Lately a number of people, including Brian Anderson in City Journal, have noticed that Hollywood is in decline. ‘Twas ever thus, I’m afraid. I can remember many saying the same thing when I started writing movies in the early seventies. Indeed, if you look at what was produced in 1939, for example, pretty much everything after that pales in comparison.
Still, Mr. Anderson has a point. Movies are in many ways worse than ever and have the box office numbers to prove it. As he writes:
Film attendance is down a wrenching 12 percent from last year, and a May USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that nearly half of American adults go to movies less often than they did in 2000. Some pundits have blamed the rising price of tickets, but in constant dollars a ticket costs less than it did 25 years ago. Others believe that it’s all those DVDs that people are buying-except that DVD sales are slumping, too.
Anderson (quoting the often-moralistic Michael Medved) blames the leftism of Hollywood stars and films for this. Well, maybe. But leftism is certainly not new to Hollywood and its stars. In the glory days, Cagney and Bogart were well known for their left-wing politics and it certainly didn’t stop audiences from seeing them. The likes of Tim Robbins and Sean Penn, no matter what their views, are not even on the same planet when it comes to charisma and interest and never could be, no matter what they produced.
No, the problems for Hollywood are deeper than politics and the production of more movies like Spiderman II (a good programmer which Anderson makes sound like the second-coming of Lawrence of Arabia) is not about to solve them.
Let’s review a few of the obvious ones:
1. The desertion of the core audience of teenage boys for computer games, which, I am told (I’m too stupid to play them myself), are often more original than today’s movies.
2. The continued corporate take-over of Hollywood. It has been going on now for decades and has reached a tipping point. It used to be said that movies were the blending of art and commerce with commerce finally taking precedence. Now, art isn’t even mentioned. Movie studios in the seventies were fun; now they’re like industrial parks making industrial product.
3. The rise of the internet and other alternative forms of entertainment. This is probably the most significant. There’s just plain too much competition for business as usual in Hollywood. If I were twenty and starting out in film today, I wouldn’t even think about Hollywood. I’d go straight to the internet and start from there.
Now, please don’t get me wrong. I take Anderson’s general point that Hollywood should diversify its politics. Who knows – they might even add to the box office in the process. But of course the movies would have to be good, always a lot harder to achieve than choosing your ideological stance, whatever it may be.
Oh thanks Roger, point 3, just one more worry for a father.
You see, I’m the proud Papa of a soon to be 20 (3 months) year old son who’s studying Film/TV/Theatre stuff at Emerson. I’ve passed along your post, any more specific things I should pass along? He’s mostly into behind rather than in front of the camera (and he’s NOT a writer).
I suppose point 2 is the reason for the collapse in originality exhibited by Hollywood. At one point last summer, I tallied the features at the local mega-theatre – 18 of them. 10 of 18 were remakes, sequels, or movie versions of television shows.
I’m really not interested in schlepping to the theatre to see someone’s new take on Bewitched. Can Steve Martin really bring anything to the Pink Panther that Peter Sellers did not?
It seems studios would rather aim at a small-but-reliable rate of return than try to make movies that can make piles of money by being major unexpected hits. I presume remakes, sequels, and TV-inspired movies do make such a modest return, since the studios keep making them. I suppose just because they have a title that movie goers recognize, they will bring in a sufficient number of teenagers looking for a place to neck, or whatever.
But when I look at the stories out there that could be turned into compelling movies, especially with today’s CGI, I just don’t understand why someone isn’t taking a chance on them.
I briefly spoke with Jerry Pournelle a few weeks ago and asked him if Mote in God’s Eye was going anywhere. He said they keep paying the options, but it never gets done. I think that novel is the most compelling first contact story ever told, and it deserves to be a movie. But it appears that it will never get there. (I know turning it into a movie would be hard, but that’s part of the risk involved. I certainly don’t think making a compelling movie out of that story is impossible, because it has plenty of subplots to lose for streamlining.)
Movies are made for teenage boys, but teenage boys aren’t going to the movies. They’re spending their movie money on computer games which are vastly more exciting and are interactive, so they can affect the outcome and even compete with each other.
How can a movie, no matter how exciting compete with that?
Why Hollywood doesn’t make movies adults want to see is the real mystery. There are millions of people not in the preferred demographic for whom going to the movies was a large part of their lives. We are ignored although we have plenty of time and money to indulge ourselves and with the boomers coming along our demographic will be swelling.
We often go weeks without seeing a movie because of the literally dozens of films showing nearby, there isn’t a one we want to see.
As for leftwing propaganda in the movies, Roger is right it was always there, but it was a bit more subtle. Now it hits you on the head and turns many people off, especially when it’s totally gratuitous and has nothing at all to do with the story line. A recent Sandra Bullock movie, I don’t remember the name of it, had her spit out a little hate-Bush meme apropos of nothing. There was actual booing at the performance we were at. I don’t like it and it’s not only because it’s leftwing — I wouldn’t want rightwing propaganda either.
Everyone is entitled to their own politics and supporting a party and a candidate is one of the rights handed down to us by our founding fathers. Actors were political in the old days, but they didn’t go out in public and engage in hate America polemics. We no longer see films connected with the real loonies nor will we invite those hateful people into our home via television.
Another problem is that Osama’s cohorts various are producing far more imaginative stuff for the news networks. You don’t need to go to the movies to get that disaster movie buzz – just turn the TV on.
Look, make a movie about Count Luckner and have Adam Sandler play the lead.
You can sell games et al off a concept like that.
There are no risktakers in Hollywood anymore. Being the odd man out on the cocktail circuit is too high a price to pay for artistic excellence.
Forgot:
Prior to the 60′s there were movie stars on the right and the left, but now people on the right don’t get work and their former friends drop them if they go public. I believe there are people around here that can corroborate that.
There are no male stars who are men. It’s a bunch of 5’5″ ,45 year old(non threatening) adolescents. William Holden wouldn’t go huntin’ or drinkin’ with any of them.
Regarding the effect that the politics in Hollywood is having on movie-goers, I can speak definitively on the effect it had on me. With the runup to the election last year, with the actors/actresses vocal against the war in Iraq, almost solidly opposed to my choice of president, and to my support of the war in Iraq, and with such a total lack of tolerance for a dissenting view, Hollywood, for me, became a metaphor for anti-american totalitarianism. When a liberal actor gets outed to the point where it comes to my notice, I blacklist any movie that that individual appears in. I don’t see many movies now. Haven’t seen one all summer, or any of the latest ones. I read alot more now, which I consider a better entertainment anyway, given the comparison of the selections available.
A lot of old entertainment media are in decline. I tend to think that some (not all) of it is due to the phasing out of the concept of the hero. When movies come out that offer a heroic character (the Spiderman movies, Batman Begins, Passion of the Christ), they do seem to find an audience.
The decline in Hollywood mirrors the decline in the quality of American culture in general. The last golden era of Hollywood was the seventies, which also reflect the fact that American life in that time so much cooler in almost every way.
But I’m not complaining that much — I actually think that capitalism, free trade and the development of technology have made the overall decline in cultural quality quite easy to take. There is so much variety these days, in addition to the fabulous access to old films and old music — remastered and restored to DVD or CD, or on cable tv — and with so many more efforts in independent and foreign filmmaking and musicmaking being undertaken. Who cares about what crap Middle America is being fed by Hollywood, as long as I can go to the local blockbuster and rent a DVD of a John Cassavetes movie, or pick up a Miles Davis boxset? America has always been a very good place for an elitist snob to live. (BTW, this is something I never hesitate to point out to anti-American leftists.)
Regarding films only, I’d say the center of innovation is definately NOT in Hollywood. The most memorable recent films I’ve seen have almost all been European. Comparing a film like Bergman’s Saraband to an American film is simply unfair: it’s like comparing a Shakespeare play to your typical soap opera.
I’ve not seen a movie in the theater in over three years now, and don’t intend to anytime soon. For that matter, I do not even currently own a TV at home, and I’m not in any real hurry to get one (I’ve watched virtually no TV for the past three months now since I moved into my new place, and oddly enough the only thing I even really miss is Food Network…) Part of this is the fact that I’m just not a big fan of movies in the first place (or more accurately, not a big fan of sitting down for two hours and watching something, I have a rather short attention span.)
Beyond this, the other major reason I don’t watch movies is that they’re just trashy. There are far too many Hollywood types who use gratuotius sex and/or violence as a substitute for actual content, as though they’re required to fill some quota per movie. I find it insulting the way Hollywood makes movies almost exclusively to the lowest common denominator these days. Even if Hollywood wasn’t chock full of people determined to prove Joe McCarthy was right, I still wouldn’t be watching the garbage Hollywood passes off as movies these days.
I say BULLSHIT to all these psuedo-psycho-sexual technological explanations!
A good story is a good story.
Good dialogue is good dialogue.
Bah dah bing
Where is The Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Paul Muni’s staggering lastline “I STEEEEEAL!”)?
Where is
Out of the Past
The Little Foxes
Laura
Chinatown
Three days of the Condor
Mildred Pierce
GILDA!
Razor’s Edge
Leave her to Heaven
Bus Stop
Public Enemy
Little Caesar
House of Strangers
Somebody up there likes me
Toys in the ttic
BABYDOLL!
Two for the Road
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
The Godfather
Citizen Kane
Vertigo
Notorious
Spellbound
All about Eve
Enemies, A Love story
ok ok I’ll shuddup but I have barely begun. I am SUCH a cinemaphile and yet I haven’t gone to the movies in years.
It’s pathetic. I have cable and it’s all news all the time……..even AMC sucks. I want a dish so I can get TMC but I hate Ted Turner so I am torn!
Studio Schmudio…………..if it aint on the page, it aint on the stage!
bad dah bing
Bad dah boom
CRACK!
Crack is responsible!
The inmates took over the asylum…………
Michael Moore vs David Selznick
Steven (the only worthwhile Jew is a dead Jew) Spielberg is the best they got?
yech!
Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger where for art thou?
Me? I am still a ginormous cinemaphile, it’s the pictures that got tiny.
Cheers,..
I saw Seabiscut in the theater and didn’t go again until Serenity came out at the end of September. Make movies for adults with a storyline more than an inch deep and I might go again. Oh, and can the politics.
Not to mention that Hollywood
Dale Gribble wrote above:
Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote a tremendous essay on that very subject recently. It’s well worth a read.
I have 237 DVD titles in my collection at home, but I have not bought a new title this year. Nor have I paid to see a movie in a theater in several years. My wife and I did get some free passes and have gone to a theater 3 times this year but none of the movies impressed me at all. I have not even rented a movie in months. Simply put, there have been very, very few movies made in the past two years that I wanted to see. Two weeks ago, I walked into a Blockbuster video store and spent 30 minutes looking for something interesting to rent. I left empty handed.
There are several reasons why I’m just not interested in what the movie industry is selling. Like some, I won’t subsidize people like Sean Penn. He’s free to say whatever he wants, and I’m free to spend my money as I see fit.
I spent 13 years in the military so language and nudity doesn’t phase me but it should serve a purpose in a movie. When profanity and sex scenes are thrown in for no other reason than to buy a bit more box office, well, that does nothing for me.
I suppose more than anything else is the poor quality and lack of originality in so many of today’s movies. Some (Star Wars III) are little more than collections of explosions and sound effects clustered around a weak plot. I actually found myself humming along with the film score and checking my watch hoping for it to end.
When is the last time you were actually surprised by how a movie ended (maybe “The Sixth Sense”)? Most movies are so predictable that you can tell how it’ll end within 20 minutes. In a season filled with remakes and TV ripoffs, what ever happened to originality? Other than some of the animated features like Shrek, when was the last time that you saw something so unusual and quirky that you wondered how the writer came up with the idea (“Secondhand Lions”)?
I enjoy good movies. Make movies that are interesting and I’ll see them, either in the theater or more likely when they come out on DVD. Continue like they’re going and I’ll be among the millions staying away. Like millions of people are saying to other parts of the mainstream media, “I don’t need you.”
It’s just a crying shame that Antonio Gramsci isn’t alive to see how it’s all turning out…
Roger,
“Now, art isn’t even mentioned. Movie studios in the seventies were fun; now they’re like industrial parks making industrial product.”
During Hollywood’s Golden Age, it was run exactly like an industrial factory, and they turned out fantastic product. Sure, some of it was awful (some of it will always be awful) but some of it is the greatest ever. Also, I read recently (but for the life of me cannot remember where) that the largest drop in attendance came when Hollywood finally jettisoned the Hays Code in the late 60s/70s. Yeah, that much vilified thing, without it we wouldn’t have many great films, but it also caused a large number of people to turn away and never return. They shouldn’t talk about art at all. They should just make the best film they can.
I’ve been reading recently some books on John Ford and they discuss how Westerns were their meat and potatoes films back then. The westerns cost very little to make, could be made in large numbers and quickly, and they made buckets of money at the box office. The tentpole films Hollywood relies on nowadays cost too much, are too few in number and fail all too easily. They need to figure out how to make something cheaply that grosses large amounts of money.
I can’t even imagine a director today having the ability of a John Ford to direct a film a year for 20+ years. It’s now treated like a ming vase and they make one once every six years. While a great artist, Terrence Malick is probably the worst offender.
I’m absolutely convinced that ticket costs are driving people away as well. There was an article about some study in the NYTimes a while ago that seemed to blame video games and tv, but in the middle of the article it mentioned that large percentages of young men weren’t attending because of ticket prices. No one seemed to want to talk about that.
“The decline in Hollywood mirrors the decline in the quality of American culture in general. The last golden era of Hollywood was the seventies, which also reflect the fact that American life in that time so much cooler in almost every way.”
That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone declare the 70s “cool”
Linden,
“I read recently (but for the life of me cannot remember where) that the largest drop in attendance came when Hollywood finally jettisoned the Hays Code in the late 60s/70s.”
That was probably from this piece by Michael Medved in the Wall Street Journal last year:
You ended your post with, “That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone declare the 70s ‘cool’”.
Hearing it described above that way reminded me of the New York radical chic art crowd, who recently pined for the return of Manhattan’s 1970′s high crime Death Wish/Taxi Driver era.
Lindenen,
Whoops–sorry to mispell your name in my previous post!
Ad Dresckile
Costs? $% for a cuppa java at Starbuckss? C’mon…
The product stinks. End of story.
The Hays Code forced writers, directors to be creative, imaginitive, and not just one leg on the floor or panning to an open window or waves crashing on the surf. In fact, the Hollywood studios adopted the code in large part in the hopes of avoiding government censorship, preferring self-regulation to government regulation. ………..but now when in doubt, show some silicone breast, gratuitous violence or special FX.
It used to be about telling a good story, seducing an audience, grabbing them by the heart or soul or brain and never letting go.
Now they preach to us. Every story has a lefty message. Yes, they surprise with a “Sixth Sense”, “Blue Velvet”, “Sea Biscuit”, but it is the exception not the rule.
Now we have to sit through a Kidman “thrilla” extolling the virtues of the UN (!), or Clooney vilifying the McCarthy Era (a great American that Joe was – see the Venona tapes, no not Valachi. Recently declassified (1996) Venona Transcripts, which prove the US government was infested with Soviet spies at all levels, including the White House).
“But moviegoers turned up their noses. Weekly film attendance in 1967, the first year after Hollywood dumped the production code, plummeted to 17.8 million, from 38 million the year before (television had already eroded moviegoing from its late-1940s peak of 90 million a week).
OT
oy……..chuckie schumer is such a SCHMUCK
Godzilla: “When a liberal actor gets outed to the point where it comes to my notice, I blacklist any movie that that individual appears in. ”
Me too, more or less. (I made an exception for Serenity, whose producer, Joss Whedon raised money for John Kerry. Serenity was GREAT!)
Hate to bust your bubble but the William Holden I remember was a whiny, irascible girly-man. I have seen numerous portrayals by him from Bridge on the Kwai (Guiness stole that show) to Network and that character persona always seeps through.
Try again.
“The desertion of the core audience of teenage boys for computer games, which, I am told (I’m too stupid to play them myself), are often more original than today’s movies.”
Roger, you’ve got to be kidding.
Teenage boys don’t want computer games more than they want teenage girls. The movies used to be a place to meet or take a girl. It’s not the abscence of teenage boys it’s the missing girls.
No one has mentioned what is a major factor for me (and it may be that I am just a very peculiar curmudgeon)… but I remember going to the movies and enjoying being hypnotized along with a large group of other people of various ages and incomes.
Doesn’t happen any more. The spell is immediately, and repeatedly, broken by people having loud conversations, and by ringing cell phones.
People are no longer willing to be enthralled by the movies. (Granted, most of them are not at all enthralling. But a very few might be, if they were allowed to be.)
Formula, formula, formula. Why? because special effects drive up the cost so high that nobody will bankroll something that doesn’t look like a sure thing to get the money back. So, hundreds of the same movie are made over and over again.
It is a shame, because except for the stories, everything else about the movies is better than it ever was – the acting is uniformly superb, the directing is fabulous, lighting, sound, effects, pacing, just no stories.
I actually think movies are just too short for a lot of the best stories and characters–yes, Serenity was good, but it would have been ten times better if the same story had been told in, say, one or two more seasons of the TV show. A movie has to drive constantly to one climax–a TV show can take the time to make little detours, experiment a bit with its form, let you get to know individual characters better. Somehow, for stories of great narrative complexity (I won’t even mention the uber-crappy attempts at turning books like Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, Les Miserables, and–horror of horrors–Moby Dick–into two hour and change movies or brief miniseries which might as well be mainstream films for all the risks they take) the big screen is far, far too small. I imagine that there could be a huge audience for such things adapted at length and then released episodically on the internet like the old radio dramas (the production values on some of those ‘viral’ ads are amazing enough), which would get you around all the atrocious hurdles which currently stand in the way of a good show appearing on television and staying there. Not to mention the ads. For all that people’s attention spans are supposedly shrinking, ‘Lord of the Rings’ had people gladly sitting through three hour and over films, going to special back-to-back ten hour screenings of the trilogy, and buying the even longer extended editions in DVD. Of course, every success breeds a new formula, and now every studio seems to have taken up some kind of fantasy trilogy–but I think there’s a desire for stories which unfold at a more leisurely pace than movies, but are still told ‘visually’. Eventually, I think it will spawn a whole new medium.
The spell is immediately, and repeatedly, broken by people having loud conversations, and by ringing cell phones.
The last two times I went to the movies there were maybe five people in the audience, including myself. Distractions weren’t the problem. The last “serious” movie I saw was Erin Brockovitch, and it was total junk from beginning to end. The sensitive motorcycle guy? Gimme a break. Ever spend time with a member of the Gypsy Jokers or other motorcycle gang? Ever get to know some of the gals who hang out with them, you know, the ones who will hide their boyfriend’s sawed off shotgun in the closet and wear a knife strapped to their calf? Ever deal with their children? The movie was pure unadulterated bs that missed everything that might have been interesting.
By in large, I only go to cartoons because they are the only things left that have any semblance of honesty.
Dale wrote:
D responded with:
There is no one reason. Most of the things mentioned all play a part.
One alluded to but not explicitly mentioned is the FACT that teenagers don’t date anymore. There is no longer any need for a boy to try and romance a girl by taking her to a movie and out for a bite to eat. Movies used to be about the only place that a boy and girl could be alone in the dark for a while, especially in the beginning of a relationship building exercize.
Now, it’s easy to find a place to do whatever
Cagney and Bogie visited the USSR?????? They took out full page ads? Wrote and acted in plays?
Cagney’s 2nd-to-last film was 1-2-3, I think it was called. Worked for Pepsi or Coke and the commies kept trying to get the formula.
There’s a difference in having your views known and shoving them in our face and wanting US to pay for the privilege.
Roger:
I would like to add one more thing. Movies have substituted special effects for plot and acting. Compare a movie like the Matrix to THX 1137 or even Logan’s Run. You had to act to make the plot work. Today’s movies are little more then non-interactive video games.
Dale Gribble-
Yup.
All of today’s male leads are girly-men, with the exception of some of the black guys, like Denzell Washington. There are a handful of exceptions. For example, Benjamin Bratt, who in real life is the girliest of girly men, successfully played a real man (a Marine sniper) in one of those Tom Clancy adaptations. But in general, there are no real men in movies today.
All-
I think it’s the writing. Special effects don’t diminish good writing; they complement it. For example, the original Star Wars, while hoeky and formulaic, was faily well-written. The story was engaging, the characters were interesting and likable, etc. The special effects were pretty decent too. Ditto for Indiana Jones and Saving Private Ryan.
The problem is that today’s movies are not well-written. The reason why the movies of the 30′s, 40′s, and 50′s were good was becuase you could relate to the characters.
The characters weren’t just handsome, courageous, quick-witted, etc. They also exhibited human qualities like loyalty, decency, and compassion. The plot often turned on one of these qualities. This got the audience emotionally involved in the action. Think of it this way: which plot is more emotionally gripping? One in which the main character has to rescue his wife, the mother of his children, from the clutches of a deranged killer, or one in whcih the main character needs to rescue some hot babe who he doesn’t even know, a woman clad in a thong and a lace bra, from the clutches of the same killer? The old movies had plots like the former, the new ones are more like the latter.
The characters were also put in situations that everyone in the audience could relate to. That is the secret of Hitchcock’s films; the characters are very ordinary, and lead very ordinary lives. When something extrordinary happens to them, it has tremendous impact. There is one scene from a Hitchcock film — either Veritgo or The Birds — in which you see one of the characters packing a suitcase. She puts in a slip, a couple of skirts, a toothbrush, a hairbrush, etc. Modern movies do not waste time on details like this. But they are really important. They humanize the characters and make you relate to them.
Finally, the characters in the old movies, even the heroic ones, tend to be idealized versions of Everyman. Humphrey Bogart, for example, was sort of a blue collar James Bond. He wasn’t handsome, and he wasn’t polished, but he had guts and total confidence. There is this one movie where he plays a paratrooper, just home from the war, who has to avenge the death of his friend from the Army. In the first five minutes or so of the film, the friend is stil alive. You get to see how close he was to Humphrey Bogart and how much they like one another. You also find out that before the war, Humphrey Bogart was a cab driver in St. Louis. During the war, he was a Captain in an Airborne unit. When the friend is murdered you really understand why Bogart has to avenge him. There is this scene where Bogart is in a posh, mob-owned casino. This beautiful rich woman he is with loses a huge amount of money — $14,000 I think — in a craps game. She starts freaking out. Bogart instantly steps up to the table and starts rolling the dice for her. The thing which makes this scene so great is that: (a) you know Bogart doesn’t have $14,000 — if he loses, he is ruined, or worse, since it is a Mob casino; and (b) Bogart’s blue-collar upbringing in the Midwest makes him a better dice player than any of the rich playboys in the room. The whole thing doesn’t last more than a minute or two but it is incredible. Bogart is playing for huge stakes but he never breaks a sweat. He does it all to help a damsel in distress. And he is able to pull it off becuase he is a streetwise regular guy. If this scene were fillmed today, Bogart would be a drop-dead handsome billionaire who wins the game through luck. He would have slept with the damsel in distress seconds later, and afterwords we would never see her again.
Even Grace Kelly, perhaps the most beautiful woman who ever lived, played fairly ordinary characters in her movies. Nothing could conceal her epic beauty, but her emotions and actions on screen were those of a normal woman, not those of narcissitic uber-starlet. These days the beautiful actresses are either prima donnas or promiscuous on screen. It just isn’t the same.
The common thread here is writing. There are plenty of very fine actors today. There is plenty of money for making decent films. The directors are good. The writers are the weak link.
Loss of the western as a stock form seems to me to be at least a small part of the problem. The western is the uniquely American mythic story form. A couple of the better movies in the last few years were westerns – Unforgiven and Open Range. Especially the latter film, which reminded me of another great one, The Man Who Would Be King. For me, it is all about the story. the magnetism of the characters (and the people who play them), and the cinematographic art that puts the story on the screen in a way that is unique to the genre. Unforgiven – dark, brooding; Open Range, bright, breathtaking scenery. Both backdrops to great stories.
The war movie is in disuetude, too. At a time when they ought to be cranking them out – legions of young men (target audience) would see them – but where are the movies? Black Hawk Down (again, something of a cavalry/savages epic in the old Fort Apache tradition) was a gripping movie, and very popular with the testosterone set. We Were Soldiers – great movie, great (true) story. But Hollywood can’t seem to get the message.
Another great turnoff for me, and I believe many others, is the steady takeover of the cinematic art by the computer geeks. I thrill at the sight of several thousand extras charging on horseback or running in headlong attack – but 50,000 computer-generated Acheans left me flat in Troy. One need not guess much about what the $7 or so will buy – a LOT of special effects, with attendant loud noises – but what did it mean? It’s all so repetitive and boring. Sets and special effects are only there to help tell the story about the people. In so many movies made today, the people are literally swallowed up by the effects.
I disagree with part of the argument about video games, by the way. I watch my college age kids play these things – the games are repetitive, predictable and boring, and do not compare with even a mediocre movie. I think that teens are choosing video games over movies because movies have the previously discussed intrinsic failings
Last point: movies (the good ones) can grab the audience like nothing else can. How often do you get teary or viscerally excited at a movie versus the same reactions reading a book? Movies won’t go away, but it is clear the audiences are voting with their feet against the Hollywood status quo.
In 4 days Saw II took in 9 times its production budget.
In 16 weeks Wedding Crashers has taken in 5 times its production budget domestically and isn’t doing too bad worldwide.
The worldwide gross of March of the Penguins hit the 100 mil mark this past weekend.
The latest Wallace and Gromit is nearing $120 mil worldwide after 4 weeks.
Mention Bill Holden and the ’70s and…
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’
Wasn’t that a time?
I blame Keanu Reeves.
And yet, revenues are up.
http://www.slate.com/id/2123286/
Until that changes, movies will remain a kind of loss leader for the corporations. Or until conservatives start making movies for the people who are so turned off by today’s movies.
“Costs? $% for a cuppa java at Starbuckss? C’mon…”
Yeah, but a venti latte at Starbucks doesn’t cost ten dollars. If it did, most would not buy it. Even so, I go to Starbucks much less since the prices have risen. Gas prices are also nipping into my budget, so someone who used to go get coffee three times a week during college now goes twice or thrice a month. I haven’t been to a movie in forever. The only movies I really want to see this year are Walk The Line and Narnia. Also, I wonder if the tendency to group all the good movies at the end of the year for Oscar reasons has a negative effect on moviegoing. I generally only want to go at the end of the year, but can’t afford to see two movies a week. For the rest of the year moviegoing is a wasteland.
If I’m already paying $40+ for “coffee” (aka cable/HBO/etc), do you think I’m going to pony up an extra $10 a week to go to “Starbucks” (movies)? This doesn’t even include the cost of an internet connection, renting dvds, video games, etc. What happens when you want to take your family to “Starbucks” and it costs $50 for a family of four? Anyway, you can contest it all you want, but the study clearly indicated that ticket prices were a big part of the problem for many potential moviegoers.
“The war movie is in disuetude, too. At a time when they ought to be cranking them out – legions of young men (target audience) would see them – but where are the movies?”
Instead, we’re getting tons of movies about how the government is lying and dishonest and corrupt, etc, etc.
Roger:
Bogey may have leaned left but it wasn’t jammed into all of his films with the subtlety of an examination for prostate cancer. The L.A. Times featured stories on a couple of Iraq movies that are coming out this year and America as the root of all evil was the theme and I can tell that the politics of the movie will resemble the Soviet style propaganda that made those films so dull. I have long given up on the idea that Hollywood will produce balanced films that touch on foreign policy. But the political lectures are so transparent and rant like and often have no organic connection to the plot or the character. They might as well stop the film, have a tape of Chomsky giving a lecture, and then start the film again.
One of my favorite films is the Manchurian Candidate. The remake was so brutal. Disney villians have more depth then the cardboard cutout baddies(general, oil executive, religous leader,and of coarse the worst of all republican) and they resemble the puppet protesters you can see at every anti-war protest. The dialogue is wooden, it is riddled with cliches, and they preach to the choir.
Donald Sutherland was interviewed by the L.A. Times this weekend. They asked him if it was hard to play a conservative Republican since he is such a liberal. He responded, no I have played a murderer and I have played someone who wants to sleep with his daughter. I caught his performance in the new show C.I.C. and that is exactly how he plays it.I half expect him to show up in a black suit with a black waxed mustache so he can twirl it as he ties a old lady to the railroad tracks. I watch one T.V. show on a regular basis, West Wing. The politics are sometimes silly and it is written from a liberal perspective and conservatives rarely get a fare shake but the stories lines are often clever and I like the characters.
I know that Hollywood will never get over it’s liberal adiction and it will never give a balanced look at politics. But they don’t have to hit me over the head with a hammer with their agit-prop. It’s predictable and boring.
Roger — good points all and if you go to Big Picture:
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/film/index.html
There is another analysis that says basically the same thing with more numbers. Substitution of video games, DVDs, and the internet for movies by the core teen audience that makes movies hits. Author compares the “hamburger helper” strategy of movies to radio (corporate playlists and no local content) and music.
To me Hollywood risks becoming like the Coffee brands in the late 1970′s … decades of making a cheap product with lesser beans weaned people off Coffee, and when folks came back it was not to Folgers or Hills Bros. but to Starbucks or Peets or other specialty coffee blends from an alternative retail network.
I think Hollywood overall is in deep trouble; the audience sexually segregated (TV is mostly female; film mostly male). Emphasis on demos leads to micro-channel entertainment designed to get cult audiences stimulated but by their very nature unable to break out to a broad audience (no Raiders, no Die Hard, no Sixteen Candles).
Much of the bad habits of TV (soap-like plots, “shock” such as birth, deaths, marriage, “they did it” etc) stems from pushing towards a completely female audience; the same goes for big movies (special effects “things blowing up” extravaganza, pointless action sequences, emphasis on remaking TV shows and comic books (quick WHY do we need an A-Team movie?).
Who really buys Owen Wilson, Jude Law, Ashton Kutcher, Sean William Scott, and Johnny Knoxville as leading MEN? Boys maybe but not men. The few “men” who are around are used in stupid anti-American “let’s feel sympathy for terrorists” films like Syriana. Boys need and want films that show them how to act like men, guys like Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford and Denzel Washington.
Try Sex and Violence.
Several of the most highly touted movies recently have relied on Sex and Violence rather than plot or acting. It is sad.
Several years ago, a highly successful movie had the heroine accidentaly drop an automatic rifle down a flight of steel stairs. As the gun bounced it fired randomly at the oncoming bad guys. In the old days, the guys would have dived for cover and the jokes would have been made by where they landed. In this movie, they were being killed, while the audience laughed as it was supposed to be funny.
We seldom go to movies any more, other than a few retrospectives, foreign films or “art films.” It is sad b/c we enjoy going to the BIG screen. They lost us largely because of sex and violence and a severe lack of knowing right from wrong.
The problem is not that movies are being made for teenage boys.
The problem is that movies are being made by arrested adolescents with the personal and social maturity of teenage boys, who cannot imagine anything else.
I simply refuse to pay those prices to sit through commercials, put up with the inconsiderate people yacking on cell phones, and in some theaters being denied the right to bring my own snacks.
Did I mention the films that all seem to be crude language, car crashes, explosions, and special effects?
Oh, it’s much worse than that.
I despise the movie industry AND the theatre owners. Crappy leftwing shite spewers, dirty shite smelling theatres. Noisy, offensive crud. If I want bad rock music played too loud I’ll have my son play it for me. If I want plotless badly edited self indulgent blather I’ll call Streisand directly.
So I play games. I fill out and answer every survey possible and lie like crazy. Why not? They lie to me. My ‘no littering’ and ‘piss accurately into the urinal’ rules are in abeyance in the theatres – when I go which is maybe once a year. I always go to second run; I’ll never pay those a**holes full price again, even the good ones. I’ll never watch Sean Penn again or his leftoid shite c*nt buddies again. When those SOBs turns up on TV I turn it off. Not even for free.
Enraged? Hostile? Yes. I only wish I could express myself as well and as crudely as Twenty Major.
If they made a movie about Count Luckner, Amanda Garrett would certainly go see it. As the protagonist in James Cobb’s near future Naval adventures, she’d be a good subject herself.
I was absolutely appalled to learn that they’ve made a remake of The Fog, and that it is stupider than the original. They’ve been scraping the barrel so long the bottom has fallen out.
The problem is not that movies are being made for teenage boys. The problem is that movies are being made by arrested adolescents with the personal and social maturity of teenage boys, who cannot imagine anything else.
Bingo. The studios’ MBAs and young whippersnapper producers who by and large determine what gets made are trying, vainly, to guess at what middle-market adolescent males want to see. Those guesses are deemed as valid or invalid after about two weeks from release: a movie is either the precursor of the next big wave in (gross-out)(action)(weirdness)(horror)(schlock romance), or it’s not, with upwards of 95% of the features deemed as failures.
This is basically a venture capitalist, not an industrial capitalist, approach to production. The industrial model is based on continuous improvement based on substantial and ongoing investments in people, product, process, technology, fixed assets. The venture model is based on reducing risk by spreading investments across a portfolio of in many cases rather dubious assets, 70% of which will be write-offs, 25%+ of which will break-even or earn minimal returns at best, and 1-5% will earn the spectacular, “ten-bagger” returns that constitute over 90% of the returns for the portfolio.
To the extent that Hollywood favors the industrial model, it’s in funding blockbusters with mega-stars and Spielbergian directors. I believe Citibank in the late 1990s offered IIRC a bond securitized by the cash flows from revenues generated by a series of movies (and collateral stuff) to be made by the director of “Independence Day.” The essence of the offering was that, like credit card receivables or oil revenues, the schlock enviro-horror and world-coming-together formula would generate predictable, steady, safe returns for investors.
I suppose you could make an analogy to the steady, predictable cash flows from earlier eras’ formulaic films and stars– someone mentioned westerns’ ability to generate outsized profits year in and out, and perhaps the star studio system is another way of securing, if not securitizing, future cash flows from a known, valuable asset.
But the scale today is different. That films today are securitized speaks volumes about how enormous the scale of the risk, the financial investment involved, has become. To securitize is to transform a financial risk into manageable, tiny bits that can then be sold via paper instruments to thousands of investors, who can sell them to others as they see fit. When Hollywood financing has more in common with ExxonMobil’s method of project finance, you know that the movies have lost whatever soul they possessed.
Another way in which Hollywood’s production model is screwy, if not screwed, is the extraordinary emphasis on distribution costs for blockbuster films. Securing theatre runs, marketing, PR: these aren’t investments proper, in the sense that a software company invests $100 million in a platform technology or a consumer goods company invests in building a brand. This is simply a speculative crap shoot along the lines of a venture capitalist urging his stable of Pets.coms and bluenile.coms to burn through a million or two in Super Bowl ads on the off chance that one of the stable will become the next eBay.
Despite the occasional jackpot, this is a loser’s game. Marketing costs escalate higher and higher, while the effectiveness of the advertising and distribution model, in a fragmenting media environment, diminishes accordingly. IIRC this is the same challenge that the sneaker manufacturers encountered in the early 1990s, when their market turned to cluky Doc Martens and army boots, and Nike etc’s sales began to turn downward. The solution was guerrilla marketing instead of Michael and Bo Knows X, with Puma showing the way by sending slacker/grunge market researchers into the hipper clubs and lounges to “test” new products, build awareness of new designs and gather intelligence about what was deemed the next big thing. Lo and behold, suede became cool, Puma soared up the league tables, and the industry was saved.
I suppose for Hollywood the analogy is internet-based distribution and blog-based marketing and market research. Only when the balance of attention shifts from traditional monster marketing/distribution of blockbusters back toward actually listening to customers, and trying to build something of enduring value– namely, the depth and richness of creative talent– will Hollywood win back its lost audiences. My $0.02…
Roger:
Another problem with Hollywood if they have a large investment they must have the same ‘star actors” and thus pay them so much that there labor costs go thru the roof. If you start off paying 20 million to one actor the need for gigantic sales means that giant ad campaigns are required. Whena film costs a quarter billion to make the investors are going to want more control of what they are paying for, and thus, push towards formula and proven styles. They keep making the same fim over and over. Corporations and art don’t mix. And since many in the artistic community disdain the idea of entertainment they make dreary films about the “serious” dark side of life. If I hear “a gritty look at the underbelly of humanity” or any of the offshoots of that theme I think I will puke. Two hours of depressed people who hate themselves and hate life. I can go down to the homeless shelter if I want to be depressed, and the “reality” isn’t phoney and back lit.
I was going to ignore Anderson, but on further reflection I do want to write something about a particular passage:
The countercultural movies of “New Hollywood”— such as Arthur Penn’s violent, criminal-glorifying Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Robert Altman’s cynical antiwar comedy M.A.S.H. (1970), Hal Ashby’s sordid paean to the sexual revolution Shampoo (1975), and Martin Scorcese’s urban nightmare Taxi Driver (1976)—wowed critics, who shared their anti-establishment and anti-American attitudes.
But moviegoers turned up their noses. Weekly film attendance in 1967, the first year after Hollywood dumped the production code, plummeted to 17.8 million, from 38 million the year before (television had already eroded moviegoing from its late-1940s peak of 90 million a week). “In a single one-year period,” Medved notes, “more than half the movie audience disappeared—by far the largest one-year decline in the history of the motion picture business.”
I’m not big on Shampoo, but every other movie mentioned is among the best made by Hollywood and all did good to excellent box office. In real terms the largest year-to-year drop in weekly movie attendance was 27,500,000 between 1949 and 1950. The 1966 to 1967 drop was the largest percentage drop. Maybe a ton of drive-ins went out of business that year. In dollar terms the top ten grossers of 1967 made about 4 million less than those of 1966. You Only Live Twice grossed $16.3 million in 1967. Thunderball grossed $26 million in 1966. Was Bond-fatigue to blame?
As to the code, it was abandoned when, as wikipedia.com puts it:
After the film was denied Production Code approval, MGM released it anyway, the first instance of an MPAA member company distributing a film that didn’t have an approval certificate. There was little the MPAA could do about it.
This great movie from England is that film:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060176/
…and all the junk the code might have kept off the screen since isn’t, in my not-so-humble opinion, worth a single change to that film.
Thibaud –
Sorry. You’re making the same mistake the movie business is: the whole problem is Evil Capitalist Corporate Influences. Bullshit. Movie financing has always been weird, and Enron and the like can only dream of some of the scams producers and studios pulled, especially in the Forties and Fifties.
Everybody –
The last two movies I went to the theater for were Chicken Run and Men in Black. My wife rents CDs fairly regularly; I end up watching for a few minutes, then head back for the computer while I can still stifle my gag reflex.
I’ve heard it attributed to Sam Goldwyn: if you want to send a message, call Western Union. Nowadays it’s even easier, with email and all… yes, many of the old-time actors were leftoids. Being a screaming leftoid and still able to play, e.g., a soldier in battle, or an unscrupulous bar owner, is acting. Being a screaming leftoid and using “star power” to force the scripts to issue screaming leftoid rants regardless of the character being played is not acting.
A relentless, pounding repetition of pudenda, politics, and political correctness is boring. $15 for that? Bullshit. Wait ’til it comes out on CD… six months later it’s forgotten because the next remake of the same f*ing PPP screed is up.
And of course there’s the theaters and their owners. Forty years ago I sold cokes and popcorn at a ratty, run-down, small-town theater that seated maybe three hundred. Once a week the projectionist flipped all the seats up and pushed the crap around with a broom. But dammit, it had sound baffles in the walls (even if covered by spiderwebs), a decently-reflective screen, and enough seat spacing for a little comfort. Compared to today’s cinderblock walls, off-white projection surface + 5 megawatts of projector lighting, and seating to make “tourist class” on a Japanese airline look spacious, the State Theater was luxurious.
So yeah, competition from other venues is a contributor, but actually going to the theater and seeing a movie in person is a unique experience. If the product being pushed was worth the powder and shot to blow it to blazes, they’d still be making money and keeping an audience. Pushing what are essentially double-length TV shows out through crapola shoeboxes is queering that, and the political content just makes it impossible to ignore the other flaws.
Regards,
Ric
I want ROBERT MITCHUM………
JOHN GARFIELD
STEVE MCQUEEN
CLARK GABLE
I can’t stand today’s girlie men that wax their bodies, WTF is that?
Hello Ric – perhaps you’re new here; if so you’d do well to try to read people’s posts before splattering a stream of “Bullshit!” in response.
As a corporate veteran (and whippersnapper MBA) myself, I don’t consider corporations “evil.” In fact, I argued rather clearly, I think, for the kind of investment in the product that well-run corporations are noted for. I distinguished this kind of investment from the venture capitalist’s wildcatter approach. I wrote:
This is basically a venture capitalist, not an industrial capitalist, approach to production. The industrial model is based on continuous improvement based on substantial and ongoing investments in people, product, process, technology, fixed assets
As an example of movie financing I mentioned not Enron but an offering arranged by Citibank, the largest, most solid commercial bank in the US. I wouldn’t dispute your proposition that “movie financing has always been weird”. As I noted, it’s the scale of today’s financing and, as Kevin points out, the need to advertise massively through traditional media that distort the studios’ attitude toward risk and creativity.
Pamela,
Pierce Brosnan did a decent job with the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. Not a McQueen but no Queen, either. My wife enjoyed watching him as much as I enjoyed watching Rene Russo. But that’s about the only first-run Hollywood film (aside from Notting Hill) that we’ve seen and enjoyed in the last seven years.
There have always been good and bad movies, actors, writers and plots. There was dreck in every decade.
For me the thing that has ruined many movies and TV shows is the political posturing of actors. When I watch a movie I must have the “willing suspension of disbelief” to enjoy what I’m watching. If an actor has foisted his political views on me in a way that grates then I will see him as that and not be able to suspend my disbelief and see him as the character he is playing. This ruins the movie no matter if it is a good one or not. This is bad enough for new films and shows but it is worse when a actor in an older movie I like decides to come out as a far leftist and leaves me with a bad taste when I watch something I previously enjoyed.
“This is basically a venture capitalist, not an industrial capitalist, approach to production. The industrial model is based on continuous improvement based on substantial and ongoing investments in people, product, process, technology, fixed assets”
Imo this is what used to happen. Having actors, writers and directors as free agents means that, if a studio invested in people, they would essentially piss money away.
Patrick,
Thanks for the Blowup reco. I’d never seen it or even heard of it. Just put it at the top of my Netflix queue.
When Hollywood givs a damn what I think out here in the wilds of the red state I live in, I will give a damn about seeing their product.
Oh, and Roger, everybody knows it’s the writers. What is with you guys anyway? Would you get with it already?
I agree with many others on here regarding quality, regarding ideology, values.
I was ranting in a long post about quality, about supporting our troops and American war heroes, but truthfully, hollywood is not worth such an effort.
I consider them forever lost now if they refuse to tell the truth(in scripts and movies) of an enemy as disgusting as the Islamic jihadist which recently killed three Christian girls 16 and under. If hollywood is afraid to take on such leaders as Arafat or Iran’s latest mullah approved rat in a cage, then I refuse to support them.
The problem with Hollywood today is Mr. Smith goes to Washington would be completely pro-dem and anti-repubs. It would refuse to see that both parties are hip deep in corporate lobby cash and therefore neither has the upper hand in ethics.
I refuse to give anymore money to an industry who ignores my values, my beliefs and is responsible for throwing so much filth into the world. I am actively trying to find other avenues and creators of video’s and music who do not support such filth or ideology. I certainly will not allow my children to watch MTV or other garbage.
As of now, hollywood(plus cable, tv broadcastors and game makers) pours out more porn, more trash, and more disgusting examples of lost lifestyles than it does family entertainment or good moral values. And while no one said they have to provide moral lessons or family values. Neither am I forced to watch it, so I walk away from it.
Severly bad taste and bad decisions on TV used to be limited, or at least the consequences of such actions would come to fruition. But now, young people are rewarded for disgusting behavior in fact encouraged to behave immorally for the TV. One only need to watch MTV one day to understand why those like them and hollywood are flushing our children down the toilet of despair and rot for yes – ‘evil’ corporate greed.
And I don’t just blame the actors, but the whole industry from CEO on down at Viacom, Fox, GE, NBC, ABC, CBS, MGM and you name it. I find it highly ironic and amusing that Madonna recently came out and said she does not allow her child to watch TV. This I’m sure is true of most elites in hollywood. What Mommy or Daddy do at work is not watched or talked about at length I am sure and in many cases, their own children are encouraged to turn away from the very industry where they make their money. What should this tell us about our own children?
Sorry, but corporate goals are cash hungry and greedy. Market forces insure the greed for profit. Those at the top are greedy. 100 million dollar compensation greedy and the stock investors that buy them greedy. You will find few if any companys and funds which are out to make films of quality, not sex, violence, etc. Even Disney crossed over a long time ago.
The fact that I must pay for such cow dung on TV which I do not select is more than irritating, it makes one want to revolt from the industry all together. It means my money is subsidizing the very filth I detest. I’m sick of it. I want alternatives. Someone who has half a brain and the money should start a new movie production set in the heartland for the hearts of those who refuse to give into greed, produce and watch such filth. There’s a huge untapped market of families who would love to watch movies based on traditional values which are intelligent, witty, humorous, dramatic and deliver deeper meanings other than pop culture psychism’s of the day.
The few things I watch on TV; news, a little sports, science, home improvement and history(but some of that I don’t trust). As for entertainment… sheesh.
I must pay for all the garbage in between. Why? If given a choice and others like me the same; the revenue stream would dry up for some of these channels, shows and movies. Or, those who wish to dip to such levels could pay for them like they do HBO.
In all honesty, hollywood could fall into the ocean tomorrow and I would not miss it.
I’ll never forget Sally Field… they like me, they really like me? I think she said…. no Sally, they just like what they think you represent, if they knew the full truth of who you are, they’d realize your weaknesses and foibles and sins like the rest of us.
Hollywood does not allow for much of that though for their elites until at least after they are dead and buried. Then the public can see the dirt behind the fascade which is unholywood.
I’m with Joe Schmoe – it’s the writing (no offense, Roger). Stories and characters now take a distant 2d and 3d place to special effects (maybe 4th and 5th place, also behind product placement and T&A).
If you go to the IMDB (Internet movie data base) web site they have user ratings on all the movies. The second highest rated movie of all time is “The Shawshank Redemption” (behind only “The Godfather”). Now SR was a very fine movie but I was little surprised to see it rated so high above many of the legendary classics. I thought about what it had going for it and came up with good story, good characters, good acting, no gimmicks. Then I realized that for a lot of younger people this was practically the only movie they have ever seen that has those attributes.
Heh, just today I saw a commercial for Poseiden and the only thing that crossed my mind was “Can’t they think of anything original??”
There are two reasons I don’t watch many movies anymore.
The last movie I saw in a theater was about 3 years ago..and that one was so bad that I walked out, something I’ve only done twice in my life.
I used to buy one or two DVD’s a week, but the last few times I’ve looked at them, I found nothing that I was even slightly interested in. The last few that I did buy were so bad that I felt I wasted my money and didn’t add them to my library, I gave them away.
Make me think, make me laugh, tell me a good story, make me care about your character for a couple of hours, leave me wanting more.
And then there’s the politics – which, I must admit, probably adds to the list of reasons that I can no longer stand to watch many movies.
Like a commenter above, when I’ve heard someone screaming about their politics I can no longer separate them from the character they play. I see their face on the screen, and all I can “hear” is whatever ignorance they were babbling about recently.
Maybe it’s because my husband is a recently returned Soldier, it’s personal with me. The ignorance they spread directly affects him. When I hear their remarks parroted by the very people who lead the fight AGAINST our troops, when I read their remarks reported in papers in the middle east papers – well, lets just say I can no longer stand to see their faces.
To quote a soldier in Gunner Palace “Cuz for y’all it’s just a show, but we live in this movie”
All the comments provided indicate to me that the public is awakening to the idea that we have been living under Cultural Establishment’s Big Brother bubble and that we are ‘not going to take it anymore.’
The Cultural Establisment has been intentionally indoctrinating the way in which people should think, speak and feel for decades however, eventually the bubble bursts when the people recognize that movies do not reflect any concepts found in reality.
Big Brother Cultural Establishment has led us to believe the sky is pink while they intimidate with mockery and ridicule anyone who does not accept the image that the sky is pink. Eventually people get fed-up with the deceptive manipulation and stop looking at the sky.
The simple fact is people are fed-up with Hollywood’s Big Brother bubble and we have stop looking.
The decline of Hollywood can be summed up in one word: Laziness.
The studios prefer to recycle old plots, remake films or go to old TV shows, than to reach down and try to pick something original and interesting.
They’ll pay a writer to create a knock-off of some other writer’s worst script, rather than to go into the hundreds of original scripts being presented; since that would require actually reading them, and that would take to much of their valuable time (Have to go to Ashton’s lastest party ya know.).
There are probably only a couple of execs who can sit down and open their minds to different kinds of stories and characters; unlike the cookie-cutter kids who check the demographics they want to reach and how much they want to spend.
A first-class script in the hands of an experienced director/storyteller will bring in the audience that the ‘kids’ don’t bother to consider.
A case in point: The film ‘Gods and Monsters’. It had a unique story, a director that didn’t ‘phone it in’, a cast that was experienced and put effort into their roles. The theatre I was in was packed and the audience around me was not the teenage boys, but adults who wanted to see a good film. This film would most likely, have been rejected by the ‘kids’ because teenage boys won’t see the mandatory explosions and mayhem.
BTW..I agree that Hollywood has ignored the values of mainstream America, and prefers an ‘in your face’ approach.
A soldier is no longer heroic and his cause is no longer noble. He is now either corrupt, crazy, or misguided. (Naturally by those evil Republicans/Corporations. It’s never the fault of some enemy of freedom who is actually evil.)
OBTW: Zulu and Zulu Dawn are now out on DVD in a two-movie set that is very cheap. Historically very accurate, thrilling, and mirabile dictu, in the movie Zulu the King of the Zulus is played by … the King of the Zulus!
It’s astonishing that on this long string nobody
And then all of these directors having graduated from …music videos!Like Tony Scott.After what he did with “Man On Fire”…oy.
What’s wrong with Hollywood?
College.
Up until the 60′s, you had movies being made by people who weren’t “filmmakers”, that is, they had dropped into it after years of doing something else, not necessarily even connected with the arts. Hell, look at character actor Victor McLaglen’s life before he became an actor: boxer, barrister, mercenary officer. Even the ones who saw themselves as artists first and foremost had a range of life experience utterly unknown in today’s Hollywood, between the Depression and World War II.
Then along came “film school,” and a generation of bourgie artistes-manqu
I want more movies with original plots. Like A Room With a View, period films that don’t stretch credibility. The other day Hubby and I watched Miss Congeniality 2. There’s a scene where one of the characters bashes in the electric switch box to turn the lights out in the place. Hubby has training in the electrical field and pointed out that this is not realistic. Little things like this just make people wonder where the folks making movies are coming from.
Oh . . . Ed . . . thanks for the link! I’ve met her several times (family friend goes to their church) and she’s a delightful person to talk with.
“It’s astonishing that on this long string nobody
WichitaBoy—
I hope you like it.
Best.
my dear sister (a delightful caring woman from middle America who spends her day caring for our mother) wrote this to me in response to Roger’s posting on Hollywood’s decline, it exhibits what I feel is the prototypical consumer’s reaction to the offerings today…
“personally, it’s the movies that aren’t any good. Same ol’ story lines, different actors. Boring. Meg Ryan use to be cute, but then she left Quiad, then she got her lips done or something, who wants to look at her now. Where are the musicals, I loved Chicago and Moulan Rouge, maybe that’s showing my age. But come on, when I watched Dodgeball, and I love Ben Stiller, the ending with the lesbos kissing and this is for kids to watch. TV is just as bad. God, I remember my parents never taking me to a funeral home cuz they didn’t want to upset me, now our toddlers are playing play station and blowing people up or depantsing them. Times have changed. Which is a good thing, but not all things are good. I want Julie Andrews and Mary Poppins, the Sound of Music, Richard Harris and Camelot. I want feel good stuff, and I want that for my grandchildren. I love “You Got Mail” and “Big” and I am sure there are more, but leave out the up close and personal sex crap. Don’t need it to turn me on. hahaha”
Elgin tyrell (dot com) was just reading today’s take on the Belmont Club web site (http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/) and came across a very good idea for a film to meet the real needs of film goers, relevance, action, intrigue, politics, etc…
Queen Mary I of England is called Bloody Mary because she persecuted Protestants during her short reign (1554-58). Her sister, Elizabeth Tudor, persecuted Catholics during her long reign (1558-1603) and she is called Good Queen Bess. Mary is criticized because she burned Protestants whom she considered heretics, but Elizabeth is praised as shrewd for persecuting Catholics, who did not accept laws passed during her reign making her both secular and spiritual ruler. Violations of these laws were considered an act of treason punishable by hanging, drawing, and quartering.
Don’t writers in Hollywood read history any more, life doesn’t need to be all fantasy and sex (more fantasy) to be entertaining.
Commercials, rude audiences, lame movies, and arrogant actors with their politics all contibute. Most annoying to me is the tendency to turn the exploits of the good guy into cartoonish antics. Watch some bozo run between streams of bullets unscathed, fire 72 shots without reloading or missing, and everything explodes. Anyone who has seen the real thing has to be annoyed.
Books are better entertainment and always have been. There are a lot of good books that probably won’t be made into movies for any number of reasons. Maybe the potential audience is too small. Many just don’t translate to film. You can take a book with you, or finish it later.
Then we get to the political rectitude. The bad guys can be white Republicans or Nazis. Anybody else will organize a boycott. Yes, I’m sticking to books.
Michael Yon has a post about an Hollywood actor who appreciates the sacrifices our soldiers are making in Iraq. A really classy guy, Bruce Willis is.
http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/2005/10/paying-respect-to-those-whove-earned.html
I just finished reading, The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood, and Epstein makes the same points you do. The big “locomotive” pictures that pulled the studios along for the last ten years have all been “Star Wars” types.
Timing is everything, via Bros. Judd about Elia Kazan:
…Moscow
I guess I’m primarily an echo on this topic, with regards to bad writing, better ways to spend my time, poor venues, etc. I also agree that it is the combination that really does them in. Do a really well written movie and show it without any distractions–and you can get away with some pretty blatant politics–especially in a comedy. OTOH, do some formulaic, borderline stuff, and the audience is just looking for a reason not to bother. (Robin Williams with good material, top of his game, makes me laugh out loud with a blatantly leftist riff. Considerably less quality than that, I’m not even listening.)
I’ve played a lot of different computer games, and observed many more. I’d say that they are, on the whole, more mindless than most movies. The difference is that once one finds a game that one likes, you can get far more milage out of it than a single movie. And if I want an intellectual activity, I’d rather read a book anyway. For the most part, “intellectual” on film was always more pretense than fact (with exceptions, of course). So the average film did not need to fall very far before games started to appeal. Plus, the games don’t have the smug pretense glued on top.
Coisty writes Warren Spencer writes aboutt High Plains Drifter:
“Eastwood plays a nameless pseudo-mystical figure who rides into a town that had cowardly watched the brutal murder of its marshal;
No. He’s a ghost. It’s the ghost of the marshall. Mr. Spencer must have missed the end of the film or is too square to “get it.”
P.S. HBO’s Deadwood is an allegory for Hell.
I enjoy Supernatural-Western dramas. They’re as American as Halloween.
Movies are a reflection of a changed world and that is not necessarily a bad thing. How many stories are there anyway that can be told in interesting, novel, and absorbing fashion that have not already been told and retold to death?
Television has stolen from the movies and the headlines, and the movies from television, the headlines and the printed word in one form or the other for the past hundred and ten years. There remains very little that has not happened or an idea not put forth that hasn’t been exploited by both mediums. Therefore, I postulate that as technological advances and the creation of other media such an the internet touches more lives, these forms of entertainment we heretofore called mainstream will continue to lose popularity.
Some takes:
1. War movies: more John Wayne, less Deer Hunter. Lose the cynicism, anti-Americanism, and don’t have rapper soundtracks. Don’t expect to make big bux on movies about gangstas in uniform. And it’s OK to make patriotic war movies that don’t involve “the Greatest Generation”.
A war movie with American heroes in uniform (except for a misguided, cynical MSM type who finally figures it out in the end) up against an evil alliance of Baathists and Al-Qaedas in Iraq? A box-office blowout, even if the cast and crew would be banned from Hollywood parties for eternity. The feverish protests of CAIR and multi-culti types at the premiere would be an added bonus, as would it being banned for politicial incorrectness in a smallish Western European country. Hire Michael Yon as a consultant…
2. Bring back Westerns. And other movies that involve strong, straight men who are neither henpecked nor evil.
3. Make movies for American audiences. Don’t water them down for foreigners who aren’t clued in on Americanisms. If the movie is good, it’ll do well abroad.
4. Don’t use so much special effects that I feel like I’m debugging your rendering software.
I hope this thread isn’t dead because this is something that drives me crazy.
I do know people who are working in the industry right now and the corporate side of it is absolutely ruining the movies. I know it may have been industrial in the old days, but I can’t believe it was anything like this.
One writing team I know is in the rewrite phase of a film they’ve sold with an actor and director attached. The actor and the director are not huge enough stars to have too much power so corporate ‘suits’ are giving the script notes and the creative team has no choice but the fulfill these non-artist’s demands. These are marketing people who believe they’ve ‘figured out’ the formula.
Right now these guys are being confronted by notes from a studio underling that will ruin the story. The script will not go any further until they take the notes. The person who actually decides whether or not to greenlight the project will never see the original script or any other versions leading up to the incomprehensible plot conversion this studio rep insists upon. If they don’t do it, the project goes no further.
I really feel for writers like Roger and especially for those who are just starting out. What you see on the screen often has no relation to what they started out with (at least these days). Even big stars will come in with their own personal writers to ‘bump up’ their parts, further compromising what might have been an excellent script.
I think movies would be a lot better if writers were more respected. And if studio underlings weren’t justifying their own paychecks by messing with perfectly good stories.
Rant mode off.
One of the hottest sex scenes I’ve seen in a movie in the last ten years was in “Enemy at the Gates” – Jude Law and Rachel Weicz. It wasn’t hot because of big sillicone breasts (really there wasn’t any nudity – just a thigh), but because of the setting (a bombed out house) and the spectre of death that hung all around. It was two people in a totally hopeless situation performing the most life-affirming act possible.
Hell, that movie was so good it almost made me like the commies. “Enemy and the Gates” and “Blackhawk Down” are by far the best two war movies of the last 20 years.
Can’t Hollywood make one TV show or movie about Iraq where the troops are just a bunch of average Americans, mostly good but with human flaws, fighting not for politics but for honor, duty, and most importantly, for their buddies? Just one? As an experiment maybe?
Also – if Munich is as bad as anticipated, can we please take away Speilberg’s Jew Card? We can just replace him with Steve Spielbergo, his cheap Mexican counterpart.
Whilst I agree with most every comment made so far, I’ll intrude with one more. Recently I was over at a friends place and we watched a B-movie – Resident Evil: Apocalypse. I won’t sing it’s praises as a movie because it has none, but I have to say my friends’ home cinema through quality hi-fi with an ashtray and beer-fridge on the side of the lounge and such, with a movie that was a $3 weekly hire…well, that’s the way to watch stupid special effects movies, IMHO – at home with friends so you can laugh and heckle.
Why pay cinema prices for tickets and popcorn when I can get as good or better, cheaper and more conveniently? Recently, my retired dad bought himself another, bigger screen so I get his two-year old system for free.
Clearly it’s all these things.
Bad Stories and PC Leftism are related. Any system allowing an outside pressure group to change a famous novel’s terrorist villains from Muslims to Nazis is, more broadly, a top-down enterprise where the money people are certainly telling the writers a lot more than such occasionally obvious examples. There may be Art in Commerce, but not when Commerce micro-manages, or chooses to do the same thing over and over.
Price and entertainment competition are certainly related. Movie prices may be down in general CPI terms, but the competition has gotten cheaper yet, while also getting more flexible and capable. Until the 1980s, it was only from TV (including eventually 1 HBO channel) which was generally free but allowed almost no choices. Then VHS rentals, and now On-Demand and multiple movie channels are cheaper and more convenient. A videogame generally costs a bit more than a movie ticket, but is good for at least dozens of hours of play before boredom sets in. Dating teenagers can stay in and watch a movie alone, and in many cases one of their sets of parents will allow far more to go on than would be safe in a theater.
The “Free” media’s constant search for content also means free publicity decides a movie’s success on opening night. The hook of the right title is key, hence most movies now are either remakes, TV shows, sequels, or best-selling novels (at least in name; is it the same novel when you change major plt elements?). The Star System may not be any more pronounced now than in the 1950s, but then stars kept their name in the public’s mind by making movies or attending press events. They did not see notorious behaviour as to their benefit (indeed, it was not), whereas now most transgressions will be praised by much of the press, and any can be excused by a stint in rehab or tales of childhood trauma (“How brave, how strong you are, to have survived!”). And finally, the mergers between movie firms, TV and magazines means much of the media’s hype is completely bogus, preordained based on how much money the corporation has invested, and not an independent judgement by anyone at the magazine or morning show as to the merits of the movie.
Not to be deliberately iconoclastic, but I think the reason for the decline is MORE rather than LESS artistic tendencies on the part of movie executives. These days, a screenwriter will get dozens of notes from anybody and everybody who has the slightest say on a project — all of them movie buffs and pop culture mavens who are convinced they could be wonderful writers if they just had the time. Used to be, the movie execs let the writers be writers, looked at them as something like colorful insects (and certainly never envied them) and either nixed or accepted what they produced. Nowadays, every script or story idea is endlessly massaged into pabulum by gangs of “co-creators” who think they are being clever, making something more “accessible,” have a ear to the popular culture, or whatever, when they are really just failed writers making mischief. We need more heartless, oblivious studio executives who don’t give a damn about anything but the bottom line!
Re: the changing of writers original scripts.
I knew this went on but didn’t realize it happened that much. I do know that the shows I’ve enjoyed the most and can rewatch have been ones where the original writer is in charge. Babylon 5, Buffy and Firefly I can watch anytime and enjoy them as much as the first time.
darkcoffee’s comments reminded me of an article I read describing how the movie “Life or Something Like It” became such a horrible pos. Apparently, the original script was very very good, and then bit by bit too many people rewrote the script to make it more ‘appealing’ or somesuch nonsense. They ruined it. Of course, the movie’s star Angelina Jolie did her part to kill the film by demanding to wear a gigantic blonde fright wig that looked like shit on her.
I’ve noticed that about movies as well, geoffb. The best ones are controlled by a creator who can defend the project and maintain creative control. I’m not sure I buy the auteur theory but the best are usually those that have one person in control.
I suspect it’s always been this way but maybe now there are too many hands in the cookie jar. So much is riding on the project, nobody really wants to take credit in case it fails, so no one is responsible.
It doesn’t really matter if the players are reds because the play’s the thing. I adore Melvyn Douglas… Jose Ferrer, Lee Cobb, Gregory Peck–they could do the job. I even liked Sterling Hayden. Dalton Trumbo could write. Paul Robeson could act and sing. Frank Sinatra once remarked, “All I owe the public is a good performance,” and these people are entitled to say the same.
Don’t expect any sympathy, though, for studios closing and bad business times in Hollywood. It has always been true that most of what they make was trash to be burned without any lament. They do need to preserve a couple of sound stages and a few cameras so that occasionally, at rare intervals, from time to time, the apparatus will be around so someone can produce a really good movie.
Do a movie about Colonel Andrew MacNaughton during the World War I battles of Vimy, Passchendaele, and Amiens. Let Rick Schroder play the lead like he did in the Lost Battalion.
Colonel Andrew MacNaughton’s story is all about technology and war. He dealt with phyicists (including a future Nobel prizewinner) and Reginald Fessenden.
You have so many characters and stories to play off of that you can build analogies to We Were Soldiers, A Beautiful Mind along with any of the retro-Tom Clancy techonology theme movies that have been box office magic.
Go make a great movie… Don’t cry about where are the heros.
Holdfast — Re: “Enemy at the Gates”, that was a fine movie. Had probably one of the most conservative lines ever filmed: the disillusioned young political officer, having lost in love and experiencing passions he was supposed to have had drilled out of him, a New Soviet Man, conceding “Man will always be man.”
Sandy P:
I have no problem with the trashing of McCarthy. He was a drunk and a demagogue. What I can’t stand about the revisionist history of some of the “victims’ of McCarthy is that they swallow the party line that these were simple liberal patriots who backed noble causes. Many of the most lionized were Stalinists. And I am not talking about the proven spies. Many were American citizens who embraced Stalinism, who followed strict party discipline, who usd many of the anti-democratic tactics that McCarty did. There was no tolerance for anyone who did not follow the official party line, those who expressed thoughts that did not toe the official dogma were hounded into recanting or were blacklisted themselves by the party faithful. And the were aware of the show trials, they were aware of the artistic repression in the Soviet utopia, and they embraced it as the required steps that wopuld lead to a Stalinist revolution in America. Many were not spies and were not criminals. But they were people whose political beliefs should be despised by Hollywood, not praised. They were committed Stalinists who fought to the bitter end to keep the myth of Stalins utopia alive in the world. Hollywood can hate McCarthy, I don’t care. But they should explain their love for people who would have outdone McCarthy in political repression if they would have had the chance is valid.