A Golden Time for a New Golden Compass?

The news that there’s a deal for a television adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is very intriguing for us fans. It also shows how the economics of special-effects adventure dramas have changed in recent years.

In 2007, New Line’s adaptation of The Golden Compass cost an estimated $180 million to make. But that movie just didn’t capture the books’ magic, earning only $70 million in the US. That was so little that New Line’s parent corporation restructured the division the next year, bringing it under the control of Warner Bros. (The film made more overseas, but most of that money went to distributors, not the studio.)

Now television shows like Supergirl can afford digital visual effects on the same level, despite having a lower budget. And miniseries have become quite lucrative. So it’s possible to conceive of a His Dark Materials adaptation that’s not only visually stunning but tells the complete story of the three books.

Philip Pullman is part of this new deal. So is New Line, perhaps because it still holds the dramatic rights, and Scholastic. The production company, Bad Wolf, is new, without any completed projects, but its founders have brought on the BBC, their former employer. They also have ties to HBO, which would be a prime customer for the series in the US. All that makes me feel a little more hope than usual that this announced deal will lead to an actual show.

New Direction for The Golden Compass?

Monica Edinger alerted me to an interesting article in Variety about the movie version of The Golden Compass. Although it's seen as an expensive dud here in the US, it's been performing very well overseas. In fact:

After its strong start in Japan last week, "The Golden Compass" is on course to make box office history as the first film to gross $300 million in foreign while failing to reach $100 million in North America.

None of that helps the executives at the New Line studio, which is being absorbed into parent company Warner Bros. For one thing, they had sold off most of the international distribution rights, so those grosses "in foreign" aren't helping the company. For another, the situation implies that the movie could have been a hit in America as well if New Line's Marketing Department had taken the right approach.

Variety suggests The Golden Compass should have been marketed as a family film (i.e, for middle-grade kids and parents, like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) rather than a special-effects adventure film (for teen boys, like the studio's magnificently successful Lord of the Rings). I don't have enough of a feel for movie marketing to parse the differences here. But the controversy over the books' portrait of an oppressive church might have foreclosed some of those Narnia marketing channels. Then again, the movie grossed "a perfectly decent $15 million" in Italy even after the Pope himself had spoken up for oppressive churches everywhere by calling it "the most anti-Christmas film possible."

Producer Deborah Forte seems determined to proceed with a sequel based on The Subtle Knife, my favorite of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. Back in 1999 Sony Pictures president Amy Pascal told Entertainment Weekly, “If a movie makes $400 million, you make a sequel. It’s that simple.” She was talking about the Roland Emmerich-directed Godzilla, released in 1998. It made $136 million in the US and $243 million overseas--more than The Golden Compass has so far, without even adjusting for inflation. And we still haven't seen a sequel to that.

We also haven't seen DVD revenue for The Golden Compass. Though its visuals won't look so handsome on a smaller screen, the movie might find its family audience at home and start to grow American interest in a sequel.

The Real Star of The Golden Compass?

All along, my main question about the Golden Compass movie was whether it would get Iorek Byrnison right. Would the studio be able to find just the right polar bear to play the part?

Fortunately, New Line studio also saw the polar bears as crucial to the movie. It found an ursine actor named Ian McKellen for the part--I hadn't even known there were polar bears in the British Isles. He turned in a fine performance, making Iorek The Golden Compass's equivalent of Aslan in Narnia, as the Shortpacked webcomic knows.

Iorek's scenes could have been even more effective, though. I recognized dialogue and action from the book in the scene that introduced him, but it still seemed surprisingly inert for one that involves a half-drunk polar bear smashing apart a building.

I went back to reread that part of The Golden Compass, and realized how heavily condensed it had been. Two long scenes were compressed into one, many details were removed (e.g., Iorek has to retrieve his armor from the local priest, for the first time we feel Lyra and her daemon Pan separating), and we never see Lyra restraining Iorek's killing instincts. Philip Pullman's narrative voice disappears, too, of course.

Such compression is necessary for a movie, of course, but in this case the result felt slower, not faster. Which leads me to quote Eoin O'Faolain at Screenhead criticism about The Golden Compass's drab pacing and repetitive plot twists:

Weitz’s utter lack of...ability to generate excitement through a sense of adventure is disappointingly evident throughout the entire movie. The film uses the old “hero is about to be killed but at the last second is saved by an ally” device four times in a row, making the action scenes rather bland. Characters appear and disappear in the movie having little valid reason to be there (while the witches are important in the books, they acted as a mere deus ex machina in the film).

(I believe that should be "deae ex machina.")

O'Faolain also criticizes Weitz for not being able to muster any "visual panache," but there I disagree: as a series of still pictures, The Golden Compass looked mighty good. But in its dialogue and in how those pictures move from one to another, in how new elements enter scenes, it felt a little too draggy and familiar. For example, I could have done with about half the number of golden-hued special-effects shots of what Lyra sees in her alethiometer.

The first time the movie sprang to life for me was Iorek's duel with another armored polar bear. That might have been because at long last there was no leaden dialogue explaining everything. Alas, we never got to see the bears' catapult attack on an airship, which appears in the book's final chapters; I've been waiting to see that scene for years now.

Instead, The Golden Compass's action climax is a long battle on an icescape--a scene with a fine cinematic antecedents, from Alexander Nevsky to The Empire Strikes Back. But here the movie's visual acuity failed. It's important to light such a battle so the audience can see what's happening. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of dim men in fur coats swinging at each other.

A Dull Adaptation, and There Wasn't Enough of It

There's an old joke about people complaining that the food at a resort is almost inedible, and what's more, the servings are too small. The Golden Compass movie fits that model. It was disappointingly shallow and pedestrian, but probably could have been exciting and rich if there had only been more of it.

The cast was well chosen and the scenes' visuals, with one exception (which I'll discuss tomorrow), are handsome, and I could have spent much more time in those settings. The dialogue, however, leaps so desperately from one expository moment to another that there's little room for character development.

New York magazine's comparison of two early scripts for The Golden Compass with each other and the final film traces what could have been:

Like many fans, we'd always assumed that [Tom] Stoppard's draft must have been a work of genius, and that his replacement by [Chris] Weitz surely doomed the project. Much to our surprise, upon reading the screenplays, we're wrong. Had Stoppard's screenplay been filmed, the movie would have been ponderous, a bit dull, and far too long. Weitz's original script was actually great and makes us sad about the movie that could have been. . . .

Weitz's early draft, though still long — 156 pages and likely three hours of running time — is sharper, funnier, and more streamlined than Stoppard's. It's also more exciting, more coherent, and significantly better than the final product. . . . Why was this all cut? Presumably, to keep the film to two hours. . . . In the end it was that decision more than any other that doomed The Golden Compass to mediocrity.

Most notably, of course, both early screenplays contain the end of the book, the crucial sequence cut from the movie entirely so that its ending would remain uplifting.

Chris Kohler at Wired agreed that, "Many of the problems with Golden Compass can be blamed squarely on the film's run time."

Rope of Silicon has posted a link to some footage cut from the end of the movie but included in the videogame. Stills from the same scene show up in picture-book adaptations of the movie, so the cut must have come relatively late. Obviously Weitz filmed something like the book's ending, but in concurrence with New Line studio cut those final scenes to make the movie shorter and less downbeat.

IMDB.com confirms something I’d suspected: those final scenes might show up at the start of a Subtle Knife movie, should one be made from the second book in Philip Pullman's trilogy. There the footage would serve as a bridge from Lyra's adventure to the new story (which starts with a different protagonist), and establish the stakes in the new plot. But will that movie now be made, given The Golden Compass's lackluster domestic earnings? The all-important worldwide box office figures will say.

Looking Back at Looking Ahead

Today's Pullman posting prompted me to go back to some earlier posts and update their labels, which in turn made me reread my first remarks on the prospect of a Golden Compass movie, back in July 2006. I commented on three big challenges for the film:

• high special-effects budget
• resistance from people sensitive about any criticism of churches, even fictional ones
• how the first book ends on a cliffhanger, making it hard to give moviegoers the satisfying ending we've come to expect

Hmmm.

Searching for Boys with The Golden Compass

Although the Golden Compass movie has gotten generally positive reviews, its American box office performance has been tepid: a weekly average of $16 million over its first three weeks. In contrast, so far the film has made $130 million overseas, and was the world's top draw for two weeks.

The Golden Compass cost a lot to make: $180 million, or about two-thirds of what the Bush-Cheney administration expends on the Iraq occupation in one day. That high cost means it could be hard for the studio to produce sequels on the same scale, even with an international audience. The series might go the way of The Neverending Story, which had two follow-ups squeezed out over the next ten years with decreasing budgets and new young actors in the lead roles.

New Line studio has apparently decided that one weakness with the movie is that it has a young female lead. The Marketing Department has Photoshopped a boy into the newspaper ads. Perhaps armored polar bears alone weren't enough to get boys into cinemas.
At least there's a prominent boy hero in the second book, The Subtle Knife.

Looking Out for Iorek Byrnison

As soon as I received the last issue of The Atlantic, I turned to Hanna Rosin’s article “How Hollywood Saved God,” which was said to be about how the people making the Golden Compass movie had altered Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials saga to make its Gnosticism less troubling to non-Gnostics (not that those themes appear much in the first book).

I was disappointed to realize soon enough that that the reporter obviously hadn’t seen either the shooting script or the finished movie, and thus had no evidence on which to base any conclusions.

I did, however, note one passage about how the New Line studio came to option the book:

In 2003, when describing what sold him on the movie, Toby Emmerich, New Line’s president of production, explained, “It was two words: Iorek Byrnison.” Iorek is an “insanely awesome character,” he added.

That much-deserved praise for Pullman's armored polar bear came back to me this weekend when I read Charles McGrath’s story in the New York Times, “Unholy Production With a Fairy-Tale Ending.” Writer-director Chris Weitz initially declined to direct the movie because he felt it would be too big for him to handle.

The studio then turned to an even more unlikely director, Anand Tucker, known mainly for “Shopgirl,” based on the Steve Martin novel, who impressed the executives with storyboards suggesting how the movie might look. But Mr. Tucker and New Line soon ran into the kind of impasse that in Hollywood is called “creative differences.”

“You know, sometimes that’s really what they are: creative differences,” Mr. Emmerich said. From Mr. Emmerich’s own account and that of others, it appears that the problem with Mr. Tucker’s “Golden Compass” was that it was paradoxically both more expensive than the movie New Line was hoping for and smaller in scale. The deal breaker may have been when Mr. Tucker, as a cost-cutting move, decided to eliminate the bear fight, the movie’s great set piece.

Yes, that seems like a very quick way to lose a job: eliminate the most important scene for the studio head’s favorite character!

(Though, plotter that I am, I can’t help but wonder whether Tucker was simply proposing to eliminate that scene in order to force Emmerich to raise the production budget enough to get it back in. When federal agencies do that with their budget requests to Congress, it’s called the “Washington Monument ploy.” It doesn’t always work.)

The movie opens this weekend.