Tom wrote:That cycle of stock footage film from the last 90's, to early 2000's appears to have ceased, but I do wonder if we'll see a new wave come up soon. Some genius will figure it's been a long time since we've seen a few Submarine/fighter pilot action films.
If I see Dolph on a poster with a crappy looking Submarine behind him in the next couple of years, it wouldn't surprise me.
Though I guess now because of digital film and the ease of using CGI (even poor standard), you can shoot anything you like as cheaply as possible.
The producers of these movies, like Andrew Stevens were lucky to get the idea to use stock footage before everyone else did. As soon as studios and the stock footage companies realized there's a real demand out there for big action shots and B-roll of explosions and what not they started to charge premium fees.
Jim Wynorski, who directed a lot of them (including working on this one) along with Fred Olen Ray, said in an interview that back then when they bought stock footage, it was for them to use as many times as they liked, and in as many different movies as they wanted for the same price, and the used to get several minutes of great looking footage for not a lot of money. I think he used the same footage of an airplance action sequence is several of his movies.
Nowadays however they only sell the footage in clips that are a few seconds long, and you can only use them once in one project, and the prices you have to pay are a few thousand per clip, footage from the big studios like Sony can cost close to $10k per clip. So I guess for DTV producers it's not worth it to spend 5 figures on a few clips, when they can instead use CGI explosions or something or hire a name actor for a few days who brings more value than any car chase scene would.
You still see it sometimes though, Danny Trejo's Badass used the bus chase footage from Arnold Schwarzenegger's Red Heat, a movie that was made over 20 years prior.
Jox wrote:What Stevens told me a few years back sums it up :
I make what the buyers ask for. I don’t blindly make films that the marketplace doesn’t want or support.
Of course he's talking about "his market" in which back then he could sell his TV movies easilly to undemanding distributors and even the likes of HBO (STORM CATCHER & JILL RIPS). And he would repeatedly respond "not at liberty to discuss" when asked about things like budgets (even though I don't think anyone really cares but everyone knows they were CHEAP)...
I have Stevens' book Foolproof Filmmaking, which is essentially another how to guide and a little bit outdated in its information since Stevens hasn't been that active in recent years which have seen a huge change in the business, but it has some very interesting stories about how they used to finance these movies.
Because they financed the movies mostly with pre-sales they would go to the biggest foreign buyers and ask what they wanted, so a Japanese buyer might say that submarine movies go over big there, give us a submarine action movie and we'll pay you $200k, then a buyer from Germany would say that martial arts movies are in demand, give us a martial arts movie with lots of hand to hand fight scenes and we'll pay you $300k, then they would go to the US buyer who would say they need a name, give us an action movie with a name and we'll give you $500k.
So they took all these pre-sales and would make a submarine movie with martial arts action starring Michael Dudikoff for like $1M-$2M or less. Something for everyone. And because they have to please all these different buyers, the movies often were a big mess with all these different elements that don't necessarily make sense.