Ed Driscoll, over at Tech Central Station, has an excellent essay on the decline of big movies, the impact of the internet, and what it means for American culture. While I love “big” movies, and regret how Hollywood has changed, one of the silver linings of this development is the empowerment of more regular people and their access to movie-making. Whether it be the advent of YouTube, and the market for smaller, independent films, the New American Revolution continues. One of your Must Reads for the day. Here’s a snippet:
One of the most iconic moments in cinema occurs in 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, when William Holden says, “Hey, you’re Norma Desmond… you used to be big!” And Gloria Swanson replies, “I AM big — it’s the pictures that got small!”…
Prior to the 1970s, Hollywood aimed its movies at a mass culture. But by the late 1970s, the first signs of political correctness began to increasingly separate movie makers from their audience, beginning perhaps most visibly with Warren Beatty’s Reds in 1981. But even during that decade, Hollywood balanced films such as Platoon and Salvador with Rambo and Top Gun. And it was pretty clear that the characters played by Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis were on the side of Truth, Justice and The American Way.
Jump cut to this past summer, where that Superman movie that Warner Brothers was counting on to kick-start their perennial superhero franchise instead became infamous for having Perry White utter “truth, justice and all that other stuff”, because the film’s writers were ashamed of, well, the American way.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Which is why I haven’t been inside a theatre since the opening of Pirates 2 earlier this year.
I much prefer to spend an evening watching TCM.
There’s been so much evolution in the movie industry that it’s hard to compare the present with the past. The old studios were like factories, cranking out a movie a week. Now, it’s a new ballgame, with new media, new distribution, new everything. With 999 channels of cable and a home theater environment, there’s demand for lots of cheap programming, and a sense that there’s no need to go out because the programs will come to you. On the other hand, people still like to get out of the house, which is why movie theaters still exist; it’s the same reason there are Starbucks, even though we can make coffee at home. (Even Tammy visits Starbucks, and she’s got an $800 (!) coffeemaker.) So maybe the dinosaurs aren’t dead yet. I admit that when I hear they’ve spent $200 million on a film (such as the recent Superman or War of the Worlds), I’m inclined to go to the biggest bestest theater I can find just to see where all the money went.
You must log in to post a comment.