I am a sucker for musicals. I’m also a sucker for beautiful people in sundresses. Needless to say, I was a tad excited to see Damien Chazelle’s La La Land. The frontrunner for Best Picture delivered the goods. With a cast that looks like old Hollywood (Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone) it really couldn’t miss. The budget for the film was around $30 million dollars (and most of that seems to have been used for the first 10 minutes of the film). I started wondering how a movie like this gets made. Who gave this super talented director and writer $30 million to make an original musical? Chazelle’s first major studio film (Whiplash, 2014) was produced for $3.3 million and made $49 million. A lot of that is due to its Oscar run. Whiplash was a great movie in a great field (Birdman, Boyhood, Grand Budapest Hotel, and Selma, to name a few). La La Land is killing it at the box office (already at $130 million) so I thought I’d look back at similar first-time writer/directors who got their early work noticed by the Academy and how their follow-up films did critically, but mostly financially.
Benh Zeiten – This will be the shortest entry. Benh hasn’t had a release since his 2012 release Beasts of the Southern Wild. We could blame him for Annie but that doesn’t seem fair.
John Singleton – The youngest director ever nominated burst on the scene with Boyz in the Hood. While the film didn’t get nominated for the biggest award of the evening, Singleton was nominated for both his writing and directing at the age of 24. Boyz had a set budget of $6.5 million and raked in $57.5 million the domestic box office. Pretty good first try, right? Well, that was followed up with Poetic Justice ($14 mil, made $28 mil) the forgotten, but not bad, Higher Learning (made $38 mil) and finally found success with Shaft. He made a boat load of money with his next film, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and was last seen directing Taylor “jortsin’ werewolf” Lautner do parkour or something.
Jim Sheridan – Made his writing and directing debut with 1989’s critically acclaimed My Left Foot. The movie that launched the awards career of everyone’s favorite method actor, Daniel Day-Lewis. My Left Foot was the little indie movie that could, even in the 80’s. It was made for around 600,000 pounds and pulled in 14.7 million at the box office. So, what does Jim Sheridan do after making a financially successful, critic-loved film? He makes some movie called The Field. I will not lie. I have never seen The Field. Most of the over 7 billion people on the planet have not seen The Field. I figured I’d read the plot to see what we were all missing. I’ll give you a teaser of the plot and then you decide if you’d like to find a VHS copy. Here’s the first sentence: “Bull McCabe, an Irish farmer, dumps a dead donkey in a lake.” Nothing has made me want to watch anything more. The Field was budgeted at $5 million and made $1.4 million.
James L. Brooks – It’s not like Brooks was a complete unknown by the time he wrote and directed Terms of Endearment. The movie did well in awards season and made $108 million on a budget of only $8 million. He followed that up with the fairly big budgeted (for the time) Broadcast News which also got a Best Picture nomination and still made $67 million on $15 million. Brooks took a decade off from the writing/directing combo but came back on the scene in a big way with 1997’s As Good As It Gets which kept the perfect game streak alive with the film getting nominated for yet another Best Picture Oscar and sweeping the lead acting Oscars. Something that hadn’t been done since Silence of the Lambs. James L. Brooks didn’t do so hot with his next release. The movie, one I particularly enjoyed mind you, was Spanglish (Adam Sandler, Paz Vega). The film lost about $30 million. That’s not nearly as bad as his last effort. The immediately forgotten How Do You Know (Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon) reunites Brooks with Jack Nicholson but cost a staggering $128 million dollars to make. Its revenue was only $48 million. I’ll let you do the math. I’m not sure where that money went. Owen Wilson plays a Major League pitcher in the film, so maybe that’s where.
The last two directors aren’t even in the same discussion as the rest of the group. Warren Beatty wrote and directed Heaven Can Wait ($15 mil, made $80) and followed it up with the acclaimed, but financially underwhelmed Reds. He later wrote and directed Bullworth (lost money) and Rules Don’t Apply (lost money) in which he plays the super talented, super crazy Howard Hughes. Super talented and super crazy brings us to our last and earliest name.
Orson Welles – This is almost worse than Beatty. Orson Welles came to Hollywood after years in theater and radio and got a contract that nobody else could get. RKO had to have him and they would give him anything. The rest of Hollywood wasn’t a fan and Wells never came close to catching the magic he had in Citizen Kane.
Considering only people who have written and directed their first two films, I’m not sure that anybody will be as good as Damien Chazelle. If you haven’t seen La La Land or Whiplash (ESPECIALLY Whiplash) do yourself a favor and see them pronto. And if you’re sleepy, or hate donkeys, watch The Field.