The Movie Biz

Reading about the 20 year anniversary of the communist revolution sounds eerily similar to the state of the movie business.

Sebestyen's book shows how it all, eventually, became a matter of looking the facts in the face. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze seem to have resolved to do this after the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor and the campaign of reflexive official lying that at first accompanied it. From then on, they accepted one thing after another: the inevitable defeat in Afghanistan and the unsustainability of the Warsaw Pact alliance. It was only a matter of time before a satellite government picked up this cue. The decisive moment came when the Hungarian authorities decided to open their frontier with Austria, allowing East German "tourists" in Hungary to begin an exodus to the West. (They had previously asked Shevardnadze for his reaction to such a move and been told that as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, it was their own affair. That was the end.)

How long can we listen to the clowns running the show? Year after year, the box office is down and fewer people go to movies and year after year they raise the price and tell us it's the most profitable year EVER and then they start laying people off and making fewer movies. The writing is on the wall. The movie people lost the energy to make movies and sold the studios to mega-corporations who don't care about movies. So we get THE BOX and PRINCE OF PERSIA.

Screenwriting is dying. MILK won Best Original Screenplay. MILK. Movie stars are disappearing. No one can open a movie anymore. Auteur's have lost their juice and are sinking into various forms of madness - Scorcese turning to cheap thrillers, Soderburgh into incoherence, Coppola into esoteria. The collective knowledge of movie-making, gained through years of experience, passed from generation to generation is dying and being replaced with digital fantasy worlds and computer generated cartoons. The unimaginative middle managers at GE and Viacom who made careers out of safe choices with their lives turn to board games and graphic novels as their saviors. No one has their own skin the game. People collect salaries and if they somehow make a mega-hit, get rich. So they all go for mega-hits with tie-ins to NFL games and McDonalds toys. This is how we got into the mortgage crisis and created a moral hazard with our government bail outs, by the way. If people had skin in their decisions, they wouldn't take stupid-dumb ass risks because they stood to lose. If you stand to lose, you hire the best and are happy at the end of the day with a little profit. If your bonus doesn't kick in until 500 billion dollars get made, sure, you go for PRINCE OF PERSIA rather than ZODIAC.

It would be one thing to be making a choice - a choice between the challenging or the commercial. Or one thing to come up with a slate and release horror movies at halloween and christmas movies at christmas or save your oscar movies for the winter. No one is even making oscar movies anymore. What movie could possibly deserve a nomination this year?

Movie people need to take back the movies and take back the studios. A young Coppola or Herzog would of steal Universal straight from Jack Donaghy.