Jeff Bridges and ‘Crazy Heart’ Shake Up Jittery Oscar Campaigns (original) (raw)

A Surprise Gets Buzz for Oscars

Nov. 18, 2009

LOS ANGELES A few weeks ago “Crazy Heart” was just another invisible movie, one with so little promise that the company that made it refused to put it into theaters. Now, suddenly, this low-budget film about a washed-up country singer finds itself at the heart of the Oscar race, with some awards watchers calling its star, Jeff Bridges, a likely best actor candidate.

Every year one or more films like “Juno” or “The Wrestler” seem to emerge from nowhere. What makes “Crazy Heart” so arresting this year is that it has jumped into the race at pretty much the last minute and also comes complete with a juicy business back story involving a studio, Paramount, that may find itself embarrassed for letting an Oscar winner slip through its fingers.

And it comes in a year when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has raised the number of best picture nominees to 10, causing even more filmmakers to demand potentially expensive awards campaigns from studios that increasingly wonder whether having an Oscar contender is an asset or a liability.

The tale had its turning point in July in Sun Valley, Idaho. While moguls were pondering the future of content and the impact of Google at their annual retreat, Jeff Berg, chairman of International Creative Management, was hounding Thomas E. Dooley, chief financial officer of Viacom, over the fate of “Crazy Heart,” which had been made for about $7 million by Country Music Television, a unit of Viacom. That media conglomerate’s Paramount Pictures division had the right to distribute the film, but it was not interested.

Mr. Berg, whose agency represents the movie’s writer and director, Scott Cooper, wanted permission from Mr. Dooley to sell it to a rival, lest the picture wind up in a scrap heap of straight-to-video releases. He got it, clearing the way for a purchase by Fox Searchlight Pictures, a division of the giant News Corporation.

A subsequent decision by Fox Searchlight to move the film’s release from early next year to mid-December, just in time to qualify for the Oscars and other year-end awards, catapulted it into the Oscar race. Now Mr. Bridges could promote the film; he would not have been available to promote it in the spring.

Once the film was shown to groups of industry insiders, Mr. Bridges, a well-liked veteran who has never won an Oscar despite four nominations since 1972, most recently for “The Contender” (2000), quickly generated word of mouth for his performance as the grizzled Bad Blake, a country legend reduced to appearances in bowling alleys. T Bone Burnett, who contributed music to the film and whose film credits include “Walk the Line” and “The Big Lebowski,” has also emerged as a potential big draw at the intimate screenings for Hollywood tastemakers, where Oscar candidates are born.

Despite the surface glamour of the Oscar race, studio executives have been waging a ferocious, and almost entirely private, debate about the value of joining the hunt.

The chase for prizes can add tens of millions of dollars to the cost of marketing a movie that, like “Crazy Heart,” may have been produced for peanuts. Sometimes, as with “Slumdog Millionaire,” which also fell to Fox Searchlight after a division of another studio passed on releasing it Warner Brothers, in that case the prize game pays off. That movie won a best picture Oscar and took in $141.3 million in domestic ticket sales, which were shared by Fox and Warner. But Universal was disappointed after spending heavily on “Frost/Nixon,” a best picture nominee, and its Focus Features division did only modest business with “Milk,” which was nominated as well.

Katie Martin Kelley, a spokeswoman for Paramount, said the studio’s backing this year for “The Lovely Bones,” directed by Peter Jackson, and “Up in the Air,” from Jason Reitman, was a sign that it is still willing to back a contender. “We believe in the Oscars, in terms of the value for a film,” Ms. Kelley said.

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Worth the Oscar campaign? Jeff Bridges in “Crazy Heart.”Credit...Lorey Sebastian

Mr. Berg, for his part, was at pains to thank Mr. Dooley and his boss, Philippe Dauman, chief executive of Viacom, for liberating Mr. Cooper’s movie, and at a price that others say was less than half of what Country Music Television had paid to make it.

Paramount executives, including John Lesher, who was then president of its motion picture group, screened “Crazy Heart” in the late spring. They had just suffered disappointment at this year’s Oscar ceremony with “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and were shuttering their own small film division, Paramount Vantage, which Mr. Lesher had started.

The studio passed on “Crazy Heart,” and Mr. Lesher was soon fired as Paramount continued to reorient toward more obvious moneymakers, as big as “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” or as small as the genre horror film “Paranormal Activity.”

Mr. Bridges’s showcase performance was pointed toward the video stack until Mr. Berg did his high-level lobbying.

Even after buying worldwide rights to “Crazy Heart,” Fox Searchlight had meant to introduce the film next year at festivals like Sundance and South by Southwest. But Mr. Bridges, who is the main attraction despite supporting performances by Maggie Gyllenhaal, Robert Duvall and Colin Farrell, had meanwhile scheduled some acting work in the Coen brothers remake of “True Grit,” a Paramount film, making him unavailable for promotional appearances in the spring.

So Fox Searchlight just weeks ago dropped “Crazy Heart” into this year’s Oscar race, putting Mr. Bridges in contention with George Clooney, for his role in “Up in the Air,” and Morgan Freeman, for “Invictus,” two actors whose work had dominated this year’s Oscar speculation even though none of these films have been released.

“Obviously, there are some incredible performances in the film,” Michelle Hooper, executive vice president for marketing of Fox Searchlight, said of the prospects for “Crazy Heart.” “We believe in the film. We love the film.”

One immediate result of the Oscar push: The original backers of “Crazy Heart” asked its producers to remove all Viacom-related credits, according to a person who was briefed on the situation but spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid conflict. In a nervous corporate world the only thing worse than losing money on a worthy little movie might be having one’s name on a film that scores for a competitor.

Rob Carliner, who works closely with Mr. Duvall and is a producer of “Crazy Heart,” said the awards potential for the movie would depend on audiences. “To have a shot at best picture with a small movie, you really have to demonstrate that it can cross over” from core fans to the broad audience, he said.

Fox Searchlight, Mr. Carliner said, is looking for support from the heartland, with hopes that the movie “has legs in a part of the country that is typically underserved by Hollywood.”

Mr. Cooper, an actor whose credits include “Get Low” and “Gods and Generals,” said he was just glad to have saved this, his first directing effort and a film that he’s worked on for about five years. He invested personally in the rights to the Thomas Cobb novel, the film’s source, and spent no small amount of time hanging around with the likes of Merle Haggard, the kind of aging star that inspires Mr. Bridges’s Bad Blake.

Mr. Cooper said he felt lucky too that he got “Crazy Heart” made when he did. “If I were making this movie right now, it would never get made,” he said, referring to the continuing disintegration in the small-film business. “This is the kind of little film that gets crushed by the big boys.”

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