Hollywood Babble On & On #316: When Smart Becomes Stupid & Stupid Becomes Smart

There was a time when Hollywood did very well with adult movies. I'm not talking about those "adult movies," I'm talking about movies for adults. The sort of films that don't rely on big explosions, and big special effects, including big cleavage, but instead were centered more on plot, dialogue, character, and often dealt with mature and intelligent themes and subject matter.

Nowadays it looks like most major studios avoid such films like the plague, preferring to have big robots smash each other to pieces for big bucks.

I think the blame can be divided two ways, 40% belongs to the audience, and 60% to Hollywood.

WHY IT'S THE AUDIENCE'S FAULT:

1. Demographics 20%: During the first "youthquake" that hit Hollywood in the 1950s independent producer Samuel Z. Arkoff estimated that the ideal target was the 19 year old American male, because he was the bellwether taste-maker at the time. Since then that has skewed younger and younger, and included the new phenom of "tweens."

These are the demographics that dominate audience buying habits. They either buy their own tickets, or decide the films that their parents can see, because they have a lock on the family's disposable income. Plus the younger viewers will go to see the same film again and again, putting a merely popular film into the realm of the blockbuster.

The problem is that if you want the true definition of an idiot with the attention span of a over-caffeinated gnat, it's a teenager. It's not a personal attack against them, all teens are idiots, I was an idiot when I was a teenager, so was you, and everyone you know. It's a scientific fact.

2. POOR URBAN PLANNING 10% & LAZINESS 10%: The days when you could walk down the street to your local neighbourhood theatre to see a flicker show do not exist for the average person. The bulk of people live in suburbs where it's just not easy to get anywhere, so going to a movie is no longer a casual thing, it's an event requiring a lot of logistical work. You have decide on a movie, find a theatre that's showing it, load up the car, find a parking space, which you probably have to pay for, stand in line at the Cineplex with a bunch of pimply little teenyboppers who are buying tickets to the PG film so they can sneak into the R rated movie next to yours, buy your ticket, buy your snacks, find a seat, etc...etc...

Most older folks think about all that and say: "Fuck it, I'll rent it from Netflix in a few months."

But they're not the only ones to blame....

WHY IT'S HOLLYWOOD'S FAULT:

1. SKYROCKETING COSTS 20%: The costs of making a film have been affected by an inflation unseen outside Zimbabwe. When you include the costs of distribution and marketing you could spend a minimum of $60-$100 million to release a "low budget" film.

Now this inflation is not a natural inflation, caused by the laws of supply and demand. It's an artificial inflation caused by poor business practices, but it's still making it extremely risky to make a film that doesn't have the potential to be a blockbuster.

2. OSCAR WHORING 20%: One of the worst things to have affected the Academy Awards was when Oscar movies became a genre onto themselves. At one time those films were called "prestige pics" and their purpose was to not only put bums in seats, but to win prizes and critical praise.

At some time in the 1990s, when Miramax began to dominate the Oscars, the shift started where putting bums in seats came in after the prizes and critical praise, and in many cases way after. After a while, lack of commercial success became a sign of Oscar worthiness, and you had films being made not to be enjoyed by the general audience, but by the narrow audience of Academy voters, who ironically, usually don't pay to see such films, preferring screeners given to them by producers.

I guess the best way to sum it up, is that Oscar films don't have to be good, because they're not being judged on if they're well made or not, but on whether they're important, and sincere enough to be worthy of an Oscar.

3. INABILITY TO ARGUE 20%: In places where everyone thinks alike people rapidly lose the ability to argue. In a social circle that includes a variety of opinions people say: "I disagree, and these are my points," which then get some counter points in return, and vice versa, until either one side wins, or they at least agree to disagree. However, toss disagreement into a milieu where the overwhelming majority agrees on just about everything, and suddenly things shift. The argument then goes: "I disagree, I may have points, but I'd rather impugn you and your motives as the main thrust of my case."

There is no place more wrapped up in group-think and conformity than Hollywood. Just do a survey of how they vote, and they tend to come overwhelming on one side of any issue.

It wasn't always like this. Hollywood was one big floating argument, especially during the early 1970s, the golden age of the mature political film. You had a more conservative "old guard" in a debate with the young whippersnappers who were coming out of New York television and later the first film schools. And these films took the form of a debate. Both sides would be presented in an intelligent and mature way. If the filmmaker had a political axe to grind, they at least tried to convince you, the viewer, that Nixon was evil, or that nuclear power was going to kill us all, with arguments.

Sadly, without the intellectual rigor that's born from constant debate, you see one side being passed on as angelic, and the other demonic, with no gray areas. If the villain, makes what could be construed as a valid political point, there is always included a "gotcha" moment where it's shown that he doesn't really believe any of it, he's just a posturing hypocrite. Because they believe that the audience is too stupid for a real debate with well rounded characters on both sides, and has to be spoon-fed that the filmmaker's side is good, and any other side is pure evil.

Of course such a stance is not going to win over the folks in flyover country who make films profitable, because they don't vote the way Hollywood does, and are considered part of the problem by Hollywood, and treated accordingly on screen.

These factors create what I call the Perfect Storm of Stupid. So called smart films get dumber, there's no profit in making dumb films smarter, because the target demographic isn't going to get it anyway, and audiences start to avoid the "smart" films because they come across as cliched as the "dumb" films, tedious in their self-righteousness, with an added soupcon of being insulting, not only to their intelligence, but also to their existence.

How can Hollywood pull itself out of the stupid spiral and start making films that make money without being dumber than dishwater?

Well, I may be a smug know it all, but even I have my limits, because it would take a complete shake-up of not only how Hollywood does business, but it's internal culture, as well, to make any sort of progress.