Free Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business by Lynda Obst

returns home to her mom after being dumped on TV by her husband and is then pursued by Harry’s character, who has always loved her. Small-town Texas with a cowboy hat on the poster looked dusty enough to be a bomb overseas.
    But that was before Fox revamped the campaign and repositioned it for the global audience, sans dust. And against all predictions, the movie made some money abroad. Very few movies play well in Tokyo, Berlin and Denver, but not New York and San Francisco! Then and there, Jim became my international guru.
    •  •  •
    When I started making movies in the Old Abnormal, international counted for 20 percent of the business. By 2008, when I left Fox, it had come to count for 50 percent. In the New Abnormal, forreasons you will see shortly, it has evolved into an astonishing 70/30 ratio, soon to careen to 80/20. The model has turned upside down. It was obvious I needed my guru to explain how this happened, and why so rapidly.
    Jim Cameron had pushed the frontiers, and without knowing it helped create a vital emerging market, as Gianopulos related:
    “I said to Cameron, ‘Here are the cities where everybody wants you to appear on this publicity campaign . . . are you up for it? You know we have to go to fifteen countries. I will join you for some of them, but not all. You’ve got to do it.’
    “ ‘Okay,’ he said to me. ‘But do you make any money in Russia?’
    “ ‘No’ I said. ‘Why?’ I mean, this was 1997.
    “ ‘Can we go anyway?’
    “ ‘Sure, I guess so. But are we going to do all the other cities on the tour?’ ”
    Gianopulos had to have that commitment first. It was key to the success of the international release. Doing publicity only in Russia was the sound of one hand clapping.
    “ ‘Yeah, oh, yeah, no problem,’ he promised me. ‘But can we go to Russia?’ Cameron kept asking.
    “So, what could I say?” Gianopulos said to me with that you-can’t-say-no-to-a-thousand-pound-gorilla-you-love look. “The real reason he wanted to go was because he is a man of his word, despite Cameron always going over budget . . .” We laughed in mutual admiration of Cameron’s obsessiveness.
    “He is a man of integrity, and a commitment is a commitment,” Gianopulos continued. “Jim had become very friendly with the Russian sailors on the research vessel on which he went down to the Titanic. And when they completed their shoot, he told them, ‘When this movie is finished, I’m going to bring it here and I’m going to show it to you.’ Well, it turned out the guys weren’t in Moscow, they were in Kaliningrad, and despite all the years that I knew international, I had no idea where the fuck that was. It turnsout it’s a little tiny port that gives Russia access to the Baltic Sea. I think it’s actually part of Poland. And I was very worried. Because this is after weeks of having been tortured by Jim about the quality of the theaters, about the quality of the projections; every print had to be pristine, everything had to be impeccable, as he is. This is one of the things that make him such a great and devoted filmmaker. So when we decided to show it in Kaliningrad, I called the London office, which patched us in to Russia. I asked them, ‘Is there a theater in this place?’ ”
    Then Gianopulos continued this conversation first in a funny Russian accent, imitating the man who ran the theater in Kaliningrad, then switching to his own voice.
    “ ‘Yes, there’s a theater, but it’s kind of more like an auditorium.’
    “ ‘Okay, well, is it any good?’
    “ ‘Well, it’s okay, but they are fixing it up.’
    “ ‘Great, great, what are they doing?’
    “ ‘They are painting the seats.’
    “ ‘Okay,’ ” Gianopulos said, thinking, This is bad. It’s not going to work. “They were just these wooden, like, Soviet school auditorium seats, so of course we sent a crew in and they put in Dolby sound, and all of these technicians outfitted this