A Race To The Bottom
Robyn's commentary on the Manohla Dargis prompted me to think through my position a little more -
Manohla and I agree studio decision-making-by-demographic leads to a suboptimal outcome. Manohla and Robyn argue the studios ought to adjust the decision-by-demographic to better reflect the population, ie more movies for women, minorities, etc. They further suggest film directors of minority demographic status will increase the likelihood of good movies for those demographics. I disagree with both of those points. I don't think adjusting the decision-by-demographic will increase the overall quality of the movies, just increase the number of shitty movies made for women, minority, and old people audiences. I believe this approach to movie-making is a recipe for continued disaster and is basically looking through the wrong end of the spyglass.
I advocate putting movie studios back in the hands of movie-people (vs. business-people) and privileging quality over demographics. I'd rather have 20 great movies about dead-white-males than 5-5-5-5 shitty movies fulfilling a perfect racial quota. And likewise, I'm perfectly happy to have Katherine Bigelow, Jane Campion, Nicole Holofcener, and Lynn Ramsey all making a movie a year.
I'd advocate studios attempting to make more "cross-over" hits. There's actually a much better term for it - Good Movies. Audiences want to see GOOD MOVIES. Not black movies or white movies or women movies or guy movies.
If we focus on quality, I think the demographics take care of themselves. If we focus on demographics, it becomes a race to the bottom.
8 comments:
Well said, I'd even argue further that most good films that appeal to a wide ranging audience tend to do better at the box office anyway than target group films so it's a win-win for audiences and studios to make quality films rather than crappy target driven pics.
And to be fair, I don't think anyone sets out to make a crappy film. I do think a lot of people fundamentally do not trust their own taste and resort to demographics as a means to try to their jobs well.
If you buy into a false conceit that taste is subjective and what's good to one person is not to another - the only means to do your job well is to resort to demographics and past sales performance as a measuring stick.
And when you have these people running the show you train a generation of underlings to think in the same terms. Those people move up the ranks and you systematically crowd out anyone who thinks in terms of quality - because they're almost speaking two different languages. Sort of how lax moral standards moved down the ranks of the Bush administration to allow torture.
What concerns me more generally, however, is the reactionary impulse in many highly educated circles to resort to a form of intellectual tribalism and thinking the solution will be more minority or female or one-legged lesbian virgins making movies will suddenly solve all of problems, that we wash away the cabal of powerful white men and suddenly we find ourselves in a utopia of great movies resembling benetton advertisements. I suspect this has to do with all this multicultural gobbley-goop taught in colleges these days.
If these people ever get control, the movies will even be worse...they'll turn it into WNBA. It'll be challenging not to want to shoot yourself in the head. How do I know this? I attended a lot of MFA screenings, that's how.
I'd also like to add that I think there is one studio out there that gets this, Pixar. Now I know you're anti-animation but hear me out. Pixar makes films that are good and think that is more important to them than making kids movies. I think Up is an excellent example of this, it could be argued the film is in fact more for adults than kids but it doesn't really matter because it's simply a good film and clearly they were not willing to comprise the material just because it may not be viewed as kid friendly.
CARTOONS! Are you crazy? Steam just came out of my ears. None of this applies to cartoons!
okay...now i calmed down...i will grant you that the screenwriting in cartoons is very impressive these days. aesthetically, i find them tedious because i'm not 8 years old. nevertheless, i'll probably see UP and WALL E on dvd.
Why don't we get a Katherine Bigelow movie at the same rate we get a Ridley Scott movie? Why don't we get a Nicole Holofcener movie at the same rate that we get Woody Allen movies? Why don't we get a Jane Campion or a Lynne Ramsey movie at the same rate we get a Peter Weir or a Todd Solondz movie?
all right, you caught me. it's because they have vajayjay's and i'm secreting controlling all the studios and conspiring to have 2.5 ridley scott/woody allen movies for every jane campion/lyne ramsey movie.
goddammit, the jig is up. oh well, i tried my best to keep women down.
Wow, this was quite a string I just caught up on. Read that Dargis article in the NYTimes when it came out and just read the interview you linked to. I like a lot of Dargis' takes on movies, but one of the strongest things I took away from the article was her critique of nancy meyers movies. She writes that she connects to them on an emotional level and thinks they're well written, have good characters etc, but doesn't like them because they dont' push aesthetic boundaries. What? She comes off like someone casting aside a work because she believes it to be too lowbrow for her even though she enjoys it. There's a certain relevancy to knowing that some things are guilty pleasures and that in abundance they're not good for you but to wallop on nancy meyers like that after admitting she likes the movies I found disingenuous (not to mention probably caused Bruce Block serious anxiety). And from that point Dargis lost any trust I had going in to her article.
As regards the lack of female directors/movies directed toward female audiences, I think Dargis makes her own wise point though she misinterpreted it. There have been numerous female studio heads and they haven't hired women to direct these huge action movies. And they did that for a reason - when you're suddenly responsible for the financial decision to hire a director for the next comic book franchise and you're choosing between Sam Raimi and Nicole Holofcener its a no brainer. The current crop of action directors did not come out of nowhere most of those are older and are from the 70s Corman school or from the indie horror circuit in the 80s like Raimi and Jackson. Can you name one single female American director from the great period of 70s filmmaking - no. I am not saying women are incapable of directing big studio movies, that is ridiculous, but I am saying these things don't change overnight or even within a generation - they'll be more female directors making big movies in ten years,, in 20 years etc, one only need look at the steady rise of women in TV for proof of that.
And I think its really the wrong way to look at things that Katherine Bigelow doesn't get to make a movie a year while Ridley Scott does - we know nothing about how Ms. Bigelow works, we have no idea if she is trying to make a movie a year. And to be honest I'm fine with her output - she has made, in my opinion, four great movies - this was a woman married to James Cameron by the way so should it surprise anyone that she takes her time between movies. Lynne Ramsay has disappeared, Jane Campion continues to make pretty big movies every couple years as well as Holofcener and neither of them are making anything close to broad appealing studio fare.
When was the last time you heard about a female director emerging with a horror film on the indie circuit - I don't know of any - though one will emerge and that will be the one to direct a studio tentpole in the future.
yes, andy is absolutely correct about the rate of Bigelow vs Scott movies. how the f--- are we to know how these people work. if i was sober when i made my response to robyn, it probably would've included this point. why does malick make a movie only every 20 years? why does tarantino not work faster? why do only 1/3 of herzog's movies get any sort of release? these questions have little to do with gender.
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