New Yorker Magazine, Issue of 2005-02-07 GROSS POINTS by LOUIS MENAND Is the blockbuster the end of cinema?
The people who make the popcorn basically know what they�re doing. The people who make the movies basically don�t, at least not until the product is out there, and then it�s too late. Moviemaking is a business almost in spite of itself. No film company was willing to invest in �The Birth of a Nation.� Everyone said that David O. Selznick would lose his shirt on �Gone with the Wind.� When he didn�t, various parties determined to repeat the formula, and made �Mutiny on the Bounty,� �Cleopatra,� �The Greatest Story Ever Told,� �Waterloo,� and �The Bible.� They lost their shirts. Universal and United Artists turned down �Star Wars�; Twentieth Century Fox, the studio that distributed it, gave George Lucas the rights to the sequels for nothing. After Steven Spielberg finished shooting �Jaws,� he believed that his career was over. Almost the entire industry was certain that �Titanic� would be a financial black hole; it took in $1.85 billion at the box office, more than six hundred million dollars ahead of the next-highest-grossing picture of all time. The history of Hollywood is a comic routine of bad guesses, unintended outcomes, and pure luck. Half of the failures were well-intentioned, and half of the successes were, by ordinary standards of fairness and decency, undeserved. People do get rich making movies; more often than not, they�re the wrong people. That�s why moviemaking is so much fun to read about. Unless, of course, it�s your money.
The cinema, like the novel, is always dying. The movies were killed by sequels; they were killed by conglomerates; they were killed by special effects. �Heaven�s Gate� was the end; �Star Wars� was the end; �Jaws� did it. It was the ratings system, profit participation, television, the blacklist, the collapse of the studio system, the Production Code. The movies should never have gone to color; they should never have gone to sound. The movies have been declared dead so many times that it is almost surprising that they were born, and, as every history of the cinema makes a point of noting, the first announcement of their demise practically coincided with the announcement of their birth. �The cinema is an invention without any commercial future,� said Louis Lumi�re, the man who opened the world�s first movie theatre, in Paris, in 1895. He thought that motion pictures were a novelty item, and, in 1900, after successfully exhibiting his company�s films around the world, he got out of the business. It seemed the prudent move.
Of course, �death,� in this context, does not mean �extinction.� What it means depends on the speaker. If the speaker is the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, the condition of the movies is a function of the variable that drives all consumer culture (including the publication of novels), which is the return on investment. If the speaker is the film critic of the Times, on the other hand, it�s a function of the return on critical attention. What is good news on one method of accounting is not necessarily good news on the other. Since 1992, the entertainment industry has been America�s second-largest export business, after aerospace; the television audience for the Academy Awards ceremony is said to be a billion people. It is still perfectly possible that, from any creative point of view, rigor mortis has set in.
David Thomson�s �The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood� (Knopf; $27.95) is a coroner�s report. The title is misleading. The book gives roughly two hundred and ninety pages to the first fifty years of Hollywood and about eighty pages to the last fifty, and the true scope of its interest is even narrower. Thomson thinks that Hollywood had only two phases of first-class product: from 1927 to 1948, �The Jazz Singer� to the Paramount decision (the Supreme Court case that broke the studio system by forcing the studios to divest themselves of the theatre chains they owned); and from 1967 to 1975, �Bonnie and Clyde� to �Jaws.� He considers silent film to be, essentially, pre-cinematic, because, in his opinion, the full movie experience requires sound; and he considers the contemporary blockbuster to be beneath critical regard. �I have nothing to say,� he says, �about �Star Wars.� �
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One of the merits of �The Whole Equation� is that it avoids isolating a cause of death. It maintains a kind of analytic deep focus; it tries to take in everything. Thomson thinks that some of the explanation for what happened to the movies has to do with the movies and the people who make them, but some of it has to do with the audience. �It�s not so much that movies are dead,� he suggests at one point, �as that history has already passed them by.�
Many readers besides Tom Shone will find all this snows-of-yesteryear stuff exasperating. Thomson is particular about the movies he loves most: they are the movies of the nineteen-forties, �an exquisite mixture of a lifelike dream world explored through the most refined and elaborate camera styles�with vast sets, insinuating tracking shots, and lighting that throbs with inner life�with the fabrication of music in the air, day-dreamy situations and indulged fantasy.� There was nothing very admirable about the industry that produced these films; it was an oligopoly designed for the enrichment of the oligarchs. But the greed and the philistinism didn�t matter, because something about the medium, and the talents it attracted, put the movies, Thomson says, �on the cusp of feeling for an entire society.�
This may seem a little like saying that music was never the same after swing�a matter of taste, and when you were born. One of Thomson�s favorite movies (he wrote a book about it for the British Film Institute) is Howard Hawks�s �The Big Sleep,� with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, which came out in 1946. In �The Whole Equation,� he calls it �sublime.� What�s mainly noticeable now about �The Big Sleep� is the cynical incoherence of the plot�during the filming, Hawks called Raymond Chandler, from whose novel the movie was adapted, to ask him to explain who killed one of the characters; Chandler didn�t know�and a lot of double entendres that seem on the verge of camp. But you don�t have to love �The Big Sleep� to take Thomson�s point, which is only that people no longer respond to movies the way they once responded to �The Big Sleep.� This is not simply an argument from nostalgia; it has an empirical corollary. In 1946, weekly movie attendance was a hundred million. That was out of a population of a hundred and forty-one million, who had nineteen thousand movie screens available to them. Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million.
And what is the main cinematic experience? The tickets, including the surcharge for ordering online, cost about the same as the monthly cable bill. A medium popcorn is five dollars; the smallest bottled water is three. The show begins with twenty minutes of commercials, spots promoting the theatre chain, and previews for movies coming out next Memorial Day, sometimes a year from next Memorial Day. The feature includes any combination of the following: wizards; slinky women of few words; men of few words who can expertly drive anything, spectacularly wreck anything, and leap safely from the top of anything; characters from comic books, sixth-grade world-history textbooks, or �Bulfinch�s Mythology�; explosions; phenomena unknown to science; a computer whiz with attitude; a brand-name soft drink, running shoe, or candy bar; an incarnation of pure evil; more explosions; and the voice of Robin Williams. The movie feels about twenty minutes too long; the reviews are mixed; nobody really loves it; and it grosses several hundred million dollars.
The standard explanation for this is economics. About ten or fifteen years ago, it became dogma in the movie industry that you could make a movie for ten million dollars or for a hundred million dollars, but there was no profit in anything with a budget in between. One reason for the Hollywood budget gap is above-the-line expenses�that is, the cost of the talent, as opposed to the cost of the crew, sets, travel, promotion, and so on. There are famous exceptions��Independence Day� is one�but the safe thinking is that only a handful of stars can open a movie worldwide. These stars command a healthy portion of the budget, and they usually take their money in the form of an advance against a percentage of the gross. If the movie doesn�t �make back,� the star gets to keep the advance; if the movie is profitable (and the star has a deal based on �first-dollar gross,� rather than on a figure reached after other profit participants have been paid off, which is often never), then the star�s income can continue to grow, and at the expense of everyone else waiting in line for a slice. The risk of opening without a name is too great to take. The actors who provided the voices for the animated characters in �Shrek 2��Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, and Cameron Diaz�were paid ten million dollars each for a few days� work in the studio. No prosthetic attachments; no early calls. Stars are brands. So, of course, are names from the pop-culture universe�Hulk, Spider-Man, King Kong�and sequels, such as the �Die Hard�s, the fourth of which is scheduled to shoot this summer. These are all ways of preselling the picture, before the reviews can unsell it.
The key to the system is marketing. In 1975, the average cost of marketing for a movie distributed by a major studio was two million dollars. In 2003, it was thirty-nine million dollars. The aim of promotion is �unaided awareness��in other words, �buzz,� a diffused sense in the public that the movie is on the way. Those previews are one means of buzz development; another is the �coverage� of forthcoming movies on television news programs, on entertainment-news shows, and in newspapers, media outlets that often are owned by the same conglomerate that owns the studio.
The all-consuming desire is to get as many ticket buyers as possible into the theatre on the first weekend, and, amazingly, people oblige. The crowds at the opening of a blockbuster are a fascinating window on mass psychology. If people just wait a couple of weeks, they can have their pick of seats. But when they get back to school or to the office no one will want to hear what they thought of the picture. That was last week�s conversation. This is why the primary target for the blockbuster is people with an underdeveloped capacity for deferred gratification; that is, kids. Kids need to see things right away. Deals are therefore made with the theatre chains which give the studio a large percentage, sometimes ninety per cent, of ticket sales in the first week, with a rapidly declining percentage in subsequent weeks. The theatre gets to deduct the �house nut,� the cost of keeping the theatre running; more important, it gets to keep a hundred per cent of the income from sales of popcorn, soda, candy, video games, and anything else it can cram into the lobby. Concessions account for thirty-five per cent of the revenue in the major theatre circuits. This explains the three-dollar water.
full: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?050207crat_atlarge
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