The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
March 5, 2006
Hollywood's Crowd Control Problem
By MANOHLA DARGIS
TONIGHT, an expected 41 million Americans will tune into the 78th
annual Academy Awards to watch a spectacle largely honoring films
they have not seen and may never get around to watching. Much has
been made, in particular, about the smallness of most of the nominees
for best picture, which usually refers to their modest budgets and
absence of stars, but also rightly suggests an economy of ambition
and scale. With the exception of Steven Spielberg's "Munich," a
political thriller about the 1972 Olympics massacre and its
aftermath, these are intimate stories in which most of the action
involves characters talking and occasionally shouting at one another.
They were also released by an independent or studio specialty
division (Little Hollywood, not Big).
There are all sorts of reasons why "Munich," along with "Brokeback
Mountain," "Capote," "Crash" and "Good Night, and Good Luck" were
nominated for best picture (they're pretty good, for one) and a
couple of reasons why we should care. Among the most obvious and
discomfiting, however, is that Big Hollywood increasingly finds it
difficult to make the kinds of high-profile movies that the industry
likes to honor with its most important awards. The received wisdom
about the awards, especially outside Los Angeles, is that they are
nothing but an orgy of self-love, which of course they are. But they
are also a useful barometer of mainstream American film culture, and
they tell us something about how the movie industry sees itself and
sees us, its increasingly fickle consumers.
You don't have to have followed all the reports of a box-office slump
last year to know that Hollywood is in trouble. You just have to walk
into the lobby of a multiplex and look at the posters to know that
America's big screens are awash in the fast and the furious, the
cheap and the stupid. To judge by how executives at major studios
often talk about their business, in their discussions about closing
windows, new platforms and emergent technologies, the movies
themselves barely count. What counts is when you can watch a film on
your cellphone, not if there is something worth losing your eyesight
over. In the age of the incredible shrinking movie, content equals
quantity, not quality.
No matter the guff about the old studio moguls pounding their fists
on their desks and demanding excellence, and despite the sob stories
about trampled vision, the American film industry has always been a
business first. The genius of the system, to borrow André Bazin's
phrase, was that this heavily standardized, technologically dependent
industry still fostered creative freedom and produced individual
works of art. American movies both gave us an image of who we wanted
to be and were instrumental in the creation of who we became.
But what are our movies saying about us now? "Munich" is one of Mr.
Spielberg's crowning achievements, yet despite its accolades it has
been characterized as a disappointment. There is a sense that the
director hasn't been able to connect with those who months earlier
thrilled to his dystopian fantasy, "War of the Worlds." Audiences may
be staying away from "Munich" because it lacks pop kicks and familiar
marquee names. I fear, though, that after being fed a steady diet of
schlock and awe, trained to expect less from films that demand little
of them in turn, moviegoers no longer expect greatness from Hollywood
and may not much care when, on that rare occasion, it shows up at the
neighborhood multiplex.
Mr. Spielberg and his friend George Lucas are often blamed by
cinephiles for helping to bring about the end of the revered period
of 1970's American cinema, for ushering in the modern blockbuster age
with "Jaws" and "Star Wars." Among the easy riders and rock-and-
rollers of his generation, Mr. Spielberg has long seemed the most
adept at riding out industry shifts, maintaining both his critical
and commercial supremacy. Yet the audience's indifference to
"Munich" (indifference that most certainly has nothing to do with the
political hysteria that greeted the film) suggests that in his
capacity as a reigning auteur of the modern blockbuster, Mr.
Spielberg has helped create an audience more interested in his
talents as a rollercoaster operator than as an artist.
IN both its ambition and scale, "Munich" is a big film; it's a
thriller that transcends genre, an action movie with ideas, with a
large international cast and locations from around the world. By
contrast, "Brokeback Mountain," for all its majestic mountain views
and turning calendar pages, and despite the groaning weight of its
sociopolitical burden, is a romance about two people trapped in their
very tiny worlds. "Capote" and "Good Night, and Good Luck," both
morality tales of a kind, make a virtue out of their humble budgets
and narrow focus without transcending either, while "Crash" is the
smallest of the bunch: a fantasy about a handful of Los Angeles
residents who keep knocking into one another, kind of like the
industry crowd that lunches at Orso.
All five nominees have their attractions; what they don't have is the
mass audience. Although they obviously aspire to that audience and
the dollars that come with it, each nominee is embedded in a specific
milieu and turns on internal struggles of specific types: Israeli
vigilantes, homosexual lovers, television producers, writer-
sophisticates and race-crazed Angelenos. With the exception of
"Munich," these are the kinds of modestly scaled, moderately complex
stories that have come to define notionally independent cinema. They
are also films that will scale down nicely when you watch them on
your television set. Which is precisely what the industry, which
relies heavily on DVD sales and rentals, is counting on.
These days big studio movies do not, as a rule, excite the intellect
or stir the soul: that's what specialty titles like "Brokeback
Mountain" are for. In the last few decades, the American movie
industry has become increasingly split between high-concept
spectacles engineered to attract as many viewers as possible (think
flypaper) and niche products pitched to specific audiences. In this
climate, films released through a studio specialty unit, like
"Capote" and "Good Night, and Good Luck," are just one niche among
many, like horror or teen flicks. Their principal value doesn't come
from ticket sales, but from the prestige and awards they confer on a
parent company. In Hollywood, as a friend recently quipped, "Quality
is now a genre."
The corporate independent, meaning brands like Fox Searchlight
Pictures and Focus Features, may be as oxymoronic a term as high
concept, but as this year's Oscars prove it's an oxymoron that has
reaped important dividends for Hollywood. The absorption of
independent companies into the system and the creation of specialty
divisions furnished the industry with a much-needed infusion of new
talent, from influential filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh to
ubiquitous executives like Harvey Weinstein. Without corporate
independents like Warner Independent Pictures, a specialty arm of
Warner Brothers Entertainment, George Clooney might be home tonight
instead of smiling for the camera on behalf of "Good Night, and Good
Luck," for which he has been nominated for best director, and
"Syriana," for which he received a nomination for best supporting
actor. As the star of films like "Ocean's 12," Mr. Clooney makes
money for Warner Brothers Entertainment; as a corporate independent
player, he gives it class.
Mr. Clooney's dual capacity reflects Hollywood's tradition of giving
us the same thing while making it seem somehow different. At the same
time, he is part of a system that now reserves most of its smartest,
most high-minded and ostensibly serious properties for its specialty
divisions, the implication being that most moviegoers are not
interested in smart, high-minded, serious films. Maybe they aren't.
Or maybe they no longer have faith in the movies: witness Hollywood's
recent inability to sell low-end garbage like "Stealth" or high-end
kitsch like "Memoirs of a Geisha." Even the chairman of Sony Pictures
Entertainment, Michael Lynton, whose company released both titles,
admits moviegoers aren't as stupid as the studios seem to think:
"Audiences have gotten smart to the marketing, they can smell the
good ones from the bad ones at a distance."
The crisis now facing Hollywood isn't unique to the movies; the
atomization of the culture makes it hard to know what people want,
particularly when they belong to a multi-everything society like
ours. Still, something will be lost if Hollywood continues to
downsize its ambitions and fails to make movies that connect with the
mass audience, to make movies that speak to us as a unified whole
rather than as a mass of self-interested egos, that give us a sense
of collective identity and social cohesion. A nation of iPod-people,
each staring at his or her individually downloaded film on the
delivery system of his or her choice, seems a poor substitute for the
oceanic feeling that comes with watching a film with a crowd, finding
communion in the dark.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com
___________________________________________________________________
How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List
Send a message addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L
The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
