Marlee Matlin is an Oscar winner for her work in “Children of a Lesser God,” and starred in the 2021 film “CODA,” which won the Oscar for best picture, but she feels that Hollywood is so rigid that it hasn’t necessarily given her advantage when it comes to pitching projects.
“I’m not happy with the way things are,” she says. “It’s simply because I don’t know how this industry works to this day. You know, you win an Academy Award, everybody’s so excited. ‘Oh, that’s great. Things are gonna change. It’s fantastic. You’re gonna be working, offers are gonna come in,’ and they didn’t. Yes, you’ll be on that high, it lasts maybe a short little time, and then something comes up again a little while later. So what I do is I have to do it myself. I create my own projects. I have a lot of projects on my plate, and I’m still knocking on doors saying, ‘Hey, look, here’s this project, here’s this project, here’s this project.’ And studios, we set meetings and they’ll say, ‘Yes, well, we have a character who’s deaf in this one little project that’s animated, and we’ve checked that box off, so perhaps another time.’ And then we get the same answer from another studio, or this studio head leaves, and then that project falls by the wayside.”
Matlin was just one creative pushing for change in Hollywood during the Variety & Vibe Reimagining Creativity presented by Google TV & YouTube panel. The discussion included Matlin (“Not Alone Anymore”); actor and comedian Roy Wood Jr. (“Love, Brooklyn”); Oscar-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg (“It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” “The Case Against Adnan Syed,” “Deliver Us From Evil”); actor Harry Hamlin (“Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches”); and Tom Quinn, CEO of Neon. The panel was moderated by Variety senior entertainment writer, Angelique Jackson.
The creatives collectively discussed the importance of taking risks in Hollywood. For example, “Love, Brooklyn” is a romantic film, and not necessarily the gear that Wood Jr. is used to. But he enjoyed the process of trying something new.
“It’s a love story, but it’s not in the sense of there is a ‘will they or won’t they.’ There’s not a villain, it’s just people existing in love and the complicated pockets of it,” he says. “And [producer and star] André [Holland] presented an opportunity for me to be the comedic foil in a way to his character, but not in the traditional sense. For 25 years of standup comedy, you would expect, at least I expected when reading it, a much larger, bombastic, more Anthony Anderson in “black-ish”-type situation. And that’s not a knock on Anthony — I’m just saying performatively. It was an opportunity to exist in a place performatively that was a lot more still than where I normally get to exist. And the fact that Rachael Abigail Holder, our director, and André Holland both trusted me to do that. When you look at my resume, there aren’t enough things that would suggest ‘he could do that,’ but they took a chance on me. So then it’s on me to take a chance on actually nailing the performance and the subtleties of it, to find more individual pockets of humor, just when you’re not talking versus when you actually are. And it was fun.”
For Hamlin, playing a role out of his wheelhouse ended up as his favorite performances.
“I could look back on my career and pretty much every time I’ve taken a leap of faith and risked something big, it’s had a tremendous effect on my career and pushed me into another level,” he says. “I did a film in 1981 called ‘Making Love,’ which was the first studio picture involving a gay love story. All of my friends told me, ‘You can’t do that. It’ll ruin your career if you do that.’ They offered it to every other actor in Hollywood before they came to me, but I saw it as an amazing opportunity to actually do a film about something that was really happening in the world, but nobody wanted to talk about. It was a subject that was so swept under the rug at the time in the early ’80s that needed to come out into the sunshine. I took that risk and it completely changed my career, but changed it in a really, really great way. To this day, not a week goes by when somebody doesn’t come up to me at a market or a movie theater or somewhere and say, ‘Thank you so much for making that film.’ So to have been able to make a movie that changes people’s lives, gives people hope, gives them a ticket to ride, if you will. … It’s an amazing experience. So I would say that as an actor, the more we innovate, the more risks we take, the better off we will be, and that’s the better for the entire industry as well.”
Quinn says that Neon is a company built on taking bold creative risks.
“To have a vision and a belief in a slate of films, and to have a point of view and to be attracted to other filmmakers who also have a very clear, strong point of view, you have to take risks,” he says. “You know, we have a very expensive musical that we produced, which was an homage to Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals about a billionaire former oil executive who bunkered in the sort of potential future Armageddon. Now that doesn’t sound very commercial, and I will tell you that the film was well-received by half of the critics and not well-received by the other half of the critics because it was making an extraordinarily bold statement. [Editor’s note: The film in question was 2024’s “The End.”] I think in the aggregate, if we believe in something and we believe that we have a canvas too, as a distributor, as a studio, I think our slate of films, if they do matter, will appeal to audiences and we will be successful. The eclecticism across our slate includes movies like ‘Longlegs,’ which is by an incredible director, and sits right next to ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ by Mohammad Rasoulof, who made the film in Iran in secret while under threat of persecution and escaped the country. Ultimately I think that if you truly believe in the power of cinema and you have a vision about what you can stand for, you will persevere here.”
Berg, who spent five years making “Jeff Buckley,” says that while making the film she interacted with people wondering why she wanted to make the film at this particular moment. Yet she says the finished product and its reception proved that art that takes risks can always win out.
“If you can get your film to the finish line and showcase it somewhere like this, then you have a chance to reach audiences and buyers in a unique way where you’re not just pitching it,” she says. “This was a blessing for me that Topic Studios and Fremantle came in and financed my film. I haven’t done this for a while, where I’m here with a film for sale. It’s so invigorating, it’s like we did it ourselves. I got to make the movie I wanted to make, and last night was our premiere, and it was just incredible. The reaction … people were crying in the bathroom and it was just wonderful to feel that the true art spoke to our audience.”
Watch the full conversation at the top of the page.