HOLLYWOOD WILL DIE WITHOUT GOOD NEW CONTENT
In the series we will discuss the future of the film industry, which will involve fewer action movies and franchises, more work on smaller screens, more original stories, and better writing. Also we will discuss how women have always been the driving force in Hollywood and can be again, if we protect and empower them.
Breaking the Code
The hated Hollywood Production Code finally came down like the walls of Jericho in the 1960s, letting directors tell vibrant, original stories – for about a decade.
The ice finally broke because of a combination of factors. By the time television drove film producers into a panic, the Hollywood studio system was already in trouble.
First, they lost control of the talent. Olivia de Havilland won her fight to get out of her Warner’s contract, and by the 1950s the big-name actors realized that they were pulling in the big piles of foreign-market money and demanded more money and clout. The collapse of the blacklist opened the door to dangerous artists and dangerous art. From 1948 to 1957 the Supreme Court made censorship more difficult, and controlling content got a lot harder when Otto Preminger arrived and audiences saw Some Like It Hot.
Meanwhile the studios were losing their economic power. They lost their cinema chains in 1948. In the 1950s they fought television with spectacles, but by the 1960s audiences were sick of them. Cleopatra almost killed Fox, and MGM’s addiction to old-school blockbusters killed the studio.
And new artistic styles were shoving the old stuff aside. Europeans were sending over modern, low-budget realism, Method actors were changing the industry, and then the youth market and American counterculture demanded their say.
Artistically, the first real tipping point came in 1965, when audiences saw nudity in the Pawnbroker, and Oscar nominations went to stuff like the proto-Woody piece A Thousand Clowns, the European-influenced Darling, and Ship Of Fools which would have been more cutting-edge if it hadn’t been directed by Stanley Kramer.
1966 had a few modernist bits like Alfie and Virginia Woolf but the real earthquake came in 1967 with the Graduate, Heat of the Night, Cool Hand Luke, and Bonnie and Clyde. And we can also mention Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which again would have been less stuffy with a director other than Kramer.
For ten years, real artists had the upper hand. Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Five Easy Pieces, MASH, Clockwork Orange, Cabaret, Deliverance, Sounder, the Exorcist, Last Tango, Serpico, Chinatown, Lenny, Cuckoo’s Nest, Nashville, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, Monty Python, American Graffiti, the Sting, Young Frankenstein, the French Connection, Rocky Horror, Patton, Dirty Harry, the Godfather.
Even then, there was push-back on hot-button issues. Midnight Cowboy and Clockwork Orange were rated X; Taxi Driver, Cabaret and the Exorcist almost got X’s as well. The notion that Clyde Barrow was bisexual never made it to the final script of Bonnie and Clyde. The attempt to use MASH as a commentary on Vietnam was sabotaged by the studio.
In 1975 the first warning sign appeared, signaling the end of an era: Jaws showed the studios that they could regain control of the industry with a business model centered around the summer blockbuster. Then in 1977 Star Wars showed them that they could not only make tons of money on the actual blockbuster films, they could scoop up even more with merchandising; they made a massive mistake in letting George Lucas keep the merchandising rights for Star Wars, an error they never made again.
And soon blockbusters gave birth to blockbuster franchises: Jaws, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Die Hard, Rocky, Batman, Potter, Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean, Mission Impossible, Toy Story, blah blah blah. And it’s been downhill ever since.
While this artistic tug of war was going on, there were also squabbles over money.
The studios were struggling financially: making profitable movies requires that leaders know both the movie half and the business half of the movie business, but control of the town was a Jets-and-Sharks dance between movie guys who didn’t understand profit and corporate suits who didn’t understand art.
Howard Hughes bought RKO and interfered a lot; they made flops and sank. Universal shut down but was rescued by MCA. Jack Warner, his studio sagging, had to hand his studio over to new leaders who preferred to steer clear of hoary elephants like Camelot and embrace films like Bonnie and Clyde. Fox almost sank after Cleopatra but was rescued by Fraulein Maria, Planet of the Apes, and later Star Wars. Columbia’s flops almost sank the studio but they hired new managers and stayed afloat on television revenue. MGM insisted on gambling on a big blockbuster each year, with frightening results, until Kirk Kerkorian arrived and downsized the shop. Paramount combined the Columbia strategy and the MGM approach, cutting production and betting on television, until Robert Evans brought in Chinatown, Love Story, Rosemary’s Baby and the Godfather, and then was swallowed up by legal and marital problems.
UA drove away its in-house talent, who stomped off to form Orion; the new bosses wrecked the studio with Heaven’s Gate and they were forced to merge with MGM, and eventually to become a plaything for Tom Cruise. The big winner of course was Disney, which continued dabbling in live action, scored massive animations hits like the Lion King, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, and then scooped up Pixar, the Marvel universe, and Star Wars.
The common thread in all these studio dramas was a power shift in favor of leaders who knew money better than they knew storytelling.
The streamers and original content
The battle for originality is returning to Hollywood.
Studios like blockbusters, which are expensive, so they want established male stars and stories, lots of brainless action blockbusters, and they want to direct the project by committee, lots of suits. It’s telling that Hollywood’s go-to movie fixer is JJ Abrams, the man who managed to suck all the original ideas out of both Star Wars and Star Trek; or else they will turn to the old-school alpha-male Whedon or the extremely safe Ron Howard. But now, audiences are ignoring big-name stars, studios have run out of popular books to film, there is no more established IP. Studios are terrified of spending big bucks on new IP, but that’s exactly what the market will demand.
Netflix and Amazon have the upper hand over Disney and Apple, precisely because they are willing to embrace new ideas. To illustrate, let’s compare Disney with the old warhorse of the Golden Age, MGM.
For thirty years MGM reigned supreme. They cornered a lot of the big actors: Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra. They made an incredible number of films and a lot of the mega-hits: It Happened One Night, Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Grand Hotel, the original Mutiny on the Bounty, Romeo and Juliet, the Philadelphia Story, Mrs. Miniver. They even had “franchises”: Andy Hardy movies, the Eddy/McDonald musicals, Fred Astaire musicals, the Thin Man movies, Laurel and Hardy, Tarzan, the Hal Roach comedies, the Broadway Melodies, the Marx Brothers.
But in the 1940s they were focusing on safe, boring material, and they began to slide. Mayer couldn’t find good new material and was fired; Schary, his replacement, did little better. They refused to give up their old model, and clung to the belief that a few blockbusters would prop them up each year; Ben Hur, Zhivago and 2001 worked, and they got one more big franchise out of James Bond, but then they made a bunch of flops like King of Kings and the Mutiny on the Bounty remake.
Critically, beginning in the late 1950s, they really stopped creating. They became more interested in co-producing with other creators, and distributing the work of others.
Kirk Kerkorian bought a huge interest in the company, but with a junk dealer’s mindset. He cut down the production schedule, sold 40 acres of the MGM backlot, and tons of sets and props including the ruby slippers. He outsourced film distribution, sold off music publishing. When they made Network they needed help from United Artists. When they made That’s Entertainment, it looked like a eulogy for a studio that was no more, like the home movies you show at the funeral home. They never really got back into producing big movies, and then collapsed.
No one could believe they would fall, but they did. In the 1930s they led the market; in the 1940s they got lazy; in the 1960s they fell behind and a big investor began dismantling it. Because they gave up on creating.
Disney is doing today what MGM did around 1960. They are acquiring more than they are creating, and they focus heavily on G ratings. They acquired a lot of stuff that fit their kid-friendly ethos: Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, the Muppets. Even the acquisition of Fox steered in the same direction: in the last decade or two Fox would occasionally come up with The Devil Wears Prada, Lincoln, the Martian, Bohemian Rhapsody, but for the most part they were putting out kid stuff: X-Men, and franchises that failed to launch like Narnia.
And those were Disney’s acquisitions: what about creating in-house? Years ago Disney had some promising streams of new ideas, big new animated pieces like Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, a few solid franchises like Toy Story and Pirates, the work coming out of Touchstone. But even Beauty and Pirates were based on known IP, and all the creativity slowed to a trickle of remakes and sequels; Touchstone shut down entirely. When they bought Fox they shut down Fox 2000; it remains to be seen whether Searchlight will survive.
It may well be that Disney and its shareholders know they have massive revenue streams running already, and understandably they want to focus on keeping all that cash flowing in from their existing properties. But what happens when they finally squeeze all that dry? The next generation won’t have that magical feeling about Luke and Leia that our parents had, any more than my daughters remember the Beatles. People are getting bored with Marvel and Star Wars, and Disney is repeating themselves with their home-grown work. The value of their existing IP, massive though it is, can only drop, just as MGM’s library dropped in value: how many people under the age of 65 are watching Singing In The Rain today?
That doesn’t mean Disney won’t try. The process of squeezing every last nickel out of their existing IP has begun, turning old properties into TV series, remakes, prequels and sequels, mostly to prop up their new streaming service. Ten new Marvel series, ten Star Wars series, shows based on Ice Age, Beauty and the Beast, Night at the Museum, Zootopia, Moana, Cars, Princess and the Frog. Buzz Lightyear movie, prequels for Beauty and the Beast and 101 Dalmatians, sequels for Enchanted, Sister Act, Peter Pan and Wimpy Kid, remakes for Pinocchio and Little Mermaid. Somewhere in there, they’re doing Death on the Nile, which is either a sequel of a remake or a remake of a sequel. So much for telling new stories.
Marvel has unveiled 25 projects for the next 3-4 years, but almost all of them involve rehashing the same formulas, magic heroes battling magic villains with magic toys. They are reheating Ant Man, Blade, Fantastic Four and the Skrulls, Hawkeye, Falcon, the Winter Soldier, Doctor Strange, Black Panther and Black Widow, Spiderman, and three new spins on Guardians of the Galaxy.
Their corporate bosses clearly directed them to go for the female market, with a She Hulk, a She Iron Man as well as Armor Wars, a She Thor and Loki, and new projects for Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek, and for Michelle Yeoh and Awkwafina. There’s a possibility that this backfires: sending a lot of actresses out to carry big projects with weak, recycled stories and directing by committees of suits, and then listening for years to executives and reporters mooing about that horrible experiment with female-driven storytelling.
There was hope that WandaVision would be a new wrinkle, but instead the show has taken Hollywood’s fear of new content into the realm of meta, combining the recycling of tired Marvel-universe nonsense with the recycling of tired, ancient TV sitcoms. The relentless, annoying flow of press stories about Wanda simply shows how desperate Disney is to revitalize the Marvel franchise. And What If is simply bringing back dozens of known characters to re-tell their own stories.
There is also an orphan project called Moon Knight but they put it on the streamer and they haven’t even lassoed a star for that one yet. The emphasis is on squeezing more cash out of the old stuff. But note that what few new ideas they have, are going to the streamers, not the theater.
Disney won’t allow creativity in their blockbusters. Perfect example, Thor 2. They hired Patty Jenkins, then insisted on a stupid story that couldn’t work. Jenkins was driven off, which pissed off Natalie Portman (they’ve also driven off others like Jon Favreau). Jenkins was replaced by Alan Taylor; the studio steered clear of the project in production but imposed their will in post, creating a mess, interfering just as they did with Ant Man and Age of Ultron (Taylor also pointed out that marketing idiots messed up Terminator Genisys by putting spoilers in the trailer). Even worse than making a mess, the Thor project made just enough money that Marvel didn’t learn their lesson: Feige still thinks he’s giving his directors plenty of freedom. The problem isn’t the interference itself: it’s the sheer scale of the investment in these projects, which impels the executives to go overboard in controlling their investment. What new ideas Disney has, will be minor tweaks in their Marvel and Star Wars universes on the streamer and in a few other places.
Although Warner has been leading the industry to the streaming future, they still indulged in old-think on Wonder Woman: the studio interfered with the script for the second film just as they had with the first, and even Patty Jenkins was hit with the squeeze-the-idea-dry fever, trying to pitch a spinoff about the Amazons. They did the same thing on Justice League, interfering with Zack Snyder, driving him off the production, and replacing him with Josh Whedon who absolutely wrecked the movie.
Paramount, like Warner and Disney, is going with reboots, sequels and spinoffs, titles with lots of colons and Roman numerals. No new ideas need apply. They’re even bringing back Frasier.
Perfect example of trying to make money without original storytelling: Star Wars. When you make 11 movies and repeat the same plot points over and over, it’s cheap storytelling.
Cute robot, R2D2 becomes BB8.
Despite secrecy, rebels learn the vulnerability of the death star and destroy it, three different times.
Hero in desert town surrounded by scary sand people is told his parents are dead, Luke and then Rey.
Elderly robed mentor murdered, Ben and then Max Von Sydow.
Pale dorky evil general with no strategic skills, leading storm troopers who can’t shoot, in almost every episode.
Hot babes in stupid costumes: Leia’s hair Danishes, wearing a bikini made from copper ash trays, Rey wearing Ace bandages.
Dramatic family revelations: Vader is your father, Leia is your sister, Rey is your daughter.
Kylo Ren uses unnecessary scary mask just because grandpa did.
Scary emperor dies and is replaced by a taller one with Gollum’s voice.
Yoda, a cute Muppet who sounds like Miss Piggy reading fortune cookies backwards, replaced by cute Muppet teddy bears in Jedi, and then Lupita, a bruised tangerine dispensing impenetrable advice like Yoda did.
Even television is getting into the recycling business, bring back the Connors, Will and Grace, Full House, Frasier. Until television itself dies off.
Bottom line: even with Disney’s massive spending push, Netflix is still outspending them, and it’s new content, not recycled IP. Netflix wins.
Apple
Apple got off to a bad start in the streaming world.
Apple seemed to be going for the “prestige” cred, but a lot of their projects seem like old guys telling stories to old guys, the opposite of zeitgeist. A documentary about Springsteen (age 71 as of this writing), a book club from Oprah (66), Spielberg (73) taking yet another crack at Amazing stories, Carpool Karaoke, yet another TV show from Julia Louis Dreyfus (59), a no-comedy news show with Jon Stewart (58). They planned to spend half a billion on properties featuring Tom Hanks (64), Will Smith whose blockbuster days are behind him, and James Bond. They have a first-look deal with Martin Scorsese (78) who ran out of original ideas a decade ago. They’re giving off a vibe like it’s CBS in 1985 and Pat Summerall is about to remind us to tune into Murder She Wrote.
Nobody told them that the big names don’t draw people in like they used to. They just signed up Julia Roberts (53), who was the queen of the box office 20 years ago, although she did have one recent hit.
After a couple of years of focusing solely on shaky original television content which didn’t bring in the customers they need, Apple decided they would be more competitive if they also bought or licensed a catalog of other people’s work. And they ran away from all edgy stuff, and toward safe and boring. They are shopping for old sitcoms and popular movies; they made a bundling deal for the creaky procedurals from CBS. They backed away from The Weinstein Company despite its excellent catalog, cancelled an Elvis story, cancelled a series about rap due to the sex and drugs and violence, and watered down the content in the Aniston/Witherspoon show. Because Apple boss Tim Cook wants family stuff, they acquired some Sesame Street, some Jim Henson/Fraggle Rock, some Peanuts, and kid stuff from the Maurice Sendak Foundation.
So, old tired people, safe stuff, kid stuff. They have enough money to buy a lot of stuff, but do they have the right leaders to buy the right stuff?
In a few years, Amazon and Netflix will still be finding and airing new stuff, while Disney and Apple rely on old ideas, old heads, old formulas. Disney and Apple could end up as glorified libraries like MGM did. Variety is already predicting that Apple will just buy another streamer, essentially an admission that they don’t know how to get their own going, or perhaps snap up a property like MGM.
PS Anyone who is interested in top-notch low-budget screenplays, I have 24 in all genres, although one is in production. Check out loglines and scripts at https://threewibbes.wordpress.com/ .