They just don’t make movies like they used to. “Everything seems so dull and diluted,” said Josh Strauss, a media study major at the University at Buffalo. He sees contemporary Hollywood as a sea of remakes, sequels, and lack of imagination.
A movie based on Doom, the popular video game, will be released next month. This will be followed by the Halo movie in 2007. In search of higher profits, major studios have decided to churn out vehicles for overpaid stars and irrelevant products rather than their less flashy, more artistic counterparts. Many people are wondering if this is the same Hollywood that has in the past produced classics like Gone with the Wind and Apocalypse Now.
In the past five years, Oscar winners for best picture have included Gladiator, a modern tribute to sword and sandal flicks (think Ben-Hur, Spartacus, etc.), Chicago, the film version of a Broadway play, and The Lord of the Rings, an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s popular book series. Thirty years ago, Woody Allen’s low budget classic Annie Hall beat out commercial juggernaut Star Wars for the same coveted award.
Star Wars practically invented the idea of commercial tie-ins for random products, with stuff like C-3PO’s sweetened breakfast cereal. Today, Kellogg’s continues to sell Finding Nemo and Lilo and Stitch cereals, even though the movies they’re based on were released more than three years ago.
“We’re bound up in homogenous values that are sold to us,” said Steven Eastwood, a UB film professor. “We’re sold the form in which you escape, as well as the thing you aspire to.” For nearly ten dollars, one can go to a corporate movie theater to see a simplified version of a Japanese film, or another movie based on a ‘70s television show. When compared to classic films, the dialogue of a modern movie is often cruder, replaced instead by flashy special effects.
Film production costs used to constitute 90 percent of a movie’s budget, according to Roy Rousell, the interim chair of UB’s department of media studies. That was when filming was done on actual film. Today, anybody with a $1,000 digital video camera, motivated actors, and computer editing software can make a feature length movie. It’s now common for the advertising budget to exceed the price of making a Hollywood blockbuster.
“Hollywood exists to make money, not to make movies,” said UB professor Sara Bay-Cheng. This has always been the case. She argues that the further we get away from any era, we only see what is good; for every Godfather, there were nine mediocre seat fillers. “If you read film critiques of the 70s, you will see that bad movies were made,” she said. But at least those bad scripts were original, as opposed to the re-hashing and mindless adaptations that are common today.
Movies like Abre Los Ojos, and Ringu, are turned into Vanilla Sky, and The Ring, respectively. The latter remakes are, according to Strauss and senior media study major Eric Basile, duller and less thought provoking. “They take any sort of uniqueness away,” said Basile.
Vanilla Sky is actually a textbook example of this trend. Abre Los Ojos was made in 1997 by Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar. It starred Penelope Cruz, who was then unknown in America. Fast forward to 2001, and Cruz was a high profile American actress when director Cameron Crowe remade Amenábar’s film as Vanilla Sky. Cruz played the same exact character opposite of Tom Cruise in a version that is laden with generic pop culture references and corporate advertisements. Vanilla Sky earned over $100 million at movie theater screenings, while Abre Los Ojos grossed under $400,000 in America.
“People generally don’t go to a subtitled film,” Bay-Cheng said. “Who wants to go to the movies to read?” There is less money to be made in the redistribution of foreign films, due in part to subtitles.
Film studies graduate student Chris Earnst has found a way to respect mainstream movies. “There are a different set of standards in Hollywood,” he said. “You are dealing with a business, [and] it comes down to money.” He sees these films as a product of capitalist society, just like a film from North Korea being seen a product of a communist state. “I appreciate all different types of films for different reasons. I’m not going to say something is bad just because it’s made to make money.”
Earnst has studied with structural filmmakers Stan Brakage and Hollis Frampton, who specialize in avant-garde, experimental works. But he still enjoys household names like Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer, the producers of Armageddon. He liked that film because it was a “pastiche of the American ideal”—a parody that was not made to be funny. He also cites Independence Day as an example. Both films feature superstars (Ben Afleck, Will Smith) destroying larger than life antagonists (Texas-sized comet, aliens with Apple software), with dubious science and American patriotism. Earnst takes all the clichés with a huge grain of salt.
“Imagine really liking what your nation is doing,” he said, “I do wish my faith in my country was higher.”
For some, it’s harder to find the bright side. “It’s easy to sell us something,” says Strauss. “Americans just need something to get us by for two hours.”
But there certainly is a subculture, with a market for foreign and independent films. The problem lies in distributing the product across nations and oceans. “Anyone can make a film, the problem is distributing a film,” said Rousell. He explained that the dream of independent film is a Marxist philosophy: production in the hands of the people. But Hollywood has beaten the dreamers and gotten a hold of the public.
In 1979, UB graduate Harvey Weinstein started Miramax Studios with his brother. Their plan was to distribute films labeled “unprofitable” by major studios. In 1993, Disney purchased the company for $70 million. This was just in time for the 1994 release of Pulp Fiction, which started today’s trend of mainstream independent cinema.
“Hollywood is always in search of new material,” said Bay-Cheng. A decade ago, they were interested in what was going on in events like the Sundance film festival. Today, outlets like Miramax, IFC, and Mark Cuban’s Landmark Cinemas distribute independently made films to mainstream theaters across the nation. Because these movies cost between $500,000 and $1 million to make, distribution profits can be immense.
But these widely seen “art-films” still carry the corporate seal of approval, designed to maximize income and minimize financial risk. In 2004, for example, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was almost shelved by Miramax.
According to the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), “Moore claimed that [then CEO of The Walt Disney Company Michael] Eisner had expressed concern that the film might jeopardize tax breaks granted to Disney for its theme park, hotels, and other ventures in Florida, where Jeb Bush, President George W. Bush’s brother, is governor.”
“Even films that say ‘we’re not Hollywood’ know the drill,” proclaimed Eastwood.
According to Bay-Chen, film distribution is a closed system. Theaters have to rent the movies, and they sign a contract with the distribution firms. These contracts order the movie to be shown a certain number of times each day. Even if an independent filmmaker came to a theater with a movie that would fill every seat, the theater would be obliged to show Jurassic Park IV in pre-determined timeslots.
The future of movies is uncertain. DVD sales now constitute over 50% of a film’s revenue. An outlet like the Internet can allow filmmakers to ship a DVD directly to consumers, creating vast audiences that don’t exist in the theatrical market.
Donnie Darko is the perfect example of this. It was made with a modest budget of $5 million and was released in 2001. The film did poorly at the box office, but after garnering an astonishing cult following on DVD, a theatrical director’s cut was released in 2004. Donnie Darko recently became the first picture to warrant a repeat screening in the Midnight Movie Madness series at Dipson’s Amherst Theater across the street from UB’s South Campus.
Michael Faust, owner of Elmwood Avenue’s Mondo Video specializes in renting out hard to find and independent videos. He opened his store in the ‘90s with a simple goal: carry the videos that major chains like Blockbuster won’t carry.
As Faust puts it, “Why make a movie if you can’t sell it to Blockbuster?” As it turns out, Blockbuster has a policy against NC-17 movies. While corporate censorship like this, as well as the obscurity of the low budget, indie titles that stores like Faust’s carry keep the art of American cinema in business for the time being, it has yet to be seen how the art house flick can vanquish the mighty summer blockbuster.
“Maybe if we got over the need for the grandiose,” says Eastwood. “Are you absolutely sure you can’t do 2001: A Space Odyssey on a shoestring? Back then, no one bought ‘2001 dolls.’”
