The New Yorker

February 7, 2005

GROSS POINTS

Is the blockbuster the end of cinema?

BY

LOUIS MENAND

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. Movie- making 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 Lumiere, 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 re-quires sound; and he considers the contemporary blockbuster to be beneath critical regard. "I have nothing to say," he says, "about 'Star Wars.' "In any normal history of Hollywood, "Star Wars" is kind of important, and if you are someone who believes that "history" means a maximum of information presented with a minimum of opinion, then The Whole Equation is not the book for you. But if you think that our interest in movies has everything to do with our feelings about them, and if you have a tolerance for repetition, digression, first-person indulgence, and general narrative shagginess, then you are not likely to find a more affecting and intellectually absorbing book on film as a popular art. Thomson's subject is not, strictly speaking, the history of the movies; its subject is the history of caring about the movies. That calls for something more than just the facts. Tom Shone's Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press; $26) is also a history of caring, though few readers would call it affecting. Shone's book is an anti-valedictory for Thomson's Hollywood, written by someone for whom the movies began not in 1927 or in 1967 but in 1977, the year of "Star Wars." Shone mentions Thomson, but his prime specimen of the reactionary taste he disdains is Peter Biskind's history of Hollywood in the nineteen-seventies, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Like Thomson, Biskind thinks that around 1967 American filmmaking caught fire and grew up, and then Spielberg and Lucas came along and put out the flames with great deluges of cash generated by junk food for fourteen-year-olds. Shone (who was born in 1967) thinks that if you can't enjoy what Lucas and Spielberg created--"Jaws," "Star

Wars" and its first two sequels, the Indiana Jones movies, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, " and the pictures their example made possible, movies like "Alien" and "Back to the Future"—then you just don't enjoy movies. What is death to Thomson was life to him.

Still, even Shone has his limit—specifically, "Independence Day," which came out in 1996 and marks, in his view, the start of Hollywood's decline into obscenely expensive bombast. "Independence Day" takes us to "Godzilla," a movie that even its makers did not like but which became the third-highest-grossing film of 1998; "Pearl Harbor," a dud universally acknowledged that made more than four hundred and fifty million dollars; and the second and third "Matrix" movies, roundly panned, whose box-office total exceeds a billion. Giants like these continue to stalk through the multiplexes, shaking gold from the heavens with their thunderous, THX Certified footsteps; but inside their high-definition, digitized craniums their tiny brains are dead.

The authors of Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession (Miramax; $23.95) do not, especially, care. Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing are editors at Variety. They arranged to observe the marketing machinations for three big-budget movies that opened on July 4, 2003: the third "Terminator," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger who worked tirelessly to promote the film, and who, shortly after it came out, announced his candidacy for governor of California; die second "Legally Blonde" and "Sinbad," an animated picture from Dream Works SKG. "Terminator 3" and "Legally Blonde 2" were "disappointments," which does not mean that they did not gross millions more than they cost. (Virtually no movie makes, officially, a net profit, but that's a separate, adventures-in-accounting story.) "Sinbad" was a bomb. Hayes and Bing believe that Dream Works lost a hundred million dollars on it.

In 1950, M-G-M allowed Lillian Ross to observe the making of "The Red Badge of Courage"; in 1967, Twentieth Century Fox allowed John Gregory Dunne to cover the production of "Doctor Dolittle." Big mistakes. We have all got a little smarter since then, but those who work in movie publicity have got a lot smarter. They are certainly not about to give reporters the kind of access that enabled Ross to write Picture and Dunne to write The Studio, withering accounts of Hollywood vanity and folly. Although Hayes and Bing talked to many people about movie distribution, which is the main business the studios are in today, and although they have a lot of interesting information about the industry in their book, they did not produce a true inside look. They did not talk, for instance, to Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was the man behind "Sinbad.” Still, the process and the product that they describe—admittedly, from the crassest possible perspective, which is the perspective of publicity and marketing--do seem soulless.

The contemporary Hollywood movie is what Harold Rosenberg once called an "anxious object." Rosenberg was referring to art after Pop, to a time when, suddenly; a painting of a soup can, or a pile of stones, or a wall of Polaroids was worth a lot of money. But were these works of art, or were they commodities? The distinction had become blurry. A similar thing seems to have happened at the same time to the movies. The legacy of the so-called New Hollywood, the period, in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, from "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Graduate" through the first two “Godfather’s,” was the belief that critical worthiness and high returns on investment symmetrical goods: They rise and fall together. With “Jaws" and "Star Wars," good-natured but cheesy adventure stories whose grosses put even the "Godfather" movies in the shade, that faith began to founder. Not that people haven't tried, God knows, but this just nothing serious to say about the larger implications of "Star Wars."

This turn wouldn't have mattered so much at the time if the movies had never gone through their New Hollywood phase, and it wouldn't matter so much now if the industry didn't care. But the industry does care. The people who make movies need to be able to take themselves more seriously than the people who make popcorn do. The situation would be simpler if everyone was certain that the movies making money today have no more creative integrity or cultural significance than a beer commercial. But no one is certain. People fear that they've lost the key to the distinction. Hence the anxiety; and hence these three books, because that, basically, is what all of them are about.

Most autopsies of the cinema tend to be "It all started to go wrong when. . ." narratives. They're appealing in the same way those "wise old person who knows the secret" stories that turn up in many fantasy-adventure movies today are appealing, and they have the same shortcoming, which is that in life there never is just one secret, and there never is just one cause. In the case of a collaborative,

semi-regulated, high-cap, worldwide, mass-market entertainment like a Hollywood movie, identifying causes is like predicting next year's weather. A butterfly flutters its wings in Culver City, and a decade later you get "The Terminator.”

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 lime 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 Hawk'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 Bullfinch'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 crew, sets, travel, promotion, and so on. There are famous exceptions--"Independence Day" is one--but 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 "Shrek2"--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 pop-culture universe-Hulk, Spider-Man, King Kong—and sequels, such as "Die Hard,” 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 percent, 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 percent 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.

When the studios could enforce the practice of "block booking," which required theatres to agree to exhibit less desirable titles in order to get the big features, movies opened in a small number of major urban areas and then spread across the country. Gradually, as the studios started negotiating with competing chains, this method of platform release was abandoned. The big features now open on three thousand-plus screens, in order to maximize the benefit of their promotion. Before the word of mouth has made it around the block, the movie has already taken in, from the opening weekend, typically somewhere between two million dollars. twenty-five and forty per cent of its total gross. "Hulk" set a record with a seventy-per-cent decline in ticket sales between its opening and the second weekend, but the average drop-off for all movies is fifty percent, and it is almost the definition of a blockbuster that the first weekend is a make-or-break proposition. Marketing costs for the “Matrix” sequels exceeded a hundred million dollars. The reason that those movies had such enormous grosses, despite terrible reviews is that opened on eighteen thousand screens simultaneously worldwide. As Shone says about the typical blockbuster, "By the time we've all seen that it sucked, it's a hit."

Hollywood studios distribute two hundred movies a year (down from between five and seven hundred a year in the studio ear), and only a handful are blockbusters. But the blockbuster is where the money is. Every once in a while, there is talk about the return of the midsize film-the picture that costs twenty million or so to make, and that attracts interest and attention on its own merits. "Sideways" is this season's poster child. "Sideways" is reported to have cost around sixteen million dollars to make (exclusive of marketing costs). After ten weeks, it had grossed twenty-two million dollars. You might be able to get Tom Cruise to walk across the street for twenty-two million dollars, but that's about it. "Elektra," a widely panned fantasy adventure which opened in the middle of January, the deadest month in the business, grossed twenty-two million dollars in two weeks. "Sideways" was unbranded by stars or title (and was not, in marketing parlance, "toyetic," susceptible to merchandising deals). In those first ten weeks, it was shown on three-hundred and seventy screens. "Elektra" was based on a comic-book character, and it opened on thirty-two hundred screens. To put both pictures in true blockbuster perspective: "Troy," which is considered a failure, has grossed just under half a billion dollars. The poor reviews for "Troy" didn't matter, because seventy-three per cent of its box-office revenue came from overseas.

Foreign box-office income started exceeding domestic box-office income for Hollywood movies in 1993. For the typical top-ten box-office hit, sixty per cent of exhibition revenue comes from overseas. This is a reason that the women don't have much dialogue, and the men are too occupied with driving, wrecking, and leaping to utter more than an occasional mal mot. In the first "Terminator," Schwarzenegger had seventeen lines. Foreign audiences aren't paying to hear an interesting conversation. That's not what domestic audiences are paying for, either. The ideal product to market is a "four-quadrant" picture, a movie that appeals to men and women in both the over- and the under-twenty-five age groups. That's one reason performers with high adult recognition-Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Robert De Niro-are paid so much for cartoon voice-overs.

All the emphasis on box-office distorts the real financial profile of a movie, because theatrical distribution is just the first of many revenue streams. These include sales to pay television, sales to broadcast television, DVDs, and merchandising licenses. Blockbusters today aspire to be "tent-pole franchises"—centerpieces for multiple spin-off products, from lunch-boxes to soundtracks, comic books, children's books, arcade games, and computer games. "Batman" earned three times as much from merchandise as it did from ticket sales; the makers of "Jurassic Park" sold a hundred licenses for a thousand dinosaur products. Blockbusters today are commercials: they're commercials for themselves. They also include commercials, in the form of product placement. The all-time record for product placement appears to be owned by the Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies," which sold screen time to Visa, Avis, BMW Smirnoff vodka, Heineken, Omega watches, Ericsson cell phones, and L'Oreal. This explains the brand names.

So what else is new? This is Thomson's question in The Whole Equation: it can't be that commercialism is what's wrong with the movies, because Hollywood has always tried to sell its product in any way that it could, and to the largest possible audience. As Thomson says, "The urge to tell these stories is inseparable from the urge to make money." Techniques are more sophisticated, but very little about contemporary blockbuster economics is new. Hayes and Bing point out that the term "blockbuster" dates from 1957, when Variety appropriated it from real-estate jargon and ordnance talk to describe "Quo Vadis?," a movie with an unprecedented budget (seven million dollars), which was promoted with department-store ,window displays. As Hayes and Bing also explain, the methods used to market "Jaws," in 1975, were basically the same as the ones Warner Bros. used to market "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms," in 1953—a summer movie that begins with an atomic blast in Antarctica and follows the logic that such an event implies (that is, the release from the ice of a dinosaur the size of a football field).

Hollywood has always had the foreign market on its mind. The United States has the highest per-capita movie attendance in the world, and one of the ways that Hollywood has competed with foreign film industries is by putting more money into its productions. The money goes right up on the screen, in the costumes, the sets, the special effects—a degree of spectacle that foreign moviemakers, with a smaller domestic market in which to recover their costs, cannot compete with. The extravagance of a Busby Berkeley musical, or of "Gone with the Wind," was the studio-era equivalent of blowing up the White House, in "Independence Day," or wrecking all those cars. It was something that everyone wanted to see but that only Hollywood could afford.

The profit participation that drives the growth of above-the-line costs dates from 1950, the year Lew Wasserman, then the head of the talent agency M. C.A., negotiated a deal for Jimmy Stewart to play in two movies, "Harvey" and "Winchester 73." The studio, Universal, didn't have the cash to pay the four hundred thousand dollars Stewart was asking, so Wasserman arranged for him to get half the movies' profits. (M.C.A. eventually bought Universal, and Wasserman found himself forced to accept the type of deal, disadvantageous to the studios, that he had created.) Thomson believes that profit participation has done the movies a lot of damage, because it allows people to profit from the success of an investment with no risk to themselves on the downside. He also thinks, more provocatively, that "creative control" is another source of trouble. When United Artists gave Michael Cimino the right of final cut on "Heaven's Gate," in 1980, it meant, Thomson says, that Cimino "owned a thing he had not paid for." He could indulge himself with other people's money. "Heaven's Gate" is, canonically, "the movie that killed the New Hollywood." It almost killed United Artists, too.

But where did United Artists come from? As Thomson reminds us, me company was formed, in 1919, by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith-four above-the-line people-in order to enjoy the profits of the films they were providing the talent for. Their inspiration was the first blockbuster ever, "The Birth of a Nation," which cost around a hundred and ten thousand dollars to produce (a budget that no film company was willing to take on) and eventually grossed sixty million. The movie had state-of-the-science promotional and marketing support, including the famous blurb attributed to the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson: "This is history written in lightning." Wilson's interest in the film was the work of the author of the novels and stage play from which it was adapted, Thomas Dixon, who had been a classmate of Wilson's at Johns Hopkins. Dixon knew the movie business. When his offer to sell the story to the filmmakers for twenty-five thousand dollars was refused (since twenty-five thousand dollars was a quarter of the movie's total budget), he accepted points instead. It made him a millionaire. Griffith made money; too, but, he felt, not enough, and that was why he was why he was happy to join in the creation of United Artists. Lucas and Spielberg are the descendants of Griffith and, even more directly, of Chaplin, who made millions from the movies he starred in: they are artist-businessmen. The type is as old as Hollywood.

The drop in movie attendance after 1946 was sickeningly steep. Average weekly attendance in the United States in 1947 was ninety million, down by about ten per cent. In 1950, it was sixty million; in 1957, it was forty million. It bottomed out in the early nineteen-seventies, at fifteen million, but it has not climbed much since. (This is not only an American phenomenon. David Puttnam points out, in Movies and Money; an excellent history of the business, that British movie attendance in 1946 was 1.6 billion, the highest in the world. In 1984, it was fifty-four million.) Almost no one had a television set in 1947, and the studio system was still intact. There was no reason internal to the entertainment business for the movies to lose their audience. They just did.

The blockbuster is a Hollywood tradition, but blockbuster dependence is a disease. It sucks the talent and the resources out of every other part of the industry. A contemporary blockbuster could almost be defined as a movie in which production value is in inverse proportion to content. "Troy" is a comic strip, but what a lavish, loving, costly comic strip it is. The talent, knowledge, and ingenuity required to make just one of the battle scenes in that film, or one mindless James Bond chase sequence, interchangeable in memory with almost any other Bond chase sequence, would drain the resources of many universities. But why doesn't anyone put more than two second’s thought into the story? The attention to detail in movies today is fantastic.

There is nothing cheap or tacky about Hollywood's product, but there is something empty. Or maybe the emptiness is in us.