Longshot
21 Mar 2005, 10:13
nu stiu daca intereseaza pe cineva si daca cineva o sa citeasca ditamai textul, dar am zis ca n-ar fi rau sa fie pus pe aici pe undeva.
asadar luati de aici "hollywood and the rise of the blockbuster" sau cu alte cuvinte, cum am ajuns sa avem in fiecare an ceva gen lotr, titanic, stuff like that.
luat din "cinema today" scrisa de edward buscombe.
Hollywood, like other institutions in the West in the late 1960’s was dominated by a generation that had been in power too long and had lost the habit of learning and adapting. They continued to apply the old formulae, even when it was clear that they were not working any more and that the young no longer wanted what they had to offer. A small number of successful but expensive pictures in the mid-1960s had encouraged Hollywood into a reckless extravagance which produced some of the greatest flops in its history. Twentieth Century Fox alone lost $42 million on the three musicals: Doctor Dolittle (Richard Fleischer, 1967), Star! (Robert Wise, 1968) and Hello, Dolly! (Gene Kelly, 1969) Costs had been inflated by the entry of new production companies, just at the time when television networks, which had been enthusiastically buying Hollywood films to fill their schedules, cut back. Overall studio losses in the period 1969-71 – named by film historian Tino Balio ‘The Recession of 1969’ – were estimated by Variety to be a staggering $600 million. The result was a convulsion in the industry, and Warner Bros. and MGM were both taken over.
The transformation involved more than a change of ownership. Since the 1920s, in order to head off official intervention, all studios had agreed to self-regulation, submitting scripts for pre-censorship and conforming to agreed standards of (primarily sexual) morality. In the late 1960s, under pressure from widespread social changes, Hollywood abandoned the Production Code and instituted a ratings system. Instead of all films submitting to the same rules, films were now grated according to the age of the audiences. Once children had been protected in this way, the route was open to more graphic representation of sex, violence and other previously forbidden subjects.
Exhibition patterns were changing too. The growth of new cinemas in shopping malls catered to a younger audience. The lowering of the age of the audience had begun some time before, but accelerated in the 1970s, and by the end of the decade eighty per cent of cinema tickets were bought by the under-thirties. The major studios, run by old men who knew only how to repeat past successes, were slow to recognize the opportunities. In 1969 came a film which turned upside down all they thought they knew. Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper, was about two guys who cruise around America on motorbikes enjoying sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. The narrative structure was as freewheeling as the protagonists, and it broke one of Hollywood’s cardinal rules: there is no happy ending. Easy Rider was the joint conception of three men, all of whom had strong connections with traditional Hollywood but who were not in sympathy with what it had become. Peter Fonda was the son of legendary screen star Henry Fonda, the hero of some of John Ford’s most noble movies : rejecting this mainstream heritage, he had thrown in his lot with Roger Corman, a producer of cheap but successful ‘exploitation’ films, those which set out to push back the barriers of what was acceptable on the screen. Dennis Hopper had played many supporting roles, including opposite James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and Giant (George Stevens, 1956), but his refusal to toe the line had led him to be blacklisted by the major studios. Terry Southern was already an icon of the counter-culture scene, the author of a notorious pornographic novel, Candy, and a screenwriter whose credits included Stanley Kubrick’s satire Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963).
Easy Rider grossed $19 million. It was not the most successful movie of 1969 but it cost a mere $500,000 to make (by contrast, Hello, Dolly! had cost $26 million). As a direct result, BBS, a company formed by Bob Rafelson, Steve Blauner and Bert Schneider (the producer of Easy Rider), was given a multi-picture contract with Columbia, the studio which, with much trepidation, had released the picture. BBS went on to produce a series of films which were the closest Hollywood ever came to the art of Western Europe. Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970), Drive, He Said (Jack Nicholson, 1970), A Safe Place (Henry Jaglom, 1971) and The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972) all starred Jack Nicholson, whose performance in Easy Rider had made him a star. None of this films was a huge hit, but their importance was that, for a time, it seemed as if small-scale, individually tailored films of intelligence and some artistic pretension, aimed at a limited but discerning audience, might get a chance to challenge Hollywood orthodoxy. After all, mused perplexed Hollywood executives, at such low budgets what had they got to lose?
Another film which had succeeded by dispensing with Hollywood’s conventional wisdom was MASH (Robert Altman, 1970). The film was scripted by Ring Lardner, Jr., who had been blacklisted for years. Set in an army field hospital during the Korean War, the film is a black farce which mingles scenes of gory operations with scabrous comedy. The tone is anarchic and anti-military, and the film scarcely bothers to conceal its obvious reference to the Vietnam War. Like Easy Rider, it featured no major stars, and like that film it also challenged orthodox Hollywood film-making technique. Robert Altman had come from television, and although hardly a representative of youth culture (he was forty-five at the time), resisted the conventions of the well-made film. The narrative was fluid and the structure loose, relying on the effect of individual scenes rather than narrative drive. There was much improvisation, and the way in which sound was used became something of an Altman trademark : instead of actors speaking their lines in sequence, much of the dialogue was overlapping, with several conversations being carried on at once.
MASH was the third largest grossing film of 1970 and was also a critical success. Politically it caught the mood of the time, but unlike some of the other radical films which Hollywood had ventured to make, such as The Strawberry Statement (Stuart Hagmann, 1970) or The Revolutionary (Paul Williams, 1970). It was immensely enjoyable. For a time it seemed as if ‘New Hollywood’ would no longer be a ‘dream factory’ but would remake itself along the lines of European cinema, with small-scale, almost artisanal companies offering freedom to ‘auteurs’, individual creators whose films expressed their personalities or ‘vision’ rather than being designed primarily as vehicles for audience enjoyment. Since, in the words of William Goldman’s much-quoted phrase, ‘nobody knows anything’ (that is, Hollywood has never been able to predict accurately what would make a hit), perhaps the best thing would be to throw open the studios to a younger generation.
Thus arose the ‘Movie Brats’, a new kind of Hollywood film-maker nurtured on a conception of cinema imbibed in the film schools of the East and West Coasts. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader all owed their opportunities in the first half of the 1970s to Hollywood’s new found willingness to give youth its fling. However, the astonishing success of these film-makers in turn changed Hollywood in ways they could not have anticipated, and may not have intended. Coppola had been directing Hollywood features for five years before The Godfather (1972) and initially resisted making a film of Mario Puzo’s saga of Mafia life, believing that auteurs should originate their own material rather than adapt novels. The film he eventually produced was unconventional in several ways. It was three hours long and the cast were relative unknowns (with the exception of Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone; Brando’s career, however, was generally considered to have self-destructed at the end of the 1960s). Worst of all for the traditionalists, photographer Gordon Willis had shot the film in a murky half-light – appropriate to its underworld subject but running very much against Hollywood orthodoxy.
The Godfather was an outstanding success, both with the audiences and critics. The performances by Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall were brilliant. As often with the ground-breaking films of the early 1970s, the film merged two traditional genres : it cunningly combines family saga – including marriages, christenings and deaths – with the unflinching depiction of organized crime in all its brutality. The Corleone family are monstrous, yet a lengthy sequence in Sicily makes them sympathetic by establishing
their roots. Coppola does now wallow in violence, but the scenes where it occurs are memorable – none more so than when a victim discovers the head of a dead horse in his bed. The film also spawned one of the most durable off all Hollywood catchphrases when Duvall explains how he persuaded a reluctant film producer to do their bidding : ‘I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.’
The film earned $86 million and helped convince Hollywood that the future of cinema layed in suck ‘blockbusters’ rather than in small-scale pictures, whether routine or experimental. Realizing that only a few productions each year will score well, Hollywood grew to rely on such ‘event’ movies to assure its viability. Admittedly this tendency had begun earlier, even as far back as the mid 1950s : The Ten Commandments (Cecil B DeMille, 1956) was one of the first ‘block-busters’, and in the 1960s films such as The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) had similar success. But a list of all-time ‘rental champs’ produced by Variety magazine in 1992 showed that the overwhelming majority were produced after 1970.
This pattern, of huge profits for a small number of films, was continued in 1973. The Exorcits (William Friedkin, 1973) was a story of demonic possession filmed with eye-popping special effects including projectile vomiting, rotating heads and levitating bodies. It catapulted the horror film from the most critically despised of genres into mainstream entertainment. Such ‘exploitation’ films were made viable by the new ratings system and had an immediate appeal to younger audiences, who flocked to see The Exorcist. It took as much money as The Godfather.
The strategic importance of the blockbuster was to be further consolidated by Jaws in 1975. Steven Spielberg’s film was based on a novel by Peter Benchley which had already sold several million copies before the film’s release, thus providing a launch platform. The story of a man-eating shark ravaging a small New England seaside town had its roots in the horror film, rather like The Exorcist. It also owes much to the ‘slasher movie’ sub-genre which traces its lineage back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho(1960) and which was to become a significant part of the production spectrum later in the 1970s. Though well-written and cleverly constructed, the film provides a plentiful helping of grisly moments in a display of half-eaten body parts. As in other slasher films the first victim is a nubile young girl : here she teasingly leads a boy down to the beach, throwing off her clothes as she runs into the sea, only to be ‘punished’ for her wantonness by being dismembered by the shark. Though hardly radical, the film cunningly places itself on the side of anti-establishment forces. The mayor of the town continually refuses to acknowledge the existence of the shark, thinking only the town’s need for tourist dollars. Eventually the monster is destroyed by three ‘outsiders’ : Quint, a cynical old sea-dog (a scenary -chewing performance by Robert Shaw) ; Brody (Roy Scheider), the police chief who is a New Yorker, and Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper, a nerdy young oceanographer.
Jaws made $102 million on its first appearance. What makes the film pivotal in the history of New Hollywood is its release strategy. Its producers adopted a policy of saturation booking, placing the film on 464 screens simultaneously. Previously, films were released initially to a few first-run theatres, then allowed to build an audience in second and subsequent-run outlets. The advantage of the new policy was that it maximized the effect of the media blitz for the film, with advertisements on radio and television that took full advantage of the film’s menacing and memorable film music. This was to be the subsequent pattern for all big Hollywood films, where the studios attempted to ‘front-load’ the audience, maximizing receipts in the first few days to capitalize on the film’s event status (and also neutralize any later negative word-of-mouth and negative review)
The success of this strategy meant that the money spent on promoting a film began to rise inexorably. By the late 1990s, it is estimated that advertising expenditure had risen to over $20 million per picture. Costs of production rose rapidly too, partly because of intense competition for bankable stars and because of the huge rewards that accrued to successful pictures. In the fourteen years between 1981 and 1995, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, costs increased from an average of $11.3 million per picture to $36.4 million. This combination of expensive promotion budgets and very high production costs is one of the factors that make it difficult for Hollywood’s competitors around the world to challenge its dominance. In a very real sense they constitute an effective barrier to the entry of new producers into the field.
Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, made in 1976, showed that the artistic, idiosyncratic side of the New Hollywood was still alive, that the new wave was still capable of making brilliant and original pictures. Robert De Niro standing in front of the mirror practicing his insults (‘Are you talking to me?’) is one of the landmarks of contemporary Hollywood cinema. It helped to make the film a box office hit and show that feel-good films were not the only ones that could find a market.
But any thought the the future of Hollywood lay with such productions, however successful, was surely laid to rest the following year, with the extraordinary success of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977). George Lucas had already had a box office hit with American Graffiti in 1973, an exercise in small-town nostalgia which derived much of its effectiveness from the use of pop songs from the early 1960s, but no one could have predicted the phenomenon of Star Wars, The film is set (unusually for science fiction film) in the distant past, or as the strapline has it, ‘ a long time ago in a galaxy far away’. The hero, Luke Skywalker, must rescue the beautiful Princess Leia from the clutches of the evil Darth Vader with the aid of a motley collection of friends and helpers – including a couple of robots, assorted aliens and his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi. The film constantly plays with cinematic conventions and iconography. C-3PO, the android, is cousin to the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) ; Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by the British actor Sir Alex Guiness, is a cross between Merlin and a Japanese martial arts master; Darth Vader wears a Nazi-style helmet and raises heavy breathing to a new level. The opening sequence of warfare in space is like a World War II aerial combat sequence. Later, Luke Skywalker, having gone on a mission away from his uncle’s farm, realizes it had been attacked. Hurrying back he finds he is too late and the farm is in flames, a scene based on Ethan’s discovery of the burning Edwards farm in John Ford’s epic Western The Searchers (1956). Most of the budget went on special effects for the set-piece dog fights in space and the collection of strange aliens that the hero encounters. The characters are pasteboard, the dialogue comic-book, but the film has a naïve charm, great narrative style and visual élan.
Star Wars was a colossal box office hit, but what made it especially significant for the future of Hollywood was the even bigger amount of money garnered by merchandising. Exploiting popular films by selling ancillary products was nothing new in Hollywood. In the 1930s and 1940s cowboy stars such as Tom Mix and Gene Autry had been used to sell breakfast cereals and children’s clothing. But the sheer amount of product sales based on Star Wars was unprecedented. Clothing, books, toys and games poured out in a torrent. By the early 1980s it was estimated that its merchandising was raising over $1.5 billion a year.
Star Wars also confirmed and incipient trend towards the serialization of hit films. The Godfather had a sequel in 1974 and another in 1990. Jaws 2 was released in 1978, and a further two sequels were made in 1983 and 1987, respectively. MASH had become a long-running television series in 1972, and The Exorcist spawned three sequels. The first Star Wars sequel, Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, directed by Irvin Keshner, was released in 1980; three years later came Episode VI – The Return of the Jedi, directed by Richard Marquand. George Lucas directed the prequels Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) and Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002). Each new release provides further opportunities for merchandising and the re-release of previous episodes. Even Martin Scorsese, the least accommodating of the talents of the 1970s, eventually succumbed to Hollywood’s determination to repeat itself, making The Color of Money(1986), a sequel to Robert Rossen’s 1961 film The Hustler, and Cape Fear(1991) a remake of a thriller from 1961.
An equally important development at the beginning of the 1980s was the growths of video and television markets. In the United States the number of households with a video recorder went from 1.85 million in the early 1980s to 62 million by the end of the decade. Sales of pre-recorded video-cassettes went from 3 million in 1980 to 220 million in 1990. There was a similar explosion in Europe. By the end of the 1990s, receipts from theatrical release made up only 31.3 per cent of a film’s total revenue. Video sales and rentals comprised 34.6 per cent. The remaining 34 percent came from sales to television, now a major factor not only in the domestic market but abroad; in Europe, for example, the privatization of much of the public television service has made for increased reliance on Hollywood products in the schedules.
Foreign markets have always been important to Hollywood, at least since World War I when the US film industry capitalized on the weakness of European cinema to edge French, Scandinavian, German and British film out of the markets they previously enjoyed. However, whereas foreign sales were a useful additional source of revenue during Hollywood’s ‘classical’ period, by 1994 the revenue from overseas surpassed that of the US market. The development of multiplex cinemas in Western Europe, and the opening up of markets in the former Soviet bloc, in China and elsewhere in the Far East have greatly boosted the export earnings of US films. So although the proportion of a film’s income derived from ticket sales in theatres has decreased, the absolute total of such sales has greatly increased.
All these factors have had a dramatic effect on Hollywood’s business. More to the point, they have had far-reaching effects on the kinds of film produced. From the 1980s onward Hollywood increasingly turned its attention to the perfection of a certain kind of film, dubbed ‘high concept’ – in essence a refinement of the blockbuster. Its characteristics follow from the changes in the nature of the business : principally, the new marketing strategies, in which the success of a film depends crucially on saturation advertising, especially on television and radio, plus an equally saturated release pattern; the growth of video; the vastly increased importance of ancillary sales, especially in merchandising; the globalization of the market, so that Hollywood comes increasingly to depend on foreign sales to supply the revenue to fund its inflated budgets; and the move towards a younger audience, less tolerant of orthodoxies, whether political or sexual, and with increasing amounts of money to spend on fashion and media products, especially music.
The ‘high-concept’ film has, in the first place, a narrative that is easily comprehended and summarized. As Steven Spielberg remarked in 1978, ‘What interests me more than anything else is the idea. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it is going to be a good movie.’ This means that the film can cross cultural and linguistic boundaries, and can be readily packaged in promotional material. Frequently such narratives reprocess or recombine traditional elements from horror or science fiction, or other genres with traditionally low cultural status. Thus Star Wars recycles the narratives and iconography of the Western and the war film. Jaws is a combination of small-town melodrama and monster picture. A corollary of this kind of narrative is a set of characters who are simple rather than complex, whose essence can readily be communicated through physical typing, as in muscle men such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone and their equally hyperbolic, silicone-enhanced female opposites.
While character and narrative are pared down, the visual style of such films is refined. Sleek and glossy, the high-concept film has a brilliant surface marked by easily recognizable and exploitable iconic images, often obtained through the manipulation of special effects, increasingly computer-generated. Such films are designed as much as they are written, and contemporary Hollywood has been eager to recruit directors and others from the advertising industry: for example, the Scott brothers , Ridley and Tony, responsible for some of Hollywood’s most spectacular and profitable films in recent years, such as Alien, Blade Runner, Top Gun, Enemy of the State, Gladiator and Hannibal.
Sound is also an important element in these films, both for opportunities it offers for advertising and also for the sale of soundtrack albums, a powerful attraction to the multimedia conglomerates that now run Hollywood. In the high-concept film, both image and soundtrack are pumped up in excess of what is strictly required to communicate the narrative. It is as if the attenuated story and characterization release image and sound to take on an autonomous status which is then available both for marketing and for exploitation as ancillary products.
One further dimension characterizes this new kind of film. Made primarily for the young, whose minds are steeped in the manifold images and sounds sedimented by the mass media, and created by film-makers who often have a self-conscious awareness of the cinema’s past (or at least its recent past), contemporary high-concept films exhibit a kind of ironic detachment. Older critics often see such films as somewhat ‘camp’, deliberately poking fun at the absurdities of their excesses. Yet it is hard to observe such intentions on the part of such film-makers as George Lucas or Steven Spielberg if their public pronouncements are to be believed. What their films display is a kind of knowingness which at the same time is innocent of a desire to parody – what Thomas Elsaesser – has called ‘sophisticated naivety’, which may on occasion be a naive sophistication. Such an air of detached ‘cool’, combined with pervasive allusions to other films and other media, seems to call for the description ‘postmodern’. Some critics, disdainful of dignifying movies they despise, have dismissed contemporary Hollywood films as ‘emptily expensive, aesthetically impoverished spectacles’ which betray the traditional Hollywood virtues of well-told stories. Yet, these movies, while they may not satisfy the tastes of critics raised on more traditional fare, are representative of important shifts in contemporary culture which need to be taken into account.
The high-concept movie is not the whole story, and indeed film historian Thomas Schatz has divided contemporary US cinema into three main categories of productions. There is the calculated high-concept blockbuster, designed to exploit to the full its potential for profit in the world market: a prime example would be Titanic. There is mainstream star-vehicle : for example Runaway Bride, a comedy starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts ; and finally there is the lower cost ‘independent’ feature looking for a niche, such as Neil LaBute’s Your Friends and Neighbors, an off-beat, edgy film with no major stars. Yet even if the high-concept film is not the be-all and end-all of the film business, it is the thing which pulls the rest along. It is in the blockbuster that new ideas, new technologies, new sales strategies are tried out. Those made uncomfortable by these tendencies may take solace in the indisputable fact that even massive marketing budgets cannot make a success out of a poor film. What is inescapable, however, is that marketing now governs the production of even modest films. The need to find a hook, an angle, a unique selling point, exerts pressure at all levels, in scripting, casting, design and editing. For Hollywood, it has never been simply a matter of the author’s self-expression.
asadar luati de aici "hollywood and the rise of the blockbuster" sau cu alte cuvinte, cum am ajuns sa avem in fiecare an ceva gen lotr, titanic, stuff like that.
luat din "cinema today" scrisa de edward buscombe.
Hollywood, like other institutions in the West in the late 1960’s was dominated by a generation that had been in power too long and had lost the habit of learning and adapting. They continued to apply the old formulae, even when it was clear that they were not working any more and that the young no longer wanted what they had to offer. A small number of successful but expensive pictures in the mid-1960s had encouraged Hollywood into a reckless extravagance which produced some of the greatest flops in its history. Twentieth Century Fox alone lost $42 million on the three musicals: Doctor Dolittle (Richard Fleischer, 1967), Star! (Robert Wise, 1968) and Hello, Dolly! (Gene Kelly, 1969) Costs had been inflated by the entry of new production companies, just at the time when television networks, which had been enthusiastically buying Hollywood films to fill their schedules, cut back. Overall studio losses in the period 1969-71 – named by film historian Tino Balio ‘The Recession of 1969’ – were estimated by Variety to be a staggering $600 million. The result was a convulsion in the industry, and Warner Bros. and MGM were both taken over.
The transformation involved more than a change of ownership. Since the 1920s, in order to head off official intervention, all studios had agreed to self-regulation, submitting scripts for pre-censorship and conforming to agreed standards of (primarily sexual) morality. In the late 1960s, under pressure from widespread social changes, Hollywood abandoned the Production Code and instituted a ratings system. Instead of all films submitting to the same rules, films were now grated according to the age of the audiences. Once children had been protected in this way, the route was open to more graphic representation of sex, violence and other previously forbidden subjects.
Exhibition patterns were changing too. The growth of new cinemas in shopping malls catered to a younger audience. The lowering of the age of the audience had begun some time before, but accelerated in the 1970s, and by the end of the decade eighty per cent of cinema tickets were bought by the under-thirties. The major studios, run by old men who knew only how to repeat past successes, were slow to recognize the opportunities. In 1969 came a film which turned upside down all they thought they knew. Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper, was about two guys who cruise around America on motorbikes enjoying sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. The narrative structure was as freewheeling as the protagonists, and it broke one of Hollywood’s cardinal rules: there is no happy ending. Easy Rider was the joint conception of three men, all of whom had strong connections with traditional Hollywood but who were not in sympathy with what it had become. Peter Fonda was the son of legendary screen star Henry Fonda, the hero of some of John Ford’s most noble movies : rejecting this mainstream heritage, he had thrown in his lot with Roger Corman, a producer of cheap but successful ‘exploitation’ films, those which set out to push back the barriers of what was acceptable on the screen. Dennis Hopper had played many supporting roles, including opposite James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and Giant (George Stevens, 1956), but his refusal to toe the line had led him to be blacklisted by the major studios. Terry Southern was already an icon of the counter-culture scene, the author of a notorious pornographic novel, Candy, and a screenwriter whose credits included Stanley Kubrick’s satire Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963).
Easy Rider grossed $19 million. It was not the most successful movie of 1969 but it cost a mere $500,000 to make (by contrast, Hello, Dolly! had cost $26 million). As a direct result, BBS, a company formed by Bob Rafelson, Steve Blauner and Bert Schneider (the producer of Easy Rider), was given a multi-picture contract with Columbia, the studio which, with much trepidation, had released the picture. BBS went on to produce a series of films which were the closest Hollywood ever came to the art of Western Europe. Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970), Drive, He Said (Jack Nicholson, 1970), A Safe Place (Henry Jaglom, 1971) and The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972) all starred Jack Nicholson, whose performance in Easy Rider had made him a star. None of this films was a huge hit, but their importance was that, for a time, it seemed as if small-scale, individually tailored films of intelligence and some artistic pretension, aimed at a limited but discerning audience, might get a chance to challenge Hollywood orthodoxy. After all, mused perplexed Hollywood executives, at such low budgets what had they got to lose?
Another film which had succeeded by dispensing with Hollywood’s conventional wisdom was MASH (Robert Altman, 1970). The film was scripted by Ring Lardner, Jr., who had been blacklisted for years. Set in an army field hospital during the Korean War, the film is a black farce which mingles scenes of gory operations with scabrous comedy. The tone is anarchic and anti-military, and the film scarcely bothers to conceal its obvious reference to the Vietnam War. Like Easy Rider, it featured no major stars, and like that film it also challenged orthodox Hollywood film-making technique. Robert Altman had come from television, and although hardly a representative of youth culture (he was forty-five at the time), resisted the conventions of the well-made film. The narrative was fluid and the structure loose, relying on the effect of individual scenes rather than narrative drive. There was much improvisation, and the way in which sound was used became something of an Altman trademark : instead of actors speaking their lines in sequence, much of the dialogue was overlapping, with several conversations being carried on at once.
MASH was the third largest grossing film of 1970 and was also a critical success. Politically it caught the mood of the time, but unlike some of the other radical films which Hollywood had ventured to make, such as The Strawberry Statement (Stuart Hagmann, 1970) or The Revolutionary (Paul Williams, 1970). It was immensely enjoyable. For a time it seemed as if ‘New Hollywood’ would no longer be a ‘dream factory’ but would remake itself along the lines of European cinema, with small-scale, almost artisanal companies offering freedom to ‘auteurs’, individual creators whose films expressed their personalities or ‘vision’ rather than being designed primarily as vehicles for audience enjoyment. Since, in the words of William Goldman’s much-quoted phrase, ‘nobody knows anything’ (that is, Hollywood has never been able to predict accurately what would make a hit), perhaps the best thing would be to throw open the studios to a younger generation.
Thus arose the ‘Movie Brats’, a new kind of Hollywood film-maker nurtured on a conception of cinema imbibed in the film schools of the East and West Coasts. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader all owed their opportunities in the first half of the 1970s to Hollywood’s new found willingness to give youth its fling. However, the astonishing success of these film-makers in turn changed Hollywood in ways they could not have anticipated, and may not have intended. Coppola had been directing Hollywood features for five years before The Godfather (1972) and initially resisted making a film of Mario Puzo’s saga of Mafia life, believing that auteurs should originate their own material rather than adapt novels. The film he eventually produced was unconventional in several ways. It was three hours long and the cast were relative unknowns (with the exception of Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone; Brando’s career, however, was generally considered to have self-destructed at the end of the 1960s). Worst of all for the traditionalists, photographer Gordon Willis had shot the film in a murky half-light – appropriate to its underworld subject but running very much against Hollywood orthodoxy.
The Godfather was an outstanding success, both with the audiences and critics. The performances by Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall were brilliant. As often with the ground-breaking films of the early 1970s, the film merged two traditional genres : it cunningly combines family saga – including marriages, christenings and deaths – with the unflinching depiction of organized crime in all its brutality. The Corleone family are monstrous, yet a lengthy sequence in Sicily makes them sympathetic by establishing
their roots. Coppola does now wallow in violence, but the scenes where it occurs are memorable – none more so than when a victim discovers the head of a dead horse in his bed. The film also spawned one of the most durable off all Hollywood catchphrases when Duvall explains how he persuaded a reluctant film producer to do their bidding : ‘I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.’
The film earned $86 million and helped convince Hollywood that the future of cinema layed in suck ‘blockbusters’ rather than in small-scale pictures, whether routine or experimental. Realizing that only a few productions each year will score well, Hollywood grew to rely on such ‘event’ movies to assure its viability. Admittedly this tendency had begun earlier, even as far back as the mid 1950s : The Ten Commandments (Cecil B DeMille, 1956) was one of the first ‘block-busters’, and in the 1960s films such as The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) had similar success. But a list of all-time ‘rental champs’ produced by Variety magazine in 1992 showed that the overwhelming majority were produced after 1970.
This pattern, of huge profits for a small number of films, was continued in 1973. The Exorcits (William Friedkin, 1973) was a story of demonic possession filmed with eye-popping special effects including projectile vomiting, rotating heads and levitating bodies. It catapulted the horror film from the most critically despised of genres into mainstream entertainment. Such ‘exploitation’ films were made viable by the new ratings system and had an immediate appeal to younger audiences, who flocked to see The Exorcist. It took as much money as The Godfather.
The strategic importance of the blockbuster was to be further consolidated by Jaws in 1975. Steven Spielberg’s film was based on a novel by Peter Benchley which had already sold several million copies before the film’s release, thus providing a launch platform. The story of a man-eating shark ravaging a small New England seaside town had its roots in the horror film, rather like The Exorcist. It also owes much to the ‘slasher movie’ sub-genre which traces its lineage back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho(1960) and which was to become a significant part of the production spectrum later in the 1970s. Though well-written and cleverly constructed, the film provides a plentiful helping of grisly moments in a display of half-eaten body parts. As in other slasher films the first victim is a nubile young girl : here she teasingly leads a boy down to the beach, throwing off her clothes as she runs into the sea, only to be ‘punished’ for her wantonness by being dismembered by the shark. Though hardly radical, the film cunningly places itself on the side of anti-establishment forces. The mayor of the town continually refuses to acknowledge the existence of the shark, thinking only the town’s need for tourist dollars. Eventually the monster is destroyed by three ‘outsiders’ : Quint, a cynical old sea-dog (a scenary -chewing performance by Robert Shaw) ; Brody (Roy Scheider), the police chief who is a New Yorker, and Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper, a nerdy young oceanographer.
Jaws made $102 million on its first appearance. What makes the film pivotal in the history of New Hollywood is its release strategy. Its producers adopted a policy of saturation booking, placing the film on 464 screens simultaneously. Previously, films were released initially to a few first-run theatres, then allowed to build an audience in second and subsequent-run outlets. The advantage of the new policy was that it maximized the effect of the media blitz for the film, with advertisements on radio and television that took full advantage of the film’s menacing and memorable film music. This was to be the subsequent pattern for all big Hollywood films, where the studios attempted to ‘front-load’ the audience, maximizing receipts in the first few days to capitalize on the film’s event status (and also neutralize any later negative word-of-mouth and negative review)
The success of this strategy meant that the money spent on promoting a film began to rise inexorably. By the late 1990s, it is estimated that advertising expenditure had risen to over $20 million per picture. Costs of production rose rapidly too, partly because of intense competition for bankable stars and because of the huge rewards that accrued to successful pictures. In the fourteen years between 1981 and 1995, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, costs increased from an average of $11.3 million per picture to $36.4 million. This combination of expensive promotion budgets and very high production costs is one of the factors that make it difficult for Hollywood’s competitors around the world to challenge its dominance. In a very real sense they constitute an effective barrier to the entry of new producers into the field.
Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, made in 1976, showed that the artistic, idiosyncratic side of the New Hollywood was still alive, that the new wave was still capable of making brilliant and original pictures. Robert De Niro standing in front of the mirror practicing his insults (‘Are you talking to me?’) is one of the landmarks of contemporary Hollywood cinema. It helped to make the film a box office hit and show that feel-good films were not the only ones that could find a market.
But any thought the the future of Hollywood lay with such productions, however successful, was surely laid to rest the following year, with the extraordinary success of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977). George Lucas had already had a box office hit with American Graffiti in 1973, an exercise in small-town nostalgia which derived much of its effectiveness from the use of pop songs from the early 1960s, but no one could have predicted the phenomenon of Star Wars, The film is set (unusually for science fiction film) in the distant past, or as the strapline has it, ‘ a long time ago in a galaxy far away’. The hero, Luke Skywalker, must rescue the beautiful Princess Leia from the clutches of the evil Darth Vader with the aid of a motley collection of friends and helpers – including a couple of robots, assorted aliens and his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi. The film constantly plays with cinematic conventions and iconography. C-3PO, the android, is cousin to the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) ; Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by the British actor Sir Alex Guiness, is a cross between Merlin and a Japanese martial arts master; Darth Vader wears a Nazi-style helmet and raises heavy breathing to a new level. The opening sequence of warfare in space is like a World War II aerial combat sequence. Later, Luke Skywalker, having gone on a mission away from his uncle’s farm, realizes it had been attacked. Hurrying back he finds he is too late and the farm is in flames, a scene based on Ethan’s discovery of the burning Edwards farm in John Ford’s epic Western The Searchers (1956). Most of the budget went on special effects for the set-piece dog fights in space and the collection of strange aliens that the hero encounters. The characters are pasteboard, the dialogue comic-book, but the film has a naïve charm, great narrative style and visual élan.
Star Wars was a colossal box office hit, but what made it especially significant for the future of Hollywood was the even bigger amount of money garnered by merchandising. Exploiting popular films by selling ancillary products was nothing new in Hollywood. In the 1930s and 1940s cowboy stars such as Tom Mix and Gene Autry had been used to sell breakfast cereals and children’s clothing. But the sheer amount of product sales based on Star Wars was unprecedented. Clothing, books, toys and games poured out in a torrent. By the early 1980s it was estimated that its merchandising was raising over $1.5 billion a year.
Star Wars also confirmed and incipient trend towards the serialization of hit films. The Godfather had a sequel in 1974 and another in 1990. Jaws 2 was released in 1978, and a further two sequels were made in 1983 and 1987, respectively. MASH had become a long-running television series in 1972, and The Exorcist spawned three sequels. The first Star Wars sequel, Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, directed by Irvin Keshner, was released in 1980; three years later came Episode VI – The Return of the Jedi, directed by Richard Marquand. George Lucas directed the prequels Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) and Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002). Each new release provides further opportunities for merchandising and the re-release of previous episodes. Even Martin Scorsese, the least accommodating of the talents of the 1970s, eventually succumbed to Hollywood’s determination to repeat itself, making The Color of Money(1986), a sequel to Robert Rossen’s 1961 film The Hustler, and Cape Fear(1991) a remake of a thriller from 1961.
An equally important development at the beginning of the 1980s was the growths of video and television markets. In the United States the number of households with a video recorder went from 1.85 million in the early 1980s to 62 million by the end of the decade. Sales of pre-recorded video-cassettes went from 3 million in 1980 to 220 million in 1990. There was a similar explosion in Europe. By the end of the 1990s, receipts from theatrical release made up only 31.3 per cent of a film’s total revenue. Video sales and rentals comprised 34.6 per cent. The remaining 34 percent came from sales to television, now a major factor not only in the domestic market but abroad; in Europe, for example, the privatization of much of the public television service has made for increased reliance on Hollywood products in the schedules.
Foreign markets have always been important to Hollywood, at least since World War I when the US film industry capitalized on the weakness of European cinema to edge French, Scandinavian, German and British film out of the markets they previously enjoyed. However, whereas foreign sales were a useful additional source of revenue during Hollywood’s ‘classical’ period, by 1994 the revenue from overseas surpassed that of the US market. The development of multiplex cinemas in Western Europe, and the opening up of markets in the former Soviet bloc, in China and elsewhere in the Far East have greatly boosted the export earnings of US films. So although the proportion of a film’s income derived from ticket sales in theatres has decreased, the absolute total of such sales has greatly increased.
All these factors have had a dramatic effect on Hollywood’s business. More to the point, they have had far-reaching effects on the kinds of film produced. From the 1980s onward Hollywood increasingly turned its attention to the perfection of a certain kind of film, dubbed ‘high concept’ – in essence a refinement of the blockbuster. Its characteristics follow from the changes in the nature of the business : principally, the new marketing strategies, in which the success of a film depends crucially on saturation advertising, especially on television and radio, plus an equally saturated release pattern; the growth of video; the vastly increased importance of ancillary sales, especially in merchandising; the globalization of the market, so that Hollywood comes increasingly to depend on foreign sales to supply the revenue to fund its inflated budgets; and the move towards a younger audience, less tolerant of orthodoxies, whether political or sexual, and with increasing amounts of money to spend on fashion and media products, especially music.
The ‘high-concept’ film has, in the first place, a narrative that is easily comprehended and summarized. As Steven Spielberg remarked in 1978, ‘What interests me more than anything else is the idea. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it is going to be a good movie.’ This means that the film can cross cultural and linguistic boundaries, and can be readily packaged in promotional material. Frequently such narratives reprocess or recombine traditional elements from horror or science fiction, or other genres with traditionally low cultural status. Thus Star Wars recycles the narratives and iconography of the Western and the war film. Jaws is a combination of small-town melodrama and monster picture. A corollary of this kind of narrative is a set of characters who are simple rather than complex, whose essence can readily be communicated through physical typing, as in muscle men such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone and their equally hyperbolic, silicone-enhanced female opposites.
While character and narrative are pared down, the visual style of such films is refined. Sleek and glossy, the high-concept film has a brilliant surface marked by easily recognizable and exploitable iconic images, often obtained through the manipulation of special effects, increasingly computer-generated. Such films are designed as much as they are written, and contemporary Hollywood has been eager to recruit directors and others from the advertising industry: for example, the Scott brothers , Ridley and Tony, responsible for some of Hollywood’s most spectacular and profitable films in recent years, such as Alien, Blade Runner, Top Gun, Enemy of the State, Gladiator and Hannibal.
Sound is also an important element in these films, both for opportunities it offers for advertising and also for the sale of soundtrack albums, a powerful attraction to the multimedia conglomerates that now run Hollywood. In the high-concept film, both image and soundtrack are pumped up in excess of what is strictly required to communicate the narrative. It is as if the attenuated story and characterization release image and sound to take on an autonomous status which is then available both for marketing and for exploitation as ancillary products.
One further dimension characterizes this new kind of film. Made primarily for the young, whose minds are steeped in the manifold images and sounds sedimented by the mass media, and created by film-makers who often have a self-conscious awareness of the cinema’s past (or at least its recent past), contemporary high-concept films exhibit a kind of ironic detachment. Older critics often see such films as somewhat ‘camp’, deliberately poking fun at the absurdities of their excesses. Yet it is hard to observe such intentions on the part of such film-makers as George Lucas or Steven Spielberg if their public pronouncements are to be believed. What their films display is a kind of knowingness which at the same time is innocent of a desire to parody – what Thomas Elsaesser – has called ‘sophisticated naivety’, which may on occasion be a naive sophistication. Such an air of detached ‘cool’, combined with pervasive allusions to other films and other media, seems to call for the description ‘postmodern’. Some critics, disdainful of dignifying movies they despise, have dismissed contemporary Hollywood films as ‘emptily expensive, aesthetically impoverished spectacles’ which betray the traditional Hollywood virtues of well-told stories. Yet, these movies, while they may not satisfy the tastes of critics raised on more traditional fare, are representative of important shifts in contemporary culture which need to be taken into account.
The high-concept movie is not the whole story, and indeed film historian Thomas Schatz has divided contemporary US cinema into three main categories of productions. There is the calculated high-concept blockbuster, designed to exploit to the full its potential for profit in the world market: a prime example would be Titanic. There is mainstream star-vehicle : for example Runaway Bride, a comedy starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts ; and finally there is the lower cost ‘independent’ feature looking for a niche, such as Neil LaBute’s Your Friends and Neighbors, an off-beat, edgy film with no major stars. Yet even if the high-concept film is not the be-all and end-all of the film business, it is the thing which pulls the rest along. It is in the blockbuster that new ideas, new technologies, new sales strategies are tried out. Those made uncomfortable by these tendencies may take solace in the indisputable fact that even massive marketing budgets cannot make a success out of a poor film. What is inescapable, however, is that marketing now governs the production of even modest films. The need to find a hook, an angle, a unique selling point, exerts pressure at all levels, in scripting, casting, design and editing. For Hollywood, it has never been simply a matter of the author’s self-expression.