Letters to the Editor
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Post Revolutionary Hollywood
Hollywood has always been a shill for fantasy riches, which was their trademark in the 1930's. Movies on that level are about product placement. Counterpoint to the process is the globally synchronized drive to join the world wide consumer market. American movies are actually past the point of diminishing returns in their intrinsic, revolutionary value, (advertising for the American way of life).
Deconstructing that image is the current counter-revolution, what you call dumbing down. The primary icon of consumer wealth is New York City. L.A. and Hollywood are nowhere near as ostentatious.. Destroying New York City is nothing new, watch the original Mothra, to see. Postwar Japan was sceptical of American materialism, but that film might just as well have been made in the modern Hollywood.
For now we must assume that offshore viewers are more intelligent, have more money, and share some of the same values Americans share. The message also works on those who have yet to share in the wealth.
You could argue that Hollywood forestalled a revolution in this country, in the 30's. Will 3-D reenactments of the destruction of New York have some ritual value to an audience deprived of the wealth in the images they see on the screen? Hollywood is nothing, if they are not adaptive, and exploiting self loathing in moviegoers in these third world slums would seem to be a constant theme here . I hate myself for being poor, to paraphrase Scarlett O'Hara..
As is usual in this kind of thing, a greater force trumps any desire on the part of a few Hollywood businessmen to market a particular strategy. Hollywood has proven itself capable of revolution, or counter revolution. They can profit in any market, it seems, when they just follow the broader trends. It's really when Hollywood tries to buck the trend that the product suffers.
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You need to spend X dollars to market a movie
Otherwise you need a completely new vehicle to market and distribute it. If it takes 30 million dollars to market a film then you need 30 million dollars to do that on top of the production cost. Otherwise you're going to need some new way to push your shitty jittery cell phone Cloverfield III picture.
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Long tail distribution
While it's regretful in this context, the power-laws distribution which yields 'long tail' phenomena also implies a fat middle.
While Andrew is obviously right about the explosion of niche films, and their cultural relevance, there is still going to be a HUGE market for people who want the lowest common denominator, and the communal movie-goer experience.
Still, it's pretty shocking to think about - large movie studios will feel the incentive to make movies WORSE!! I can hardly await the adaption of reality TV to movies.
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Production values, Piracy and Global Marketing
Dear Andrew:
I agree that individualized tastes are much more easily accommodated in a webbed world. However, the quality production values associated with Hollywood style film-making are not being replaced any time soon. And getting them is expensive. Unlike prerecorded music, there is as yet no revolution in the chain from producer to consumer. However, the ability of the studios to prevent piracy will no doubt steadily diminish, and they will be forced by the economics to provide fare that folks are actually willing to pay for rather than pirate.
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They get even dumber?
How is this possible?!?
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mico-niches
if you look at certain cultural movements such as futurism, surrealism, dadaism, 12 tone music, etc. you can track a cultural arc that is slowly evolving. You could label any one of these as 'micro-niches' but in reality they are not niches at all but phases or stages of evolutionary change or maybe a better way to view it is as 'cultural emergence'.
Each so-called 'niche' is not self-contained but are connected by people working in networks that consistently cross breed, exchanging energy and information. Example: John Cage taking from Robert Rauschenberg, Coomaraswamy, Suzuki, Joyce, Satie, etc. Cage was a locus, an intersection for all these lines of influence and information.
Consider this locus something akin to hyper-text where Cage's body of work is a collection of objects linked to something else.
Cage's music could be dismissed as 'niche' by the general fellaheen but remember that he cross-bred a flow consisting of a new cultural language which has infected everything we hear today, from New Music to Hip-Hop and beyond.
To see culture as a class of isolated niches is a 'closed system' way to view things, whereas in reality all these niches behave as nodes in a large network – especially with the advent of the Internet.
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Not a hotbed of creative thinking
"Hollywood" isn't really a hotbed of creative thinking. Once a story gets into the system, it has the stuffing pounded out of it in order to produce something known and familiar so that big bucks can be plunked down on it. But I think the real "blockbusters" -- Lord of the Rings, Titanic, Jerry MacGuire, Finding Nemo, ET, etc. -- had an element of surprise in them. These were movies that got big budgets almost in spite of themselves, touched a chord, and took off. Ya simply can't manufacture that by doing the same thing over and over. Even if the same thing is translating and simplifying French films.
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Movies becoming more like rest of culture
This post along wiht a recent one over at Beyond the Multiplex (http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/2008/01/22/oscars/index.html), lead me to think that movies are becoming more like other entertainment.
In the golden years (defined diffentely by different people), Hollywood blockbusters were often award winners. Films like Casablanca, Bridge on the River Kwai, and The Godfather did well at the box office as well as winning the Oscar for Best Picture. So the mass market aligned fairly well with critically acclaimed movies, so studios threw money behind those sorts of pictures.
It is true that these days fewer big studio pictures get great reviews, and fewer great movies make a lot of money. But this doesn't mean that Hollywood has given up on making movies that critics will like. Instead, the studio now have subsidiaries for making those pictures. Disney and Twentieth Century Fox may not many Best Picture nominations these days, but Miramax and Fox Searchlight certainly do.
So yes, the movie market is more fragmented than it used to be. But I think that it is just catching up to the same processes that have been happening with books and music for a long time.
I think that it is fairly rare that winners of prestigious book prizes are at the top of the best seller charts. Instead most publishing houses have their literary lines and separate popular and genre lines.
Similarly, music companies have separate labels for different kinds of music. Music is so fragmented that it is harder to compare what is happening with awards to movies. There are separate awards for a variety genres
including popular music, but most critics favor one or two genres, so it is harder to come to any kind of consensus on the best songs or albums of a given year.
So yes, popular culture is probably both dumbing down and becoming less popular, but it is not just movies. And Hollywood is not giving up on critically acclaimed movies, they are just supporting them differently.