COMMENT: Here’s an important story out of Hollywood about how and why some films get made. Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous is one of the key examples cited … examples of studios producing commercially marginal enterprises because of their “relationship” with a top talent, in this case their star director Roland Emmerich. This article should answer those Oxfordians who have complained (believe it or not!) about why Sony “chose” Emmerich to do this film, since it’s clear that it was just the other way around. The project was Emmerich’s baby all the way, and Sony let him do it. The film was made because Emmerich had a passion for the authorship story, and more importanly, for the “Prince Tudor” angle of the story.
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Why so many Hollywood relationship movies are box-office duds – latimes.com
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Studios these days are notoriously averse to risk. So why would Sony make a $30-million film based on the preposterous idea that the Earl of Oxford was the secret author of Shakespeare’s most popular plays?
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So why did everyone spend so much money on such commercially questionable subject matter? That’s where relationships come in. No one at Sony had a burning desire to make a thriller about who wrote “Romeo and Juliet.” But the director of “Anonymous,” Roland Emmerich, has filled Sony’s coffers to the brim with box-office loot from such hits as “2012,” “Godzilla” and “The Patriot.”
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“You have to believe in your talent,” she said. “I’m certainly not going to make a film that I don’t like. But when you have a relationship, something special comes out of that trust that you’ve built up over years of working together.”Pascal hedged her bets financially with “Anonymous,” which was co-financed by Relativity Media. But she says she has no regrets. “I believed in what Roland wanted to do. He had something fresh and entertaining to say, which is all you can ask for from a filmmaker.”
In other words, Emmerich had enough money in the Sony bank to get the benefit of the doubt.
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everreader 