TRICK OR TREAT

The dark cornered threat of ghouls and goblins seems about as worrisome as a short peanut count in a box of Cracker Jack in this, our year of the terrorist.  But that doesn’t mean that Hollywood isn’t still a pretty scary place. 

In what other town could so many with so little talent get so much money to make so much crap while trying so hard to make a little magic?   Los Angeles is so lame that everyone there knows, when not feeling the need for an extra Prozac, that terrorism would never come to L.A because there aren’t any targets worth attacking.  Honestly, bin Laden can have Dodgers Stadium just as long as he leaves Steven Soderbergh alone. 

Who’s the guy in town who is going to make the only truly great movie about terrorism?  Marty Scorsese, you dopes!!!!   Oliver Stone could only ever make a movie about why the terrorists are right.  He’s never made a balanced film in his life and he never will.  (He’s still a genius in my book… so long as he never makes a sports film again or tries to claim he’s open minded.)  But if you want to understand what’s going on in the Middle East, see B.Z. Goldberg, Justine Shapiro’s documentary, Promises.  Oops… you can’t see it.  No one has snapped it up to get it out there.  Typical.  The film reminds us that all the political machinations and philosophical angles mean nothing when you get to the core… the children of Israel and Palestine.  I look forward to presenting this remarkable film at MiFF in January.

But back to Wellsy…. if Jeff wants to write another word about Scorsese losing his edge, he should be forced to give up his column and to go work for the Enquirer, where nonsensical combinations of ignorance and pandering are the key ingredients to success.  You know, I love Jeff, as completely whacked as he is sometimes.  You won’t meet many people who want to do right in this world as much as Jeffrey.  But he knows as much about movie directing as a monkey in an astronaut training program does.  I know Jeff cares about his subject, film.  But like so many of us in this side of the business, he forgets that the art form is bigger than the game.  And a hell of a lot bigger than him… or any one of us, for that matter.

Hollywood is the land of a million excuses.  And God knows, it isn’t hard to get a movie together.  Every completed film is a miracle of sorts.  But that doesn’t keep a film from being a worthless piece of crap.  There is so much crap out there that we can drown in it all.  And there are fewer and fewer forms of natural selection, separating the good from the bad.

It used to be that even thought people went to the movies for six hours at a time and often in search of a place to rest and sit in some air conditioning, superstars developed.  People sat there for hours at a time and watched it all.  And they took it all in and somehow, in a market that wasn’t built for creative hierarchies, hierarchies developed. 

It used to be that movies had legs.  Great movies could last for well over a year in first run theaters.  Bad movies disappeared in about six weeks.  

It used to be that a movie that came on television was an event.  And there weren’t VCRs and, God bless it, Tivo.  And we stayed home to watch.  We made a choice.

And now, the only scorecard left is money.  Bottom line, baby! 

Yet I find it infuriating to hear the plaintive bleating of unqualified morons screaming about how bad movies are… not because they aren’t right, but because they all feed the goddamned monster at the same time they are yanking on its chain.   Peter “King of the Quote Whores” Travers is an embarrassment to any of us who write about movies with a modicum of sincerity.  Who the hell is out there looking to fight the good fight?  Jon Rosenbaum?  Half of you won’t even recognize the name.  Ray Pride?  When a major brings him onboard and gives him room to work, watch out!  Until then, he’s a smarter Anthony Lane with an actual real beating heart.  Andrew Sarris?  Thank God for the New York Observer and his good health, but he’s as rare a commodity among average moviegoers as a Chris Tucker feature that points out that he’s only a $20 million man in ONE movie… a sequel… and as funny as he is, he hasn’t proven jack shit as a serious box office star!  But hey!  We e-journo types are so busy keeping our jobs that we have no time for the painful, ugly, so-what-if-it’s-true-anyway-because-it’s-only-the-goddmaned-movie-business-anyway truth.

You know, there are smart – really smart – people out there in the entertainment journalism game.  (Yes, Wells is one of them, despite our conflicts.)  But we have failed you, the readers, brutally in recent years… far worse that the movie business has.  Because, my friends, there are still great miracles in the film business.  I know I’ve written this before, but Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Traffic were both major Oscar nominees and did well over $100 million in box office.  What kind of idiot can look at that and keep whining? 

But when was the last time you saw a miracle of entertainment journalism?

And while I’m at it, I will admit that I’ve been offering up some rather large, scented piles of excrement in this column in recent weeks?  Why?  My hubris.  I figured that I could just keep going, switching speeds from a daily to a weekly without much extra thought.  BZZT!!!  Wrong!  Don’t get me wrong.  I can still take on any one of the other jokers out there with one lobe tied behind my back.  But no one is that smart.  No one is that good.  I’ve been bad because I haven’t had my heart in it.  A friend of mine suggested that I not write that I forgot about writing today’s column until she mentioned that I had to do a column while we were on the phone at 10pm on Tuesday night.   But I will because that’s the truth.  I’ve been gone.  And that is a disservice to those of you who have been loyal (and smart) enough to stick with me through the years.  You deserve my best when I offer something up.  And I deserve it too.  And it took a friend to swing a verbal baseball bat at my head to help me to get my focus back. 

It’s so damned easy to just lay it in there, trying to follow the groove, day after day, week after week, year after year.  We get fat with success and lose the reason we all got into this in the first place.  There are reasons… so many good reasons.  But they are all lame-ass excuses used by people who need excuses.  I’ve always loved the quote from Noel Coward, “Never explain, never complain.”  But I’ve never been able to do that.  I explain, I complain and sometimes I even whine.  Pathetic, human and not the stuff of art of any worth.  I hope you’ll forgive me sooner than I forgive myself.

But I digress…

Whose side am I supposed to take?  Do I blame the whores or the johns?  Well, kids, I blame both.  (Note: Oliver Stone would make a movie about the poor, encumbered director who hasn’t worked with a budget under $50 million in over 5 years, but suffers from the insanity of the industry.  If you read Jeff Wells’ blather about Stone’s appearance at a New York Film Fest event, you should read Rebecca Traister’s account of the same in the New York Observer here.

Why do movies suck?  As the old joke about the ball-licking dog goes, because they can.  The domination of marketing over word-of-mouth has become a brutal display of force that destroys nothing, but builds nothing either.  It is not my job, as a writer or as a human being, to teach people what they should feel in a movie theater.  You want to tell Stanley Kubrick that Eyes Wide Shut should have been more accessible?  You’re an idiot with an absurdly inflated ego.   Show me the 20 feet of film that matches anything Kubrick did in his post-Killer’s Kiss career and you can start throwing mud.  Until then, blow me.  (Or more to the point, blow Stanley’s memory.) 

But on the flip side, who the hell am I to tell you not to laugh at The Animal?  The irony is that laughter is involuntary and your reaction to a drama, short of tears, tends to be not only voluntary, but intellectually driven.  Okay… so there’s no explaining the power of Fried Green Tomatoes.  But you get my drift.   I’m sure it will be a news flash for some, but Memento was never meant to be a $100 million hit.  The fact is, the business it has done ($26 million domestically to date) is something in which to revel. 

But there is hope!!!  Because things are changing as we sit here.  The era of marketing is coming to an end.  Not to say that marketing won’t always be important.  But marketing and more importantly, massive marketing dollars, do not guarantee what they did for a while there.  Perhaps the most important movie series that didn’t involve Steven Spielberg or George Lucas is the WB Batman flicks.  I have long said that the decision to put the June released Batman into the home video market in time for Thanksgiving was the beginning of the era of movies as product and not art.  But I would say that Batman & Robin was the film that marked the beginning of the era in which movie marketing was more important than the movies themselves. 

Look at this year to date.  Is there a member of the Top 20 Openers Club besides Shrek that anyone will remember past the sale of the video and DVD?  Is there another massive opener that anyone will describe as a classic?

There are 34 films in box office history that have opened to more than $40 million.  Only seven pre-date Batman & Robin… a movie that was supposedly destroyed by web buzz, but still opened to almost $43 million.  And promptly died on its own steam.  The seven pre-B&R films are Jurassic Park, The Lion King, the first WB Batman movie, Twister, Independence Day, Batman Forever (another turd) and Mission: Impossible.   Four classics of commercial cinema, one effects phenom, one old TV show with movie god and, of course, the turd.  Geez, five of the top eight openers happened this year!

But a funny thing happened on the way to the piggy bank.  Some of these films with massive openings either lost money or came close to losing money.  Batman & Robin was the first.  But there were three borderline cases in the last year alone. 

And so, opportunity knocks.  The film business will be redefined once again.  But who will be the Webster of this era?  We know it won’t be driven by entertainment coverage on TV.  The only thing scary about the new Hot Ticket show, starring a increasingly meaningless Leonard Maltin and a lovely but meaningless Todd Newton is that it will make Rich Roeper think that any old idiot SHOULD be telling America to think about movies.  (I don’t actually think Richard is an idiot… just ignorant about movies.)  We know that “critics” won’t drive anything.  Hell, as a group even we can’t decide who qualifies.  And entertainment writers?  Oy! 

You have the power.  You always have.  Just click your heels together and say, “I wish I liked this… I wish I liked this” four times.  Or just keep throwing money at well-advertised crap.  You know, the studios aren’t dumb.  They can make cheaper junk.  They can raise their margins by thinning out costs.  It’s really up to you.

When Halloween is over, go to a theater to see something good and buy an extra ticket for a movie that counts.  Buy it for someone who doesn’t want to know any better.   And change the world.

And if you don’t take the responsibility on yourself, no boo-hoo for you. 

E ME:  Who do you expect to change it all?