By Chris Hyde

December 11, 2002

As cinemas around the world fill up with sequels and remakes produced by mega-entertainment conglomerates, the dollars just continue to roll in. To this viewer, the overall quality of the product has declined precipitously over the last twenty years (though there are, as always, notable exceptions), and yet since audiences seem eager to lap up this celluloid pablum, it’s hard to fault the executives for whom stock price always trumps art. But though movies have nearly always been made with profit in mind, today’s cynical and formulaic environment seems to somehow have shackled film more now than ever before.

To be fair, from the very first the movies as a medium have generally been created with profit as motive. The people who helped build Hollywood in the first place were quite often previously hucksters of other goods, which is a telling indication that film has only rarely been all about art. Pioneers like Adolph Zukor, Jack Warner, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis Mayer and others came to the film business after being merchants, dry goods traders, diamond peddlers, clothes hawkers and the like. Movies were of interest as an opportunity for these men for a couple of reasons; for one it was a burgeoning business sneered at by the elite who had already established themselves in other venues. Additionally, it held the glittering attraction that in this industry the merchant got the customer's money before delivering the goods.

Though these early efforts at building the medium were certainly driven by the usual desire to make money, the wealth of material available for first time filming helped greatly in allowing studios to bring high quality ventures to the screen. Also, the fact that the grammar of the film had yet to be established aided in keeping things fresh, as studios and the people they employed experimented with various techniques while they felt their way towards a general language in celluloid. Later, once this basic groundwork had been laid, the advent of sound allowed filmmakers to tackle some productions again, as the addition of talking to motion pictures opened entirely new territory for artists to conquer.

But though there was ample opportunity to create quality work on film as the medium crawled out of its infancy, no amount of nostalgia should cloud the view that at this time movies were as much about commerce as they were about art. While the environment at the time undoubtedly left more chance for expression than in today’s tightly corporate controlled marketplace, one has only to look at the travails of some literary artists as they were chewed up and spit out by the dream factory to see that Hollywood has long been a treacherous place for creative types. A prime example is F. Scott Fitzgerald; when the once-great Twenties novelist went to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the results were nothing short of disastrous. (This tale was fictionalized by one of the literary artist’s co-screenwriters at the time and the result is one of the greatest novels ever written on Hollywood, Budd Schulberg’s brilliant book The Disenchanted).

Still and all, while movies from the start were often created with the idea of cashing in as a primary incentive, conditions in Hollywood were often freewheeling enough to allow room for plenty of creative development. Until the advent of television in the 1950s, cinema had the advantage of being the dominant art form available, and with over 90 million tickets a week being sold at times in the prior decade, there was room for a wide level of product. To be sure, there was certainly plenty of generic hackwork filling screens in the early development of the American motion picture, but the cream that rose to the top was of exceptionally high caliber. One has only to look at the Oscars for the pre-World War II period to see what sort of level of product was capturing the fancy of audiences at the time; this was an environment wherein classics like Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Philadelphia Story, Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, The Talk of the Town, Jezebel, The Great Dictator and others would be merely also-rans for the industry’s highest honor.

Whatever its faults, the studio system that had grown up by the 1940s in Hollywood resulted in perhaps the highest overall level of product ever produced by the industry in its history. Unfortunately, however, this was not to last. The war interrupted the movie business when it was operating at peak capacity and enjoying artistic hegemony; and while the postwar period was to initially result in the highest ticket sales numbers ever seen domestically for the medium, this was to be but a temporary respite from eventual decline. The coming of television would deal film a crushing blow to its dominance, and additionally, a 1948 Supreme Court decree ending the vertical integration of studios would ultimately reduce their power and influence.

Despite its waning strength, Hollywood would continue to create film for audiences, and over the next thirty years many fine productions were brought to screen. In the 1970s, though, the industry began to shift to a far more market driven philosophy than had previously been seen. The seminal event that crystallized the era of the blockbuster was the 1975 release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws; and while this would in no way spell the death of the American film as an artistic enterprise it did indeed serve as a herald for a world where movies would be seen in a somewhat more meretricious light than before.

Fragmenting audiences, global distribution, new technologies and consolidating media companies would radically alter the marketplace for Hollywood product over the final quarter of the century. Film studios, rather than being stand-alone creators of motion pictures, would become divisions of far larger entertainment companies looking to leverage their content through a number of media. Though the idea of merchandising and marketing with and through film were not in any way new to Hollywood, the scope of its integration into the overall structure of the filmmaking process would be far greater than before. Demographic and marketing data would be used far more widely to determine acceptable fare, and with companies looking to utilize films as a platform for garnering profits in ancillary areas of their business, content would become more beholden to the wider interests of the companies in question.

Yet another influence on movie production during this era was the rising costs associated with making and marketing movies. With expenses accelerating in these areas, the megacorporations that now run film studios as an arm of wider businesses have become even less adventurous than before in the choice of material that they eventually bring to the screen. While successful formulae have always been attractive to the producers of cinema, at this point in the development of the medium it seems that the marketplace is dominated by retreads, since a warmed over hash of something that is a proven profit maker is often seen as a safer bet in the marketplace than any innovative new venture. The creative side of Hollywood now generally seems more concerned with coining bland new marketing euphemisms such as "re-imagining" than it does in generating product that might edify at the same time as entertaining.

In fact, the production that first brought that new term to wider circulation is illustrative of the forces now in play in the creation of the Hollywood film. Tim Burton’s 2001 version of The Planet of the Apes takes the simple B-movie premise of the original and attempts to mold it into an enterprise suitable to this new product-placing environment. The end result is a hopeless mish-mash of a movie that doesn’t even seem to know what it wants to be; the screenplay was seemingly written more with the commercials and trailers in mind than the film itself. Burton’s capable visual sense is here perverted to serve at the behest of a story that wants to cater to various demographic audiences at the same time, but instead of a coherent universal message what we get is leavened dreck that is insulting to nearly all.

But while this film was to many viewers an unnecessary and poorly executed waste of time, it still performed relatively well at the box office, thus leaving the audience utterly complicit in the acceptance of this kind of poor quality product. Undoubtedly many Hollywood executives would simply claim that they know what audiences like and they merely give it to them. It’s hard to argue with this position in many ways, as while some may believe that at the present time Tinsel Town is cranking out some of the worst drivel in its history, ticket sales remain at brisk levels. Also, the argument that through distribution Hollywood maintains a chokehold on what its audiences might be exposed to seems a fairly thin one; while there is some evidence that at times the studios may be too conservative with what they let loose on the population, one can only imagine that after 100 years of doing business, these people must have a fairly good hold on what they can sell to a suspecting public.

Yet while to these eyes today’s Hollywood movie environment is as bad as has ever been seen, this certainly is no reason to exclaim that it has reached a nadir from which it will never recover, nor should it obscure the fact that there are always artists and creative product that will rise above the morass and deliver movies as entertaining and important as ever. The vagaries of the marketplace also ensure that sometimes out of nowhere a seeming fluke of a movie will explode into the general public consciousness. Movies such as Blair Witch Project and My Big Fat Greek Wedding demonstrate that small projects can become big money makers, and the serendipitous nature of the film business will thus always allow some room for the risk takers.

Down at the bottom of the production chain there is, then, reason to hope for innovation and work that is less concerned about moving product than creating art. But a cursory glance at the big budget productions hitting the theaters weekly reveals a landscape littered with little more than warmed over re-dos and sequels to previous winners. An ossification appears to have set in where neither audiences nor those laying out the cash to make the films want anything but tried-and-true projects leavened so as to offend or challenge no one. Though there are certainly exceptions to this seemingly general rule, the perception that Hollywood has swung the pendulum farther towards business and more away from art than was previously the case seems completely accurate to this viewer, at least.

All of the above is not meant to give the impression that this space feels only a simple revisionist desire for some wonderful way things once were in Hollywood in a halcyon golden age. Even the most starry-eyed retro film fan should be able to see that films from the United States (as well as elsewhere, but that’s a story for another day) have always involved a brutal struggle between commerce and art with the ultimate prize the heart of the paying viewer. Inextricably bound together in a wicked lover’s pact, the two muses that dominate the creation of celluloid have always battled for supremacy inside the messy process of making movies. Unfortunately, at the present time it appears that high production costs, audience lassitude and certain other factors have combined to give us an industry that is seemingly lacking in creativity in many areas and has accepted the marketing of merchandise as its major aim.

This is undoubtedly good news for bottom liners who look for studios to do little more than provide balance sheet additions to the quarterly reports of global entertainment conglomerates, as many (perhaps most?) of today’s film fans seem to want little more than these crass and loud extended two hour commercials. Maybe this writer is the only one who seems to spend less money seeing domestically produced films with each passing year; and far be it for this lone voice to be so elitist as to imply that people shouldn’t be able to spend their hard earned money watching whatever the hell it is that they want to watch. But to these eyes desirous of being awed or touched by film as well as entertained, today’s typical megaplex menu seems too often to champion the tawdry and the ancillary at the expense of the meaningful and the vibrant. Here’s hoping that at some point in the future, that always swinging pendulum may reverse its direction some and start pointing just a little bit more back towards the dominion of art. Given the brilliance of its history, the American cinema deserves a far better fate than to be turned into a simple repetitive assembly line constantly rolling out showy junk food for the mind designed only to line a megacorporation’s coffers with filthy lucre. For whatever the state of the art may be, a movie should not be a mere widget.

View other columns by Chris Hyde