by Allan Fish
You hear it said all the time on American hospital dramas. “Ok, let’s call it, people! Time of death…” With an individual’s life it’s easy to just glance at the watch and blurt it out. Not so easy when you’re talking about an idea. Or a dream. Or both…
Hollywood was once a dream, dreamt up by Cecil B.de Mille and those of his ilk who set out for the West Coast c.1913. There were financial reasons, of course. On the West Coast they could escape the patent laws that were strangling the burgeoning New York film industry. Hollywood was but a tiny settlement near Los Angeles. Within ten years figures like D.W.Griffith, Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Mack Sennett, Irving Thalberg and Samuel Goldwyn had made it into the focal point of the dreams of the entire western world. But dreams were always such fragile things.
In the early days, the halcyon golden days of repute, Hollywood was self-ruling. They even introduced their own censorship board to avoid government intervention and asked a former postmaster general, Will Hays (if only it could have been Will Hay…), to be their Killjoy in Chief. Much of the fun and adult nature of movies disappeared then, but Hollywood creative talents once sought to circumnavigate the rules, quality still alternated with dross and the likes of Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger had fun watching the Hays Code crumble.
They even had their own control over distribution, until the Paramount Decree changed it all. Studios had to give up their cinemas; they could no longer control whether a film was a success or a duck egg. In addition, TV was waiting in the wings, ready to suck the blood of the tottering monster like a leech. So Hollywood tried new things; widescreen, 3D, Smellovision. They all worked, for a brief time, but the old moguls were ageing and running out of ideas. New blood came on the scene, but even they couldn’t stop the avalanche. People were able to see more adult themes tackled in foreign films in special art-houses. They could look at Brigitte Bardot’s bare bum and nipples or see Jeanne Moreau in orgasmic throes as her lover went down on her in Les Amants, and wondered why they couldn’t see the same with, say, Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield; especially when Playboy spreads allowed them to see just that. The writing was on the wall for Hollywood’s Belshazzar.
So the dam finally broke. Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker dared to show bare breasts but then had to wait ten months after its winning an award at Berlin in the summer of 1964 before getting a home release. The Andy Warhol underground efforts were released as if from solitary confinement and showcased everything from people eating to off-camera blowjobs. John Cassavetes’ cinema vérité efforts were more realistic and in your face than any American film before. Films such as The Group, Point Blank, Bonnie and Clyde, The Trip, The Graduate, Rosemary’s Baby, The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider and The Honeymoon Killers came along like a cyclone tearing up everything in their wake. Altman, Coppola, de Palma, Scorsese, Malick, Bogdanovich and other imported talents like Boorman (from Ireland via London), Polanski (from Poland via London), Schlesinger and Forman (direct from Prague) joined the fun. It was a new golden era, but it was only temporary. Sadly a monster lurked in the deep waiting to devour them.
It would be easy to blame it all on Jaws. Historians may talk of how its saturation flood bookings and marketing campaigns were revolutionary, but it hadn’t been the first. In conversation with other cineastes I will often include Jaws as one of the pivotal five ‘rollercoaster movies’, films that changed the landscape of Hollywood, were excellent at what they did, but which first let the poison seep in. Star Wars, Halloween and Alien would follow, but before Jaws there was The Exorcist. It had pretence to art, but was marketed as a thrill ride, something to scare seven shades of the proverbial excrement out of you and still leave you queueing for the mens’ or ladies room as the credits rolled.
Jaws didn’t blow the golden generation away, but it tapped into a market among youths, the sort who had once gone to drive-ins for mindless entertainment where you could take your brain cell out and then pop it back in before turning the key on the ignition to drive home. They needed respite from Vietnam, from Watergate, from political ennui. Intelligent films were still being made after Jaws – All the President’s Men, Network, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter – but the endless delays surrounding Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and the failure of several high profile films, such as Malick’s Days of Heaven (after which he took a 20 year sabbatical to tend his wounds) and Cimino’s financially disastrous but magnificent Heaven’s Gate were the final straw. If United Artists could sink as if torpedoed a-midships, so could any studio. And several of them had come so close to extinction, so the powers that be weren’t going to let that happen.
But who were the powers that be? Once the studios ran themselves, but Laemmle, Warner, Goldwyn, Mayer, Selznick, Zanuck, Hughes, Cohn and Zukor were all gone. Now those who ran studios were themselves puppets to multi-national conglomerates – many of them from the extreme conservative Bible Belt South where oil flowed like spring water – and they were interested only in making money. So the advertising gurus who once brokered deals on Madison Avenue, the real Don Drapers from Mad Men, joined the fray. Bombard people until they buy a ticket out of sheer submission. Hollywood had always run its studios to make money, that’s a given. But then they had control over it and could accommodate artistic ambitions and pretensions. Once they didn’t, art exited stage left like Snagglepuss. Some critics and directors even made cynical reference to it. When Bob Fosse made Cabaret, Kander and Ebb wrote a new song especially for the film and entitled it ‘The Money Song’. “Money makes the world go around” sang Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey. One imagined Fosse smiling through gritted teeth while studio bosses lapped it up. What was a little subversiveness when the dollars still came rolling in? In what then seemed a natural step directors of advertisements started making movies. The late Tony Scott, who committed suicide recently in tragic circumstances, was one such director. Everyone who knew him talks of him being a lovely, unassuming man, and I have no reason to doubt that. Yet if I had to watch Days of Thunder, Top Gun, Domino, Beverly Hills Cop 2 and The Fan back to back, I’d be ready to end it all, too. Harsh, perhaps, but who knows that Tony Scott once made a film called Loving Memory, a beautiful personal piece under an hour in length and worth all his others put together.
After Heaven’s Gate, the fact remains that far fewer great American movies were made. Not what I’d call movies but cinema, films worthy of comparison to the great artistic work still being made in Europe and Asia. There was Blue Velvet, but half of critics and audiences were repulsed; it was un-American, they wanted James Cameron’s Aliens. The rot had already set in. Sergio Leone made Once Upon a Time in America, but the studios hacked it to bits as they had Heaven’s Gate. Like Cimino’s film it built up a reputation in Europe. In Hollywood they were busy praising such mediocrities and safe bets as Places in the Heart and The Color Purple while Amadeus won Best Picture when Leone’s film should have blown all out of the water. I have nothing against Milos Forman’s film, it’s an excellent film, but it was a safer bet, and awarding bodies like the Oscars were happy to acknowledge it. Yet even in Amadeus could one see a glimmer of subversiveness? As Salieri, triumphant over the dead Mozart but living in an asylum, says to the horrified priest “I represent mediocrities everywhere. I am their champion.” And so it was with the Oscars. As the studio bosses brainwashed the masses into thinking Jaws, Star Wars and the like were the peak of artistry, so the Oscars dumbed down, too. Not in giving its awards to Lucas and Spielberg, that would be too much, but in giving awards to films like Rocky, Kramer Vs Kramer and Ordinary People. Films so safe they made you want to scream like Fay Wray. And still to this day, we have gone from giving Oscars to a piece of interminable dross like Terms of Endearment and Driving Miss Daisy, designed to make faux liberals feel good about themselves and trivialising racial tension, to nominating everything in the equally dire The Help. The Oscars tell us A Beautiful Mind and Chicago were art and the best films of 2001 and 2002 respectively. Really? That these fools say they are the best films of their given years is bad enough, but the masses believe them. So while film connoisseurs laugh annually with deepening cynicism at the choices, at the depressing prediction of Crash beating Brokeback Mountain – “no movie about fuckin’ queers is gonna win, you can imagine the hard right mainstays muttering” – it’s AMPAS themselves who are laughing.
Take the Best Actress category for 2011. Nominated were Michelle Williams for My Week With Marilyn, Rooney Mara for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Glenn Close for Albert Nobbs, Viola Davis for The Help and eventual winner Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady. Two performances playing real people – always an Oscar favourite – one in a remake of a better film and performance that weren’t nominated, one in safe racial equality film designed to win awards, and the other for daring to play a bloke. No bad performance there, but among those not nominated were Kirsten Dunst for Melancholia, Anna Paquin for Margaret, Tilda Swinton for We Need to Talk About Kevin, Leila Hatami for A Separation, Mia Wasikowska for Jane Eyre, Deannie Ip for A Simple Life, Olivia Colman for Tyrannosaur, Vanessa Paradis for Café de Flore and, heck, Michelle Williams giving a much better performance than as Marilyn in Take This Waltz, all of whom would blow the other five out of the water, but who were in films that were just not Oscar films. Dunst, to take one example, was always going to be out in the cold because actresses in Lars Von Trier films don’t get nominated as punishment for daring to go to Denmark to make a movie in the name of art (the only actress to be nominated for a Von Trier film was Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, but it was her debut, so there was no desertion to punish).
Only this year a foreign film won the award for the first time, and the naïve might see that as progress, yet while The Artist was a well-made film in every respect, it made one think back to the hundreds of better foreign works ignored in the past. Once, back in 1937, La Grande Illusion had been nominated; it had lost to The Life of Emile Zola, which is in retrospect like Mozart losing a best composer poll to Lennon and McCartney. Yet at least then Hollywood had embraced émigré talents; Lang, Murnau, Sjöstrom, Wilder, Ulmer, Von Stroheim, Von Sternberg, Zinnemann, Siodmak, Curtiz, Dieterle, Renoir, Ophuls, et al. Some didn’t last that long, but they all made great films there in their day. Now name a director for whom English is not their premier tongue yet who has made a place for himself in Hollywood in the last 15-20 years? I’ll give you Ang Lee, but he’s still to win a Best Picture Oscar. We have seen directors like Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Oliver Hirschbiegel, Susanne Bier and even Michael Haneke come and go (the latter naturally told to remake his own film). Wiser men like Pedro Almodóvar and Wong Kar-Wai don’t get sucked in, while Lars Von Trier is lucky enough to be persona non grata. I am reminded of the famous tale about Sam Goldwyn meeting Sergei Eisenstein, and imagine a fantasy conversation where a million-dollar-salaried suit with the cinematic appreciation of a hedgehog meets, say, Shion Sono and tells the Japanese master “it’s wonderful to meet you, Mr Sono. I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed your film Cold Fish. Now I was thinking if you could remake it for us with Adam Sandler. Or do you like Jim Carrey? I can get Jim on the phone right now.” There’s probably someone in Hollywood right now watching a screener DVD of Ann Hui’s A Simple Life and wondering if there was a way they could remake it, with Diane Keaton or Susan Sarandon and a syrupy score by Rachel Portman. If only we could get Béla Tarr to make…Unstoppable 2. Don’t laugh at the back, it probably happens.
But all rants must have a focus. One cannot blame individuals for the disintegration of Hollywood to begin with, but we can blame individuals for taking advantage of it to become like modern day Mephistos. Put simply, “J’Accuse Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.” Lucas is the easier target, he just revamped a Kurosawa film (The Hidden Fortress, still a better film than Star Wars) into a space cowboy tale and made a mint from milking it for all its worth. He then created LucasFilm, his own toy factory, and sat running it like a bearded Gepetto for all the Lucasite Oompa-Loompas he could find. Check your intelligence at the door, children, come in and play, but pay through the nose. Only a year or two back, a bar in an American city who had planned to show all six Star Wars movies on a big TV for patrons to enjoy and talk over was contacted by Lucas’ lawyers, who told the bar owner he couldn’t do it as they didn’t have a license to do it. No matter how many millions he has in the bank, George still wants his cut. Yet his dark influence is nothing compared to his buddy. The real bête noir was and still is Spielberg.
This is a man who claimed David Lean and Stanley Kubrick were his mentors, and yet both would have baulked at just about all of Spielberg’s films. Spielberg was and is the ultimate hypocrite. He’d buy the sled from Citizen Kane and stick it in his office for inspiration, then go back to promoting Poltergeist. He’ll talk of how wonderful it was to sit with David Lean watching the restored Lawrence of Arabia in a screening room in 1989 and be given a running commentary but then say he won’t do commentaries for his DVDs because they detract from the movie. He wants films whose concept can be held in the palm of the hand, for which complexity is a dirty word and artistry is purely a tool for generating greenbacks. He’s like Jeffrey Jones’ Emperor in the aforementioned Amadeus, berating poor Wolfgang for daring to include “too many notes“. And Emperor Spielberg has his own fawning yes men to tell him “the human mind can only take so much complexity – unless it’s about the Holocaust, of course.” He’ll make Schindler’s List but only after making Jurassic Park and even include a shameless merchandise pan through shelves as if to say “mums, don’t forget to buy junior the veloceraptor toy in the lobby on the way out.” In his ‘The Big Screen’ published only this month David Thomson takes the anomaly of making Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List in the same year and compares it to Beethoven writing the Eroica Symphony and ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ at the same time. Not to denigrate those two opposite ends of the musical spectrum, but I smiled ruefully as I read it. Spielberg lives content and smug in a self-created world where Empire magazine movie readers made him the greatest director of all time. Doing the same futile thing myself only recently, I placed him roughly at number 120 (Lucas not even in the top 400!). And I’d be accused of heresy, but in a world where Spielberg has set up a shrine to himself, I say send me to hell. Or rather subject me to the Ludovico Technique from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and force me to watch Hook, The Lost World, War Horse and The Color Purple over and over till my brain turns into a cabbage. If I could change anything in film history, if I could go back in a time machine – it seems appropriate to be in a DeLorean with a flux capacitor, for the sheer irony – and prevent any one person building up such control, that person would be Spielberg. It would mean doing without Schindler’s List, which is, faults aside, a great film, but when we have Shoah, Nuit et Brouillard and Laurence Rees’ TV series Auschwitz isn’t it rather redundant anyway? And besides, what makes one doubly angry with Spielberg is that he should know better. The man is a considerable technical craftsman, but one who prostitutes his talent. He could have been another Kubrick, another Lean, but the money was always more important. He may not have caused the demise of Hollywood – that would be like saying gangrene killed a soldier when it was the wound he received that caused the gangrene that was the problem – but he was the one who benefitted from it and exploited it most effectively. I berate him as I would anyone who takes the easy option.
Now Spielberg and Lucas die-hards will prostrate themselves at the feet of their Gods’ shrines and bemoan that these films really have depth and layers that aren’t immediately visible. To them I would argue this; firstly, they don’t. If a fanatical follower of something wants to he or she can find layers in The Land Before Time XIII and believe it the equivalent of Hitch’s Vertigo. Secondly, you can bet your bottom dollar the makers weren’t thinking of depth when they wrote it. And then there comes that well-trotted out defence; “well, millions of people love them.” To this there is a double-barrelled blunderbuss response, too. Firstly, that the media makes us love them by far from discreet persuasion, hammer on the head advertising, suggestion, brainwashing…insert your own euphemism. Ask your average UK film follower to name two industry periodicals, you won’t find many votes for Sight & Sound. Empire and Total Film magazines are their Bibles. Browsing through this month’s Empire in WH Smith on Preston station, I saw Blu Ray reviews where the Universal Horror box set gets only **** for the films while the Indiana Jones quartet, none of which were great and two of which were worthless, gets a big red *****. What can inquiring young minds do against such brain-washing when their Bible of choice is basically just there to fawn at the studios big releases and promote Spielberg as God? As Nick Wrigley, founder of Eureka’s Masters of Cinema DVD label, said on Twitter only a few days ago about Empire, it’s “100% puff-piece industry car-waxing.” And that’s being kind. And then there are the film guides, which are now all but defunct. The Halliwell was scuttled by its own publisher Harper Collins, the Time Out ceased to exist when all its pieces were made available online. We have the Radio Times Guide, but it’s written by nearly as many contributors as there are films so there’s no sense of balance. Oh, and the Maltins. Safe, predictable, frightful Maltins with its default **½ for anything complex, minimum of *** for anything by Disney, virtually non existent coverage of foreign films because it only lists some of those shown in L.A. (a pittance compared to New York). This is the guide that has Hidalgo and The Human Stain at ***½ and has Pearl Harbor at **½ ahead of Taxi Driver at ** and which criticises the remotest sense of anti-Americanism so that one half expects the Star Spangled Banner to play when you open its cover like one of those pop up birthday cards. One admires Leonard for his knowledge of animation and of classical Hollywood, and he seems a very genial and popular man, but the coverage of especially 1980 onwards is a joke. I still buy it every year, but only because it’s cheap and I can have a chortle. That’s what true film fans are reduced to.
And the second response, I hear you remind me? Defenders of popoulist trash and their uses of the masses. Yes, the dear old masses, who don’t need a leader so much as a sheepdog and a whistle. The masses used as a defence by Spielberg’s devotees once used to go to public executions, to watch people torn to shreds by lions in the arena, to lynch people for fun and now turn in to watch Britain’s Got (No) Talent and are told by right wing bastions like the Daily Heil Mail where to vent our spleen (Charlie Brooker’s Daily Mail Island, thankfully on Youtube, is now more prescient than ever). And don’t let yourself be conned into believing shows like Talent are to promote individual talents; they’re to make money for other Mephistos like Simon Cowell by tapping into humanity’s basest desire to see people make an ass of themselves in public. When Hollywood recently made The Hunger Games, the levels of irony were enough to make one’s head spin. But not as much as the irony of me being reduced to the sort of polemical rant worthy of the Daily Mail to voice disagreement to it.
Everything’s about making money. It’s even gone into the home video market, and has increased since the digital age of DVDs and Blu Rays. Films are released only for director’s cuts, special editions, extended versions and the like to follow hard on their backs. And don’t kid yourselves that these are REALLY director’s preferred cuts. Directors have enough clout to get the films they want out there. True, one can list Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, as he openly stated that a longer more faithful version would follow on DVD before the cinematic release. But then seek out the supposed extended version of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. The scenes of Russell Crowe wandering o’er the battle camp at night did add something to the piece – “a little touch of Maximus in the night” as Shakespeare might have put it – but one reinstated scene used dialogue already played out in another. In other words, it was a scene lost from the editing process very early on, the dialogue from which Scott and his scriptwriters had then incorporated into another scene and forgot about. That is until someone just plonked it back in incongruously. With one or two exceptions, these are not director’s cuts in any sense of the word. They are Accountant’s Cuts and are designed purely to squeeze more money from you. As are the Anniversary releases; The Wizard of Oz has been released more times than I care to remember and is seen as the ultimate children’s story. Who cares that its sentiments are the sort Conservatives would applaud; know thy place, do not leave your home, the grass is never greener. “It’s dangerous out there, Aunty Em! Close the gate, Toto might run off.” Warners release it every year or so, now on Blu Ray, with promises of vac-packed specks of glitter from the original ruby slippers, and yet still we wait for proper DVD releases for such silent masterworks as Greed, The Wind and The Crowd. Greed, it seems with bitter irony, is bad.
It isn’t all the fault of the movies, though. It’s merely a portion of the media and the whole media charabanc is designed to dumb down, play it safe, and tell the masses what they want to hear. So when George W.Bush needed a reason to avenge his daddy and go to war he invented Weapons of Mass Destruction (Distraction would be more accurate), it was so easy when effectively all of America’s media were owned by just six corporations – NBC Universal, News International (the Murdoch absorbasaurus), Viacom, Disney, Time Warner and CBS. Just take a look at what these monsters own and see where the problem lies and why anything we see in various different media is to be taken with a huge pinch of Saxo. There were always individual examples of it, dating back to William Randolph Hearst and even to his father George (remember him as the villain in Deadwood?), but nothing on such a complete and absolute scale as this. Take an individual hypothesis. If Universal has a film out they want to make unbelievable sums of money, what resources do they have? Universal Pictures is part of NBC Universal, so they can rely on NBC programmes and reviewers to rubberstamp it. Not to mention the Sci-Fi channel and its publication. Then take another, Warner Bros. They can rely on exposure online on AOL. They have Time, Sports Illustrated, Marie Claire and People magazines. On TV they have HBO, Turner Classic Movies (trailers for the new amongst the gems of the old), Warner TV network, TMZ (nice to control the gossip, too, like the good old days of Uncle Jack in the 1930s)…the list is endless. With that sort of back up expressly tailored to let each sister tributory make a buck, how can one remotely trust what we’re being told?
So if we have the news and our daily lives so dictated by the media might of the six – the old Hollywood najor five were small fry in comparison – how hard can it be to dictate, say, TV? And the disease has spread across the pond. In the UK we’re now force-fed The X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, Big Brother and other execrable shite – no kinder term – and made to think these are the best thing since Warburtons sliced toastie loaf to allow bigwigs to send original and creative programming to the wasteland; or BBC4, as it’s otherwise known. One could perhaps forgive it of commercial TV stations when revenues and advertising are everything, but it’s even affected the BBC. We, the viewing public, pay the license fee, but we still have garbage rammed down out throat. And while original work is made, great TV dramatists like Alan Bleasdale cannot get their dramas made as they are too controversial, too incendiary, too likely to upset the status quo. Even safe costume dramas have been affected. When in 2008 Andrew Davies’ adaptation of Little Dorrit didn’t attract as many viewers as Bleak House had three years earlier, they pulled his forthcoming adaptation of Dombey and Son. Give the public what Dickens they want, the bosses said. And we got another pointless version of Great Expectations, which was naturally mediocre. In the US, thank God there’s HBO we all say, free of Network TV stations run by the hard right killjoys. Yet even they have to have revenues. Series such as Deadwood and Rome had their plugs pulled prematurely and cruelly so The Sopranos could eke out another year or two. Game of Thrones meanwhile only went into production in the first place because of the guaranteed audience of the avid fans of writer George R.R.Martin. Had Thrones been an original series, it would not only never have got the green light, it would never have made the traffic lights in the first place. And while the merchandise still sells by the frigate-load all is well, but as soon as ratings drop for a season or more, the suits will get itchy trigger fingers, even if the series is reaching its natural end.
Art is a funny thing to quantify. To these eyes and ears it exists for its own sake, to enrich the collective culture of the population. If you can make money out of it, all well and good, but how many artistic geniuses have died in poverty – Mozart, Van Gogh, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, the list is endless – and how many have died young, their creative light literally burnt out? The cinema has had a few of these, too, not least Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but he was never interested in making money, merely in staying busy, and using drugs to keep the fire burning when tiredness threatened to creep in the back door. He died at 37, but did more in those 37 years than any Hollywood filmmaker of the last 40 years has in twice that time. One recalls Wagner in Syberberg’s Ludwig Requiem for a Virgin King, berating all the pleadings of his creditors and employers with “Es ist für kunst”(“it is for art”). Anyone trying that in Los Angeles would be frogmarched to the local loony bin; “get this asshole outta here, what do they think we are, the Metropolitan Opera?”
Independent cinema was a shining light for a brief happy time in the early 1990s, until those small companies were brought up by the larger companies so they became merely tributaries of the same sewage-filled river. And in doing so, even independent cinema developed their own formulas, their own money-making strategies and were absorbed by the greater whole. Occasionally we’ll get some good stuff come along, but it’s not by design more by the law of probability. 2007 was one such year. No Country for Old Men won Best Picture and was probably the best Best Picture winner of its decade. Yet while in itself a great entertainment, the Coen Brothers themselves were now part of the establishment. Greater films that year – There Will be Blood and the criminally neglected The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – were never going to win the big one.
Staying on that subject, take a look at the career of the man seen as America’s greatest living director, Martin Scorsese. He was one of the original movie brats, the man who gave us several masterpieces before turning 40 and yet since then, has had to mix and match projects. One for them and one for me, as he admitted in his BFI documentary A Personal Journey Through American Film. He finally won an Oscar only in 2006, for The Departed. Now The Departed is not a bad movie; far from it, it’s greatly enjoyable, but it’s a remake – little wonder Spielberg and Lucas were there to present him the award as if to say “now you’re getting it.” That Marty won his award for the film which most adhered to Hollywood’s formula is depressingly ironic. Taxi Driver had lost to Rocky. Raging Bull to Ordinary People. GoodFellas to Dances With Wolves. And if not quite a great film, Casino wasn’t even nominated when Braveheart beat Apollo 13! Yet The Departed wins, and by 2011 he was reduced to making a kids movie, Hugo. Yes, it was about early cinema history, he did it for his small child and it was very good on its level, but even so. Marty should be giving us his late masterpiece, instead he’s reduced to cinematic etch-a-sketch. Watch Casino now and hear Ace Rothstein’s final narration: “the big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like Disneyland.” For Marty and the true film buffs around the world Ace may just as well have been referring to Hollywood. Do we even have any masters now among the younger generation? We may have Paul Thomas Anderson, but how damning is it that when asked to name the masters of the new Hollywood we’re expected to accept just one as an adequate return and see dubious half-talents like Wes Anderson, David Gordon Green, Jason Reitman and Richard Linklater raised way beyond their worth. Indeed, I’d take Ben Affleck’s work as a director over them any time, flawed or not.
So what is Hollywood now? To me, and I have used this analogy often, it’s a corpse on the side of Sunset Boulevard, road-kill being devoured by jackals in suits. Anything original comes along, it is immediately sequelled, prequelled, franchised, remade or regurgitated until its original has become so hated by serious film buffs they never want to watch it again. Once that dying carcass has its lifeblood sucked out of it, they move onto another. Tarantino was once a shining light, until he believed his own press and regurgitated the same stuff again and again – Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction seem a lifetime ago now. We’re left with a depressive state of affairs, where excellent movies may be made in America, but where they will be the exception that proves the rule. And what’s more, it’s only going to get worse. So long as impressionable people are told that Spielberg and Lucas are Gods the creativity of American film is going to remain in a coma just waiting for someone to pull the plug on it completely. To those defenders I can only shake my head in disbelief. It’s their defence, and our continually falling for their so-called mastery, aimed at 12 year olds, which is killing American film. These defenders compromise increasingly, accept the volume of trash for a few crumbs of incidental comfort from something half decent, which in turn more often than not gets over-praised such is the dearth of quality, but it’s a downward slope that gets increasingly treacherous. Admire Spielberg’s best films if you must out of some misguided subservient loyalty, but be aware that there are dozens of greater filmmakers in the world taking risks that Spielberg would veto at the first opportunity. One is left feeling like Chuck Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, staggering along the desolate beach of what was once American cinema and coming across a statue of Eliot and E.T. on that BMX; the thought of Spielberg enough to make one shout out “you bastards, damn you all to hell!”
Time of death…
While the essay makes an enjoyable read, your thesis is a bit off-the-mark and out-of-date, I think; films like E.T. and Star Wars may have paved the way for today’s cinema (although of course so did, in whatever roundabout way, every development that’s happened in the movies up to now) but they have been totally superseded. For a few reasons: they were focused on imaginative pleasure, whereas today’s blockbusters cloak themselves in a kind of drab, self-seirous aesthetic; and, however fancifal, they were moored in a lived-in universe with a naturalistic sense of reality (both have a real vibrant, detailed set design and cultivate a sense of their onscreen worlds as lived-in vs. today’s CGI-soaked spectacles which completely lack the texture of real life).
I don’t doubt your genealogy – it’s absolutely true that Jaws and Star Wars and the others you mention were big gamechangers. But the game has been changed again since then so that today as filmmakers (if not as moguls who continue to profit from the new paradigm) they are as anachronistic as the 60s/70s rebels or 30s/40s establishment figures that preceded them in turn.
I think this is an important distinction to make because people have been talking about a decline in cinema for at least 35 years in similar terms. I think the phenomenon of the 21st century is quite different and, whatever the merits of the earlier critique, it deserves to be criticized on its own very unique terms. Today’s blockbuster cinema is not that of the 80s or 90s and many of its flaws actually stand in direct opposition to those earlier eras. At any rate, a 2012 George Lucas would never be allowed to make a Star Wars. Too risky (not based on a pre-existing franchise with built-in audience), too offbeat, too original. That’s one of the greatest ironies of the financial paradigm Lucas himself helped create.
At any rate, and on another note, I’d be quite interested in some alternative scenarios. Why SHOULD Hollywood dominate the world cinema scene in the era of cheap digital technology, internet distribution (and discussion forums), and DVD & streaming? I sometimes wonder if the writing isn’t on the wall for the conventional parameters of the American film industry.
(And on that final note, there’s a further irony for you: the descendents of the men who fled Edison’s Trust in the early 20th century have become the new Edisons of the 21st century.)
Incidentally, lest the argument stray in this direction, I agree with Maurizio that the Spielberg/Lucas debates have been more or less played out. My interest is not so much in defending them (I’ve plenty of criticisms/doubts as well there’s an awful lot I admire about the two – and I think your analysis of Spielberg’s ambiguous ultra-Hollywood-insider vs. film-loving artist persona is pretty solid; few filmmaker/moguls have more effectively managed to both have their cake and eat it too, which invites all sorts of discomfort and questions – where does one role end and the other begin?). It’s more in precisely pinpointing what’s wrong with Hollywood today. Which I think is a bit different than whatever was wrong with Hollywood several decades ago (while there are definite throughlines as well as to even further back, as Maurizio points out). Another thing though, the Oscars have pretty much always been as embarrassing and wrongheaded as they are now. I really can’t see anything new in their current absurdity except for their decision to chop the Honoraries from the broadcast and thus spit on their own history – if the Academy had one major virtue it was that, in its self-serving efforts to mythologize the industry it raised a lot of awareness about great classic films and the long tail of the past preceding the headline-grabbing present. Now even that virtue is gone, and I don’t even watch anymore.
Incidentally, some of the other stuff I like about your piece here: the analysis of Scorsese is spot-on, he has fully become the sort of Establishment figure he once seemed incapable (both happily and tragically) of becoming. The incestuous overbearing nature of the media-movie conglomerates (a major, perhaps THE major observation of Epstein’s book) in not just “reflecting” public taste as is innocently claimed but in actively shaping it to monopolistically corner its own market (although – and this seems to be common among non-Americans observing our at times confusing political landscape, you are conflating two groups – greedy capitalists and the religious right – which share uneasy political alliances but are in fact quite distinct from one another, despite the occasional overlap). And, in conjunction with that point, the important observation – not nearly made enough – that, whatever other virtues or deficiencies the film industry of today has with that of the past, there’s a certain admirability to the independence of the business back then, the way it was built up from nothing and dominated from within. Today it is just a subsidiary. Maybe that’s one reason it’s no longer interested in its own past; it also explains why there is no compunction about merely exploiting phenomena which have arisen in other media rather than cultivating its own phenomena.
There is no middle ground, Joel. You can’t praise Spielberg for some aspects. He’s calculatedly set out to make money and make films to benefit HIM and his own standing. He could have made a career making decent films, but chose to take the easy option. Spielberg’s position in the industry as God is all he cares about and ensuring Hollywood keeps making the sort of braindead movies that fit his formula, then making a Lincoln, Munich or Empire of the Sun and expecting people to accept it as art. Sorry, no.
So you are retroactively removing Schindler’s List from your countdown I take it? The whole moralistic, absolutist strain of this argument is silly. It’s perfectly rational to criticize Spielberg’s actions as a mogul and praise at least some of his work as a filmmaker. Just because he has trouble divorcing the two roles doesn’t mean we have to. Since when are you an advocate of letting aesthetic judgements fall prey to extracurricular concerns, anyway? That’s never been your modes operandi.
At any rate, I have zero interest in making this a referendum on Spielberg which is frankly the least interesting part of your argument. If it would make you happy and refocus the debate elsewhere I’ll concede for the sake of argument everything horrible you have to say about him and we can move on. Because the important question is what is the nature of Hollywood’s affliction, what is the cause, and what is the cure.
Not at all. I was fully expecting you to be the defendor in ordinate. Judging individual films is a separate discipline to judging the individuals themselves. Schindler’s is an excellent film, but if losing it was the price for ridding Hollywood of the Spielberg influence, I’d take it.
I also rate Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs very highly, but I have come to the point where the bad influence they have had has dampened the initial enthusiasm.
I enjoy the Lord of the Rings films, but they, too, have brought a lot of dross in their wake from inferior imitators following set formulas.
This will be my last comment on this thread. I leave it to readers to notice how I hardly mentioned Spielberg. And how my “inordinate” defense of him consisted merely with debating how central he was to contemporary Hollywood (and in fact barely taking issue with Allan’s characterizations of him at all – if that’s the stuff of being a Spielberg love-boy than I must say the love-boy club has lowered its entry standards as of late).
And especially how the bulk of my arguments have been ignored by Allan, so that he could focus in this red-herring, straw-man notion of me as as some diehard apologist.
Does this bear any relation to what I actually said on this thread? I think not.
I also leave it to readers to figure out why Allan seems to be so angry out of the gate with me, so snide in response to some qualified disagreements with his thesis. I leave it to them to figure this out…because God knows I can’t.
I’m not remotely angry with you, Joel. You are just seeing any contradiction as proof of a conspiracy against you by someone who isn’t even at Wonders any more.
You make some good points, but dismiss them with your own eager flippancy. You want adult discussion, they stay short of accusing one of the site founders from trolling on his own site. I don’t take offence at it, I expected to be called far worse than a troll and by others, but even so.
Let’;s just move on. I spoke my mind in the piece, that should stand for itself.
After reading the Nicholas Ray biography a few months ago (and echoed in other stuff I’ve read about the studio system) it’s pretty obvious that Hollywood has always been a money over art kind of place. Law of averages say that the huge amounts of films they were cranking out in the 30’s and 40’s would lead to some masterpieces, but the overwhelming amount of pictures in those years were either sabotaged by the Hayes Code or destroyed by shortsighted studio heads. I don’t see much of a difference when it comes to these time periods (other than the magical 70’s perhaps) as all you can ask for is a few great pictures a year from a few bold director’s. That probably holds true for any national cinema…. movies are expensive to make and the people putting up the funds want to turn a profit before making art. As the relative expense of making a film rises so does the formulaic safeness of the project… a kind of cinematic elasticity in economic terms.
We’ve had these Lucas/Spielberg debates endlessly on this blog and I mostly agree with your version/opinion of it. I will say that at least Spielberg made AI, Munich, Schindler’s List, and the first half hour of Saving Private Ryan. While he may be the Pied Piper to some extent of what blockbuster Hollywood has become, there are so many worse perpetrators out there plying their trade these days.
Btw, I’d be remiss not to post a link to David Denby’s excellent essay since we’re discussing “death of Hollywood/cinema” etc. There’s been a real flood of this stuff lately, which I like – I think it’s a topic that should be addressed openly although it tends to get dismissed as being over-dramatic or whatever – and of them all, I think Denby’s points are some of the strongest.
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/107212/has-hollywood-murdered-the-movies
Another thought: if you want to pinpoint an artist/mogul who most accurately predicted and perhaps helped shape Hollywood’s later business model you’d probably be better off going back to Walt Disney who realized that the profits from films ultimately would have little to do with their theatrical runs and far more to do with their merchandising; he also embraced alternate mediums like TV early on, branded his products beyond the vague house styles of the various live-action studios, and was consistently innovative with technology. One of the major ironies in fact is that while Hollywood has completely embraced his business model 70 years later they are rather pathetically doing so with material that they themselves did not originate (unlike him).
Full hat-tip; this is not my observation it’s from the excellent book The Big Picture by Edward Jay Epstein (no relation to the Thomson book you mention above, at least as far as I know). It’s marvelously effective in the no-nonsense way it pulls back the curtain of Hollywood’s gauzy facade to reveal the real way the machine operates. (Although I noticed some errors in parts which made me question other aspects I didn’t know enough about to judge.)
I think there’s some defensiveness here. If you noticed, the piece – which was not a long thought out one, merely a structured rant knockled off in four hours – was meant to be ilustrating the slow process of Hollywood’s disintegration. Yes,m the majority of the damage was done in the 1970s, and Spielberg and Lucas took most advantage of it for their own ends rather then specifically caused it. Holllywood’s death was a slow process that began with the Paramount Decree in the late 1940s.
As for Disney, it’s missing the point. Disney’s films were always about children. Spielberg and Lucas dragged Hollywood’s so-called industry for adults down to that level. He made films for kids to enjoy and stopped making films for adults. They and Spielberg in particular dumbed Hollywood down and the state of affairs we currently have is that Spielberg acts as mentor to the likes of J.J.Abrams and Michael Bay, executive producing their films. For him to say Kubrick and Lean were mentors is like Judd Apatow saying he was inspired by Ozu and Naruse.
In the 1970s, at least the popular movies included some that were for adults, like Alien, like The Godfather, like The Exorcist. But Spielberg had ensured that the only films that make a packet are films with merchandising tie ins and that 12s and under can watch. Spielberg didn’t cause the wound that killed Hollywood, he is the gangrene that is ensuring the wound festers.
As for talk of the 1930s and 40s being no different, they’re poles apart. Compare the quality of films made in the two eras. Then studios had largely got control over whether a film would make back its cost so could afford to make some films of quality that would never get greenlighted today without dumbing them down for their audience. And films for adults were still made, they just had to circumvent the Hays Code as best they could – as the best noirs did so well, as the best Sturges comedies did.
Everything is dumbed down now, everything to the lowest common denominator. Everything has to be able to be pitched in 30 seconds or less.
No, I think you are eagerly looking for defensiveness so that we can make this an argument about personalities rather than ideas. Again, zero interest in having a Nah Nah Nah Nah Spielberg-Lucas debate. Zero. At a time when contemporary cinema is at a crossroads so much bigger than these two, to reduce the crisis to an auteuriast squabble is unnecessarily petty.
In a way this ties into the discussion we had recently about the Schama’s History of Britain vs. others. I’d venture you are more interested in a history romantically made up of stories and individuals, as evidenced here where you make the essentially ahistorical and unscientific argument (which you then equivocate on repeatedly) that two individuals are the arch villains here. And to what end?
You have some good points that you allow to get lost in personal axe-grinding. Noting the role of multinational corporations and mass media, of long-term trends and shifting business models is astute analysis. Making highly debatable assertions about Tarantino or Wes Anderson or Lord of the Rings is not; it’s merely muddying the waters with dubious subjectivity passed of as fact (with no authority but your own insistence). Don’t want this to get too contentious, but man your “gotcha” response method here gets under my skin.
We’ve got a chance here to discuss some of the most important matters facing film today. To turn that into a childish squabble over favorite directors, which frankly I’ve seen too many potentially rich Wonders conversations devolve into (its the far easier route rather than assessing and analyzing – and most importantly proposing solutions to – problems at hand) is to myopically lose the forest for the trees. Let’s not go there, not this time.
Re: Disney, missing what point? The point should be how Hollywood approaches its product. If you really want to determine why Hollywood product of the 40s was superior in terms of quality you have to look at both marketplace and business model. Disney’s conception of the film as just one cog in the wheel was, in business terms, visionary, and in aesthetic terms, threatening, because when the movie itself no longer matters so much in the overall selling of the product, its quality is probably going to fall, as the important thing becomes if it hits the right, broad notes – if it avoids discordance in the overall symphony of market saturation. Made all the easier when the product is already a safe, familiar, repackaged quantity.
Damn you, Fish. I need to to bed. I need to wake up in the morning. Couldn’t this post have waited till Monday? 😉
Now as far as celebrating the 40s, again I agree the films were better by and large but we don’t want to over-romanticize too much. Fact is, much of what made the studio system work aesthetically was highly objectionable socially. It was a closed system – the studios lost that monopoly case for a reason – in which moguls played with a stacked deck. The entire notion of independent cinema was virtually impossible and the contract system, at least initially, amounted to employee abuse. My point is not that this somehow lessens the films – they are as great as ever – but that the circumstances of such aesthetic success are not something we want to repeat. In rejecting the present we don’t want to make the mistake of setting up a rosy past as the logical opposition. These are all steps along the way and the idea should be to take what little control we have and try to nudge the perspectives and discussions toward a more optimal future. While the American cinema is less rewarding today, it also has the potential for far more freedom. Today if you or I make a food movie and post it online, utilizing the right channels and circumstances, a great many could see it. Seventy years ago there was simply no viable way to reach wide audiences – partly because of technology, partly because of studio monopoly. That’s an improvement right now; at the moment it’s almost entirely potential, but an improvement nonetheless.
Um, that’s supposed to read good not food. A video of me attempting to cook would probably qualify as a disaster movie. Damn iPhone autocorrect…
Maurizio in classic Hollywood, producers got films made, and many worked within the studio system to produce profitable yet subversive and quality product. A case in point is the activist Adrian Scott who in the Forties before he was destroyed by the punks from HUAC and the cowardly studio bosses produced a string of great movies:
1948 The Boy with Green Hair (producer – uncredited)
1947 Crossfire (producer)
1946 Deadline at Dawn (producer)
1945 Cornered (producer)
1944 Murder, My Sweet (producer)
This piece was not written for the hardcore Wonders regulars and Spielberg love boys. We have discussed him and Lucas numerous times. This was written to get my entire feelings on the subject, however polemical they may be, down for all to see. The main core can keep quiet if you like as there is no further point digging up previous defences. I know Sam with his life stance of moderation will be against it, I know Dennis will want me crucified for it, but it was not written for them or to get their dander up as they have already done so. It’s essentially for anyone outside those core emails to read, digest, spit out, whatever.
Essentially though it needs a stand taken, because Wonders, in its tiny way, is part of the film media, and the defence shown such figures is exactly the reason why it needed saying. So long as Spielberg is held up as God – there should be no such title, but if there has to be, atr least let’s have someone who, good, bad or indifferent, at least attempts art each time, not just to add another few readies to his 3 billion in the bank. If that means I detach myself from the Wonders majority and come across as Mr Angry, then so be it. Someone has to be the bastion of sanity.
We defend him, we defend the Empires and Total Films of this world acting like an interview with him is like an audience with the Pope. Yes, Jaws and E.T. are entertaining on their level, but note the use of the word level. They’re mere entertainments and nothing more.
potential can never be an improvement over actuality. To take sporting analogy, it’s like sayoing every Premier League football team has the potential to be champions. But only three or four have the financial clout to be able to do so.
One must always look at what is, not what could be. Hollywood, faults and all, gave us great things in the old days. Hollywood now gives us the occasional great thing, but as I said it’s more down the laws of probability, and those that gives them to us, if it’s at a major studio, never repeat the trick.
It reminds one of Harry Lime’s Cuckoo Clock speech, but with old Hollywood in the place of Italy under the Borgias and new Hollywood being Switzerland, happy to just produce cuckoo clocks and leave art to those who can afford it while building up billions in the bank by staying safe and out of every conflict imaginable. Machiavellian as it sounds, I’ll take the Borgias and dei Medicis any day, if I could have Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini and Caravaggio, when going with Hollywood means settling for mere cartoonists of note.
Mine would be far worse. I can’t even cook books.
In fact, the more I think about it, this is a piece that should have gone up with comments disabled. Just to stand for itself by itself. Reading it and smiling ruefully at the state of affairs is all I want.
I was going to post a longer response but really, what’s the point? As it turns out, you’re just trolling.
This could’ve been a really interesting discussion. Pity.
I think you’ll find trolling is done on other people’s sites…
A rather bizarre rant. The injudicious use of gross similes and metaphors cheapens the rhetoric. You start lambasting Hollywood for seeking profit – the only reason for its existence – and halfway switch to blaming the Oscars. Cinema is not just about fetishes and critical hurdles, but also about reflecting and critiquing the zeitgeist. Hollywood has historically done and continues to do this. Most of these films may be flawed and not high art, but they do challenge audiences and the conventional wisdom.
Cinema is not just about reflecting the zeitgeist. If that were the case then all art is the same and The X Factor is perfectly legitimate as it’s what the masses want. The point also was to show that the zeitgeist comes out of the mass populace and the mass populace are not to be trusted. As for bizarre rant, yes, absolutely, but one that needed putting on record rather than to a few people in emails. I fully expected to be shunned for it and am prepared for that.
The only person doing the shunning is you, Allan. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies.
Perhaps, and I fully expected it to be so. This was, as Tony points out, a rant, hence going off on tangents and writing off the cuff from A-Z; it’s me as Howard Beale saying “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it any more!” and knowing I’ll probably end up being effectively shot for it. It’s a venting of spleen, frustration in print. All my pieces have been about a passion, and that passion can be positive and negative; that is to say one can have a passionate revulsion at a state of affairs as well as attraction to.
I didn’t write it for people to agree with, as I knew hardly anyone would, that’s the size of the problem we face. Let Spielberg live up to his billing and talent rather than feed off being acclaimed for empty entertainments. On one level this may reiterate the point that film does reflect the zeitgeist, in that we live in an age where people are less and less lietrate, less and less educated and more and more shepherded into what to like or think. But we don’t have to accept it.
If academic and scholarly studies are what is wanted, as Joel points out there have been excellent pieces, not just by Denby but by others that do it far better than I ever could. And re Spielberg and Lucas, David Thomson covers both in successive chapters in his latest book.
You need to calm down Allan. The future of cinema does not rest on your shoulders. You need distance. This attitude that you are some sainted oracle is out of order. You have not established your case with detachment nor rigor. You should welcome discussion not repel it. The strength of an argument needs to be tested.
Look at your rebuttal to my comment. You don’t engage with it. I did not say what you say I did. And you grab for a new villain – “the mass populace are not to be trusted”. Can’t you see the hubris here? Your obsession is a hindrance not a strength.
My point, to put it bluntly, is that a flawed Hollywood effort like Margin Call is as if not more important than Melancholia, if you are interested in understanding the world you inhabit.
Tony, remember this is supposed to be a rant and as such may go to the same levels of invectvie that in its way I comdemn, which can lead to calls of hypocrisy and I accept that with rueful irony. I accept that Margin Call is as valid as Melancholia, that comes down to personal taste, but if Hollywood was making the majority of films like Margin Call, whatever one thought of it as an example, such a piece wouldn’t need to be written. It’s the fact that people see it as so much hot air and soapboxing that just reflects how anyone speaking out against the normal practices is seen as some sort of lunatic. My fellow student at Uni, who are a fantastic bunch by the way, would see me a a killjoy extremis for these views, hence I don’t promote this site or my work with them, but it’s not their fault Spielberg is seen as God. it’s what they have been tought.
But when the media single out mindless entertainment as the shrine of pure devotion and real attempts at filmmaking – never mind, heaven forbid, real cinema – to a side column of two paragraphs between eulogising about rhe latest franchise instalment, it need speaking against.
Hollywood has always made mindless entertainment since the beginning of time. Like any company anywhere in the world they are designed and structured to make a profit. The only reason that it seems more crass these days is because technological advancements (plus researched data) makes it easier to pinpoint economic/financial goals and render them effectively and to a specified tee. The studio heads of the past were not interested in making art anymore than the CEO’s of corporations/conglomerates are these days. The success of American (or any) cinema has always been down to a few creative individuals subverting standard practices within the established framework. Since way more films were produced back then, more of them came out worthy of repeat viewings (probability and averages).
You still have the same type of rebels out there working these days like Malick, Anderson, Dominik, Lynch… the problem is that with production much lower in this expensive era of filmmaking, you get less quality overall and longer periods of inactivity by these individuals. Spielberg is clearly part of the status quo and even the alpha figure within this modern Hollywood structure, but at least he has made stuff worth watching every so often. Some of his brethren like Bay, Lucas and Cameron can’t even give us that.
Think about director’s like Michael Curtiz, William Wellman, or Raoul Walsh. Those guys made so many movies it was inevitable some would come out great. Then think about people like Lang (in the US) and Ray who were sabotaged throughout their career from studio heads and producers in Hollywood. How about Orson Welles… did his career come out smelling like roses in this idealized era of 40’s and 50’s filmmaking. The fact that (possibly) his second best picture was butchered says it all. Things were no different back then when it came to making actual “art”. Human beings simply have an affinity for romanticizing the past at the expense of the present. Every era of Hollywood or cinema in general have had these problems between art and commerce. Things only seem worse now because we are alive living in the period and because technology has made the commerce side of filmmaking easier to predict.
I think momentary rants, anti establishment tirades are needed for us to pause and ascertain from time to time. I’d enhance what Tony said..
“Cinema is not just about fetishes and critical hurdles, but also about reflecting and critiquing the zeitgeist. Hollywood has historically done and continues to do this. Most of these films may be flawed and not high art, but they do challenge audiences and the conventional wisdom.”
Inasmuch one is allowed to compare different eras.
For instance, LGB films, today in contrast to the previous eras. Isn’t much more progressive and authentic, less of the suggestive homoerotic nonsense..
Fish might be in the wrong here to entirely reject, but that’s just him. Any article that anyone writes is for oneself, first and foremost and you’d have to allow the liberty of expression..
I think the disintegration of Hollywood coincides with the disintegration of American culture and economy. As far as the Oscars go, as Maurizio points out they’ve always been suspect. Regarding foreign directors, well, many of the early producers were European so they would be inclined to bring talent over from other countries. And by the way, at least Ang Lee did win an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain.
I concur with Pierre’s cultural argument. Still the no-holds-barred repudiation of Hollywood is rather simple-minded.
Frank, I’m just glad that comments haven’t been disabled so I can concur, naturally, with your concurment!
Haven’t attacks on the disintegration of a society and it’s culture been thrown out by every single past generation? Isn’t it an obvious and innate human characteristic to genuflect lovingly on the past while deriding the present?
The good old days don’t really exist people… it’s a figment of your imagination.
Reminds me of what the Coen Brothers were trying to get at with No Country For Old Men. The world does not become more evil (stupid) with time, just that certain people stop being able to cope with the changing aspects.
I agree with you, Maurizio – though I’m not one to swoon over the good ol’ days — except for one thing: The Batman TV series.
Simple minded? I’ll let you get back to me on that…
Art is overrated. It does not put food on the table nor does it solve any of the massive problems of suffering humanity. Better a Hollywood that is profitable and makes the occasional good movie, than a coterie of self-important directors that make “art” for a privileged and irrelevant minority. Great producers and directors make great films for wide audiences. Nobody else has done it more consistently than Hollywood.
And let’s have all media for the masses, too, while we’re at it. Bugger serious drama or documentary, let’s have TV 100% reality TV and shite. Let’s keep music the way it is, that’s what the public wants. And films, who need serious cinema, we want junk. God feckin’ help us, Luddites of the world unite.
https://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/noir-poetica-the-art-of-the-b-movie-must-be-preserved/#comment-45571
I’m not sure I altogether agree with you, Tony. Hope is what keeps one going. Qualities such as good coping skills and spiritual wholeness may not put food on the table but they keep us going during tough times. I think of the musical traditions, for example, that arose from antebellum slavery. And as for the “art” you mention – well, I think of films like L’avventura, which might be characterized as both for and about a privileged and irrelevant minority. That said, I certainly agree on the value of great films for wide audiences such as that produced by Hollywood over the years.
Exactly KG. B- movies were the ‘filler’ for the period.
I was being to a small degree facetious, as we can all take this concern with art too far. Conissuers of film or any other art have no monopoly on feeling or decency. The ‘art’ of living is cultivating right living through compassion. To write off the tastes of the mass of humanity is not only arrogant it is stupid. The delusion that art elevates us above the great unwashed is alienating in the extreme. Art is a way of living not about obsessions that breed hubris and contempt that exclude us from life and others, Intellectuals and aficinados have their place, but revolutions and social justice are made by people in the world not by those cloistered in cinemas or extremely lonely in front of TV screen for hours on end.
Make your own art by living in the world not observing it from a crumbling ivory tower.
But who defines ‘living in the world’. You?
I defend Tony’s right to perceive what he sees, not what others see. I think he makes quite a lot of sense too.
While I don’t believe Hollywood is completely dead artistically, I agree things don’t look very good. But even if that is the case, you make it sound as if this is an obituary for American Cinema in general. Lets not forget, independent cinema didn’t die after the 90s. Filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt, Ti West, Jay Rosenblatt, Ramin Bahrani, and Alex Ross Perry are all great examples of young talents working outside the studio system and producing great films. If you give up on Hollywood, it’s time to finally pay attention to the neglected independent filmmakers!
The problem is Anu, back in the early 1990s, the indepenbdents really WERE independent, at least to a degree. Now they’re merely subcompanies of the giants. Hence the independents of note will struggle to find funding even more and more.
American independent cinema will struggle more and more to retain its own vision. You either conform or go to Hollywood or get cast out into the cold to find your own funding. And it echoes across to the UK where only formula stuff is being made and arrtists like Mike Leigh, Terence Davies or the like struggle for funding. Others like Andrea Arnold have enough talent to fill the gap, but will they make enough money to be given the chance or will they have to take years out finding funding. It’s depressing.
Agreed. The biggest problem seems to be the almost complete deterioration of indie production companies. However good filmmakers are still managing to make good films. It may be a while until we see an independent filmmaker that takes the industry by storm the way Tarantino did, but might be it’s better if that doesn’t happen. While the 90s was looked at as the high point of indie cinema in this country, I would argue there was just as much good indepent work being produced during the 60s and 70s, when we had auteurs like John Cassavetes, Charles Burnett, Jon Jost, Monte Hellman, Robert Krammer, Robert Downey Sr. and Eagle Pennell were at their artistic peaks (and thats not including the great underground avant garde scene). None of those guys were particularly flashy, but they found a way to make good work. While this generation is not as good as them (and who could expect them to be) they are still making great work and providing American viewers an alternative. Its harder to do without the Hollywood machine, but thats why we as cinephiles/bloggers have to do our best to push their work. If we are not happy with Hollywood, we should actively seek out and champion great current cinema, the same way this site, and you in particular, have for older, more obscure art house cinema (something I, and many others who follow this site have been very appreciative of).
90’s independent cinema was a marketing tool. No more no less. To have the “Sundance Hit” attached to you allowed them to market the film with a hipster vibe.
I agree Independent Cinema was just a new name for the latest style of moviemaking that was separate to the mainstream. Before that they called it Underground or avant garde or cinema verite. What else was Cassavetes if he wasn’t independent? Yet the amount of people who see it invented in the 1980s is mind-boggling.
Alan, were you a long while getting to the patient or do you believe that you actually heard the death rattle this year, during the Oscar nominations perhaps? I’m not here to dispute your call but to suggest that something might actually have happened this year to justify your timing. That would be the box-office victory of Marvel’s The Avengers over The Dark Knight Rises, which you might otherwise regard as morally equivalent to a tank battle in the Iran-Iraq War. The deck was stacked in Marvel’s favor because of the premium 3D option, while few theaters could take advantage of Dark Knight’s premium IMAX option. But to the extent that the Avengers victory vindicates Marvel’s approach to blockbuster or tentpole filmmaking it will represent an even tighter shutting-off of openness to individual creativity. Dismiss Christopher Nolan as you please — he already strikes me as a director in decline — but take my word for it that his was an idiosyncratic take on Batman, relative to the “official” comic-book version, in a way that is most likely impossible in the Marvel system, where directors are replaceable for the upcoming second cycle of films and there may be no such thing as a true auteur for any of them. The success of the Marvel model may well be imitated outside the superhero genre; if someone in Hollywood isn’t studying how to do it I’d be shocked. This may strike you as an irrelevant event, but you might see it from your own perspective as dirt on the coffin.
Samuel, the prolific roll-out of superhero movies year in and year out is indicative of the fact that Hollywood is mostly irrelevant. If I see another superhero movie….it will be too soon.
No, like I said it developed gangrene in the mid 1970s and has been kept on a Life Support Machine ever since. Time to save on the electricity and make the men in suits get back to accounting.
You could even argue that the Seventies were an “Indian Summer” during which the patient suddenly feels unusually healthy, in this case because the doctors stopped trying to force feed it bloated musicals on the Sound of Music model, those being the disaster, sci-fi or superhero movies of their generation and the next try after the historical epics in Hollywood’s quest for blockbusters to make up for the decline in output during the Fifties, before the corporations took over.
Well Allan this is quite the piece if I do say so myself. I of course am a Spielberg fan…this should come as no surprise to you. However I think you give the guy WAY too much credit. You’re turning him into some sort of Hollywood God or something. Fine go ahead and do that…but I won’t. He’s a filmmaker who found a formula for making incredibly popular popcorn movies. Is it his fault that Hollywood now only wants to make popcorn movies in totality? Is it his fault that Hollywood runs itself like a business to make money? Is it his fault that we as a stupid public eat up the usual tripe week in and week out and do nothing about it? I will not blame Spielberg. I blame an cinema-uneducated and uninterested public. It is OUR fault. Not Spielberg. Heck none of us even go to movies anymore and discuss them or share them as a collective. We’re all watching our oddball miniseries on Netflix at home.
The real question is…..Is Hollywood Dead? Fact of the matter is Hollywood hasn’t been relevant since the 70’s. It should come as no surprise to any of us and I’m shocked we’re even discussing it. Nearly everything American made worth watching is found on the fringes or left of the dial. Am I sad about this? No. There is always another film or another director around the corner. That’s my search and I’m sticking to it.
Absolutely. But the majority of directors associated with Hollywood just want to become little Spielbergs and so long as the readership of so-called industry periodicals like Empire quote him as the greatest filmmaker ever, he needs bringing down to the level where he belongs. Namely, as a talented craftsman who chooses to make shit and set that shit as the standard and has people dumb enough to look up to him and say “you are so it” when they need to add two consonants to the front of the last word.
Haha! That’s funny. But Hollywood was already on a downswing before he came along. Think of those trashy big budget distaster films etc… I mean come on, making something that is popular and finding some critical relevancy is close to impossible. He found a way to do it multiple times…..that doesn’t mean everyone else should, but you’re sort of right I guess that everyone’s out to make money and the industry would love to have a bunch of little Spielbergs running around. But they don’t. Thing is, to do it right, you have to be skilled. I’m sorry I think it’s really hard to make a great popcorn movie. Lord knows most of the stuff out there is pure trash. To make good popcorn you need to know what you’re doing. But Allan don’t you see, Hollywood only wants to make films that make box office sense! People don’t want to watch Tree of Life and The Master! When I saw Tree of Life, 6 people walked out and the rest were fidgeting and talking. When I saw The Master a few weeks ago, less than 4 days after it opened, there were exactly 5 people in the theatre. Now The Master is a flawed film, but at least it’s interesting. But, people don’t want to see “interesting”. They want to be entertained. Can we blame them? That’s what movies have been about for a long time. Some of us want more. I still say Hollywood is sort of like the Walmart of cinema. You’re not going to find fine foods or ingredients to make fine foods at Walmart. You’re going to find staples that feed middle America.
Incidentally, the downward slide of Hollywood is inversely proportional to the rise of home video, dvd, netflix and streaming. We have more access now…..to crap. I think this coincidence is too compelling to ignore. At least the diamonds in the rough are easier to find now.
Yes, the disaster movies were there, but it was the marketing and saturated bookings of Jaws that went further, they bombarded people into seeing it. It would never be the same again.
They want to be little Spielberg’s because that is what their audience crave… spectacle over substance. This over saturation of men in tight films is not Hollywood force feeding viewers what they think they want, it’s giving them precisely what they keep asking for.
Your attack on Spielberg is understandable, but he didn’t create himself from a separate vacuum. The American public clamors for more of what he’s produced, so he and other imitators keep producing it. Demand propels supply. If The Master and The Tree Of Life made 100 million at the box office, then we would be getting more of that. In some ways we should be thankful that someone like Malick/Anderson can make a film in this environment at all.
And this goes for any country as well. Yeah Ceylan made Once Upon A Time In Anatolia in Turkey… but I guarantee you that 95% of Turkish films are probably commercial fodder as well. We don’t know about them because they never get shown internationally and cater only to mainstream tastes in that region. It’s not Spielberg we should be blaming, but a populace that wants mindless formulaic entertainment (if we are going to cast any blame at all) over something more consequential.
And back to an earlier point I made, Hollywood is not any less artistically valid these days then past decades. It just knows how to maximize the areas which gives it the most profit and thus trims the fat where it doesn’t. This was something it was unable to accomplish with total accuracy in 1943. And if the same few amount of movies were made back in the 40’s and 50’s as today with the same expense… half the noirs would probably not exist, but every musical still would.
Maurizio that’s the same point that I made earlier and I agree…..it’s the public that should be blamed. But what gives you any reason to assert that Hollywood is still artistically valid?
What I meant by “simple-minded” is that you severely compromised your argument by a continuing vendetta against Spielberg and Lucas. Few would argue that Hollywood has fallen to commercial interest, as Mr. Roca attests to above. But Spielberg is one of the most artistically successful American filmmakers of the last 40 years. His work is what I would call a trap for snobs. To attempt to make a valid artistic judgement based on personal tastes is a failure in presenting a convincing argument. Lucas too has done some very great things and doesn’t deserve this summary castigation. Hollywood still produces great films each and every year, and this attempt at painting everything with the same color is incredibly short-sighted.
I would certainly buy the notion that Spielberg is better than all his imitators combined. Some of his work that I mentioned above are truly great films IMO. If something like Jaws bombed at the box office perhaps Hollywood would look different these days. The reality is that it didn’t, and it’s success corresponded directly with what audiences wanted to see anyway (since cinema was invented I would argue)… spectacle and popcorn entertainment over more serious fare. He was the best at it, but circumstances would of played out the same regardless of his existence. To think Hollywood would be making a higher degree of There Will Be Blood’s and Blue Velvet’s without Jaws/Spielberg seems like wishful thinking. Most audiences are simply not interested, now or ever.
While Spielberg has a high degree of shallowness/fluff pervading his work, lets not defend Lucas at all please. The best film in his kiddie space opera wasn’t even directed by him…. which should say it all.
Wow Allan. Some of my thoughts are echoed here and interestingly I did a similar piece about Bollywood for an Indian film magazine a decade ago. I was frustrated that the young generation of Indian filmmakers who had enough money to make anything were content with making rehashed love stories & family melodramas. Since then, there have been some positive changes but for the most part my frustrations remains. And like in Hollywood, if a new story/idea works in Bollywood, it is endlessly copied. Also, equally worrying is how both Hollywood & Bollywood can flood cinemas with their new product & stifle non-studio films.
Maurizio, this is regarding your point about what the local Turkish people want. I once praised the films of Carlos Reygadas to a Mexican friend who told me local people don’t care for his films. If you look at the global box office numbers, that is the case as Hollywood dominates multiplexes is most nations. Shifting back to Indian cinema, I have this debate a lot with family who despite disliking Bollywood continue to watch it regularly.
Here’s an interesting piece on Hollywood’s financial morals.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121018/01054720744/hollywood-accounting-how-19-million-movie-makes-150-million-still-isnt-profitable.shtml
This is news? The reality is that most of the gross made from a movie is taken from the top by the exhibitors and the distributors (who want their cut even if it is a dog). This comment at the above thread provides a context:
One thing that I hope Mike will recognize in these “Hollywood Accounting” stories is that box offices revenues are *not* revenues actually recognized by studios. Generally, 50% or more of those astronomical box office figures go directly to the exhibitors (i.e., the theater owners). Thus, while box office revenues are referenced by studios for purposes of calculating certain percentages owed to participants, it is important to realize that the studio isn’t splitting up the box office revenues… it’s likely splitting up less than 50% of that amount. I’m not sure that this is distinction is made clear to readers in this article.
Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_hollywood_economist/2005/05/gross_misunderstanding.html
An other perspective from the above cited article:
“Consider, for example, Touchstone’s Gone in 60 Seconds, which had a $242 million box-office gross. From this impressive haul, the theaters kept $129.8 million and remitted the balance to Disney’s distribution arm, Buena Vista. After paying mandatory trade dues to the MPAA, Buena Vista was left with $101.6 million. From this amount, it repaid the marketing expenses that had been advanced—$13 million for prints so the film could open in thousands of theatres; $10.2 million for the insurance, local taxes, custom clearances, and other logistical expenses; and $67.4 million for advertising. What remained of the nearly quarter-billion-dollar “gross” was a paltry $11 million. (And that figure does not account for the $103.3 million that Disney had paid to make the movie in the first place.)”
Tony’s presentation is telling, and reason for me to make my first appearance on this thread. Bravo!
Sam, that second article is by the author of the book I mentioned above – The Big Picture. Definitely recommended for anyone who wants to see how Tinseltown functions behind the faux-glamorous facade; though very impatient with gauzy publicist’s bs and ultimately critical of the industry’s impact on the medium, the book is mostly unsentimental in its investigations – its tone is neither moralist nor apologist but very clear-eyed.