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WITH an awful and low-yielding summer movie season recently concluded, I’ve been meaning to try to make sense of the continued decline of grownup film, independent and otherwise. Two LA Times stories get at the problem, which is both economic and aesthetic.
The first story, by Josh Rottenberg, takes the point of view of frustrated screenwriters.
Over the last few decades, as the studios have shifted their business models toward making fewer, bigger would-be blockbusters, a certain kind of movie that used to be the bedrock of American cinema — namely the kind aimed at adults who didn’t necessarily grow up surrounded by stacks of comic books — has gotten only more difficult to make. Unfortunately, that just happens to be the kind of movie that Frank, like many of his peers, aims to write.
He quotes bigtime screenwriter Scott Frank, who sees a lot of writers moving to TV:
“I’m sure ‘Out of Sight’ wouldn’t get made today,” Frank said recently. “‘Little Man Tate’ definitely wouldn’t be made. Even ‘Get Shorty’ is a struggle to get made today. They’re all tricky movies that probably wouldn’t happen.”
Also worth noting is this statistic: “Meanwhile, over the past five years, total earnings for work in film reported by WGA members has dropped more than 24% as a number of studios have cut back on production.”
The second is a critical reflection by Kenneth Turan, whose essay asks what’s changed since 1939.
Among the films released in 1939 alone were “Gunga Din,” “Stage Coach,” “Love Affair,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Dark Victory,” “Young Mr. Lincoln,” “Beau Geste,” “Goodbye Mr. Chips,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Women,” “Golden Boy,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Ninotchka,” “Destry Rides Again” and, of course, “Gone With the Wind.” Comedies, dramas, westerns, fantasies, period pieces, inspirational tales, romances. And that’s just scratching the surface.
Today’s Hollywood, by contrast, has transformed itself into the hedgehog. The one big thing it knows how to do is make sequels and superhero movies and sequels to superhero movies, all aimed at a young adult crowd with no end in sight. The race to secure prime spots has become so intense that studios have claimed release dates for as-yet-untitled superhero movies through 2020, which at this point feels a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Hollywood, he says, has doubled down on a single audience sector and a single kind of film — like a farmer who relies on just one crop. Like Lynda Obst, he blames corporate control and the overseas market.
Redbox killed the movie star just like Pandora killed the music biz. CHEAP or free wins out all the time. It’s to easy and much cheaper to wait for a big box movie to come out on Redbox and watch it on one’s giant home theater system than pay the enormous price of a movie ticket, even though not buying the giant home movie system would have allowed someone to go to the movies hundreds of times for the same price. So what else is Hollywood to do, but focus their money on the Biggest Baddest Movies made for the BIG screen, the one that’s bigger and badder than what you have in your basement movie room. The problem with theater’s is that you pay the same price for see “Avengers” as you do the slow moving romance “Labor Day”…but they don’t feel equal to movie watchers who will say about Labor Day “Oh, I’ll just wait for that to come out on Redbox” because it feels more like made for TV and with the cheap price of a Redbox rental…I sadly fall into that group. Now Avengers…THAT is made for bigscreen and feels more like a $20.00 plus date night movie and is more fun to watch on a big screen. For the record I saw “Labor Day” in theaters for a date night…but I would have felt no less thrill out of it had I watched it on a small screen at home, where as watching Avengers on my 42″ TV can’t compare to the Movie theater and so paying the higher price feels worth it to me. As for 1939, you only had one shot at watching a movie ever…in the theater, so of course movie sales were better, people had to pay full price and there was real anticipation for the release of a movie…something that is forever lost in our digital age and will not return. Plus, I personally am just sick and tired of crap like “F” bombs being thrown in just so a movie can get a pg-13 rating and I’m tired of the all around sleeze that is in so many movies these days. The messages are so against my moral grain (at least in 39 they were “suggestive” instead of soft pornographic or full out porn in their romance movies) most of the time I just don’t really care to watch most of what comes out of Hollywood. Just being real here.