People in show business will tell you: It takes just as much sweat, time and tears to make a bad movie as a good one. HBO’s “Project Greenlight,” produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, is proof.
The reality show, whose latest season ended on Sunday, is ostensibly about choosing the best rookie director to shoot the best possible original movie. It hasn’t produced a great film in three previous seasons (one on Bravo) and this year was no exception. But this season was still an absorbing look at who holds power in Hollywood, at the tense dance of art and business, and at how “best” is in the eye of the beholder.
In the most notorious scene of the season Mr. Damon clashed with Effie Brown — a veteran African-American producer whose movies include “Dear White People” — over diversity in hiring. Ms. Brown argued for considering someone besides a white male to direct, especially since the script they planned to shoot was about a man who marries a black prostitute.
Mr. Damon disagreed. “When we’re talking about diversity, you do it in the casting of the film, not in the casting of the show,” he said (as if the choice of director in Hollywood doesn’t affect the actors cast, the crew hired, the perspectives shown). “You want the best director.”
That best choice, the show’s judging panel decided, was a white man: Jason Mann, an abstemious, film-purist fussbudget who avoided junk food and at one point used the term “movie-ish” as a pejorative. You might think that would make him a bad fit for a “broad comedy” under the mentorship of the Farrelly brothers (“Dumb and Dumber”).
You would be right. One of his first moves as director was to dump the script (titled “Not Another Pretty Woman”) and co-write a new one, a high-society farce called “The Leisure Class.” There was no black prostitute in this script, but now all the significant characters were white.
Ms. Brown was paired with Mr. Mann as his line producer to oversee the shoot. She saw her job as bringing “The Leisure Class” in on time and on budget. He saw his as bringing his exacting vision to fruition. He insisted on spending more to shoot on film rather than digitally, the $3 million budget be damned. She argued a newbie director would be better off using the money to finance a couple of extra shooting days.
He felt undermined. She felt disrespected. It was the bean counter versus the artist. Or the experienced professional versus the naïve whiner.
The season was an object lesson in how the art and business of movies work together — or should but don’t. Sure, nobody goes to a movie to watch the budget. But filmmaking is collaborative. Things go better if you work with your team, rather than against it.
Conflicts during production were more about logistics, budget and respect than race and gender. But the subtext was there, complicating the power dynamic. Ms. Brown, after all, is not entirely the establishment insider when she’s the only voice arguing diversity to a room of white producers and executives. And Mr. Mann is talented and passionate, but he’s also, necessarily, what an older white-male filmmaker might more easily see as a young version of himself.
Through the finale, though, Mr. Mann saw himself as an individualist bedeviled by the Hollywood machine. Editing the movie under the eyes of HBO, he lamented, “I would love it if I could make movies in the future where I don’t have to debate the logic of my opinion on how something should be.”
One way to get there is to have made an indisputably brilliant film. “The Leisure Class” is not terrible, but it’s not that.
The movie, which HBO will show on Monday, is a slight comedy of manners, a farce that’s only intermittently funny. The premise: William (Ed Weeks of “The Mindy Project”) is a con artist who’s become engaged to Fiona (Bridget Regan) in order to scam her father, a wealthy Connecticut senator (Bruce Davison). His scheme is complicated when his loose-cannon brother, Leonard (Tom Bell), shows up at the wedding-eve party and threatens to blow his cover.
It’s hard to watch “The Leisure Class” without thinking of “Greenlight” — which, in fairness, is a reality show edited for drama. Still, it sure looks as if Mr. Mann spent a lot of time fussing over inessentials. The cinematography is rich, but did shooting on film add much in a TV movie that viewers may end up streaming on laptops or phones? “Greenlight” spent more than one episode on the shooting of a highway crash that, to Mr. Mann’s exasperation, couldn’t involve a car-flip stunt. It looks fine. It lasts seconds. It’s a car crash.
Mr. Mann has a fine eye, and he uses the rapport between Mr. Bell and Mr. Weeks well. The real problems with “The Leisure Class” are story and character. Leonard is a human Cat in the Hat, a madcap chaos agent (Mr. Bell recalls Richard E. Grant in “Withnail and I”), but his motivations are never clear. Fiona is an enigma, making her story arc and her relationship with William unconvincing. The story feels padded and small, as if the entire season had been an argument over the best way to carve a grain of rice.
So was Mr. Mann the best choice? Other directors might not have had his technical brilliance. But they might have run a smoother shoot or focused on bigger-picture issues. They might have kept the awful-sounding original script. But they might have made something better of it.
Mostly, “The Leisure Class” makes me wonder what Mr. Mann might do with someone else’s script. Yes, as he said, cinema “should be kind of a personal art form,” but that doesn’t mean making movies alone, for a demographic of one.
The last scene of “Project Greenlight” showed Mr. Mann working together with his editor, Craig Hayes, finishing his movie’s final cut. “You did it,” Mr. Hayes said. “No, you did it,” Mr. Mann answered, then added: “We did it.”
Which I suppose is the lesson of “Project Greenlight.” In the end, even an auteur has to use the first-person plural.