Читать книгу Breaking into Acting For Dummies - Larry Garrison - Страница 44

Every film or television project needs money. Although a producer can raise money from a variety of sources — including individual investors — many projects eventually need the financial resources of a studio. (Occasionally, studios even collaborate with each other to share the costs and risks of a project, such as Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount Pictures did with Titanic. That way, if the project bombs completely, neither studio loses too much money as a result of diversifying their risks.)

When a producer tries to convince a studio to invest money in a project, the producer is said to be pitching the idea or script to the studio. Pitching a project involves convincing the studio to help get the project completed. Getting a studio to agree to fund a project is still no guarantee that the project will ever get done. Sometimes a studio may decide to kill a project for political reasons (maybe the new studio executives don’t want to complete any projects started by the previous corporate executives), and sometimes studios kill a project because they think it’s going to bomb so they want to cut their losses.

Sometimes, big stars and directors may invest their own money into a project to ensure that the project gets made and to earn a bigger share of the profits. Kevin Costner invested his money to get Dances with Wolves completed, and George Lucas put in his own money to finish Star Wars.

Although studios have millions of dollars in resources, they can’t finance every possible project. Instead, they must selectively choose which projects they think will succeed and pass on those projects that they think won’t make money. (Of course, every studio has passed on projects that turned out to be blockbuster hits, which only goes to show you that nobody can predict who or what will hit it big tomorrow. Just ask the people at Universal Studios who thought Star Wars wasn’t worth financing.)

When a studio commits to starting a project, that project is said to be green-lighted.