Summertime Blues (Or: Jay Sherman solved it years ago. . .)

There's been a lot of hubbub lately about the state of diminishing box-office receipts, and Hollywood pundits have been scrambling to come up with reasons why. Everything from the price of a ticket, to early DVD releases, to home theater systems, to the evil that is internet file sharing, etc. Yet none of them even hinted at the possibility that their product is crap. But before we shed any tears over their losses, bear in mind that universally panned films like National Treasure, Constantine, and The Amityville Horror each earned around $25-$35 million on opening weekend. While that might not begin to cover the amount spent on the aggressive marketing campaigns, it still proves that people will see just about anything new each Friday and Saturday night, and this is what must change. While the summer season is hardly the time to seek out great films, it seems that with each passing year things get worse. Summer is not the time for originality, but rather three months of remakes (of films that were shite in the first place), sequels, and films based on other mediums -- be it TV, comic books, or even video games. As everybody knows, the summertime blockbuster craze began exactly twenty thirty years ago with the release of Jaws. But looking at a list of other major releases from the summer of 1975 makes one nostalgic for a time when escaping from the heat meant more than simply two hours of CGI, bad acting, and even worse writing. To wit: 92 In the Shade, The Drowning Pool, Rollerball, Night Moves, Farewell My Lovely, Love and Death, and Nashville. Not all great films, but certainly far better than the $110 million earning The Pacifier, yes? Awful as this year's crop of summer movies may be, each will still pull in double-digit millions, though few will truly be profitable, or break even for that matter. Why do studios keep making them then? Sure, there's cable, video, and of course foreign sales, but rather than spend $80 million making Son of The Mask, why not gamble on four $20 million projects? Jay Sherman, the critic from the short-lived but brilliant TV series The Critic (1994-5) summed it up best in a speech that won him the Pulitzer Prize: The Sorry State of Films Today It's very simple, if you stop going to bad movies, they'll stop making bad movies. If the movie used to be a TV show, just don't go. After roman numeral two, give it a rest. If it's a remake of a classic, rent the classic. Tell them you want stories about people, not $100 million of stunts and explosives. People, it's up to you. If the movie stinks, just don't go! Pretty sound advice.

Comments

[artless]

I don't mean to make you (and therefore me) feel that much older, but it's been thirty years since 1975, not twenty. You should take your Geritol before posting.

[Filmbrain]

Doh!

Less to do with senility than with a denial of growing older. . .

[Aaron Hillis]

As we talked yesterday at length about this exponentially worsening problem, which unfortunately affects the kinds of films we'd like to champion, I only wanted to rant that (and mind you, I consider myself an optimist) audiences unfortunately aren't easily distracted away from the in-your-face marketing of Joe Q. Blockbuster. Me and you and everyone we know has been bitten by the film bug, and we've made it a lifestyle to seek out the unique and wonderful, but we already know it's out there lurking. The big-boy studios are setting lower standards in entertainment quality, to which the masses -- already numbed by the non-challenging comfort food that is TV -- are prone to accept as "THE cinema as we know it." Jay Sherman's joke is sadly over a lot of heads simply because there isn't enough context for the multiplexers to know they're getting shit upon.

This now begs the question if whether mainstream moviegoers would seek out more eccentric, character-driven, smaller-budgeted, foreign/arthouse/indie/whatever fare if they simply knew it existed, and I'd like to give people the benefit of the doubt. But will they be willing to spend $10 a ticket (seriously, this is too much money) to try out something untested to them, when (a) they got burned on last weekend's newest banality, if indeed they even have the basis of comparison to understand it as banal, (b) DVDs offer more bang for the buck in a household of 3 or more, without the multiplex talkers/annoyances, and (c) the jump from Shark Boy to Old Boy takes a more patient, educated understanding and acclimation... what would be the middle ground for mainstream audiences, Crouching Tiger? We are still talking about a culture whose median education as moviegoers sits at an 8th grade reading level. And Subtitles! They're box office death in this country for we uncultured swine who don't want to "read our movies," while as you mentioned yesterday, Jia Zhang-ke’s The World plays on 9 screens across Paris. Would the crowd-pleasing but sub'd Kung Fu Hustle have made its $16M without its own aggressive marketing push? Let's not even open the ol' art-versus-commerce worm can.

Also, as we agreed, think of how many people don't live in metropolitan areas with instant access to the alternative, the fringe. Do these patrons stand a chance against the monopolizing bombardment of ads for Mr. and Mrs. Sith, Smith, or whatever is market-tested to the lowest common denominator this week? The catch-22 of it all is that the dumber the blockbusters get, the more polarized high- and low-brow will become and "outsider film" will just seem that much stranger and more incomprehensible to those on a junk-food movie diet, whereas if wide releases got smarter, those same folks might think they're getting enough improvement to really not need an alternative. Honestly, from one cyberspace pundit to another, the best that you can do is to continue educating people with this website -- which may be preaching to the cinematically converted -- but perhaps that one person Googling "Lindsay Lohan" will accidentally get their eyes opened. There was a time in my youth when all I watched was bullshit (in the suburbs of Phoenix, I'll say no more), so there's a potential age of enlightenment within others.

Lastly, why is so much ink being wasted over this decline in domestic ticket sales, when only the studios are complaining? I think it's a given that film culture has become more alive and infectiously rampant in the age of the DVD, a time in which I've personally doubled and tripled my knowledge of film. Now if only we can get the digital generation of cinephiles into positions of distribution & exhibition clout, maybe we won't have to suffer as heavily from what's apparently sweating the greedy, product-churning execs.

[Peter]

Well, I'm one of those that enjoys some summer entertainments. I was weaned on Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I didn't find the Coens and Scorsese till I was about 13, and by that time my taste for wholesale destruction and outrageous special effects had solidified.

The movies this year HAVE been crap. Nothing put out by the studios has been worth seeing more than once. Nothing released yet - with the possible exception of Sin City - will have any sort of shelf life beyond the month after its DVD release.

The problem is that, as mentioned, the majority of cinemagoers don't know or care what's good and what's not. They'll go see anything on the weekend. This year, though, nothing has been worthy of seeing twice or telling your friends about. That, largely, has been what's kept the box office down. There are movies to go see, but no one's given a damn about any of them.

Without some sort of cinematic education, and with the continual refusal of high schools to treat film as anything more than a diversionary entertainment keeping it that way, people are going to continue to want Big Dumb Entertainments. Occassionally something will turn out to be interesting or fun (Spider-Man 2, The Lord of the Rings, the first Matrix), but mostly, we'll see subpar action epics that dazzle for a moment and then recede from memory in another.

[Flickhead]

We shouldn't forget that "blockbusters" in the 1970's raked in millions and millions over the course of three, four or five months in first run. And when "Jaws" or "The Exorcist" played on a Saturday night -- even after two or three months in release -- theatres were generally SRO.

After that the films played in second run when the feature would be paired with another movie and shown for another month or two at the dollar theatres.

And then there was something that younger viewers don't know about at all: reissues. I remember the James Bond movie "Thunderball" played in theatres from 1965 through the mid-'70s...and was again reissued in 1979.

Hollywood's nearly always grinded this shit out like sausage, but nowadays, if it doesn't hit on opening weekend, everyone's crying the blues.

[Filmbrain]

Peter/Aaron/Flickhead:

Great comments all around, but a question -- is the implication that audiences (on a whole) are dumber than they were 30 years ago? Or is it that they simply don't know better? (Emphasis on the last word.)

I can remember as a child seeing the around-the-block lines for The Exorcist, and the crowd was a good cross-section of NYC's population. Yet a few years ago, when they re-issued the original film, a large percentage of the audience in the sold out showing were unable to sit still or pay attention. They were bored out of their minds with the first third of the movie -- people were cracking jokes, walking around, making phone calls, etc. Now The Exorcist is hardly an art film -- why couldn't the audience stand it? Have they been "ruined" by today's horror films, which move at a much faster pace, and are far more graphic? Is it something else?

[A quick aside -- I plan on using this as an argument against the jackass who wrote the recently published book Everything Bad is Good For You, who argues that today's pop culture makes you smarter than that of the 70s.]

As for audiences seeking out character-driven fare, what if they didn't have to? What if that's what they found when they went to the multiplex? Would they not go simply because the poster doesn't feature a gun, car or beefcake hero? Would the losses on four $20 million films be greater than the whopping loss on Son of The Mask? It's not for want of material -- I know plenty of talented screenwriters who have wonderful spec scripts at the ready that have nothing to do with remakes, revamps, or TV adaptations. As Peter pointed out, people simply go to the theater and see whatever's playing. Imagine if they saw something of quality, of substance -- something that remains in their brains for more than five minutes.

[George]

The general levels of education and cultivation are probably against mass conversion to movies which do more than assault and/or insult us. I suspect that if you did a test about the film-going habits of people who read hontest-to-god books (Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon, Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie . . . well, you get the idea, as against the habit of those addicted to best-seller garbage from Dan Brown to James Patterson, you'd get the "Old Boy" and "Kings and Queen" audience at one end and the "Troy" and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" crowd at the other. The culture, and the schools, not to mention television, don't force using the brain (except in rote memorization exercises useful for multiple-choice test-passing), and they have made a virtue of novels which read like sprints: how fast do the pages turn? So the polarization of the film audience will in all likelihood continue, even grow, with the bulk feeding off the junk food and the discriminating ones trying to find that terrific new cuisine. It would probably be easier to change Hollywood's production strategies than to alter those fundamental directions of American schools and popular culture marketing.

[Aaron Hillis]

Audiences aren't necessarily dumber, but attention spans have become dangerously shorter (allow this to address your Exorcist annoyance, Filmbrain). Blame MTV, advances in technology, or the predicted evolution of a too-often lazy, commercially driven culture that blindly follows lemming trends to keep up with the Joneses; hell, execs are prone to the same ADD temperament in depending on weekend box-office results as a universal gauge & instant gratification (I'd say Flickhead was 100% right in what he says about reissues, but that's still being done -- ten-fold -- in the home video market, i.e. the 6 different DVD releases of Independence Day thus far, collector's editions, etc... even that culprit Jaws had a previous anniversary disc 5 years ago.)

Agreeing with George also, that the American education system and pop-culture branding are also factors in the watering down of tastes, the question still remains whether multiplexers do or don't know better. Studios are catering to that 8th-grade median to get as many a$$es in seats. Explosions for boys, love stories for girls, merchandising opportunities all around, drink up! What this has done, and the reason why the polarization will continue, is that moviegoing habits have changed: while even Jaws was smart and crafty, the masses today only seek the highest-profile escapist entertainments, so the idea of challenging the heart and mind in cinema isn't a goal. It's an abstract concept to those who have never been asked to think and had tastes forced upon them. "If I wanted to think, I'd read a book. It's not why we go to the movies!" Besides, how many of those $51M in Mr. & Mrs. Smith tickets went to base tabloid-readers who simply wanted to fantasize about Brangelina hooking up in real life? Remember, we're talking about a society where Paris Hilton isn't just a celebrity, she's practically our idea of royalty. It's the little battles we have to claim as our own, then perhaps we can work our way up. This is why Sony Picture Classics, Fox Searchlight, and however many "indie" studios can exist, because they're still answering to the big dogs.

As for your idea of cheaper, character-driven movies... *sigh* I expect that's a pipe dream. That's still 4 times the number of titles a studio would have to pump money in to promote. Yes, people go to the movies and see whatever's playing, but you're forgetting that the title of what they're plunking down 10 bucks for has been ingrained in their heads ALL WEEK/MONTH LONG. Adam Sandler's The Longest Yard made a lot more money than Kung Fu Hustle, and which one had more visual effects and fast-paced action?

One last bit of food-for-thought is that no Hollywood blockbuster has lost money in the last 20 years. Seriously. Domestic box office may be down for a movie, but that "commercial" presentation advertises the product for international box office, DVDs (rated and unrated, "double-dipped" collector's editions) for sale and rental, pay-per-view, airline in-flight movies, promotionals (i.e. free DVDs with your Happy Meal), premium cable channels, regular cable channels -- and so on, all the way down to a heavily-edited network showing of The Grudge that shows on a Sunday afternoon in 2009. And that's not even discussing merchandising. Studios may gripe that they're losing money, but no wide releases have been that disastrous on the books. Even Hudson Hawk or Waterworld (neither of which I think are as terrible as they're forever slandered).

We'll talk ourselves blue in the face on this because there isn't an easy answer or resolution. Education and enlightenment, that's the first step in our grassroots campaign. Welcome to Filmbrain dot com.

[George]

I don't think audiences are dumber than thirty, or fifty, years ago; I went through public schools in the 1940s and '50s, and the education was pretty pathetic. I don't remember the popular movies of those days as being especially impressive, with a few exceptions; you had lots of vapid musicals, soap opera love stories, and movies which have become cult favorites but I have trouble seeing as on a par with, oh, say, "The Third Man" or "Seven Samurai." I'm thinking of things like "Rebel Without a Cause," which is pretty sorry, and "On the Waterfront" and "From Here to Eternity." I put most of '50s Hitchcock in that category, although I understand that's a minority view. Pop culture fashions change; I'm not sure that mass refinement has changed much at all.

[Hotspur]

Even though I think I know the answer, I often wonder why cinephiles of your ilk (and mine) worry so much about the quality (declining or otherwise) of mainstream Hollywood movies. Do people who are passionate about Thomas Pynchon sit around bemoaning the fact that there's nothing worth reading in airport bookstores this year, or wring their hands over why all those Dean Koontz fans aren't reading William Gaddis? Surely The Pacifier and The Longest Yard have nothing to do with what you're really interested in? And the multiplexes will only ever be showing Hong Sang Soo movies in your fevered utopian dreams (and mine).

[Flickhead]

Just when were tastes more elevated than they are now? We've always gravitated toward crap. It's easier.

How does one define "dumber?" Up until a hundred years ago and the development of offset printing, illiteracy was commonplace.

We must be smarter today, or craftier. How else to explain the proliferation of millionaires in the middle class?

In the early '60s, David Suskind pleaded with America to yank The Beverly Hillbillies from television, fearing it would lower our cultural standards.

Yet twenty years before that, moviegoers probably bought more tickets to Ma & Pa Kettle, Francis the Talking Mule, Bowery Boys and Blondie movies (all an acquired taste, for sure) than they did to Nick Ray or Douglas Sirk, never mind Renoir or Visconti. (This was back when very few people knew what or who a director was.) And Welles was generally dismissed until the French taught us otherwise -- twenty years after the release of Citizen Kane.

This subject is vast and intricate. It has to do with abbreviated attention spans, media conditioning, and general gluttony. I'd love to write a book about it, but I'm easily distracted and it'd never sell.

[Filmbrain]

If Hotspur didn't exist, I'd have to invent him/her. Mentioning both William Gaddis (author of the greatest book ever written) and Hong Sang-soo in a single post is just too wonderful for words.

But I think you are right, to a point. There's always going to be crap, and rightly so. However, what about The Longest Yard AND Woman is the Future of Man playing at the same multiplex?

[Filmbrain]

Ok - so if we're all in agreement that audiences are no dumber than they were thirty years ago, but rather conditioned by media forces, what are we to do? Throw up our hands and be thankful for holes in the wall like Cinema Village, Anthology, Film Forum, etc.? Sure, if we were heartless and self-centered, but we're not.

Don't you think that Oldboy (as one example) is a film that would (or could) appeal to the same people who flocked to Mr. & Mrs. Smith? I do, but people need to be given the chance. I don't expect multiplexes full of Hou or Tarr, but why not at least films on par with the summer hits of 1975? Would something like Arthur Penn's Night Moves be an impossibility today? Must we be stuck with the bland and uninspired The Interpreter?

Have a look at these recent script sales found on the web:

Stay at Home Tom - A father has to learn to take care of his two young children when his wife goes back to work.

Piranha - A prehistoric strain of the feisty fish is unleashed by a subterranean tremor in Arizona's Lake Havasu just as the college crowd shows up to party in the lake.

Adventures in Babysitting - A suburban high-school senior's dull night of babysitting is interrupted by a call for help from a friend.

The first one sounds an awful lot like Mr. Mom, and the last two are actually remakes of 80s films that that were forgetful the first time around. If this is what studios are spending their money on -- if this is what they think will sell tickets and get asses into seats -- how can/will things ever change? Do studios actually believe that this is what people want?

I say it's time we came up with a polemics for a new cinema! Like Martin Luther, we need to write our own ninety-five theses, and nail them to the gates of Paramount Studios. Who's with me?

Sigh.

[Aaron Hillis]

I didn't say give up. [insert heavy-handed cello score] Teaching the uninitiated and spreading the word is an honorable beginning. By fighting the good fight, a difference can be made, even if the transition doesn't come in bulk qualities. For instance, I'm really proud that a mainstream venue like Moviefone is allowing me to write full pages dedicated to Au hasard Balthazar and Tropical Malady this month, instead of just no-risk crowd-pleasers like The Motorcycle Diaries or your favorite fascist fantasy, Amelie... believe it or not, diehard cinephiles can sprout from merely spreading one's passions with grace and non-snobbish vigor, as proved to me when I ran a video store. Never underestimate the power of word-of-mouth advertising.

Ok, I know you're kidding about the Luther comment, but there's something inspiring about making that kind of heavy-hitting, blunt-edged statement. Isn't that what some of the greatest art is about, an ability to get the conversation going and to get people thinking, by any means necessary? Maybe there's a happy (and legal) medium between the riled-up shenanigans of the Dogme manifesto and Fight Club-style terrorism? One thing's for sure, somebody better call Herr Herzog now. We're gonna need him on this one, I just know it.

When I read what you wrote about an Adventures of Babysitting remake, I think I vomited a little in my mouth.

[Flickhead]

You mention Cinema Village, Anthology, and Film Forum. One of us should write an article about when there were well over a dozen revival/art houses in NYC, several of which changed bills daily. The Thalia had an amazing schedule. So did the Theatre 80 St. Marks, where I got my education (two or three times a week) in '30s RKO and '40s Warners. (There's nothing like seeing Ann Sheridan sling hash in "They Drive by Night" on a big screen.) Plus the New Yorker, Bleeker Street, the Waverly (home of "Night of the Living Dead" on weekends in the early '70s -- and playing there for a couple of years), the Elgin . . . And the real hole-in-the-wall film societies managed by dedicated, sun-deprived fans (with 16mm equipment) in dingy storefronts.

When I lived in San Francisco in the late '70s, the bills changed daily at The Strand -- and on Sunday afternoons they had triple or quadruple bills. I remember sitting through all three Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone movies, topped off by "Duck You Sucker" in one day. If you got there before noon, the admission was about $1.25.

Now that's the stuff I miss . . .

[la depressionada]

polemics? martin luther? 95 theses? stop with the dirty talk already, it's hot enough outside.

for one thing 1975 is a bad choice. it's like sitting around rome in 1550 and saying will we ever see another 1509 again? 70s movies happened because lots of things came together -- i mean do you think we'll have a decade like the sixties any time soon?

we will NEVER return to the halcyon days of the '70s when we could kick back in the balcony of 42nd street grind house with a big doobie and settle in for a "a man called horse," "jeremiah johnson" and a "two mules for sister sarah" triple feature (you miss the good movies but even the next level of crap down, was pretty good), but the new multiplicity of outlets, like the internets eg, kind of guarantees there will be room for the protean movies you miss.

i observe in movies, as in other products and services -- food and clothing are two examples -- simultaneous trends: an increasing sophistication at the one hand, and a revoltingly vulgarian impulse at the other. general intelligence is compromised across all strata of entertainment (including literary production, jonathan safran foer par example). i was watching something recently (days of heaven maybe?), and reveling over the assumption by the director of the audience's historical knowlege. he just assumed the audience would understand the context and thereby could tell a more complex story.

it's not as simple as boycotting the bad movies. 70s movies reflected what occupied society at that time, the pacifier reflects what occupies society now. if we change the way things are, movies will change. this sounds all high falutin i know, but it really isn't. it's kind of like how people used to wear suits and dresses with hats and gloves to ride the subway. the bar (not intellectual pretension) was higher. the great summer movies i loved -- rollerball, soylent green, silent running -- all, to some degree or other, assumed the audience wanted to think something (not merely respond in a visceral way to action, suspense or violence), but they also weren't berlin alexanderplatz. you miss good middle brow, it, like the middle class, is going bye-bye.

but, i was heartened by something i saw recently: tom cruise's retarded behaviour and steven spielberg's too studied, chuck cruise under the chin response. tom cruise and steven spielberg are two of the biggest purveyors of the kind drek that has resulted in the shitty summer blockbuster. when i saw these two trying to recoup whatever dignity it was that they thought they i had, i had a startling revelation: they seemed just like the hollywood movie directors in the sixties that were trying to keep redoing the formula that had always worked ("paint your wagon") despite the fact that we were in easy rider territory now. spielburg and cruise in other words seemed like DINOSAURS. and i smiled when i saw that, because i'd seen it before.

on a separate note: i am suicidal over missing hannah schygulla at moma.

[Tribe]

I've been following this comment thread with interest...so I might as well throw in my unsolicited two cents.

I don't think that any amount of education, publicity, etc. is gonna change the basic viewing habits of the average movie-goer. Sure, the studios share lots of blame for the amount of crap on the screen. But (and far be it for me to defend corporate interests), there is just no amount of "education" that is gonna compel the average movie-goer to go out and storm the box office for, say, Altman's Nashville, for example. It just ain't gonna happen.

La depressionada hits the nail on the head in her (his?) comments.

In any event, the net and the relative ease (compared to twenty years ago) that film geeks can make their own idiosyncratic films assures that there will still be fodder for the types of movies that, say, Filmbrain (as well as myself) love.

[Robert Nagle]

I wouldn't worry too much about this.

There are much better distribution channels than movie theatres. You go to movie theatres to see elaborately staged carcrashes and galactic adventures, not serious cinema. TV has gone highbrow, and Internet video is beginning to take off. BTW, in preparation for my own documentary, I'm going to start foraging around ifilm, atomfilms and ourmedia, to see what's decent. (Will let you know what I find).

Fun fact: The budget for American Wedding (that's the second sequel to American Pie) was 55 million dollars! You might enjoy my essay on that (and Kill Bill 2) here http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/29/032641.php

I enjoy watching things in a theatre (and btw, saw a world premiere of a horror film the other day and loved the audience reaction), but our home TV screens are getting bigger and louder. In houston where I live, multiplexes spring up like mushrooms, live for a few years and then shrivel up and die. One hopes that if these places have 20 screens, at least one or two of the films would be "alternative" or "artsy" but in this business climate, even that seems unrealistic.

[David]

Hotspur, I suspect, has made the most interesting comment so far - if most of America wants to see what the rest of us label trash, why should we take it upon ourselves to stop them? The problem isn't, or shouldn't be, anyway, the great quantity of little quality, but that our beloved art movies are simply not getting the money or attention we believe they deserve. The real problem, I'd say (to echo a point Alexander Payne once made), is that we're creating an average movie-goer in our minds based on the statistics, that represents no real existing person.

Most Americans who go to the movies once a week may not feel compelled to search out old movies, or foreign movies, or experimental movies, but from that vast group, surely, surely there are subdivisions that support each. I'd love to see our easy average American admit that my taste in movies is superior and stop supporting multiplex garbage (though shouldn't we admit, as Davids Edelstein/Denby seem to be moving for, that Jaws - not to mention Minority Report - is a damn good movie?), but is this our responsibility, or even the studios'? Jay Sherman gets it right. The studios can determine the potential of success for a movie (and it is here that we must take aim at them), but I'd say it's each movie-goer's responsibility to determine, for his part, each movie's actual success.

[Filmbrain]

LaD - I was waiting for you to chime in (I knew you would).

I don't necessarily desire a return to 1975, but there's no good reason why studios can't turn around and make the kind of films they made back then. I keep up with screenplay sales, and the examples I gave above are pretty typical. Sure, there's always a few that sound genuinely interesting and original, but most are just high-concept garbage. Does Disney have nothing else available to push on the young-teen crowd than a remake of a 3rd rate 80s flick?

You said, "if we change the way things are, movies will change". However, if you read people like Thomas Frank, you see just how hard it is for things to change nowadays. Dissent has been co-opted -- we've been trained to think that consuming is rebelling. ("Think Different", "Just Do It", etc.) Movies have become more and more about product placement and merchandising opportunities, and as companies continue to merge across entertainment platforms it's only going to get worse. Remember You've Got Mail, produced by AOL/Time Warner?

I think the first thing that has to change is that Robert McKee has to be banished from the kingdom. As long as screenwriters and those annoying creatures that read screenplays for studios/agents are adhering to his rules, there's little chance of an up-and-coming Schrader ever getting a screenplay sold. I met a professional "reader" for one of the larger Hollywood agencies who proudly stated that she never reads more than 3 pages of a screenplay -- if she doesn't know absolutely everything by then, it's trash. Lovely. (Ever look at the first three pages of the Taxi Driver screenplay?)

As for other means of distribution -- yes, digital cable and the internet will allow for greater (and easier) distribution of more specialized product, but isn't that sort of defeatist? Tribe pointed out that the average moviegoer wouldn't storm the box office for Nashville, but they once did! Is Nashville now considered an art film? Are we soon going to be relegated to watching films like that on our laptop screens? Will large theaters be limited only to loud things blowing up? I hope not.

Going to the cinema is a tremendous experience, and no home theater system will ever replace seeing Lawrence of Arabia at the Ziegfeld (the re-issue in the early 90s), or 2001 in 2001 at the Astor Plaza, or Abel Gance's Napoleon at Radio City, etc.

As for David's comment - I'm not saying that the masses should be forced to watch what I want to watch, but why can't the "trash" be of a higher quality? Why the strive towards mediocrity?

To Hotspur's point -- most bookshops carry Gaddis AND Koontz. (Even the cruddiest airport bookshop will have at least one real literature title.) That's not the case at the multiplex.