Kicking Off Production: One Moore Hollywood Podcast and Jon Gordon Discuss the Greenlight Process
Welcome to the latest installment of One Moore Hollywood Podcast featuring the first-ever special guest of the show, producer Jon Gordon. In this episode, hosts Chris Moore, Katie Marpe, and Dennis De Nobile discuss the process of greenlighting a movie with Gordon–what it is, what it looks like for different kinds of production companies, and how it's changed over recent years.
Getting the Greenlight
Greenlighting a film means the studio has approved the project for production. So, what does it look like for a movie to get the official go-ahead?
According to Gordon–the former President of Production at Miramax, Annapurna, and Universal Studios–the greenlight process depends on the type of film studio. A major studio like Universal has a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it comes to making decisions. In contrast, independent studios like Miramax require fewer people to sign off on projects.
For visualization's sake, say Gordon is Universal's studio head. Before even entering a greenlight meeting for a film he wants to make, he will have done tons of work to prepare, including having conversations with every department head about the film. Even as the studio head, there's a long line of people he’ll need to convince and appease to get a project officially greenlit.
Compromise By Committee
As Gordon surmises, needing every head of department to sign off on a film tends to result in a lot of compromise to the film’s original vision. Since the ultimate goal for studios like Universal is to make a movie that satisfies the 'four quadrants' of age and gender demographics, each department has a different checklist. From the budget to the marketing strategy to the publicity efforts, there is an extensive range of competing interests at stake for each department when it comes to making a film.
"The audience doesn’t know what they want to see, but they can tell quickly when something is not authentic."
–Jon Gordon
At the end of the day, the financial risk of the movies Universal releases is often greater than the ones from Miramax. A major studio is always going to want to make the most amount of money possible, which means all the department heads have to be convinced of a film’s impending success before greenlighting it. But as Gordon warns, if you're making a movie by committee, the resulting film will likely be tempered by compromise.
More Risk Leads to Less Risk
Ten years ago, Gordon explains, you'd go to the movies to see something different, something new, something unique. However, since streaming entered the picture, the studios that used to make films for niche audiences became fearful of the increased risk and began to play it much safer with the projects they pushed forward.
"When you're making things that you want to appeal to everybody, that’s definitely going to compromise it… you're shaving every edge and corner off by not taking any chances.”
–Jon Gordon
Now more than ever, Hollywood values projects associated with names that carry pre-established audiences. Movie stars, popular book series, social media influencers, you name it; the less work major studios need to do to educate an audience about an upcoming film, the better. Star power is just another way to make big bucks, and with more content out there than ever before, studios are refusing to take chances on new faces.
As our hosts and Gordon agree, making content for everyone only sometimes works. The resulting film, a thing usually shaved of its originality, complexity, and weirdness in favor of something that more people will like, isn't always what the audience wants. There are exceptions, of course, the movie Barbie being the most recent example of a major studio getting it right. Even so, it's disappointing that this is often how the movie business operates today–an industry driven by money and numbers rather than creativity and originality.
Listen to the entire episode here: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or iHeartRadio.
