February 25, 2005: Headlines: COS - Bolivia: Movies: Hollywood: Hollywood Reporter: Taylor Hackford found that even after "Ray" was made, however, it still was tough getting a distributor to take it on
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February 25, 2005: Headlines: COS - Bolivia: Movies: Hollywood: Hollywood Reporter: Taylor Hackford found that even after "Ray" was made, however, it still was tough getting a distributor to take it on
Taylor Hackford found that even after "Ray" was made, however, it still was tough getting a distributor to take it on
Taylor Hackford found that even after "Ray" was made, however, it still was tough getting a distributor to take it on
Reaching screen an ordeal for all five best picture noms
By Martin A. Grove
Oscar ordeals: It's all over but the celebrating for this year's Oscar season.
[Excerpt]
"Ray" (Universal Pictures, Bristol Bay Productions) -- From the moment it opened last October, "Ray" was generating a best actor Oscar buzz for Jamie Foxx's performance as Ray Charles. At that point, insiders really weren't anticipating that Academy members would also be singing "Ray's" praises for best picture and for Taylor Hackford's directing. Those additional nominations make it even more ironic that so many studios turned down the project when Stuart Benjamin (who produced "Ray" with Hackford, Howard Baldwin and Karen Baldwin) and Hackford originally took it around.
"It was really, really, really a long odyssey," Benjamin told me in a column that ran here Feb. 11. "A friend of mine just asked me did I ever doubt? And the answer is no. Taylor and I got our hands on this project when it came to us in like 1988, after we'd made 'La Bamba.' As you can imagine, after we made 'La Bamba,' everything was coming at us that had a musical quotient to it. We met Ray Charles, Jr. -- he was introduced to us through a mutual friend -- who said, 'Would you consider making a movie about my dad?' We fell all over ourselves (to see) how fast can we do this. Then what we discovered is that it was much easier said than done. Through the years what really happened was that we tried to get in business with a number of studios. Some of them were interested more than others, but ultimately we were just never able to put it together."
What Benjamin said he and Hackford consistently heard from the studios was that the project was "difficult to market, tough subject matter, won't travel foreign (and) may be better off as a TV movie. And I think everybody that we dealt with studio-wise had a degree of skepticism as to whether or not this was a movie that could earn money at the boxoffice. I always believed that this was a really special story and I always believed that if we told this story well people would come and see the movie.
The project finally made it into development, he explained, "because I was in business with Phil Anschutz and Howard Baldwin in a company called Crusader Entertainment (now known as Bristol Bay Productions). It's always been my pet project and I said, 'Let's put it in development here' and they agreed, which was lovely. We hired Jimmy White, who'd been a dear friend of mine for years and who is one of those people who in my heart of hearts I always knew was the right guy to write this piece. And I guess he was. So Phil and Howard stood behind it. And then we got to a point in the process where Taylor was into it, Jamie Foxx was into it, we had a script and Phil couldn't find a studio partner to finance it or co-finance it. And to his everlasting credit -- as far as I'm concerned and everybody (else is who's) associated with the movie -- Phil said, 'I believe in this and I'll put up the money.'
"I think Phil got a lot of advice from a lot of people around town and a lot of people in his Denver offices that he shouldn't do it. The same kind of advice (that Benjamin had been hearing from the studios) -- 'it's a biopic, it's a TV movie, it's all African-Americans,' those kinds of things. And Phil believed and Howard believed and so we got the movie made."
Even after "Ray" was made, however, it still was tough getting a distributor to take it on. "You sit here today and we have done (about) $75 million at the boxoffice. The DVD is selling like hotcakes. We have six Oscar nominations. And I don't know what else I could say. And then you look at this movie and you say, 'What were all these people thinking that they didn't want it when they looked at it as a completed movie?'" Benjamin asked. "But, I think, a lot of the studios had the same kinds of fears and concerns even though the movie was completed that they had had over the last 15 years (when it was looking for financing) -- until Universal stepped up. Those guys loved the movie and, I think, not only did they believe in us and in the movie, but they believed in themselves. Their marketing team believed that they could bring this movie to the marketplace and get people to come to the movie theaters and see it. And they were right."
Asked how Universal came to distribute the picture, Benjamin recalled, "What happened was that we sort of systematically started screening the movie. We had done a research screening of the movie in Kansas City in October of '03. NRG (National Research Group) came in and set it up for us and we did it two nights in a row, back to back. One night with a predominantly African-American audience and the other night in a suburb, which was more diverse ethnically. Both nights, it was huge. Audiences really loved the movie. This was a two hour and forty-five minute version. We were still fussing with it in terms of editorial things. (The final version is) 2:20 or 2:22 plus credits. This was 2:45 without credits. But the audience loved it.
"So we did a little bit of tweaking and trimming and we got it down to about the two hour and twenty minute length that you see right now. We had that plus the NRG book (of results) and we started showing the movie to studios. We just couldn't get them to move until Universal (said yes). There was nothing magical about what we did. It was just screening the movie and hoping it would speak for itself and speak to somebody. It obviously spoke to Ron (Meyer, Universal Studios president) and Stacey (Snider, Universal Pictures chairman) and (Universal Pictures vice chairman) Marc Shmuger and Adam (Fogelson, Universal Pictures marketing president) and Eddie (Egan, Universal Pictures marketing co-president) and the marketing (team) at Universal. It was pretty much a completed picture and the marketing guys were the guys who had to put their collective asses on the line and say, 'We can do this.' And they did."
When this story was posted in February 2005, this was on the front page of PCOL:
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Story Source: Hollywood Reporter
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Bolivia; Movies; Hollywood
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