Hayes, Dade

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Office—c/o Author Mail, Hyperion Books, 77 W 66th St., 11th Floor, New York, NY 10023-6298.

CAREER: Journalist; formerly worked for Los Angeles Times, Investor's Business Daily, and Associated Press; Variety, Los Angeles, CA, began as film reporter, became assistant managing editor, 1999–2005.

WRITINGS:

(With Jonathan Bing) Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession, Hyperion Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Los Angeles Times, TV Guide, and Premier.

SIDELIGHTS: Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing are journalists who serve on the editorial staff of Los Angeles-based Variety. Working in Hollywood and covering the weekly openings of major studio movies for several years, the pair have seen their share of hits and flops. The box-office trends the two journalists began to notice through their film-going assignments inspired their book Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession, a work Tom Carson described in the Atlantic Monthly as a "first rate" work that "briskly, knowledgeably, and often wittily … puts the inanities of Hollywood's conventional wisdom on display" by analyzing the three "blockbuster" films released during the summer of 2003.

As film production budgets have increased through the years, the time between opening night at the movie theatre and the release of a film on DVD has continued to decrease. As Hayes and Bing note in their book, films depend on their first weekend opening gross sales to determine whether or not they will rank as a box-office success; if a film fails to gain a good box-office draw in the first few days after its release, it is unlikely that it will ever create enough momentum to propel it to blockbuster status. Hayes and Bing decided to pick a typical weekend during the summer movie season—one with high expectations from studio executives—and watch to see how each film released on that weekend struggled to come out on top of the sales figures.

Open Wide recounts Hayes and Bing's observations over the Fourth-of-July weekend, 2003. Some of the movies scheduled to open over that particular holiday were Terminator 3, Legally Blonde 2, and the animated film Sinbad. The authors tracked not only the marketing campaigns and box-office receipts of these three films, but also the activities of the directors, producers, executives, and actors. Because of their extraordinary access to the players in the business, the journalists were able to speak to a wide range of individuals, regardless of their stature in the film industry, although a select few became unavailable after it became apparent that their particular film had not made the box-office numbers cut.

Saul Austerlitz, writing in Cineaste, stated that, "in our era of the megaplex, the marketing process for a big-budget release begins almost concomitantly with filming, and the intricacies of positioning a film in the maelstrom of studio product is a highly complex art." In a review for the Los Angeles Times, Paramount Pictures producer Lynda Obst called Open Wide "unique for its emphasis on the less glamorous post-production phase of the game. We see our soon-to-be Governator pushing his product to theater owners at the film-marketing extravaganza ShoWest, vouching for the credibility of the third installment of the 'Terminator' series." Obst went on to remark that "the book is a must for the novice director or studio exec and is likely to fascinate even the most jaded Hollywood junkie." New York Times Book Review contributor Stephanie Zacharek concluded that, "lively and intelligently researched, Open Wide is valuable chiefly because it gives a fairly clear picture of how the realities of the marketplace affect what movies get made, and how." A reviewer for Bookwatch called the book "a fascinating peek behind the curtain," and a contributor for Publishers Weekly dubbed the work an "excellent book that's a must read for anyone passionate about the film business or cultural trends."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, May, 2005, Tom Carson, "The Big Shill: Hollywood's Need for Hits Creates a Culture of Misses," pp. 127-132.

Bookwatch, November, 2004, review of Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession.

Cineaste, spring, 2005, Saul Austerlitz, review of Open Wide, p. 71.

Daily Variety, October 28, 2004, "Variety Toasted the Launch of Open Wide, an Examination of the Industry's Focus on Opening Weekend Box Office," p. 15.

Library Journal, September 1, 2004, Roy Liebman, review of Open Wide, p. 152.

Los Angeles Times, November 28, 2004, Lynda Obst, "Three Movies and One Nail-biting Weekend," p. R2.

New York Times Book Review, December 5, 2004, Stephanie Zacharek, review of Open Wide, p. 79.

Publishers Weekly, August 23, 2004, Jeff Zaleski, "Chasing the Money," p. 50; August 23, 2004, review of Open Wide, p. 50.

Variety, November 1, 2004, Geoffrey Berkshire, review of Open Wide, p. 42.