As a country with separation of powers, the legislative power of the United States is mainly in the hands of Congress.
The core job of members of the House and Senate after being elected is to propose, formulate, amend or repeal various bills (Bills) based on the actual conditions of all walks of life in the United States.
The U.S. Congress accepts thousands of bills of various types every year, ranging from the national economy and people's livelihood to the trivial.
Of course, there are differences in the importance of bills.
Take Hollywood for example. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which is mainly responsible for helping major Hollywood studios lobby, one of its recent lobbying focuses is to abolish the merger restriction act between Hollywood studios and the American Public Television Network.
The repeal of this bill will involve tens of billions of industrial changes.
On the other hand, members of Congress naturally cannot conceive of some bill out of thin air just sitting in their offices.
Most bills come from members of the House and Senate through communications between the public, unions, business owners, interest groups or federal government agencies.
Therefore, the United States has produced countless professional lobbying companies, responsible for connecting various groups and members of Congress.
Although the so-called lobbying in the United States cannot avoid behind-the-scenes power games or exchanges of interests, it is generally very formal. At least on the surface, no congressman would be so stupid as to accept invitations to dinner, gifts, and red envelopes from someone who knows they want something from them.
If you want to push for a bill, you first have to contact your connections, usually lobbying firms.
If you can't find the 'temple gate', everything is in vain.
It is worth mentioning that most lobbying consulting companies are often established by politicians who have resigned from various levels of U.S. departments. The more top politicians are, the higher their fees will naturally be. This is another form of high salary to support integrity.
Considering the huge number of bills submitted to the U.S. Congress every year, you can imagine the huge income of these people.
If you have connections, it is impossible for others to help you persuade a certain congressman to submit a bill without any basis, let alone to put money into the hands of certain people for you. If you want to promote any bill, you must collect and organize the corresponding data yourself to prove the necessity of enacting or repealing a certain bill.
After obtaining sufficient data, members draft a bill and submit it to Congress, which then enters the process of review, debate, and voting.
The process after a bill is submitted is often the focus of the game.
In most cases, the more important a bill is, the more it will take more than just solid evidence and detailed data to ensure its passage.
This requires the promoters of the bill to continue to show their talents, including political strife, mutual compromise, public opinion building, interest exchange, etc., to name a few.
The frequent back-and-forth between the White House and Congress over the annual government budget bill has even led to government shutdowns, which is the most intuitive manifestation of this kind of game.
Of course, most of the dark confrontations hidden behind the scenes are often not visible to ordinary people.
The bill that Simon discussed with Joseph Schlapp this time prohibits operators from participating in the field of telecommunications equipment manufacturing is a relatively important economic bill. It will take about two or three years from the time the bill is proposed to the time it is voted on, and it may require lobbying together with other telecommunications control bills.
The two discussed for more than an hour, initially finalized some details, sent Joseph Schlapp away, and Simon boarded the flight back to the West Coast at the Westchester County Airport near Greenwich.
Back at Cape Dume, it’s just lunch time on the west coast.
After having lunch with Janet and casually chatting about the trip to New York, Simon rushed to work at Daenerys Studios in the afternoon.
Today is Monday, May 20th.
Next Friday, the 1991 summer season will begin.
However, today is another day. Another Cannes Film Festival in France ends today.
There is a nine-hour time difference between Los Angeles and Cannes. When he arrived at Daenerys Studios in the afternoon, Simon quickly received the film festival award results from Cannes, which was already at night.
Daenerys Entertainment's two films that entered the main competition this time, the Coen brothers' "Barton Fink" and Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever," both missed Cannes' top Palme d'Or. Fortunately, they were not empty-handed. Returning, "Barton Fink" won the Best Director Award, and Samuel L. Jackson in "Jungle Fever" won the Best Supporting Actor Award.
In Simon's memory, "Barton Fink" should actually win the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year.
However, two of the three Palme d'Or films in the previous three years, "Pulp Fiction," "Cinema Paradiso" and "Wild at Heart," were American films. Two American films, one produced by Daenerys Entertainment and one distributed by Daenerys Entertainment.
This time, the Cannes jury apparently had some balance in mind.
The final Palme d'Or winning film was French director Jacques Rivette's "La Belle Embrace".
Jacques Rivette is not very well-known, but one of the heroines in "Beauty Untamed" is well known to everyone, her name is Jane Platinum. Hermès’ Birkin bag, which is outrageously expensive but coveted by countless actresses and ladies, is named after Jane Platinum.
Because of such a gimmick and the blessing of the Palme d'Or, Ella Deutschman is already in contact with the copyright owners, hoping to obtain the North American distribution rights of "Uninhibited Beauty".
Neither "Barton Fink" nor "Jungle Fever" won the Palme d'Or, but only won two minor awards, which actually met Simon's expectations.
After all, Daenerys Entertainment cannot take all the light, so it is necessary to keep a low profile and bide its time.
Moreover, Gaomen Pictures’ overseas awards business focus this year is actually the Venice Film Festival.
Due to the production schedule, Jane Campion's "The Piano" was unable to participate in the just-concluded Cannes Film Festival, but it has been applied for the main competition unit of this year's Venice Film Festival.
Jane Campion's "Angels at My Table" received very good reviews at the Venice Film Festival last year. "The Piano" is obviously more suitable for the artistic temperament of Venice than Cannes. This film is very promising. Win this year's Venice Golden Lion.
On the other hand, the connections Ella Deutschman and Sofia Fesi have developed in the Italian entertainment industry are enough to support "The Piano" to win the championship.
Apart from the affairs in Cannes, Simon's main busy work during this week back on the West Coast is "The Flash" which has been successfully completed in Melbourne and returned to North America.
As the first producer of "The Flash", Warner expressed a lot of doubts and dissatisfaction with Simon's behavior that he never went to Melbourne to visit the studio in person during the filming of the film.
Simon didn't refute this, and he really didn't have time. However, Simon actually invested a lot of energy in this film, which was enough for him to get the salary included in the original producer contract.
For several working days, Warner Bros. CEO Terry Semel took time to review the dailies with Simon every day.
Terry Semel didn't feel relieved until it was confirmed that there were no major problems with the film samples and Simon personally presided over the finalization of the film's post-production plan.
Time has come to Friday, May 24th in a blink of an eye.
The summer season of 1991 officially started.
This week alone, a total of six new films of above scale were released. In addition to the Antarctic documentary "Snow World" released by Gomen Films and the popular summer comedy "Fred the Trickster" from New Line Cinema, the opening of the other four films The size of the painting screen has reached more than 1,000 pieces.
The four films are "Backfire", a fire-type crime action film starring William Baldwin and Kurt Russell, which is temporarily distributed by Universal Pictures. It has a screen size of 2,036.
The Bruce Willis comedy action film "Condor" released by Columbia Pictures' TriStar label has an opening screen size of 1,621.
Chris Columbus's new romantic comedy film "The Big Man", which was promoted to the front-line last year by directing "Home Alone", has an opening screen size of 1,561.
And finally, Disney produced the horse trainer-themed movie "The Prancing Horse" adapted from a true story, with an opening screen size of 1,521. .
The opening screen sizes of "Ice World" and "Fred the Troublemaker" are 687 and 821 respectively.
Perhaps because the competition is too fierce, or because none of the six new films has the potential to be a hit, in the first week from May 24 to May 30, no film in North American theaters had a single-week box office of more than 20 million US dollars. Appear.
Universal Pictures' "Backfire" finally won the single-week box office championship, with a box office of only 19.21 million US dollars in the first seven days.
Subsequently, the second place on the list was an old Disney film "Crazy Geniuses". The film tells the story of the male protagonist starring Bill Murray who has a series of unfounded insecurities about the world. A series of jokes.
"Crazy Geniuses" opened last week, and in its second week of release, due to word-of-mouth fermentation, it unexpectedly achieved a 5% box office drop and earned US$13.53 million under the attack of many old films.
The new film "The Eagle" starring Bruce Willis ranked third, but the box office dropped directly to US$8.64 million.
The production cost of "Flying Tiger and Condor" is as high as US$65 million.
With negative reviews and a dismal start of US$8.64 million, the commercial action movie may experience a 50% drop in the next week. The total North American box office of the film may be less than US$20 million. Columbia Pictures is destined to lose all its money. Sony, the owner, once again paid an expensive 'tuition' to Hollywood.
Chris Columbus' new film "The Big Brother" ranked fourth, earning $7.73 million.
Based on the film's production cost of US$20 million, it was also a failure.
Immediately afterwards, the fifth place was not Disney's "The Prancing Pony" or New Line's "Fred the Trickster", but "Snow World" which brought a refreshing feeling to this summer.
In the first week of its opening, "Snow World" opened with 687 screens, which exceeded many people's expectations and earned a box office of 6.97 million US dollars.
If calculated carefully, "Snow World" has become the only film whose average box office in the first week of the summer season barely exceeded 10,000 yuan.
As we all know, a new film that opens on a larger scale can only be considered a blockbuster if its first-week openings exceed 10,000.
From the original fashion documentary "The Gucci Mark" to this year's Easter-scheduled Madonna music documentary "Truth and the Brave" to the Antarctic scenery documentary "Snow World" at this time, Hollywood has been helpless to find that its own studios have been trying their best to Following in the footsteps of Daenerys Entertainment, a fashion documentary was launched, a music documentary was brewing, and now, a landscape documentary has popped up.
What’s even more devastating is that it is said that the budget of this documentary is only 3 million US dollars, and it is just a birthday gift given by the Westeros couple to a little girl.
The box office revenue of US$6.97 million in the first week can be regarded as directly recouping the production cost.
According to such opening data, next step will be to strengthen the publicity, a little more word-of-mouth and popularity brewing, and appropriately expand the scale of screenings. It will not be a problem for this documentary to easily accumulate 30 million US dollars in box office.
Although the box office of 30 million US dollars is still far from the "Diary of the Penguin" in Simon's memory, this is already a rare success in the eyes of other Hollywood studios.
Compared with the budget cost of US$3 million, the return rate is 10 times only at the North American box office!
Hollywood studios that were originally following the trend and trying to support the previous successes of "Imprint of Gucci" and "True and Brave" have set their sights on various scenic spots on the earth after the box office of "Ice World" was released.
Some producers also began to take the opportunity to promote adventure projects to studios such as the Antarctic, Arctic, Amazonian jungle, and Sahara desert. Even a documentary plan to explore the African savannah appeared on Simon's desk.
However, among this series of films, Simon is more concerned about "Fred the Troublemaker".
Or New Line Cinema, the company behind Fred the Troublemaker.
New Line Cinema in the original time and space relied on the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" series to make its fortune. After "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" exceeded 100 million in box office, it entered the mainstream studios' field of vision. It was eventually acquired by Time Warner and created "The Lord of the Rings", "The Peak" Hours" and other hit series.
Now, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" has been censored by Daenerys Entertainment.
The loss of one movie in the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" series, which was enough to support a second-tier studio's profits for several years, has basically exhausted the potential of the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" series. In addition, New Line has blindly expanded film production and distribution in the past few years. In terms of scale, the summer release of "Fred the Troublemaker" can be regarded as one of New Line Cinema's last attempts before its decline.
"Fred" stars Carrie Fisher and Phoebe Cates. According to information obtained by Simon, the film's budget is approximately $6.7 million. Just from this number, it is not difficult to see how sophisticated the new line is.
Although after so many years of accumulation of distribution resources, New Line forced this fantasy comedy film into the summer schedule, its box office opening was not ideal, with only 4.39 million US dollars, and it was basically impossible to break through the 10 million mark.
However, including the publicity and distribution costs, the total budget invested in "Fred the Troublemaker" is probably US$10 million.
Clearly, this was a failed project.
For Daenerys Entertainment, the failure of a $10 million project is completely insignificant.
New Line Cinema, which has a shallow foundation after all, cannot afford several similar losses.
Simon checked New Line's 1991 film list, and there were as many as 11 films planned for theatrical release.
Except for "A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Last Nightmare," Simon didn't find any of the remaining films to have blockbuster potential.
A film company that barely squeezed into the second tier, churning out 11 movies in a year, basically used up all the wealth accumulated in the past few years. If Simon's secret sniping is also included, this film company will only fall back to the bottom again. A bleak business situation.
Speaking of which, another company that Simon has been secretly watching, Miramax Pictures of the Weinstein brothers, is now in complete turmoil because it has missed out on turnaround films such as "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" and "Cinema Paradiso" in succession. A small-scale, workshop-like business operation.
Since they have no production capabilities at all, the brothers have been able to fudge some copyrights from Europe to North America in the past two years to earn a little bit.
In the final analysis, just as the total number of moviegoers in the U.S. movie market is relatively fixed each year, Hollywood's luck is also fixed.
The rapid development of Daenerys Entertainment for several consecutive years has not only captured a large number of blockbuster films that originally belonged to other studios, but also carved out a large part of Hollywood's other resources.
Even the other major studios are feeling the pressure in front of Daenerys Entertainment, not to mention those second- and third-tier film companies that cannot form economies of scale and have mediocre ability to resist risks.
In the past few years, Daenerys Entertainment has continued to devour Hollywood's best scripts, the most outstanding filmmakers, the hottest movie schedules, the hottest public opinion attention, and the highest quality publicity and distribution resources...
Losing the studio that was originally its own blockbuster project, even if it can still produce other films of good quality, with the all-round shrinkage of film and television production and marketing resources, those films produced by Daenerys Entertainment have taken away a lot of attention film can no longer compete with Daenerys Entertainment at the box office.