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

[la depressionada]

we gripe about distribution and the lack of availability of "our"* movies at the box office, but i suspect a kenneth anger or a jack smith (or a god forbid jonas mekas) was as frustrated in the 70s and would be delighted by the numerous avenues that independent filmmakers now have to show their work.

as far as i can tell, there is no divine right to studio funding for "good" movies; i'm sure louis b. mayer would agree (and he was, after all, god). the fact is in the 70s people like robert altman, francis coppola and michael cimino** got money because the studios were scared shitless that they didn't know WHAT would sell. (i mean what the hell are the kids buying anyway?) the studios weren't making great movies necessarily, they were hiring people who they thought could speak a language they no longer could AND MAKE MONEY. the tora tora toras just weren't cutting it anymore.

*this is precisely why george bush is in the white house, and "we" can't understand why.
**he showed them i guess.

[Hotspur]

Re: most bookshops carry Gaddis AND Koontz. Yes, and Netflix carries both The Pacifier AND Stan Brakhage films. That wasn't my point, which was why do we care about multiplex movies? Why do we despair over their decline? Oenophiles don't get upset that everybody's drinking Coke, they just enjoy what they enjoy. I suspect the answer is that cinephiles enjoy a good popcorn movie like everybody else and we just wish they were better. We're all hoping War of the Worlds will not be a complete waste of our time, even though we know that a really good blockbuster only comes along as often as Haley's Comet. Maybe I'm wrong--maybe Gaddis fans dip into Grisham every now and again for some light relief, but I doubt it.

Did anybody see Mike D'Angelo's piece in GQ or wherever he writes now, calling for a boycott of Revenge of the Sith, saying that if every single person who was severely disappointed by the Clones or the Phantom Menace just stayed away from the Sith then it could change Hollywood's way of thinking in one fell swoop? Nice idea. Didn't happen.

[Filmbrain]

Hotspur -

While you're not wrong about cinephiles enjoying a good popcorn movie every now and then, I think the bigger concern is this sort of forced separation and classification of films. There are plenty of titles that play at the Angelika or Sunshine that would fit nicely in the Lincoln Square. The fact that films like Head On or Red Lights are considered "art films" is ludicrous.

Did Mike D really suggest that? Jeez. . .

[Filmbrain]

LaD --

You are spot on about the 70s directors and how/why they got the money they did. As Peter Biskind's Easy Riders and Raging Bulls points out, never again were the studios going to allow directors to have that level of freedom -- certainly not after hugely expensive failures like Heaven's Gate.

However, are the people in charge of the money now any more responsible? The pressure for a film to succeed is far greater thanks to the bloated salaries they are paying the actors.

Louis B. Mayer and his ilk might not have been the nicest guys, but goddamn it they knew how to run a studio. They were motion picture men -- not executives of a media conglomerate with MBAs in their pockets.

And then there are today's directors -- while some have talent, others (take Chris Columbus, for example) are studio stooges who lack even a hint of vision, but simply create marketing "product". Will people ever remember their names? Will we one day look back at the films of Adam Shankman or Brian Levant? Will we ever be able to tell them apart? Give me a Stuart Rosenberg or a Richard Rush any day -- at least their films have some sense of a directorial fingerprint!

[burritoboy]

Depressionada,

Actually, there was a whole 1970s comparatively large underground scene and circuit that often showed such things as Anger, Mekas, Smith and so on. They probably didn't make any money then either, but they had more places to show their work. So far as I know, Anger's recent Mouse Heaven has only been shown a handful of times.

What's probably better is that now that Anger, Smith and Mekas are firmly within the cinematic canon, they all (well, those of them who are still alive) can get reasonably cushy academic film-school positions and make some dough that way.

The fact is is that movies that now would be considered extremely highbrow were once commonly released as very accessible fare. For example, such things as Sunset Blvd. (which pre-supposes a decent knowledge of film history) - a movie with a circular narrative structure, fairly adult and complex emotions, realistic economics (geeze, struggling writers' big worries include paying the rent - who woulda thunk?), intricate plot, only extremely limited action or violence, and is partially about the complexities of aging - were considered a quite middlebrow product.

[toto]

A wee note to Aaron: the past tense of to shit is shat. And thank you Filmbrain for throwing in the Scots' version (as the noun) in your text.
T

[la depressionada]

yeah, bb, believe me i knew that scene very well -- i knew 2 of those guys. but the venues for their exposure were far narrower than today. not to mention the potential receptive audiences. it's just isn't the same thing.

i'm not so sure what you're saying is true about sunset blvd. either. at first blush it certainly seems like schlockhorror, and i'm sure it was received as such, but i think from the very beginning there was a set who understood it for more. (although i am no sunset blvd. historian.)

if what you're saying is robert altman made better movies than michael mann, duh yeah. but i'm saying, mccabe and mrs miller came out of a peculiar set of social and political circumstances. we are unfortunately living in mediocre times, haven't you noticed? the result is mediocre movies. also, i think anybody who thinks we can boycott war of the worlds and then we'll get a new generation of paul schraders and alan rudolphs or whatever back is on crack. there has to be something going on in society to see it (on a broad scale) on the screen. didn't bertolucci just make a movie about that?

by the way i'm no theorist, just a fan. an old fan. i think people wax nostalgic about an era (or eras) and the reality was far more pedestrian than the romantics could imagine.

[Peter]

There's no easy answer to what the problem is with mainstream filmmaker. If there was, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

I think part of it, though, is the mentality that came out of Jaws, Star Wars, etc... where studios realized that one or two tent pole pictures could support the company for a whole year. Well if one or two can make $200million in profit, how about 4 or 5 - or 12?! Thus, part of the problem is that producers are only interested spending money on a project that appears to have the potential to make $150 million.

There are some exceptions, like the shitty little tween flicks that cost ~$15 to produce an inevitably pull in a good $35-40 million (The Perfect Man counterprogrammed to Batman this week is actually a pretty smart move, if cinematically vomitous). But generally, the idea of a small audience film is anathema. If there's no potential for big success, why even try at all?

Recently, this has changed, to a small degree, with a small crop of medium-low budget films pushed out towards the end of the year: Sideways, Lost in Translation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The rise of DVD has made them even more successful, as movies like these lend themselves to home viewing and repeated watching.

As for the question of audiences, I don't think they're any dumber - I just think that more films are aimed squarely at their stupidity. The high quality mainstream films, even the successful ones like Godfather or Serpico, of the 70s may have had lines around the block in New York and LA, but they didn't see the same sort of mammoth, country-wide success that Spider-Man 2 did. Audience stupidity hasn't grown, but it's been trained by 20 years of pandering.

Many of those people cracking jokes in the Exorcist now probably wouldn't have seen it in 1974, or at least might not have seen it till many weeks after it opened, meaning that you, the cinephile, could stand in line to see it opening night with a crowd that knew the score. Outside the home, film IS entertainment these days. From what I understand, it simply didn't have the same cultural domination 30 years ago.

The audience has been broadened by dumbing down the films. Film reaches more people, but it matters less.

[nick]

Philosophizing on the potential dumbness of the audiences is a risky business when you think of the commercial success of such a dumb movie as "Fahrenheit 911", which the people who've rushed to see it (I was one of them), praised afterwards as a great documentary. That leaves me rather thoughtful on the relativity of "dumbness".

[telly]

I have no way to really back up this hypothesis, so maybe I'm totally out to lunch, but:

Couldn't it be that there has always been a large percentage of shit, but the shit got old real quick and was therefore phased out of the public consciousness? Really -- and I mean 'really,' as in this is not a rhetorical question -- how common were cinematic masterpieces in the "good old days", and how successful $$$-wise were those masterpieces at the time? How does that compare to this year?

I have a feeling there are a lot more great directors nowadays, making a lot more money than their predecessors. Not in theatres, mind you. But movies for grown-ups don't play in theatres, because grown-ups rarely go to theatres.

Also, I think you all are just blinded by the perennial summer shit. Summer shit has an obvious purpose: to fully exploit the younger market, who are now out of school and able to see movies 24/7. In the fall and winter and spring, the theatres have big lulls -- with that demographic anyway -- during school hours and on school nights, so the powers-that-be put in more adult-oriented programming to bring in the people who might actually becapable of seeing movies on Wednesday afternoons.

Maybe the movies really are shittier than usual, but I doubt they're that much shittier. (I won't dispute the fact that yes, they really are shitty.) With DVD's and downloading (which, as far as the film industry is concerned, is a brand-new phenomenon), the kids are getting more bang for their few dollars, and can therefore buy more weed. It's really that simple. And it's because of this that we should all be hopeful, since with fewer youngsters going to summer movies, there's a chance of more "grown-up" movies in summers to come.