Tuesday, 10 April 2001

I am traveling today, so the column is short on numbers of stories but, hopefully, rich in thought.  Next week, it’s off to Bermuda and then back to Chicago, en route to Champaign-Urbana for the 3^rd Annual Ebertfest, two events I highly recommend to anyone who loves film, surf and sun.  Which you get where you’ll have to figure out yourself.

C MARCS THE AWARDS:  I was surprised and thrilled to see Marc Caro’s Sunday Chicago Tribune story about questions of art vs. commerce with the Chicago Film Critics Association Awards.  I wasn’t thrilled to read that the group was having some challenging issues, but I thought it was gutsy of Marc to write the piece and unusually aggressive of the Tribune to let it run.   Read it here.

READ ROSENBAUM:  One of the great parts of traveling is the opportunity to read stuff that isn’t just work related.  I spent a good percentage of my flying hours this week reading background material that I hope to use to write my first book, which I hope to be able to tell you about in greater depth in the near future.  But in the process of buying the books I was looking for, I ran into Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See.  The book had been recommended by a number of readers and colleagues, some of whom are mentioned in the book.  So, I decided, $24 price tag not withstanding, that it was time to take a look.

At 225 pages, it took me almost all the way from Chicago to Phoenix.   It’s always interesting to read someone who has wandered onto your turf.  After all, Rosenbaum is a "pure" critic and this column has always been devoted to the entire scope of the movie business, not just the art.  And sure enough, Rosenbaum had me foaming at the mouth within the first 20 pages.  The simple reality is that he has absolutely no perspective on how the film business actually works and, worse, he has no interest in figuring it out.  Which is not to say that the entire experience of reading his book was like listening to an aging drunk whine on about the good old days.  But the first half was.

Rosenbaum starts off by setting himself up for a fall, complaining vociferously about critics who don’t know their place, daring to criticize a filmmaker as though they know his or her work after having seen only one film.  Fair enough, in that many critics rear their ugly little heads with the pretense of knowing more than they do.  And Rosenbaum spends much of his short space tearing new rectal entrances for Janet Maslin, David Denby and many others.  But he then proceeds to admit, over and over and over again, that the world which he speaks of -- the nasty world of commercial cinema -- is not only beyond his comprehension, but that he hasn’t bothered to research even the smallest things.  For instance, he takes Janet Maslin’s review of The Phantom Menace to task ... based on a story about her take on it written by Sarah Kerr in Slate ... and admits to never having read Maslin’s full review.  Do you know how much work it would have taken this guy, who is putting this in a book that he hopes will live forever, to read Maslin’s review?  About 5 minutes to call it up on the New York Times’ web site.  But he didn’t bother.

And there are simple factual errors, such as his false notion that National Research Group fell deeply out of favor in Hollywood after a 1993 Wall Street Journal story.  PLEASE!!!  Harry Knowles, who started his site in 1995, spent the first two years specifically making NRG and Joe Farrell one of his central focuses of derision as he built his "outsider" site.

Likewise, he takes on Sundance and Telluride at length ...though he has never attended either festival.  And while many of his Sundance issues hold water, though way too vague and undernourished to take too seriously, his dismissal of Telluride is based primarily on having seen a TV slip somewhere with Oliver Stone and his U-Turn crew crowing about how they don’t have to do press at Telluride.  Ah, the irony!  But as someone who has been through many faces of the e-journalism mill, I will attest, without reservation, that Telluride is not a press-based festival.  That’s why it is the best festival for me as a journalist.  It’s about the films, not the press. 

And it continues.   Rosenbaum comes up with hypothesis after hypothesis about Miramax, the then-Siskel & Ebert TV show, the box office, press junkets and on and on and doesn’t seem to have the vaguest interest in even asking for anyone representing these interests to comment.  Now, I must admit that this column has never been much about calling people up so they can "no comment" or deny my hypotheses.  While the occasional story about playing games with Sunday estimates pop up, no one is going to go on the record about anything on a Sunday afternoon, unless a studio is so heinous in their manipulation as to change reality by more than 10 percent.  Of course, Rosenbaum, in discussing just this issue, refers to the final numbers as if they are clear arbiters of reality ... which they are not.  But he just doesn’t know.  He knows what he read in the L.A. Times.   He knows what a friend told him.  He KNOWS what’s up with A Taste of Cherry.

And that’s when the book takes a turn for the better.  Only about half the book has anything to do with the stated premise, sorting out how Hollywood keeps you from better films.  The other half is an appreciation by Rosenbaum of films and filmmakers he loves and hates and wants better or worse for.  And there, he is in his milieu and is worth reading.   If you want to read a lot about Orson Welles in a short space, this is your book. 

But the central thesis of the book?  He admits it himself ... he has no answer.  The truth is, he doesn’t even know what questions to ask.  It may be provocative to wonder aloud whether Roger Ebert would still be on TV if he thumbed down every movie for a month or two.  But it simply isn’t relevant or realistic as an issue.  Roger likes plenty of movies I consider crap and hates plenty of my favorites.  But is Rosenbaum really suggesting that Ebert is part of an elaborate hoax designed to keep his ratings?  Come on.  The truth is, Ebert has done more to promote small films outside of the realm of cineastes with the Overlooked Film Festival alone than Rosenbaum could ever do on his bully pulpit.  Absolutely, Disney has no interest in a movie review show that features every week’s art house releases.  But that’s not because they are interminably crass (though they may be), but because syndicated TV is a mass medium.  And that’s why, presumably, Ebert does go to a lot of film festivals every year, in the midst of seeing over 200 movies specifically for the TV show. That’s why, presumably, Ebert gives back in the best way he knows how, by doing the Overlooked festival and by using his space at the Chicago Sun-Times (also a mass medium outlet that prefers a focus on the mainstream) to promote small films he values, like George Washington. 

And what does Rosenbaum expect Ebert to do?  The idea that critics can educate America and make business sense of art films and foreign-language films is nonsense.  I sympathize with his dreams of a revolution, but Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon just made over $100 million despite being in Mandarin and is, in many respects, an art film.  That opens the next door.  The idea that anything other than that will speak to people who are in the business of show -- the business of making money is -- absurd.

Rosenbaum doesn’t seem to understand.  The movie business is all about huge risk and huge reward, now more than ever.  I don’t think anyone would accuse Tom Bernard and Michael Barker of having a problem with independent and/or foreign language film.  Yet, it took months for them to convince themselves that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon could be what it has become.  They had faith, but the return has been, I would daresay, well beyond their wildest dreams. 

Harvey Weinstein may be a barbarian in many ways.  But he was as key to the building of the indie movement of the 90s as anyone.  And the responsibility for the current slowdown in that movement has more to do with his success than with his failure to, if you’ll forgive the pun, do the right thing with a lot of titles.  The idea that indie film could break the $10 million domestic gross barrier is a function of Miramax.  Period.  And with that success, the door opened to other indies who aspired to the same level of success with smaller films.  And one after the other, they have failed to duplicate the success.  And it isn’t because they don’t buy good films.  It is because Harvey is a good salesman and knows when to spend and when to conserve and he plays the game as well as Barnum ever did.  And yet, here we are in 2001 and Miramax has all but abdicated their indie throne, as the costs of the indie business have risen beyond reasonably expected returns.   The same is true in the mainstream business, and in company after company "restraint" is the password.  Everyone is looking for the new way of making money in the movie business.  Because every film can’t make $100 million and you have to be able to make a living with small movies, hitting the occasional surprise home run, or you are going to lose your job.  So, being the smart man he is, Harvey has gotten off the dance floor and left his brother Bob and Dimension Films to make the cash keep flowing with a nice selection of cheap crap knockoffs until he sees some light at the end of the cash tunnel. 

Anyway, Rosenbaum would just want you to know that Harvey deserves to lose a finger for every cut to an auteur’s work that wasn’t welcome.   And I can’t really disagree.  When Weinstein buys the one film he bought at Sundance, In The Bedroom, for less than $2 million, and then the rumor goes out that cuts are coming (something that director Todd Field denied the night of the Sundance awards), you’ve got to wonder whether The Big Man really likes movies at all… or whether he just loves the movie business.

And that’s what is so wrong with the Jonathan Rosenbaum book with the provocative title and so little insight into how the film business works that he can’t even take a stab at finding an answer to the morass.  He loves movies.  People who distribute movies are in business.  And the though they are not mutually exclusive, they are strange, strange bedfellows.

READER OF THE DAY:  PM Magazine writes:  "I am a great fan of your column, but I do have a little bone to pick with you.  While some people may consider the issue of the lack of decent roles for women a dead horse, I believe that even the obvious is worth taking note over again (especially when the problem is noted and no changes take place).  I am an actress in New York in my mid-thirties.  Some friends and I were discussing the fact that Hollywood is awfully unkind to actresses over a certain age (a natural consideration for an old bag, by Hollywood standards, like me) and it occurred to me that the industry is actually even WORSE for young women now than it has ever been in the past for any woman.  I thought about all of the young actresses around right now, Paltrow, Judd, Diaz, Hayek, Barrymore, Berry, Hudson, Winslet, Theron, etc. and it occurred to me that not a single one of these women is having a career I would want to trade places with (in spite of the fact that all of them are working regularly).  A couple of them have one or two decent films in their resume, but the vast majority of their work is forgettable.  When Sigourney Weaver was young she had Alien 1 and 2, Gorillas in the Mist, Year of Living Dangerously, etc.  Meryl Streep's career is too stellar to need mentioning, Diane Keaton, Madeline Kahn, Julie Christie, Sarah Miles, Barbara Streisand, etc. 

All of these women had great opportunities to show what they were capable of, but with the arguable exception of Jennifer Lopez (who is generally interesting if not always stellar in her choice of materials) and Renee Zellweger (who has an underrated resume as far as I am concerned) the actresses of today do not get a real opportunity to show their chops.  This is not true for the men.  Edward Norton, Dicaprio, Maguire, Ledger, etc. are getting one opportunity after another in either a great picture or a great part (sometimes both).  I appreciate that you may not agree with me.  A friend of mine said that these women were the ones responsible for their own career choices, but the fact of the matter is that you've gotta eat so that means these women are working and taking the best film projects available to them.  What gives?"

E ME:  This is one to think about ...what do y’all think?