Blockbusting

George Lucas's Blockbusting

When the ultra-fussy film director Stanley Kubrick had problems devising a prehistoric set for his 1968 space movie 2001, he got help from an unlikely direction.

The production tea boy Andrew Birkin had an idea, caught the overnight train to Liverpool and photographed the dunes at Formby.

It was just the design reference Kubrick needed and the director was so impressed that he immediately promoted his tea boy to effects coordinator and special assistant.

This is just one of thousands of tales from George Lucas's Blockbusting, a decade by decade survey of Hollywood movie production and distribution.

The basic premise was to take 300 best-selling films and look at their production problems and financial gain and loss.

It's a huge brick of a book running to 944 pages with each film getting a double page spread, statistics on the left, production stories on the right.

Between the films there is a lot of other information covering each decade from 1900 to 2005.

The design means that it is a book you can dip into now and again and each time you find fascinating information.

At random I can pick the 1935 David Copperfield produced by David O Selznick. He fought hard to make the film - MGM executives thought the subject "too highbrow" - and had to drop his original casting of Charles Laughton as Mr Micawber when the actor proved unhappy in a comic role (W.C.Fields got the role and did a great job). Then cinema owners complained that its running time of 2hours 13mins was too long.

But the public loved it and it became one of MGM's biggest grossing films of the year.

Cecil B. DeMille also had to fight for his 1925 silent classic The Ten Commandments when it went over budget. Paramount executives wanted to curb expenses so DeMille offered to buy the film himself for $1million. The execs got cold feet, allowed DeMille to continue and ended up with one of the biggest financial successes of the silent era.

Today, as the book makes clear, big box office does not always mean high profit thanks to all the cash spent on advertising and other post production deals. A profit and loss account for the 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit shows that it made £349 million at the box office but actually ended up with a net loss of $19 million.

Just as important are the rising salaries of the actors. When Sylvester Stallone made the first Rambo film in 1985 his salary was $3.5 million. Three years later by the time of Rocky IV, his salary was $15 million. Stars also had their own staff who needed paying: When Demi Moore appeared in the 1995 flop The Scarlet letter, her support staff (assistant, chef, trainer, makeup artist, hairdresser and three nannies) picked up $877,000 from the movie budget.

Today, it's all about franchise movies, films that create other films with all the merchandising that goes with it - examples are Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones and Star Wars.

A couple of things to be said about Blockbusting: it is an American book and concentrates almost entirely on American production and distribution. But what America does today, the UK generally does tomorrow so although the book goes up to the end of 2008, it is already reporting the growth of 3D screens.

And while Lucas gets his name in the book title, it has actually been edited by film writer Alex Ben Block with contributions from a host of others.

Is it a worthwhile buy? Put it this way, I purchased this myself from my local Waterstones and paid full price. While some of the graphs and profit and loss accounts left me a little confused, I found the whole book fascinating. It also gives plenty of space to the silent cinema, one of my favourite eras.

* George Lucas's Blockbusting is published by itbooks and George Lucas Books at £19.99.