Why R-rated true stories are likely to make movie magic

NEW YORK: Just what makes movie magic? A psychology professor has done a statistical study of thousands of films to determine what makes them critical darlings or box-office hits. Films that earn awards and praise from reviewers tend to be R-rated and based on a true story or a prize-winning play or novel, says psychology professor Dean Simonton at the University of California, Davis.

Big-budget blockbusters - whether they are comedies, musical, sequels or remakes - do not ordinarily draw acclaim, Simonton found. Neither do summer releases, PG-13 movies, movies that open on thousands of screens or ones that have enormous box-office numbers in their first weekend.

"I had this hope that there was a difference between blockbusters and really great art films - films that can be considered great cinematic creations," said Simonton, who presented his findings Friday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco. "It was gratifying to find out they're very, very different and you can find out what's different about them."

Simonton says he is not a movie buff - "I'm a consumer like everyone else" - but in his longtime studies of genius, creativity and leadership, he started compiling data about the collaborative process of filmmaking in 1999.

Brokeback Mountain is a prime example of what Simonton discovered. It was rated R, had an 87 percent approval rating on the Metacritic.com website and it came out at the height of prestige-picture time in December 2005. It featured a top-notch creative team, including director Ang Lee and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, working from a short story by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx. The film cost $14 million to make and grossed nearly $175 million worldwide. It was nominated for eight Oscars and won three.

But then there are exceptions, like this summer's Knocked Up. It is also very much an R-rated movie, but it is a comedy that's gotten 85 percent positive reviews on Metacritic and it came out in June. Judd Apatow, who has long enjoyed a cult following, wrote and directed it. The film cost an estimated $33 million to make and so far has grossed $164 million worldwide. It is probably not going to win any Oscars, but who knows?

"All these things are just statistical relationships - there are always exceptions to every finding you have," Simonton said. "You'll have a film that really shouldn't have success but they have something quirky going for them ... My Big Fat Greek Wedding, it's just a quirky thing.

"As a consequence," he added, "Hollywood falls back on sequels and remakes. Even though you've seen them before, you know they've succeeded in earlier versions."

Stephen Whitty, chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, says Simonton's findings were not terribly surprising.

"Anybody watching the Oscars even casually knows that they tend to reward certain things they love - they love biopics, they love when a pretty woman puts on some ugly makeup to play a character in trouble," says Whitty, critic for The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey. "They're not going to spend three or four hours of prime time rewarding movies that flopped badly at the box office."

But Whitty points out that one of the rare recent times that his group and the Academy Awards have matched up was with 2003's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which was a big-budget fantasy sequel as well as a huge box-office hit.

More often, the group prides itself on singling out movies that are not obvious Oscar bait, like Mulholland Drive and Far From Heaven.

"Our best-picture winners, very few I would say were major hits because a lot of them tend to be smaller, more serious movies," he says. "They don't depend on special effects so they tend not to cost as much as most movies."

Agencies

(China Daily 08/21/2007 page19)