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August
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August
2, 2003
The
Film Industry
Business
and Ideology
By SAUL LANDAU
"Through the movies, a Frenchman
remarked, the United States has effected the `cultural colonization'
of the world." Leo Rosten
The US motion picture industry like other
entertainment businesses -- works with government to make profit
and culturally colonize the rest of the world. "In the mid-1960s,"
according to Tyler Cohen, in the April 28, 2003 Forbes.com, "American
films accounted for 35% of box office revenues in Continental
Europe; today the figure is between 80% and 90%." Why?
Cohen concludes that "Hollywood
films are technically advanced (e.g., special effects) and heavily
advertised and publicized in the mass media. The typical European
film has about 1% of the audience of the typical Hollywood film,
and this differential has been growing. American movies have
become increasingly popular in international markets, while European
movies have become less so."
European films, slower in pace, appear
to hyperactive US audiences as unbearably heavy tomes filled
with ideas, philosophical comments and nuanced relationships.
And, as Cohen points out, "the training of cinematic talent
in the U.S. and Europe reflects these differences. American film
schools are like business schools in many regards."
Compare the best US film schools (UCLA,
NYU or USC as examples) with the cinema program at the University
of Krakow in the 1950s that turned out directors like Roman Polanski
and Andres Wajda. Instead of training for a job in the industry,
the Polish curriculum emphasized liberal arts and humanities.
Actual training for lighting, camera operation, acoustics, etc.,
took place in the last year of a five year  program. US film schools "train"
rather than "educate" from the beginning. They hold
out promises that right after graduation, their trainees can
become assistant editors or associate producers, defined by Fred
Allen as "the only person who would associate with a producer."
By the early 20th Century, business grammar
captured American cinema. Entrepreneurs devised formulas to transform
a new "art form" into commodities that would attract
large, poorly educated audiences likely to return next week for
more captivating celluloid mind fodder. Over the decades, technological
perfection came to substitute for the innovative dynamic of artistic
creation. Indeed, the industry built its worldwide reputation
on Hollywood craftsmen's ability to simulate reality. It challenged
all foreign rivals and independents to match it. Hollywood elevated
the perfection of animation and special effects technology for
examples into the criteria on which mass media critics should
pass their first judgment on films. Anything less than its standard
of technical excellence would be the equivalent of offering a
new car with a scratch on the paint job. Trace the industry from
the silent, racist epic "Birth of a Nation" to the
21st Century musicals "Moulin Rouge" or "Chicago."
Technology as art wins audiences.
Aesthetic judgments aside, each Hollywood
movie required, first and foremost, a business plan. To pass
on a film idea, studio executives fashioned a profit-making blueprint:
"give us scripts," they ordered the writers, "that
will lure audiences to theaters and keep them coming back."
This success formula spun off candy, popcorn and soft drink profits
as well as Hollywood itself as a special culture from which countless
other industries developed. Naturally, for the first six decades
of the industry, the producing studios also owned the movie theaters.
Hollywood studios helped create audience
by offering what Irwin Shaw called "the American dream made
visible," which included cultivating the star system. Behind
the powerless but rich glamour pusses and dashing heroes of the
Silent Screen, sat the multi-millionaire studio moguls who manipulated
"the talent."
Using simplistic recipes produced by
the writers, defined by studio boss Jack Warner as "schmucks
with Underwoods," and the technology of the giant screen,
movies conditioned excitement-starved audiences to expect magical
Saturday afternoons and evenings.
By the 21st Century, technology had rescued
once challenged filmmakers from actually finding locations and
figure out how to actually render them credible through the camera
and editing process. Soft ware and digital technology now "render"
the drama of a precipitous gorge or lush jungle. Technology has
enhanced the industry's possibilities for commercially designing
and manufacturing cinema magic. It has not improved the idea
quality. Indeed, few expect such "high brow" offerings.
Buying a ticket means that one leaves
credibility at the box office along with the price of admission.
The lights fade and impossibly beautiful people appear. They
don't die in high-speed chases or falls from insufferable heights.
In addition, publicity and the 24/7 nature
of contemporary TV and the web has extended Hollywood's trivia
to cognitive proportions. On TV and in supermarket tabloids,
actors' personal lives take on vicarious energy. They substitute
for excitement in one's own life. The untold numbers of shows,
articles and web shorts deal exclusively with the dalliances
of the stars. The people we stare at sympathetically in films,
who shoot with amazing accuracy, make perfect love every time
(to romantic music of course) and rarely deal with children,
poverty or the banality of everyday routine, show off their wardrobes,
cleavages, houses, furniture and pools -- and their attention
deficit disorders for all things except attention.
We "escape" to the movies to
watch emaciated models with baby smooth skin do and wear things
we don't or can't. Then we learn "the shocking truth."
Kim Basinger, who I drooled over as the beautiful hooker in "LA
Confidential," is really shy. Her steady relationship with
Alec Baldwin dissolved because she abhorred life in Long Island,
where he felt at home. Gossip unfurls, inter-cut with film clips
of Kim, now in her late 40s and looking 30. The narrator pauses
over a Hollywood mug shot; another episode in the fictionalized
lives of truncated people far from the monotony of our jobs,
boring school or tedious house and child care.
Behind the glitter, the film industry
produces for two reasons: profit and reproduction. The motion
picture industry resembles the automobile industry: big and shiny
looking products on the outside. But don't look under the hood
or on the cutting room floor.
Both industries rely on beauty and spectacular
landscape to sell products. You've seen commercials that offer
you power, sex appeal, prestige and status by owning a new SUV.
In addition, you and your car as company share a pristine landscape
a Dodge Destroyer against an Alaskan panorama.
The commercial world lures the public
into the virtual setting, the theater where the available light
shines on the screen, where a face (after hours in the make up
room and years spent with "beauty experts") appeals
to you to love it, sympathize with it, fear for it. "An
emotional Detroit," actress Lillian Gish called Hollywood.
The perfect look usually disguises artistic
emptiness. Hollywood malapropist Sam Goldwyn opined that "you'll
get along fine in this business as long as you don't bite the
hand that lays the golden egg." Oscar Levant underlined
mogul Goldwyn's point. "People don't understand Hollywood,"
he said. "They don't look beneath the superficial layer
of tinsel. Underneath lies the real tinsel."
Hollywood's marketing success begins
with the assumption that youth and undernourishment constitute
universal aesthetics. My teenager takes these criteria seriously
and thus refuses to accompany us to the movies. She doesn't want
to be seen in public with us, and we find her tastes at the local
outlets less than appetizing. In July 2003, we have sequels to
"Charley's Angels" "Matrix," "Legally
Blond 2" and "Terminator." In these films actors
run "the gamut of emotions from A to B," as the late
Dorothy Parker put it.
"Why," I ask my daughter, "do
gossip shows about movie stars or pop singers excite you?"
"Get real!" she responds.
I deduce that since I'm no longer young
enough to know everything, I should recall how teenagers went
nuts over skinny Frank Sinatra in the '40s, before the skinny
crooner turned into a national idol another product of the star
system.
"Romantic hoopla," as Leo Rosten
calls "Hollywood's amorous acrobatics," became highly
profitable on the one hand and diversionary on the other. It
can market anything. For example, take the rare film personality
who fights for justice. Hollywood presents millionaire Julia
Roberts (in Erin Brokavich vs. the polluting gas and electric
company) as the woman with whom the oppressed can identify. Occasionally,
a producer sneaks through a socially relevant film that eschews
the shoot 'em up, beat 'em up or screw 'em up formula. These
films can indeed inspire some people to emulate the fictional
characters. Compare them in number to films that teach audiences
to identify with their oppressors good cops, wise bankers, trustworthy
governors.
Such exceptional films prove the rule.
Hollywood is a world-wide business whose product includes "American
values," from the John Wayne pseudo-macho notion of obeying
patriotic orders to the notion that no amount of clothes suffice,
as Reese Witherspoon goes through endless costuming in her Legally
Blond roles.
Beneath thin plot and story lines, embellished
by skilled photography, special effects, set design, costuming,
make up, mood music scoring and the variety of photography tricks
employed, one finds a world designed to divert -- entertain at
the lowest common denominator.
The Hollywood sales manager instructs
his team to "take this crap and sell it to the world as
the greatest art and entertainment ever made." God Bless
America especially the one that Hollywood invented!
Saul Landau
is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He teaches at
Cal Poly Pomona University. His new book, PRE-EMPTIVE
EMPIRE: A GUIDE TO BUSH S KINGDOM, will be published
in September by Pluto Books.
Weekend Edition Features for July 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
NYT's Screws Up Again; Uday and
Qusay Deaths Bad for Bush; Gen. Hitchens at the Front
Gary
Leupp
Faith-Based Intelligence
Saul Landau
A Report from Syria
Stan
Goff
Bring 'Em On Home, Now!
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Book Cooking at Boeing
Andrew
Cockburn
The Sons Are Dead; Now the Blood Feud
Begins
Jason Leopold
CIA Points the Finger at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
Robert
Fisk
The Power of Death
Joanne
Mariner
Monsieur Moussaoui
M. Shahid
Alam
The Global Economy Since 1800: a Short History
Harry
Browne
Northern Ireland: the Other Faltering Peace Process
Fidel Castro
Moncada, 50 Years Later
Lula
Democracy Requires Social Justice
Edward
S. Herman
Refuting Brad DeLong's Smear Job on Noam Chomsky
Ron Jacobs
Guided by a Great Feeling of Love: a Review of Gordon's The Company
You Keep
Julie
Hilden
A Photographer, an Offer and Cameron Diaz's Topless Photos
Adam Engel
Man Talk
Poets'
Basement
Keeney, Witherup, Short, Nimba, Guthrie and Albert
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