With the Golden Globes over, and Oscar nominations due to be announced soon, BoxOfficeGuru.com examines this year's major contenders with the new Oscar Spotlight column. Each Friday, editor Gitesh Pandya talks one-on-one with producers and studio executives behind some of the most acclaimed films up for recognition this season.

This week, Oscar Spotlight kicks off with a man who is both. James Schamus is the producer of Brokeback Mountain and also co-president of Focus Features, the film's distributor. This weekend, the award-winning cowboy drama expands to nearly 1,200 theaters and we discuss the awards, the industry, and all the madness leading up to the Academy Awards.

Box Office Guru: What was Monday like for you, from preparing for the Golden Globes to after all the big wins?

James Schamus: I have a very zen attitude towards this aspect of the business, which is not cynical and not dismissive. I really do try to distance myself emotionally from it, and I'm absolutely successful until they start reading the list of other nominees. At that point I literally turn into the most pompous and aggressive studio executive in Hollywood. This is a process that can reduce any semi-mature human being into the worst junior high school version of yourself imaginable.

BOG: Were you surprised that the film shot to number one at the box office the day after the Globes?

JS: No, because we've been watching not only the aggregate numbers. As you know, what you watch carefully and what you track are inside those numbers - where they're coming from, what's driving them, where they're growing. And we have been for the past four weeks both stunned into a kind of waking stupor, but also very proactively astonished at the numbers coming out of places like Little Rock, Arkansas or Fort Worth, Texas, or Pittsburgh or Columbus. The stereotype would be that you would continue to get huge grosses out of San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, etc. And then as you expand you'll get these smaller numbers from so-called "less sophisticated" markets. But, when you're doing $40,000 weekends on screens in Salt Lake City, you better catch up to reality fast! We're seeing this in every corner of America, and that's the real story. When we saw the trending, especially as we very organically and very carefully expanded the film, we really felt confident that if we had a presence at the Globes of any significant kind, that the film would rise its way up to the top.

BOG: How did you first get involved with the film?

JS: Many years ago as an independent producer back at Good Machine, I optioned the script from Larry [McMurtry] and Diana [Ossana] and spent two years failing miserably to make the movie, thank God. I let the option lapse, then we formed Focus, and then suddenly WE were the guys who were the ones who really were going to greenlight it or not. So we couldn't blame anybody else. And when my friend Michael Costigan called and said 'I've picked up the option to the film', suddenly I was either going to be a complete hypocrite or I was going to actually put my money where my mouth used to be.

BOG: Back when you began developing it, how big of an audience did you think the film would ever reach?

JS: That's a difficult question to answer, but because now we've had the experience so often, both success and failure, it gets easier. I always make a movie, from a financial point of view, with expectations that are solid. You know, you always have to believe in a film and believe it's going to find an audience. But 'solid' is still pretty modest. And yet from a marketing, publicity, and distribution point of view, everything we do at Focus is built around never precluding an unexpected success. There are ways of delivering specialized fare to the marketplace that puts its ultimate box office gross into the realm of self-fulfilling prophecies. And that is the one thing at Focus that we always attempt to avoid. We always want to keep an open architecture to our releases, that allows for the films to find and seek and grow audiences. Then we kind of push and follow. Brokeback is a pretty good example of that approach as finely tuned as we've ever had it.

BOG: Brokeback Mountain has been labeled the 'gay cowboy' film in the media. Does that help or hurt in the marketing of the picture?

JS: It does both in its own weird way. One thing that we did was not really engage that stereotype early on. The whole goal of this process is to get the film in front of people. The minute people see the film, the stereotyping and the caricatures disappear. But before they see the film, that handle is out there. I can't say I find it pleasant to think that things get stereotyped often in a fairly negative way, but at the end of the day the film was strong enough to resist that stereotyping. Our job was to make the best film we possibly could, and then we let the film do the rest of the work. You know last night I went on Google and looked up 'gay cowboy movie' and there were 190,000 hits! We've never shied away or apologized for the subject matter of the film. And we never sold a controversy either.

BOG: Other distributors have found success by selling controversy, it must have been tempting.

JS: You know, it's tempting, but it would have done a disservice to the film. And at the end of the day, we've proven for us it's better to sell the movie you have, and leave the shouting to out in front of the theater. If you have a movie and filmmakers you respect, I don't think that's really an appropriate way to release a movie.

BOG: Before the commercial release of the film, what steps did you take to get the film noticed in the industry?

JS: We always wanted the film to drive that notice, so Venice [International Film Festival] was the perfect launch for the picture. On one hand it's a relatively modest context, although the prestige and the press coverage of it was substantial. To have it win the Golden Lion there, and then show up at Toronto [International Film Festival], it had a credibility that then made people really pause. In the community, you had to see the film before passing judgment on it, at that point. It was a really good impetus to get people in to see the film.

BOG: What would an Oscar nomination for Best Picture mean to the film's domestic and international potential?

JS: The international releases are just starting to come into play. We opened in the U.K. a couple of weeks ago and hit number one at the box office there on Wednesday. We opened in France on Wednesday and are in the top three somewhere. We open in Italy this weekend and expect a similar response. Denmark has opened extraordinarily strongly. So everybody is already on a roll. The film is right around $6M in the U.K., and we haven't even started yet. And then we just got nine BAFTA nominations. So every step of the way, you're poised to seize the opportunity to present it. When the Oscar nominations are announced, and we hope we'll figure prominently but you never know, Brokeback will be on over 1,000 screens in North America.

BOG: Three years ago, the movie Chicago was slowly expanding and also grossed about $30M as of MLK day and was playing in about 600 theaters. It went on to do over $170M. Do you think Brokeback Mountain could be on a similar course and have the bulk of its audience still ahead of it.

JS: I do. I will allow others to speculate and allow myself only to dream of anything like the heights of a movie like Chicago. We made a specialized film. It was targeted towards the specialized niche market originally, and has proven to be a crossover hit. We didn't make this movie to be the next Star Wars. When we hit $10M, you have to understand, we were really happy! So all of it, and I mean literally all of it, is gravy. All of it is just simply mind-bogglingly extra. So yes, to answer your question directly, I believe that the bulk of the audience for this movie has yet to show up.

BOG: Has it been a challenge to be the producer of this film and also the co-head of the distributor releasing it? Do those jobs ever conflict?

JS: No. So far, I've been incredibly gratified by the fact that we've seen just zero snide Hollywood stuff, whereas the question is absolutely legitimate. This is the ninth film I've made with Ang. But I'll tell you where the conflicts arise. It's much more in production where on the one hand I'm with the studio saying basically 'no', and on the other hand I'm the producer saying 'please baby, please baby, please!' It was very important to me personally and professionally, and I think that set the tone all the way through release, that this film be made on budget and on schedule. That there was no double standard, even from day one. Ang had to make his days and he had to make this movie on budget. And I was going to make damn well sure that nobody could point to our behavior in production and finance for this movie and say 'see they played favorites.' So Ang got his rear-end kicked mightily hard, and that set the tone quite frankly. And the other thing is that we love our films so much and every release is crafted so individually, that the idea that somehow my dual role is responsible for all our critics awards, would be giving me too much all-power.

BOG: Do you think a big Hollywood studio could have developed and released this film properly?

JS: Well studios are getting more nimble and specialty divisions are getting more capable of crossing over. That said, I have no interest in becoming a studio. Zero interest. Our growth is not about growing our budgets and opening day screen counts of our movies. Our growth is always about finding new and exciting films to make. With that said, there are a number of studios out there that are fairly sophisticated these days, often because they are in constant dialogue with their specialty divisions and/or they're learning from marketplace patterns and distribution patterns that are evolving in the specialty field. You look at a film like Walk the Line. It's a mainstream crowdpleaser, but on the other hand it's very much a character-driven piece. I think Fox did an extraordinary job with the release of that picture.

BOG: With so many acclaimed films vying for the attention of Oscar voters, how do you keep Brokeback Mountain ahead of its competitors throughout the very long awards season?

JS: There are so many ways in which we can't do that. You have to allow it to happen. I wish I could lay claim to some kind of authorship to the vast majority of the discussions that are taking place all over the country and among Oscar voters too about what the film means. But you can only hope for that, you can't necessarily control it. However, the ongoing and nearly absurd story of the film's commercial success is a good signal. A lot of people wanted to frame the story of this film as a film that leftist Hollywood elite and critics would like but nobody else would. That was an early attempt to marginalize the picture, and I think that any Academy member who might have a fear that by supporting Brokeback they're supporting some kind of elitist cultural hegemony, that fear is now gone. When you look at what's going on in Salt Lake City, and in Kansas City, and in Little Rock, you know that if you support and respond strongly to Brokeback with your heart and soul, you're doing it in the company of millions and millions of other Americans.

BOG: Do you think box office success for a film like this has an impact on Oscar voters and moviegoers in general?

JS: Members of the Academy, at the end of the day, vote for the films that they love and respect the most. Some years it's Titanic. Some years it's The Piano. I think all those prognostications of 'oh, there's a trend' or 'it's all independent this year' or 'the independents are shut out', it's absurd. With independent and studio films, there's no law that says one type of movie is better than the other. Academy members have proven again and again that the agenda is the movies they most respect. There is no other agenda.

BOG: If you could change anything about awards season, what would it be?

JS: I would attempt to live in a world without it! Not that I don't like awards, and not that I don't feel as if there is a reason for any artistic community to celebrate achievements it finds most worthy on a regular basis. But the only thing I object to is the fact that I'm allergic to wool and I have to wear a monkey suit. I wish I were not the kind of person who got a little bit too involved sometimes.

BOG: Finally, what impact do you hope the film will have on both mainstream America and the film industry?

JS: On the film industry, not just Brokeback but this whole year with everything from Capote to Good Night, and Good Luck, there's so many movies that were made because people just felt passionate about making them and they were able to convince their colleagues and partners to help them. And so when you have a year when that happens, and there are so many good ones, that's a great signal to the industry that the only way you're going to actually stem the tide and win back audiences is to make films you believe in and not the films that some computer program tells you will have the best chance at success. As far as changing America, we didn't make the movie so that straight people would be nice to gay people. We've gotten thousands and thousands of emails and people literally want to share what they're experiencing. It's been one of those weird ancillary experiences of making and releasing this movie that's been amazing. People are really involved in this feedback. It's a really intense thing.

Be sure to check back next Friday for a new installment of Oscar Spotlight.

Last Updated : January 20, 2006