BLACKLEY: GAME MAKERS SHOULD CALL THE SHOTS

When Creative Artists Agency brokered the deal for the forthcoming film version of "Halo," it was a watershed moment in the process of how video games are morphed into movies. Microsoft, the publisher of the wildly popular video game, had commissioned the script and brought in a producer.

According to Seamus Blackley, the significance of the deal was that it was one of the few times that the creative people behind the game had played a critical role in the process of producing the movie. Blackley is an agent at CAA, where he works with Larry Shapiro and Ophir Lupu on projects involving video game creators, a community he knows well from prior experience. After stints at DreamWorks Interactive and Looking Glass Studios, Blackley was instrumental in the creation, design and launch of the Xbox game console while an executive at Microsoft. He later formed Capital Entertainment Group to finance and produce video games.

In a talk with videogames industry journalist Paul Hyman, Blackley talks about the "Halo" deal, focusing on the creative people and not technology, and the box office slump.

Paul Hyman: You were an original designer of the Xbox and so you must have some thoughts on the next generation of that console, the Xbox 360, and how it's technical abilities are likely to affect the relationship between the movie and games industries.

Seamus Blackley: People are going to look at it and say, "Gosh, now consoles can finally draw movie-quality images." But it's not clear to me why that's important. I mean, the increase in technology tends to obviate the importance of that technology. Once everybody can draw people who look realistic, the challenge is no longer drawing people who look realistic; now it's making them do something interesting. That's when you need to find people who can do that and that's where the real meat is ... setting up creative teams of people who know how to do something interesting with all that technology.

Hyman: But the gaming audience has always been one that's impressed by technology ...

Blackley: I see an important change happening in gaming, a cultural one. There's a new audience emerging, a generation who has grown up with games as an important part of their entertainment lives. As they get older and start to become studio executives and presidents of corporations, you'll see video games becoming much more mainstream. When the previous generation thought of videogames, they thought of "Pac-Man" or they think of the caricature of violence in "Grand Theft Auto." But "GTA" didn't sell upwards of 10 million copies because it enabled you to shoot hookers in the head. It sold because it told an amazing story in a way that essentially puts you in the middle of a great crime novel.

Hyman: Let's talk about the "Halo" deal which involves taking the hugely successful first-person shooter, "Halo: Combat Evolved", and turning it into a big-screen epic. Is that indicative of what you're talking about? (Read more about the Halo deal here.)

Blackley: Absolutely. The essential thing to note is that, in the "Halo" deal, the game creatives are playing a critical role in the process of producing the movie.

Hyman: Explain that to me.

Blackley: The typical licensing deal is a straight business transaction -- someone sells the license for something to someone and then, as we say in the video game industry, someone slaps that license on top of the project and hopes it will increase sales. Oftentimes what happens, unfortunately, is you'll see the game publisher or producer take the license and use it as a Band-Aid for an inferior product. Audiences are starting to become very wary of this and very frustrated.

The cure is to respect the video game property just as much as you'd respect the motion picture property on the film side ... and, on the game side, respect the motion picture property as much as you'd respect the game property. And start a real creative collaboration that can produce something greater than just a movie with a game license or a game with a movie license.

At the end of the day, that was the strength of the "Halo" deal. The thing that really worked was having the game design team collaborate with a screenwriter to produce a screenplay that they liked, and then taking that screenplay and driving it creatively as a collaboration between the writer and the design team. That's a crucial difference between this deal and other game-to-film deals. Does it ensure a commercial success? No, nothing does. But it ensures that the audience -- presumably of gamers -- will have that special feel about the property.

Hyman:So what it comes down to is that the movie will have the look and feel of the game?

Blackley: Exactly. Listen, you have these game designers who sell 5 million, 10 million, 15 million copies of a game at $50. Meanwhile, you have people in the movie and TV businesses who are worried about their audience going away because people are spending more time with video games. The answer is not to find ways to cross-license everything. The answer is to tap into the creativity of the people out there who can make games like "The Sims" and "Half-Life" and "Halo." How can we find a way to take those people -- who have their fingers on the pulse of what the audience wants -- and leverage that in an interesting way? That's really what it's all about. Nobody has ever made a big push into finding these game creators and supporting them and teaming them up with people from other disciplines, like with movie directors who are interested in working on a game.

Hyman: Is the "Halo" deal the wave of the future? Here we had the folks at Microsoft shopping around their concept and their script. Is that the way it's going to be when people want to make movies out of games?

Blackley: Yeah, I think it is. Doesn't it seem a bit ridiculous to you to spend tens of millions of dollars on a new movie that is designed to take advantage of the audience that was created by a video game ... and then not involve the people who captivated that audience in the first place?

Hyman: That's the way it's been done up until now.

Blackley: Again, it's that cultural problem. The film industry finally has executives who are gamers. If you go in and say to them, okay, we want to do such-and-such a film which is based on a game which was built by so-and-so designer ... and then you suggest that we ought to collaborate with that designer, they get excited. That's because, if you're in the video game generation, the names of those designers are meaningful to you. I mean, you've got Warren Spector and Lorne Lanning and Peter Molyneux and all these incredible talents who make games that sell six million copies each -- which means that 50 million people have played them and spent 20 hours each on them -- and if you're not leveraging these guys, it's sort of silly. Because they are the guys who really know how to communicate with the gaming audience, for whom they are providing experiences that are incredibly deep.

Hyman: You seem to indicate that we're going through a period of enlightenment. Why now?

Blackley: I'm sure this sounds a bit cynical, but people have to do it the wrong way a bunch of times before they get it right. In the early '90s, there were a lot of efforts to unite Hollywood and games, and most of them were driven by people who were looking at it from a commercial standpoint only. I can hear them thinking: "Look how big the game industry is, look how big these titles are, let's set up a business to take advantage of that." But no venture into a creative medium can be successful when it's driven that way. Much of the synergy that's starting to occur is, in part, because of the mainstream nature of games today that forces a lot of people to look at it.

Hyman: It will be interesting to see what kind of reviews "Halo The Movie" gets because, frankly, I can't remember the last critically acclaimed movie that was based on a game.

Blackley: Who knows if any movie-based-on-a-game is going to be unbelievably critically and commercially successful? But you can do some things that increase the chances of that and the biggest one is that, when you're doing any sort of crossover work in either direction, get the creative people involved with each other. They don't speak two different languages, you know. Essentially, you have the same type of people. In fact, most movie writers you talk to these days are also huge gamers. Take Roger Avery, who did "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction." His hobby is restoring classic Atari vector arcade games. When you sit him down with Warren Spector, who designed "Deus Ex" and "Thief," you find that they get along unbelievably ... frighteningly well. And that's because they think about things in the same way. The reason they're able to touch audiences today is because they both have their finger on their pulse. And you find that's the case every time you introduce these people. It starts to become a joke that it hasn't happened before, but it really hasn't.

Hyman: You brought up the box-office slump. Is there some connection with the increasing popularity of video games?

Blackley: I really don't know. But I suspect that the folks who are equating one with the other, well, again, I think it stems from a cultural difference. If gaming isn't part of your life, then you may look at it as an alien thing and imagine that a customer going to, say, Target, may be buying a game instead of a movie. But if you're a gamer, you probably love movies. That's why PSP movies are doing so well. In my opinion, it's all about the quality of the entertainment. That's the only important thing. The more good stuff there is, the more people will want and buy.

Hyman: So maybe the slump at the box office just has to do with not enough movies that people want to see?