Breaking Baz: ‘Scandal’s Tony Goldwyn Discovers Teen Actor Who Runs Rings Around Robert De Niro & Bobby Cannavale In Impactful Movie ‘Ezra’
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Tony Goldman called them “thoughtful human movies” — the ones, he said, “that don’t have the big marketing hook or are not genre pictures or horror or action movies have become increasingly difficult to get made.” We were discussing Ezra, his new film as director.
It’s about how Max (Bobby Cannavale), an erratic stand-up comic and divorced father, dives head first into outlawing himself against, among others, his ex-wife (Rose Byrne), education officials and the FBI because he believes that only he knows what’s best for his son Ezra, who is on the autism spectrum.
The film recently won the Audience Award for Narrative Films at the Woodstock Film Festival. There’s a huge gulf between the heavy duty tentpoles and other gargantuan studio fare, leaving little room for the smaller, more meaningful — and often more satisfying — movie where maybe you might learn something about how others live their lives. “There’s been a real shift in our business.
I hope it swings back,” Oppenheimer actor Goldwyn sighed. He argued that Ezra is the kind of movie “that was made regularly in the ’60s and ’70s and started to change in the ’80s, really — middle-size, middle- to lower-budget films that were about people. … In the ’90, the marketing of films became so expensive that movies like Ezra just weren’t made as often.” Passionately, he insisted that there’s a huge audience for them, “but there was pressure on entertainment companies to put their money into movies that they knew has the marketing hook and can hit screens big and do big grosses in the first few weeks.” More often than not — there are exceptions, of course — those pictures with their “marketing hooks” are instantly forgettable.
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