1. How would you evaluate Cameron in terms of the Big Five personality dimensions?
2. How would you evaluate Cameron in terms of the five traits important to organizational behavior? Explain.
3. W hat were Twentieth Century Fox's attitudes toward producing the film at the start of the case-use the three components of attitudes and why did they change over time?
4. Do you believe that Cameron's personality and attitudes affected the workplace attitudes and behaviors of the film's actors? Explain your rationale.
5. Did the management at Twentieth Century Fox display any of the four distortions in perceptions? Explain.
6. What factors were causing stress for Cameron? Explain.
Reasonable people can debate the artistic merits of James Cameron's work .... What's indisputable, however, is that the Avatar director's influence extends far beyond his movie credits. More than George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay, or Pixar, Cameron is the most important commercial force in modern film, and his vision for the future of the movie business is rapidly demolishing anything that gets in its way.
There are 1.64 billion reasons that Cameron is Hollywood's director of the moment-that figure being the mid-January [20 l 0] worldwide gross of
Avatar, the blue-aliened, 3D extravaganza that earned Golden Globes for best director and best dramatic picture. By the time you read this, Avatar may have passed the $1.84 billion mark set by 1997's Titanic, Cameron's previous feature and current holder of the title Highest-Grossing Film of All Time ....
At 55, the man who declared himself king of the world at the 1998 Oscars has mellowed some. Cameron accepted his 2010 Golden Globes with a mix of humility and amazement. No one knows better than he how close Avatar came to not being made. Despite Cameron's track record for delivering large profits on big budgets, Twentieth Century Fox, which co-financed Titanic, hesitated to make an even riskier film that required the creation of a three-dimensional alien world. "I knew that if this failed my name would be dirt, but that's the nature of this business," says Cameron. "Every director knows that you can flame and burn like the Hindenburg, and do it very publicly. "
With the studio balking, Cameron had to turn himself into an inventor-entrepreneur. Using his own funds, he developed the technology to bring Avatar to the screen, betting that what he saw in his head would be so visually persuasive that, ultimately, he could sell his souped-up camera rigs back to Hollywood at a potentially considerable profit. ...
Cameron wrote the original script for Avatar in the mid-1990's .... Even 15 years ago, Cameron had a fully formed vision of Pandora-right down to the blue aliens, six-legged mammalian predators, and floating mountains. But he put any plans to film his Avatar script on indefinite hold, knowing that the existing technology could not do justice to his ambitions.
By 2000 he was growing impatient. So Cameron contacted Vincent Pace, an entrepreneur who helped design and manufacture the underwater lighting system for Cameron's 1989 movie, The Abyss. Through his eponymous company, which develops and rents cameras for use in hazardous conditions, Pace agreed to work with Cameron on a camera rig that could capture 2D and 3D images simultaneously. Cameron says the project cost about $12 million, much of it his money.
It's a rule as old as Hollywood: Never sink your own money into a movie. Ultimately, Cameron felt his investment would be justified not only because it would allow him to make Avatar but also because the new technology would accelerate the rollout of 3D, giving theater chains an incentive to upgrade their projectors and screens and moviegoers an incentive to leave their increasingly well-equipped living rooms.
Developing the technology was one massive project. Cameron also had to persuade Fox to finance Avatar. Although the studio had backed and distributed several Cameron films, the Titanic experience had made Fox executives cautious. Originally budgeted at $110 million, the film's production costs famously ballooned to $200 million when special effects and the cost of constructing the ship delayed filming. There were also months of rumors preceding the film's release that it would prove to be one of the worst business decisions in the history of the movies. Given all that scary background, says Twentieth Century Fox Co-Chairman Tom Rothman,
"Avatar couldn't be rushed." In 2005 the studio decided to place a small wager on Cameron-$10 million so he could show proof of concept. With the Fox money, Cameron repaired to the 280,000-square-foot hangar he leases in Playa Vista, California-where in the 1940s Howard Hughes built the Spruce Goose-and began working on a 3D film clip that he could use to persuade Fox brass to make the movie. Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, says he and Cameron were in touch frequently during the experimentation phase and that Cameron visited the DreamWorks facility in Glendale, California, to learn more about animation software. "We create our own world in animation," Katzenberg says. "But this was the first time a director could take real characters and put them into a world he created, in real time." ...
In October 2005, Cameron screened his 3D segment for four Fox executives at the offices of his production company, Light Storm Entertainment, in Santa Monica, California. "Their eyes kind of lit up," Cameron says. "They could see what I had been talking about for months." But Avatar producer and Cameron business partner Jon Landau says Fox still wanted a shorter script and a more reasonable budget. In response, says Landau, Cameron combined several characters to trim expenses. Cameron says he also agreed to cut his usual fee in half and take a lower percentage of the film's revenues if Avatar wasn't profitable. "Luckily," says Cameron, "We're at such a stratospheric level now that we're not worried about that."
By mid-2006, according to someone involved in the negotiations, Fox was still concerned that making Avatar would cost too much money. "They told us in no uncertain terms that they were passing on this film," Cameron says. Cameron decided the best way forward was to try to persuade another studio to get involved. Walt Disney had produced two of the director's underwater documentaries, so Cameron invited Dick Cook, then Disney's studio chief, to watch the clip. "We loved Jim and would have liked to work with him," says Cook. "He has an infectious love of 3D that impressed us. Unfortunately, we never got that far." The reason: Fox had the right of first refusal. "We were never going to let this one get away," says Fox Co-Chairman Jim Gianopoulos.
To get the deal done, the studio decided to bring in partners to share the financial burden. Fox already had a deal with Dune Entertainment, part of a New York private equity fund that since 2006 has contributed financing for Fox movies. To further reduce its risk, Fox began talking to London-based Ingenious Media.... "We consider all filmmaking a dangerous game," says [Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp., which owns Fox] "and we always lay off [risk] to the film funds when we can. This time we laid off more than usual. But we own much of the distribution and other rights. In the end, we will make much more money than them." In October 2006, Fox agreed to make Avatar. Cameron says he still isn' t quite sure why Fox finally jumped aboard but recalls studio executives saying: "We don't get the giant blue guys with the tails, but we believe in you." ...
Production began, and word soon leaked out that something extraordinary was going on in Cameron's airplane hangar. The director had rigged the ceiling of the cavernous space with cameras that tracked his actors, who were wearing versions of the motion-capture suits made famous by the character Gollum in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Headsets rigged with tiny cameras captured actors' facial expressions and eye movement, a jolt of reality that Cameron deemed crucial if he was going to make the film. Using software developed in-house, the crew imported the actors into Pandora's digital world while Cameron was shooting.