Nobody Knows Anything

Nobody knows anything
New documentary explores the mystery of how to make a hit

CANNES, France Virtually nothing Hollywood produces can be sure of
success, say the filmmakers behind a documentary that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
The movie "Boffo! Tinseltown's Bombs and Blockbusters" presents such filmmakers and stars as George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, Jodie Foster,

Morgan Freeman and Richard Dreyfuss, all reaching the consensus that to
slightly paraphrase screenwriter William Goldman's famous Hollywood dictum
no one really knows anything about what makes a hit and what makes a

flop.
The directors, producers, actors and studio executives interviewed in the
film agree that groundbreaking movie successes share some common denominators, yet there is no formula to guarantee a hit. "You have to take risks, you have to believe in yourself, you have to have
luck, you have to accept failure and move on," said "Boffo!" director Bill
Couturie. "You have to have a script, and then you put all that together,
and sometimes the movie god smiles at you and sometimes he doesn't." The documentary, which makes its cable TV debut June 29 on HBO, was inspired by the forthcoming book "Boffo! How I Learned to Love the Blockbuster and Fear the Bomb" by Peter Bart, editor in chief of the daily
Hollywood trade paper Variety. The book comes out June 14. (HBO is a unit
of Time Warner, as is CNN.)
Bart an executive producer on "Boffo!," a documentary made in conjunction with Variety's 100th anniversary said the key similarity

shared by most innovative hits is that no one in Hollywood believed they
would work.
"Almost all of the major hits, the kinds of hits that really sort of moved
the needle on pop culture, they were all absolutely bashed at every stage.
Everyone hated the idea to begin with," Bart said. In the documentary, Freeman discusses projects he's been involved with that surprised Hollywood by clicking with audiences: Clint Eastwood's brooding Western "Unforgiven"; "Driving Miss Daisy," the story of a black
chauffeur and a cranky Jewish widow; "The Shawshank Redemption," a prison
buddy saga that sank at the box office then found commercial success on

home video; and "March of the Penguins," the documentary smash Freeman narrated.
"Penguins? Penguins? Penguins?" Freeman says. "Nobody knows. You never can
know."
"Boffo!" presents a litany of films that defied convention and became major hits, among them "Jaws," "Star Wars," "Tootsie," "Forrest Gump," "Braveheart," "Apollo 13," "A League of Their Own" and "Cast Away." The documentary focuses mainly on the blockbusters and is relatively light
on the bombs, but does examine what went wrong with such duds as "Howard
the Duck," "Clan of the Cave Bear" and "The Bonfire of the Vanities." "Bonfire" was adapted from Tom Wolfe's best seller and starred box-office
stalwart Tom Hanks, yet it became one of modern Hollywood's big flops. Sixteen years later, Hanks starred in another best-selling adaptation, "The Da Vinci Code," which pulled in $232 million worldwide by the end of
opening weekend.
"That was a gold-plated project from day one," Couturie said. "They spent
whatever they needed to make the movie, and they got the best people they
could find."
Bart noted how executives at Universal scoffed at George Lucas when he delivered his 1960s nostalgia romp "American Graffiti" with unorthodox trappings such as multiple story lines and a wall-to-wall rock 'n' roll

soundtrack.
"Universal said this isn't even good enough to sell as a TV movie, and they said, 'Get lost, kid. You're in the wrong business,"' Bart said of

1973's "American Graffiti," which became a $100 million smash.