Peter Lorre reading.
What happened to movies after the mid-seventies? Oh, I know the going thesis. That movies like JAWS, E.T. and STAR WARS, etc. made movies like this one impossible to make. Studios had to have block blusters every time out of the gate. And it's a crying shame. This movie is loaded with nice shots, memorable small performances, a naturalistic setting, great dialog, sadness, a taut yet full-bodied story. And this was a Hollywood production. Hollywood made many memorable films once upon a time--and not just in the period before Christmas.
Isn't longevity, something that movies like EDDIE COYLE often have, worth anything? Will people thirty years from now yearn to see TRANSFORMERS II come out on whatever the medium there is then? I don't think so.
A lot of people reading this blog watch small movies about crime. How about small movies about other subjects? Are you attracted to them if they even come to your neighborhood?
And why were seventies movies so great? Sixties movies were not. Do certain times produce good movies?
23 comments:
I'm sure you're getting all kinds of ocrrect answers by now, but what happened in the early '70s was that Hollywood studios were suffering bigtime by the late '60s, and were also noting that the indie/small studios were offering films with adult (not solely sexual, but also other sorts of mature) themes, or importing them, and reaping reasonably good to remarkable profits, while the likes of STAR! and DR. DOOLITTLE were falling over sideways. So, what the hell, lets let the film school grads and the tv vets and these other arty sorts take a crack at some small-to-medium budgets and see what happens...and suddenly Paramount and UA aren't hemorrhaging money any longer with blockbuster-budget flops, but doing not too shabbily. Which doesn't mean the films were uniformly good, by any means...though, say, THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN, which I just saw for the first time a few months back on RetroPlex, isn't bad...but a new grit and cetera was suddenly possible and not available on television. And, hell, the films in the late '60s such as MEDIUM COOL were the ones that opened this way, even if the run of the latter '60s was entirely too often HELLO DOWN THERE.
You know I watch the indies and "indies" and have basically all my life...I hit IFC and Sundance (and recently MHz WorldView and even This TV, which runs to about the same range as RetroPlex) and IndiePlex and Flix before I turn to HBO and Showtime and Encore/Starz on most nights, all of whom are not shy about snatching up whatever fodder they can from indies and imports, though of course IFC and Sundance and WorldView and to some extent IndiePlex are willing to go a bit more unconventional than the other channels. I don't know if the Ritz theaters were established by the turn of the decade that you left Philly, Patti, but they seem to be doing fine...recently, I saw the well-acted but poorly-written AWAY WE GO at their best inner-city auditorium, the Ritz East (the Voorhies, NJ theater they used to operate is now in different hands, as for that matter is the Centery City cluster, but it, too, still mixes straigtforward commercial fare with some "alternative" film, and is the best theater for comfort in the area). And, of course, after THE STING and JAWS and STAR WARS, the megacoporations that had bought out several of the major studios basically took the same attitude toward them that mostly the same corporations now take toward publishing, and most other things...if That Kind of Profit Can Be Made, Why Not Always!?!
The one good thing you can say about these blockbusters. The huge box office(along with international and DVD sales) makes it possible for studios to do these small films. Costs have risen so alarmingly, in recent years especially, without them the mid-range pictures wouldn't be possible.
No one seems to be big enough these days that they can be allowed these vanity projects that used to be the norm without these huge injections of money.
A lot of the theaters in smaller areas never get anything but blockbusters. Example, my little town has a four theater multiplex, the only one in the county(the only other theater in the county is a single screen dating back to the forties in a neighboring town), and it closed last fall abruptly because of poor business. Another company just reopened them back in May, but blockbusters only. They made a special point of advertising they would be open in time for the summer blockbusters.
I can't remember the last time we got anything else.
It's funny, I've been watching a lot of those 70's movies again and I'm not liking them so much.
I think the themes they explore just don't lend themselves to visual storytelling very well. We want them to be great and deep and meaningful but I think we bring more of that to the films than they really brought on their own.
Even then, the scenes we seem to remember most fondly are the ones with the most action - which makes sense to me, the most visually dynamic.
So, I think filmmakers may have discovered that such a purely visual medium does Transformers better than anything else could, but those '70's movies will only ever be pale imitations of books.
And you know, real artists like Hollywood movie directors don't want to spend their lives making imitations ;)
I think critical opinion believes that the late sixties to early seventies were the best Hollywood years with 2001, The Wild Bunch, Last Tango in Paris, The Godfather films etc. I prefer the 1940s with Casablanca, Laura, and The Third Man. And you're right that no one will give a hoot about Tranformers in the future except the rich producer who profited from the tripe.
This movie is on my NetFlix list. I read the book several years ago. It was a revelation.
I know what you mean about small movies. I recently watched the original THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1-2-3. Based on what I've heard of the remake, I see no reason to see it now, even though I'm a big Denzel Washington fan. The original got the tone and rhythm perfect. I read this book, too, and this is not an action story.
Small movies that don't involve crime (at least not directly) that I like a lot are TENDER MERCIES, MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, THE HI-LO COUNTRY, and lots of others that aren't at the top of my head right now. The stakes don't always have to be apolyptic for a story to be riveting.
The financial structure of movies changed in the Seventies. Budgets exploded so the resulting films had to be blockbusters. More risk means fewer "small" films. All the mergers didn't help, either.
I have to admit that I don't go out to the movies as much as I would like. It's mostly a time and money issue. A good number of small and indie films do play in Ann Arbor, I plan to and want to see a lot of them but rarely get around to it. I end up watching several films a week on DVD-- mostly because I can watch on my time schedule, I have netfilx and work in a library so it is easy to pick them up and drop them off.
Why were 70s films often times so much better? well there was a better balance of art and money making in those days, Directors were turned loose by the studios and allowed to create. films we allowed to be personal and to take chances. The young directors making the films were the first generation to grow up with a vibrant film culture around them and a pop culture of music, tv and comic books that informed them and that they were drawing on to make their movies.
Then came the blockbusters and the multi nationals bought the studios as money making divisions. Stock holders and boards of directors starting looking more and more at the bottom line and quarterly profits became the mantra--- now it's been almost 30 years of that and we have a generation of filmgoers who know a limited film history (despite the fact that more of that history is at your finger tips than at any point in the past) and that film going public is used to a steady diet of nothing. I could go on and on about the topic, instead I will just point out that there are still a lot of great little films out there that people will find and discover and that one of them (in my book at least) is Roman Coppla's CQ which is about a young film maker on the cusp of the 70s and his dealing with the change in the film industry from the 60s and his desire to make more personal films.
And let's not forget the emergence of TV as storytelling medium.
TV shows these days can be a lot closer to novels - 13 episode story arcs, ensemble casts, character-driven and even dialogue-driven.
The experience of watching a TV show in your own home can be closer to reading a novel than watching a movie in a theatre.
I know I'm in the minority on this, but I don't find movies very good when they try to be imitations of novels. Movies are great when they're imitations of roller coasters (because I won't get on a real roller coaster ;)
I am aways less disappointed by a Transformers, which more often succeeds at what it sets out to do, than I am by a movie that aims for something it can't possibly succeed at (most recent Oscar winners, for example).
I'm no film historian but I think Iren hit the nail on the head: there was a balance of art and commerce. Now, it's all commerce so much so that when we see films nowadays with real stunts and explosions rather than CGI mess, we cheer. Another reason that, say Jaws and Star Wars, works is that those films and other big budget films of the 70s focused on character. With Jaws, it was about Scheider's Brody and Shaw's Quint. Just about the most riveting scene in the film is Quint talking about the USS Indianapolis...and that was real. Ditto with Star Wars. It's not about the explosions and spaceship battles. It's about a boy trying to save a girl. That kind of intimate storytelling even amongst a blockbuster is what's missing nowadays.
We have two Landmark indie movie houses and the Detroit Film Theater. We're lucky that way. Funny how some movies don't hold up, John. I watched RED ROCK WEST the other night and couldn't imagine why I had liked it ten or so years ago. The forties and fifties were another great era for films. But I still like a lot of seventies films. They speak to my youth, I guess.
Hollywood like the publishing business wants every movie to earn hundreds of millions. They care less about art than ever.
Actually, Randy, the big pictures are not subsidizing the little pictures at all...if anything, as with the ridiculous-advance "big" books in publishing, they are sucking away the mid-level money, and the small-money pictures have to shift for themselves, whether they are released by indies or the "indy-esque" divisions of the big studios, such as Fox Searchlight or the recently shuttered, iirc, Warner Independent.
Publishers and studios have always been businesspeople, but of course they have been increasingly pressured over the last several decades to Up that Return On Investment. Only problem is that it's tough to reliably commoditize even the most demotic pop art.
John--Indeed, if a television series is novel serialized, or comprable, then a film is more like a short story or novelet, with some striving for novella status. And certainly television at its best has Nothing to be ashamed of in comparison to film at its best in the last decade or so.
If the first TRANSFORMERS aimed at putting my friend Alice to sleep, and she likes even a mediocre explosion film, then it succeeded admirably.
Iren, you have one thing wrong...the young filmmakers of the '70s were hardly the first gen to have a vibrant film/pop culture around them and forming/inspiring them...but otherwise, I pretty much agreed in advance...
And there certainly has been some impressive work from every decade of films.
I watched Red Rock West in the last couple of years and didn't like it as much as when I first saw it. I wonder if it was the fact there were not a lot of films like it at the time.
It seemed very sluggish and over the top. Also I think my dislike of Cage has grown.
There are lots of good answers to your question above, some of them even largely accurate. For me, though, a good and overlooked answer is the PG-13 rating, which has just about destroyed good movie making on the studio level. Where directors once either aimed at the kids/family audience or aimed at adults, now they're forced to aim for the mushy middle. Nearly every big budget movie is either intended to have, or dumbed down to achieve, a PG-13 rating. There are some welcome signs of a backlash. The raunchy R rated "The Hangover" became a major hit. Sam Raimi's long awaited return to the horror field, "Drag Me To Hell", was a flop because its PG-13 rating was seen as a sellout and Raimi's fans avoided it. It's a pretty simple minded and over simplified answer, but 'tis mine and I'm sticking to it.
I nod to your expertise, Todd. As I said, we never get anything but the big films here in Eden. I don't even go to the theater anymore(the first Lord of The Rings movie was the last one).
I look to foreign films for movies focused on story and character. Because so many of them are low budgeted, they tend to tell stories that Hollywood would pass on. To see them first run, you pretty much have to live in a big city, I think. Next best thing is to rent them via NetFlix or Blockbuster. But, they're out there; you just gotta search. AND be open to reading subtitles.
Lots of great reasoning here. A good book I read ions ago related to Hollywood's decision-making process was EASY RIDER, RAGING BULLS, Peter Biskind.
Todd- I should have said immersed in film history and pop culture. The 70s directors had often grown up with TV, movies ever weekend, and comic books of the 50s and 60s. I think that TV is the key here. The directors we are talking about either grew up watching or working in TV. The impact of this was frequent and massive exposure to visual story telling, what worked, and what didn’t work. Also with the advent of the Late Show and the Late Late Show, older films were shown frequently and over the course of a week people could see 3 or 4 films instead of the 1 or 2 that they would see in the theater.
Patti- I hear you, my Nick Cage tolerance is pretty shot at this point. I wonder if it would be worth it to go back and check out Dahl’s The Last Seduction?
Good comments so far and I don't have much to add but this topic has always bugged me. I think one thing that never gets mentioned is that there are just as many good movies being made now as then. You just need to look for them. Same for every decade. The 70's produced a LOT of total crap. What we see now as "70's movies" are the distillation of an entire decade. When you boil down ten years of movies to a list of 25 or so everything looks amazing. And yes, that's true of the 80's and 90's and will be true of the 2000's as much as no one wants to admit it. The movies than endure are not the most highly publicized (which is what most of the reactions to "today's blockbuster" movies seems to be) Will Transformers be remembered fondly? Doubtful. Will The Matrix be payed at a film festival 50 years from now? Yes. And people will say "They don't make 'em like that any more!" (For the record I hate that movie with a white hot passion. As well as every Batman/Spiderman/X-Men movie ever made)
One other thing that rarely gets discussed is that when a generation grows up and has seen hundreds and thousands of movies the thrill tends to fade. I thought of this watching Superbad. Good movie but didn't speak to me the way, say, 16 Candles did. Why? Because I'm not the same age I was when I saw 16 Candles. But there were kids in the crowd who were seeing THE defining movie of their youth. Who are we old curmudgeons to say they are wrong? When a new movie comes out and we all say "That's been done before! There are no new ideas in Hollywood!" In addition to being partly right, we are also not taking in to account the fact that teenagers haven't seen the cliche yet. And if they see the cliche in even a great movie from the 70's or 80's it won't resonate the same way.
So if you don't think there aren't great movies being made anymore, it just means you're not looking hard enough. It's hard because we're force fed so much crap but great movies are still out there. And as Patti just discovered, even an old movie is new if you haven't seen it yet.
At least I'm not crass enough to suggest that anyone check out my movie at http://www.indieflix.com/Films/TakingYourLife
That would be tacky.
Eric
Eric-I guess the main thing is that few of the movies I love get made in Hollywood proper. If I review my favorite movies of the last few years, most are either indies or foreign. WENDY AND LUCY, FROZEN RIVER... Oh, and yes, if you see two-three movies a week on netflix on at the cineplex, it's hard to be wowed. But when you are....
Beetner: I think the issue is more that in the 70s the good stuff was getting put out and promoted by the studios. The people that had the money and the connections to get their movies into local places to be seen. I don't think anyone is saying that there isn't a lot of great new stuff, it's just not getting the push or distribution that if a studio had made it 30 years ago it would have. You can say the same thing about the music industry and in a lot of way publishing as well.
That's it exactly. We might need to look outside the studios more and more (and outside the country) but they do exist and the ones that are out there getting made on a shoestring - they need our support!
Personally I think if everyone could find a way to step back from the bottom line as THE deciding factor in all decisions it would be a little easier to breathe.
Not just in film making but in everything.
If I was making three dollars an hour but a 1/2 gallon of milk only cost a dime then I would have enough left over for bread at a nickle, and rent and gas and and and...
But we have turned into a world of something ugly, motivated only by the size of the potential profit. Sadly know one knows how to take the first step back to sanity.
67 million dollars for a guy to play hockey for four years? 100 million to make a movie that may or may not be any good but if it is marketed the right way a profit appears...madness; 21st century industry be thy name.
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