Project lessons from movie productions
Rob James
If the mechanical shark looks hokey, just film the dorsal fin and crank up the John Williams score.
If you work on big infrastructure projects, and if you like movies, then you might like stories of movie projects going sideways.
The tea-spilling podcast What Went Wrong and a shelf-full of books chronicling cinematic disasters and near-misses furnish a backlot’s worth of examples. There are obvious ones like Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo, Waterworld, and any number of Terry Gilliam flicks. There are not so obvious ones like The Emperor’s New Groove (originally a Sting musical?). And there are ones where the disaster is precisely what I want to see, like the 1967 Casino Royale with five directors, dozens of beautiful femmes fatale, and seven James Bonds.
Three film productions offering instructive project management lessons are presented here.
HEAVEN’S GATE: TAKE EARLY WARNING SIGNS SERIOUSLY
The 1980 film Heaven’s Gate featured great stars like Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges, and Isabelle Huppert. A chronicle of a Wyoming rancher-farmer conflict akin to old-time “oaters” like Shane and The Virginian, this Western was perhaps a bit out of sync with the times.
Director Michael Cimino was a hot property after the success of his Vietnam epic The Deer Hunter (1978); United Artists green-lit him to shoot his own script. He was subject to a budget of $11.6 million. But reportedly no senior studio “suit” was on set to mind the expenditure—beyond Cimino’s partner, who was the producer.
RAJ: Already we feel some organization chart tremors. The director, the screenwriter and the producer all lived under the same roof, and the producer was essentially the resident chief accountant.
Photography began April 1979 and the release date was set for December 1979. “According to legend, by the sixth day of filming the project was already five days behind schedule.” (Tim Robey, Heaven’s Gate: the bomb that almost destroyed Hollywood, The Daily Telegraph, Jan. 29, 2015.)
50 takes of scenes were routine; entire sets were demolished and rebuilt just to widen the street six feet. 220 hours of footage were ultimately filmed. The delays were such that John Hurt, who had a small part, went off and starred in The Elephant Man for David Lynch, then returned to Heaven’s Gate for his bit.
Cimino presented UA a five and a half hour print in June 1980. It was released with cuts to “only” 3 hours 39 minutes a year late, for Christmas 1980, to poor critical reviews and weak box office. (A milder review was to the effect that Cimino sold his soul for the success of The Deer Hunter “and the Devil has just come around to collect.”) It grossed $3.5 million on its run against $44 million of expenses. (It must be said that later critical appraisals have been kinder.)
RAJ: When a project goes five days over schedule within six days after Final Investment Decision (FID) or Notice to Proceed (NTP), it is time to reassess the project and the project team. Sunk costs and past green lights are sunk; don’t let them color your present judgment.
Otherwise, it may quickly become too late. A decision to acquire a business may have been made before due diligence identifies significant issues suggesting a price renegotiation or even walking away, but the deal often proceeds because the corporate momentum is overwhelmingly in favor of sticking to the initial commitment.
JAWS: IF THE SHARK SUCKS, LOSE THE SHARK
A classic that brushed up against calamity was the 1975 summer blockbuster Jaws. No major movie had been shot on location at an ocean setting, which here led to cost and schedule overruns ($3.5 million and 55 days became $9 million and 159 days). But plenty of movies have run over. Here, the project management lesson instead lies within the property department. (Edith Blake, The Making of the Movie Jaws (1975).)
The center of the action was supposed to be the shark, visible in many scenes establishing the horror. The two mechanical robot props malfunctioned, however, and what is more, even a genuine shark eye is kind of cartoony looking and does not inspire innate fear. Desperate, young director Steven Spielberg gave up and just filmed the dorsal fin and the actor reactions, and leaned more and more on the menacing John Williams score during the buildups. The scenes became iconically frightening. (I personally saw Jaws that summer from the first row of a drive-in—the “IMAX of the 1970s,” if you will—and can attest to the shock.)
Spielberg originally thought the two-note Williams theme was a joke. He later recalled, “The shark not working was a godsend.” The ad-libbed line from Roy Scheider (“you’re gonna need a bigger boat”) and the USS Indianapolis monologue of the difficult actor Robert Shaw were lucky lightning strikes—contingent benefits that sealed the film’s legacy. (The film did all right and recovered its budget, thank you very much.)
RAJ: If a project element is not working well, quickly assess whether it is necessary or if there are alternatives that work just as well or better. On a ballpark construction project, when brick masonry became problematic, we moved to concrete that was dyed and pressed into brick shapes, and we thereby kept on budget and schedule.
And as with Roy Scheider’s spur-of-the-moment line, never underestimate the power of good fortune on your projects.
INSIDE OUT: REVISE, REHEARSE, AND LISTEN
Pete Docter, the chief creative officer of Pixar, tells an interesting project management tale from the making of the original Inside Out (2015). One might think an animated movie would progress smoothly from elevator pitch to finished film. Instead, the Pixar process at the time was to turn a 12-page outline into a 120-page draft and then into a 90-minute filmed storyboard (of 2700 drawings, with employees speaking dialogue and making sound effects).
As early as that point, this crude “home movie” version was shown to rank-and-file Pixar employees—not just the production team or executives, but instead to a wider range of potential filmgoers. Their feedback led to substantial rewriting, and the process was repeated—as many as eight times. (Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner, How Big Things Get Done (2023) p. 72.)
From those audience response sessions, Docter as director and co-screenwriter learned that he had too many voices going on in Riley’s head (Schadenfreude and Ennui, believe it or not) and reduced them to the final five. Much of the early plot-driving dialogue was concentrated in Joy voiced by Amy Poehler, akin to Poehler’s incessantly peppy Leslie Knope character in Parks and Recreation. Audiences were put off by that. Docter listened to their feedback; he shunted some of the plot lines to other characters, like Phyllis Smith as Sadness and Mindy Kaling as Disgust. That subtle change made the team more collegial—all while still centering the interior story around Joy. “By the time you see the film, it’s about the ninth version of the movie that we’ve put up.”
RAJ: Project planning should visualize the entire work process before the first shovelful of dirt is turned. “Dress rehearse” the entire project and get feedback from all types of stakeholders and communities, not just the ones who approved the project in the first place and who have a vested interest in protecting their position.
I had a client to whom I reported on joint venture negotiations, for whom I made sure to get all the facts and feedback quickly before he formed an opinion. I knew that as soon as he had made a decision, he would defend that choice even as new facts started to come in that might suggest a course correction.
“There are eight million stories in the naked city [of Hollywood], and this has been [three] of them.” See you at the movies!