Say goodbye to Hollywood

Tinseltown is apparently about to quite happily slit its own throat.

Good riddance, you say? Ah, but...

According to a report on this evening’s Marketplace, audiences are telling the studios that for any number of reasons—paid advertising on the screen, cell-phone usage, obnoxious spectator behavior in general—they now opt to go out only to so-called “event movies,” preferring to wait for the smaller films to be released on DVD.

I’m not sure I understand the reasoning here, given that Hollywood has long since all but stopped making “small” movies (read: movies about human beings) in favor of big special-effects driven blockbusters. But the news gives studio execs the perfect excuse to jettison everything that can’t be summed up in a single hyperbolic sentence (“It’s King Kong Meets Harry Potter”) and marketed via Burger King.

The old canard “The audience is never wrong” has always been risible. But then, the suits running (ruining?) the studios since the 1960s are businessmen only. Long gone the days when the moguls made movies not merely for profit, but because they loved making movies. They were vulgar, despotic, unlettered and often foolish—but they were not MBAs.

Of course, the gradual debasing of American movies—which in turn degrade the culture of the rest of the globe—is largely due to the audience itself. American literacy’s decline has affected not only the bestseller lists but also the content of popular art. If the slobs go only to see Mission: Impossible and the studios (rightly) aim their product at adolescent boys, what hope does Spike Lee have in the marketplace? I’ll set you a scenario:

Imagine if you will that the current, self-immolating mind-set gripping the studios had taken hold in 1971 rather than now.

There would have been no Godfather. No McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

No Taxi Driver, Harry & Tonto, Godfather Part II.

No French Connection, Cabaret, Klute, Nashville, The Hospital, Mean Streets, Apocalypse Now, American Graffiti, Badlands, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Network, Paper Moon, Days of Heaven, Shampoo, Chinatown, Fiddler on the Roof, The Driver, “Save the Tiger,” Sugarland Express, Young Frankenstein, The Last Detail, The China Syndrome, The Sting, An Unmarried Woman, All That Jazz, A Little Romance, Thieves Like Us. Not even a Frenzy or a Family Plot.

In short, none of the movies that define the early-to-mid 1970s as the last great period of individualized—or at the very least, gutsy—American filmmaking. At best, they might have received two-week engagements or gone straight to video.

I’m not against fantasy—far from it. I love the Star Wars movies. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of my five favorite movies. The best new flick I saw last year was Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. But as a steady diet, even these superior movies would rot your teeth. They should be part of the feast—dessert, if you will. There should also be main courses, rich in character, dialogue, visual acuity, human conflict and emotional truth. Imagine a world in which the contenders for the Best Picture Oscar are the likes of Twister, Days of Thunder, Jurassic Park II and Independence Day.

I’ve all but given up going to the movies myself, which at one time was the most pleasurable activity in my life—not because there aren’t enough mind-numbing special effects spectaculars but because there are too many. Well, that and the paid advertising, the cell-phone usage, the obnoxious behavior of my fellow spectators...

The biggest unreported irony, to me, is that the aging Baby-Boom audience wants desperately to see itself reflected on the screen. If the kids turn the latest lame live comic book into a blockbuster, it will spawn two sequels and a half-dozen imitations. Yet every time a small, human-driven movie attains a wide audience, no one follows up on that success with anything like it. Instead, the studio execs call it “a non-recurring phenomenon,” shrug, and go back to the enthralling fun of cobbling up another Home Alone. The mature audience finally gets the message, and their movie-going habit dies.

In Sunset Blvd., Gloria Swanson has this to say to a screenwriter about the end of silent movies: “You’ve made a rope of words and strangled this business! But there’s a microphone right there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the red, swollen tongue.” With a few modifications, that speech could serve as the epitaph of the so-called New Hollywood.

If the new thinking prevails, I may never go to the movies again.

Congratulations, assholes. You’ve just killed off an entire segment of your audience. Now do us all a favor and commit hara-kiri for good.