This has been roiling around in the back of my brain for a long time.\u00a0 Showmanship in movies is dead, and yet the one thing that needs to return to movies is showmanship.\u00a0 Hollywood has decided that the only people who see movies are 15-year-old boys who like to see explosions and special effects.\u00a0 Production values, story, presentation, acting, etc… they don\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t believe me?\u00a0 Andy Hendrickson, a Disney executive, admitted it last month.<\/a><\/p>\n This reminds me of Merian C. Cooper, who went through draft after draft of the screenplay to King Kong <\/em>until he got it exactly the way he wanted it.\u00a0 When Cinerama came in, it was Cooper who insisted that it be done right.\u00a0 He knew that Cinerama was so cool that he built it up with a deliberately-too-long intro with Lowell Thomas.\u00a0 He knew if he kept it going long enough, the audience would be wondering what Cinerama was and why it was so interesting.\u00a0 It worked.\u00a0 The opening shots of the roller coaster are still breathtaking.<\/p>\n This is Cinerama <\/em>blew out all records and was the top grossing film of 1952.\u00a0 This was at a time when TV was killing movies, or so they said.\u00a0 Cooper was enough of a showman to make it work.<\/p>\n Sadly, those days are gone.\u00a0 Even as late as the 1970s, we occasionally had \u201croad shows\u201d in which the studios allowed only one theater to run a particular film that was shown carefully and well.\u00a0 There was but one theater running Star Wars <\/em>when it came out in Indianapolis in the 1970s, and it ran there for a year.\u00a0 It was run properly; it was an event.\u00a0 If you wanted to see it, then you\u2019d see it there.<\/p>\n Lawrence of Arabia<\/em>, Dr. Zhivago, 2001, <\/em>and many others were given deluxe road-show treatments.\u00a0 Columbia revived the practice briefly when Lawrence <\/em>was restored in 1989, making that an event as well.\u00a0 It worked, and people came out to see it.<\/p>\n Movies are never an event anymore.\u00a0 They are a commodity.\u00a0 Where once you could go into a clean theater and see a movie run by a trained projectionist, today we have an untrained teenager starting a projector he doesn\u2019t understand, in the midst of an unclean theater, ripped screen, and people chattering endlessly on cell phones.<\/p>\n Focus?\u00a0 Sometimes.\u00a0 Framing?\u00a0 Usually.\u00a0 Oh, and you tell me that the digital revolution will make things better, eliminating the untrained projectionist?\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Whereas the old projectors were workhorses and would run continuously for years, the new digital ones are so persnickety that vapors of popcorn oil cause them to start projecting with a green cast and then shut down.<\/p>\n Hollywood has figured out that there seems to be an endless hunger for movies, and they turn out more and more of them with dumber and dumber plots.\u00a0 The idea is that no one sees films in a theater anymore, and that films need to be made for multiple viewings on handheld devices and small-screen friendly.<\/p>\n So if you watch Pirates of the Caribbean <\/em>40 times at home, you might figure out the plot.\u00a0 Oh, rapture.\u00a0 But heaven help you if you see it just once in a theater.<\/p>\n There\u2019s an old saying that applies here.\u00a0 \u201cSome people know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.”\u00a0 Hollywood is doing the same thing.\u00a0 They are making more and more movies with less and less money, fewer and fewer viewers per film.\u00a0 The day will come when everyone has free films with zero quality.<\/p>\n This shouldn\u2019t be.<\/p>\n Hollywood is digging its own grave.\u00a0 They are killing off theatrical exhibition by killing off the reasons why people go to movies.\u00a0 They\u2019ve been doing it for years.\u00a0 When fewer people started going to movies, their response was to raise ticket prices.\u00a0 The theater owners had to get by on less money.\u00a0 Do you know why you pay more than $5 for a small popcorn?\u00a0 That\u2019s because the theater owner pays 90+ percent of the ticket money back to the studio for a new release.<\/p>\n The studios also got the cute idea of making exclusive contracts for movies.\u00a0 You\u2019d have to sign up for a particular title for six weeks.\u00a0 If it was a dud, then you were stuck with it.\u00a0 Theater owners made multiplexes so they were able to shuffle duds off to small screens in the back and get the good titles in the bigger houses.<\/p>\n Single-screen theaters died.\u00a0 They couldn\u2019t compete.<\/p>\n Once they had multiplexes, they got automation.\u00a0 One projectionist could run 15 screens.\u00a0 There once was a day when the projectionist had to be there during the entire film, so that if something went wrong, he\u2019d see it immediately.\u00a0 Now, we\u2019re lucky if he has time to get there within 15 minutes.\u00a0 With digital projection, there\u2019s no one up there at all, and the guy who can fix it is probably in the next county.\u00a0 Heaven help you if the lamp blows.\u00a0 Come back next week.<\/p>\n All of this cost-cutting is also throat-cutting.\u00a0 Corporations assume people are stupid and will put up with anything.\u00a0 They\u2019re not.\u00a0 People realize they\u2019re getting a sub-standard product and they don\u2019t show up.<\/p>\n This is the long-standing contradiction that is Hollywood.\u00a0 There\u2019s a disconnect between art and commerce.\u00a0 Art is stagnant if you do the same things over and over again.\u00a0 But commerce encourages sameness.\u00a0 When you can make the same thing repeatedly, you can make it cheaper and more efficiently.<\/p>\n So art is suffering these days because commerce is winning.\u00a0 What Hollywood hasn\u2019t figured out is that people respond to the art.<\/p>\n Movies aren\u2019t like McDonald\u2019s, no matter how much we\u2019d like to make them like that.\u00a0 When you\u2019re out driving at midnight, tired and hungry, you can always stop at McDonald\u2019s, and you know what you\u2019re getting.\u00a0 It tastes the same no matter where you go.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost comforting in a way, even though it\u2019s not something you would want to do all the time.<\/p>\n On the flip side, movies are boring if they\u2019re too repetitive.\u00a0 Clint Eastwood says that every year he\u2019s asked to do another Dirty Harry <\/em>movie, and yet he\u2019s now 80.\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t matter, they say.\u00a0 People will come to see it.\u00a0 And Clint won\u2019t do it because he knows it wouldn\u2019t be any good.<\/p>\n The other quality vs. showmanship battle that I fight is over DVD, or even worse, downloaded movies.\u00a0 I\u2019ll say it now: if you can avoid it, then you should never show DVDs on a big screen.\u00a0 They\u2019re not designed for that.\u00a0 Blu-ray is better but still not very good.\u00a0 Hollywood is using projectors better than blu-ray on all of the digital setups, so even they understand that they can\u2019t get by with it.<\/p>\n But I work with a lot of small theaters who want to cut costs.\u00a0 They\u2019ll tell me that they have no money, and ask what I can do to help.\u00a0 I bring in good prints of uncopyrighted movies, things I\u2019ve collected over the years, and I introduce the films.<\/p>\n Usually I can bring in a decent crowd for a special event movie. \u00a0 Seeing this, a few places have gotten the idea to cut me out of it.\u00a0 Let\u2019s not pay that guy for good prints.\u00a0 Let\u2019s not pay him to tell people why this film is interesting.\u00a0 I can buy a DVD or download something free from archive.org and then we can run something for free.<\/p>\n No one shows up, and it confuses them.<\/p>\n Anyone can buy a DVD or download from archive.org.\u00a0 It\u2019s no longer an an event, nothing special.\u00a0 People are smart to see through that and don\u2019t show up.<\/p>\n I do see glimmers of hope on the horizon.\u00a0 Kevin Smith, of all people, has seen that doing road shows, with cast members in attendance, is probably a good tactic.\u00a0 His new film, Red State<\/em>, is doing city-by-city shows.\u00a0 Ticket prices are higher, and he\u2019s taken criticism for it, but he\u2019s sticking with it.<\/p>\n I think that, if theatrical exhibition is going to survive, then it will be with higher quality shows that are special events.\u00a0 Kevin Smith is on to something.<\/p>\n Another failing is the persistent idea that only 15-year-old boys show up to movies.\u00a0 Well, when we tailor all movies to 15-year-olds, then that\u2019s who shows up.\u00a0 Teenagers are an automatic audience for movies, because they want to leave the house.\u00a0 You want to attract an older audience? \u00a0 There\u2019s one out there.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how you do it…<\/p>\n People don\u2019t see movies anymore because it\u2019s too much work, and they perceive it as too expensive.\u00a0 Make it easier for them to do it, and make it worth their while, and they\u2019ll show up.<\/p>\n What this world needs is more showmen like Merian C. Cooper.\u00a0 What this world needs less is more cynical businessmen like Andy Hendrickson.<\/p>\n Thinking like Cooper will save the movies.\u00a0 Thinking like Hendrickson will kill them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This has been roiling around in the back of my brain for a long time.\u00a0 Showmanship in movies is dead, and yet the one thing that needs to return to movies is showmanship.\u00a0 Hollywood has decided that the only people who see movies are 15-year-old boys who like to see explosions and special effects.\u00a0 Production … Continue reading “Come Back, Mr. Cooper! Come Back!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,207],"tags":[51],"class_list":["post-122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-films-pocket-rants","category-film","tag-hollywood-showmanship-quality-story-script-dvd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1936,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions\/1936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n