”

30 Rock pokes fun at all this...

“Spirit” of the Film

• “...in terms of style and genre, the film is anything but independent. Indeed, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is interesting in how utterly unoriginal it is—in fact, as many critics noted, it seems more like a ninety-minute sitcom than a feature-length film.”

Exhibition

• Opted to “release the film as if it were a commercial film rather than an ‘indie’.”
• Opening the film wide in a limited number of cities
• Opting for theater chains over art houses
• TV ads

Where is “Hollywood?”

• “Since the studios...were increasingly incorporated into large multinational corporations-- ‘Hollywood’ has been more useful as a marketing tool than as an indicator of specific aesthetic characteristics or industrial, economic, and cultural conditions.”
• Autonomous motion picture studios no longer exist
• Hollywood: “...a complex network of media industries in which major entertainment conglomerates exist at the center, financing products intended for distribution via a number of ‘pipelines’ around the world.”

Hollywood doesn’t make films like this anymore?

• The industry, journalists, and scholars have created “a vision of Hollywood as a movie factory that releases films solely for theatrical release.”
• The reality is that Hollywood makes and distributes films in a variety of other ways
• Lines between film and TV continue to blur
• Two distinct discourses surround film and TV
• The film auteur and film as ART
• TV as “highly commercial” and “creatively bankrupt” medium
• Narratives present the film and TV industries as autonomous entities… compartmentalized industries. This is not the case.

Cinderella Stories

• Nia Vardalos: “Just a girl from Winnipeg?”
• Second City
• Film roles
• TV roles
• “The little film that could”: Grassroots marketing?
• Strategy was to make the film look like a “major release from a major studio
• Saturation advertising
• Oprah, Regis and Kelly, Bride

Conclusion

• Key Lessons:
• “Contrary to journalistic claims that MBFGW shows that ‘Hollywood has lost its way,’ the film’s success in fact demonstrates the clarity with which the Hollywood system operates today.”
• “The label ‘independent’ needs to be analyzed more extensively.”
• “We need to look more closely at the interrelationships and interdependencies between the studios and the independents and between the film and television industries.”
• “We must understand how ‘software’ (the industry word for film and television content) continues to be vital to the success of the entertainment industry.”
• Predicting box office is extremely difficult. At best, big studios might hope to limit losses by producing high-concept, FX driven blockbusters, while “specialty” divisions focus on low-budget, “niche-oriented” films with an “edge.”