What ails Hollywood? As the studios shed more jobs, Variety editor Peter Bart looks at the difference between then and now:
I was a young executive at Paramount when films like "Bonnie and Clyde," "Midnight Cowboy" and "Easy Rider" were building their surprise constituencies. The lesson was clear: These films had moved the needle of our pop culture. Public tastes were changing and we had to keep pace.
I fondly remember the brief, chaotic meetings when we studied the box office results and asked ourselves, "What does all this mean?" And since we couldn’t come up with an answer, we decided to make films that we ourselves wanted to see: "Harold and Maude," "The Conversation" and "The Godfather." And that meant the ultimate heresy: no sequels. To us, they were stultifying...
Today’s studios, however, are peopled by marketing gurus and Harvard M.B.A.’s. They are keenly aware that the ground is shifting under them, as it did 30 years ago...Their basic response, however, is to fall back on marketing, to tell the public what it wants — tentpoles, most of them sequels — rather than respond to change. Given the unrelenting advertising campaigns, the "success" of the tentpoles is essentially pre-ordained... But do they hold up the tent? As production, talent and promotional costs keep soaring, return on investment has dwindled.
Libertas, which has been pondering the crisis for some time, links to an LA Times story:
It’s a long article and I recommend reading it in full, in large part because it runs counter to the endlessly misleading boosterism we’ve been getting from the entertainment press over the past year with respect to Hollywood’s actual
financial state. Ironically enough, even this article begins with the line: "Never mind that movie ticket sales are picking up and that "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest" could become the biggest hit in motion picture history."
Biggest hit in motion picture history? It’s not even obvious it’s going to match "The Da Vinci Code’s" worldwide gross this year, or even "Revenge of the Sith’s" domestic gross from last year. And incidentally, all of this doesn’t take into account ticket price inflation... Adjusted for inflation, the biggest hit ever is still (by far) 1939’s Gone With the Wind, which would make almost $1.3 billion at today’s domestic box-office.
Adjusted for inflation, "Pirates 2" is hovering around #86 right now, and hasn’t even made as much as "Mrs. Doubtfire" yet. But again, this is part of the fog of PR the town has been putting out about itself to cloud the obvious: it’s in trouble. And at some point one would hope that someone in a position of power would start to ask questions about why Hollywood and its product have fallen into such disfavour.
Comments