David O. Russell rose to prominence in the last decade as a director with a unique talent for transforming blockbuster movie stars into working class character actors. But this “way with actors” has occasionally led him into hot water. Some of his past collaborators have called Russell out for on-set behavior which they believe crossed the line into unacceptable workplace hostility, akin to the infamous verbal abuse Stanley Kubrick inflicted upon Shelley Duvall on the set of The Shining (1980).

All the same, there is no denying that Russell’s process with actors has led him to assemble some of the greatest ensemble casts of the 21st century. The director once enjoyed a five-year hot streak with one commercially and critically successful film after another: The Fighter (2010), Silver Linings Playbook (2012), American Hustle (2013), and Joy (2015).

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In these four films alone, Russell managed to repeatedly capture career-best performances from some of the biggest movie stars of modern cinema. At times, it felt like the director had tricked Hollywood into funding his own little theater company with the likes of Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Mark Wahlberg, to say nothing of his memorable supporting actors like Melissa Leo, Jacki Weaver, Chris Tucker, and many others.

After multiple collaborations with Robert DeNiro, it is no wonder that Russell was unofficially branded the “Scorsese of the 2010s.” In 2013, NPR’s film critic David Edelstein went so far as to say that with American Hustle, “Russell out-Scorseses Scorsese.” This was in reference to Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, which was released in the same year.

With a career that hot, what could possibly go wrong for David O. Russell? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot has gone wrong for the filmmaker.

David O. Russell Is at a Crossroads in His Career

     20th Century Studios

After a seven-year hiatus, that hot streak Russell once enjoyed came to a screeching halt with the October 2022 release of Amsterdam. The film was his most star-studded to date, featuring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, and many more.

Russell got eaten alive for Amsterdam’s convoluted plot which critics attributed to his scatterbrained direction and zigzagging screenplay. Moviegoers might have had similar complaints, had they actually gone to see the film in theaters. Amsterdam lost nearly $100 million, making it one of the biggest box office bombs of all time.

Russell faces something of a mid-career crisis in the aftermath of Amsterdam. For a director as cinematically literate as he is, Russell must be feeling an awful lot like he is living out his own personal version of Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963). Hollywood is unlikely to shell out a budget north of $100 million for “A Film by David O. Russell” ever again. Even with Taylor Swift’s name on the poster.

Russell may be an outspoken champion of the cinematic experience, but the multilayered, dialogue-heavy, ensemble films which he has always written and directed for the big screen have a lot in common with shows made for the small screen. Now that he faces something of a crossroads in his career, will Russell make the jump to television?

Many Hollywood Film Directors Migrated to Television in the 2010s

     Netflix

In the 1950s, Hollywood studios feared TV. The rise of television sets in homes across America would inevitably usher in the fall of cinema. Or so they thought. While they might have pictured this coup to be a little more imminent, by the 2010s that classic Hollywood nightmare had more or less come true. Shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and other hit TV dramas led critics to proclaim a “New Golden Age of Television."

This decade also saw filmmakers migrate from the big screen to the small screen in greater numbers than ever before. It was a Hollywood brain drain that included successful directors like David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Soderbergh, along with many more up-and-coming auteurs like Alex Garland, Derek Cianfrance, Jean-Marc Vallée, and Cary Joji-Fukunaga. Not only does this list go on, this trend hasn’t stopped with the directors behind the films.

Classic Movies Are Being Adapted Into TV Shows

     HBO Max Releasing

The early 2020s have seen a string of theatrical films themselves being adapted for television. This is a fascinating reversal of a decades-old Hollywood tradition whereby successful television shows were blown up to the silver screen. Think Sex and the City, The Simpsons, and the hundreds if not thousands of other TV shows titles that received a colon followed by “The Movie.” Like Hannah Montana: The Movie (2010).

In 2021, HBO Max adapted the Swedish writer-director Ingmar Bergman’s 1974 film Scenes from a Marriage, which is every bit as excruciating as its title suggests, into a miniseries. It starred Jessica Chastain as Mira, in a contemporary update on Liv Ullmann’s Marianne character, and Oscar Isaac’s Jonathan, an Anglicanization of Erland Josephson’s role of Johan.

In 2022, Showtime adapted Paul Schrader’s 1980 film American Gigolo into a TV show with Jon Bernthal in Richard Gere’s old role of Julian, a male escort falsely accused of murdering one of his older female clients. Even Martin Scorsese, a frequent collaborator of Schrader’s, is adapting his epic historical drama Gang of New York (2002) into a television series, more than a decade after Scorsese came to television with Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014).

     Warner Bros.

However, there are still several big name film directors who have resisted the pull to television. There’s Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and of course, David O. Russell. Any one of those big names could direct a knock-out miniseries. Tarantino hasn’t been able to constrain his runtimes under two hours since his directorial debut in 1992 with Reservoir Dogs. And that hardly counts since he didn’t have the budget at the time to make that film any longer.

But it is David O. Russell, even more than Tarantino, whose entire film career is practically crying out for the long-form narrative freedom and character-driven stories that television can allow visual storytellers to indulge in.

David O. Russell Is a Maximalist Director

     Sony Pictures

Russell is a maximalist filmmaker in almost every artistic sense of the word (outside any connotation with explosive big-budget blockbusters like Michael Bay movies). Russell’s larger-than-life characters are turned up to 11. His soundtracks are turned up to 11. Even his tracking shots, influenced by Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), are turned up to 11.

Ever since Spanking the Monkey and possibly Flirting with Disaster over 25 years ago, Russell hasn’t been able to direct a minimalist film if his life depended on it. His style is the exact opposite of directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Jim Jarmusch, or Yasujirō Ozu. Russell can’t help but make multilayered, busy ensemble films, and his influences bleed through his entire filmography.

In the spirit of Robert Altman, who pioneered multi-layered sound recording to capture a level of realism that was absent from dialogue scenes in American filmmaking before the 1970s, characters in a David O. Russell film constantly talk over one another. He’s not afraid to force audiences to choose who to listen to from one scene to the next. He’s also not afraid to get lost in the weeds of character development. If the plot goes to hell in the process, so be it. Like John Cassavettes, Russell doesn’t appear to mind at all if the audience even has a plot to follow, so long as they enjoy their time with the characters.

Russell’s Maximalism Is Perfectly Suited for Long-Form TV

     Columbia Pictures

Here’s the thing. If Robert Altman was alive today, he would be directing television like he did throughout the 1950s and 60s before his acclaimed film career. If John Cassavettes was alive today, he too would find television more receptive to his actor-centric approach. Martin Scorsese is alive today, and the later part of his career has been increasingly steered toward television.

Like some of his directing influences, David O. Russell is a filmmaker who would thrive in the long-form, character-driven medium of television. Except for one little snag: his expensive casts of A-Listers. How is he supposed to pay all those movie stars he always works with on a shoestring TV budget? After all, Russell does pack his films with stars like Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper, whose careers reflect that traditional view of television as a lesser medium than cinema, even if they don’t come right out and say something like “TV is beneath me."

However, actors on this level like Leonardo DiCaprio, Joaquin Phoenix, or Jake Gyllenhaal are becoming a rare breed. In the 21st century, TV has swallowed up some of cinema’s brightest stars. For instance, Matthew McConaughey reinvented his career and did some of his finest work in the first season of True Detective (2014). While it would likely drive their agents up the wall, a big director like David O. Russell making a miniseries for Netflix or HBO Max might be all the push that A-list actors would need to dip their toes into television. In fact, if Russell had done this with his last project, turning Amsterdam into a miniseries instead of an overstuffed film, it may have become an acclaimed hit.