Below is an article from The Telegraph in the UK.
While I miss the kind of films they are talking about, and applaud their efforts, I can't help thinking that this venture would do better on television than in the cinemas.
Moreover, the younger crowd running the studios and distributors hate -- I mean literally hate -- the older actors and producers and will do everything they can to keep them out. It used to be the other way around. Caan and his colleagues are going to need some big money to pull this off. Getting their films distributed is going to be like going to war; the distributors don't want to share the screens.
What do HTF members think? :
HOLLYWOOD GRAY MAFIA RETURN TO FILMS
By Chris Hastings, Beth Jones and Graeme Culliford in Los Angeles, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 10:15am BST 24/06/2007
As stars of The Godfather, James Caan and Robert Duvall were part of a golden age of cinema that was driven by highly literate stories beautifully shot.
The Godfather: Boomer Films is working a film similar in tone
Now the big-screen tough guys aim to make a generation of neglected filmgoers an offer they can't refuse by presenting them with movies that revive those forgotten production values. The two actors have teamed up with another on-screen mafioso, Joe Pesci, to form a production company that will make sophisticated films for an older audience that they feel is being ignored by Hollywood.
Boomer Films, created by Caan, 66, hopes to break the stranglehold of big-studio blockbusters such as Spiderman and Pirates of the Caribbean. Helped by an older generation of filmmakers, the company wants to produce movies based on powerful stories that are less reliant on explicit sex and violence.
Caan told The Sunday Telegraph last night that he was in talks on the project with Val Kilmer and Ray Liotta. British stars including Dame Helen Mirren, Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen are among those likely to be approached.
Caan, whose film credits include The Godfather, Misery and Rollerball, set up Boomer Films after noting the success of low-budget British films such as The Queen and Notes on a Scandal. He has stepped down from his starring role in the NBC television serial Las Vegas to concentrate on the project.
Caan said he had decided to create Boomer Films after learning that experienced writers in their fifties and sixties had felt forced to write under noms de plume in an effort to convince studio bosses they were young. He said: "It sounds terribly idealist but I want to get back to making those kinds of picture we were all making in the Seventies and early Eighties. When I say me, I mean people in the US, Britain and Europe who had a genuine passion for movies that were character-driven.
"The problem these days is that the guys running the studios are not the Jack Warners or the Sam Goldwyns who were in love with movies. They are executives who have to answer to their shareholders and corporations.
"I wouldn't trust some of the directors working today to direct me in a two-line commercial. There is only so much The Fast and the Furious and Spiderman that anyone wants to watch. The films I want to make are economically viable because the baby-boomers are the fastest growing audience."
Figures released by Pathé Films show that in Britain the number of people aged 45 and over going to the cinema has risen 38 per cent in five years. Several follow-up blockbusters aimed at the younger market, including Shrek and Spiderman, have underperformed.
Boomer Films is already developing a film similar in tone to the 1972 classic The Godfather, which starred Caan as Sonny Corleone and Duvall, now 76, as his adopted brother, Tom Hagen.
Craig Baumgarten, 56, a producer who has signed up to the project, said: "We are not trying to put those other kinds of movie down; we are just trying to broaden the spectrum and make movies for the audience who grew up with Jimmy [Caan] and want to see the type of film he has traditionally been involved in."
But others in the industry warn that Hollywood will try to wreck the scheme. Frederic Raphael, 75, the writer of films such as Eyes Wide Shut, said: "There had better be a number of these firms working together because the distributors will try to crush a project like this."
However, Nik Powell, the British producer of Calendar Girls, argued that targeting an older audience made economic sense.
"I made a conscious decision that this was the market place where I wanted to work," he said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../wfilms124.xml
