On the State of the Studio System

             

               The American studio system is in a sorry state. Hollywood, which was once considered an emporium of imagination and ideas, has seen these concepts be subsumed by marketing and synergy. The main studios of America have been relegated to pumping out comic book sequel after comic book sequel, occasionally taking a break so that they can put the finishing touches on the third chapter in a trilogy based on a set of children’s toys. Movies exist not to sell themselves anymore, but to sell an endless stream of toys and tie-ins, none of which can hope for the mainstream success of the film they are based on, but which together create a powerful financial incentive. When not scoping out the aisles at Toys ‘R Us, the studios also spend their time churning out the type of exploitation fare that the Poverty Row studios once made, the modern studios apparently under the belief that throwing money at these types of projects will somehow make them better films than their grindhouse forebearers, showing a complete lack of knowledge as to what made these earlier exploitation films work.

            There was a time when the prestige picture was considered the tent pole on which a film studio’s fortunes could be stretched, but the days of those films topping both box office lists and the year-end lists of quality is long gone. The past three Best Picture winners have come from outside the American studio system, a system which had once produced some of the highest quality films in the world. At their heights in the 1940’s and 1950’s, the American studios were exemplars of the possibilities of film, which while not always particularly daring in an aesthetic sense, established a standard of quality which all films hoped to match. Many of them have ultimately stood the test of time holding an emotional resonance which many modern studio films lack. And this is not to mention the American studio system’s effects on films that were made as a response to it. Where would the French New Wave have come from if there was not an established studio system for them to react to and draw from? How would the Poverty Row studios have presented an alternative product, if there was no quality Hollywood product to have an alternative to? That is not to say that the American studios were necessarily a source of divergence for post-war global film movements (The French New Wave was a reaction to French studio productions and they originally lauded many American films), but without American aesthetic influence, or if the studios had presented a product free of aesthetic concerns, it is unclear how inspiration would have emerged.

            Now, I do not mean to propose that there was ever a time in which the studio “bigwigs” were not concerned about the bottom line, but there was once a time when creating a high quality film was considered the way to get there. In today’s market, where the major studios are controlled by global conglomerates, the desires and necessities of the studios are being subsumed by the parent company’s attempts to create synergy and to increase the revenues that they receive from tie-in products and sponsorship opportunities in a variety of fields. Even The Lorax, whose basis is a book and television special which warned against the evils of materialism and consumerism, is being used to sell Mazda automobiles and disposable diapers. In forty years, we have gone from a television special that respected the message of the book in an honest way to a film whose marketing subverts the very message that Dr. Seuss’s classic rests on.

            Perhaps we should be lucky that the American studios were able to push out great films for as long as they did. When Hollywood arrived at a critical and commercial crisis in the late ‘60’s, they turned to their few recent successes for inspiration. Thankfully for cineastes everywhere, these were the high-quality, young, rebellious films that would come to make up the corpus of New Hollywood. When Hollywood encountered another crisis a decade later in the wake of such New Hollywood disasters as Sorcerer and Heaven’s Gate, they didn’t do anything different. They once again turned to the films that were popular at the time, only this time the defining essence of said films was not so much quality (even if most of them were great movies), as it was a certain mode of blockbuster filmmaking.

            This mode would be ushered in for good with the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Most films at the time were released in a scattered fashion, akin to how a film like The Artist would be released today. A film would open in New York, and then make its way across the small towns and suburbs of America, relying on newspapers and local radio to spread the word of its arrival. Jaws on the other hand launched everywhere, all at once. Wide release had been attempted by the major studios several times prior to this point (even back to the 1940’s with Duel in the Sun), but it was usually regarded as the recourse of trashy exploitation films, not a major studio release like Jaws, a film whose concept was itself slightly “trashy” for its time, at least trashy in comparison to the films that usually made up a studio’s tent pole releases.

            While Jaws would establish the pattern, it would be Star Wars that marked a sea change in the way the film industry did business. Or rather it was the Kenner action figures released in tandem with the film that would mark its change. While tie-ins had always been a part of the film industry, in the years following Star Wars, this sort of synergetic universe building would take on a life of its own, with a film like Cars 2 existing almost as a way to advertise toys, rather than the toys existing as a way to advertise the movie. The monetary successes of the Star Wars merchandise machine would only encourage the film studios to follow suit, leading down an increasingly perilous path, where a film’s potential to produce merchandise now appears to be a studio’s preeminent consideration in producing it. Star Wars would also help usher in an era of sequels, with latter films in the series drawing people to theaters not because of their quality (which was, like the original, still quite prodigious) but because they offered a world that audiences were familiar with. The Godfather Part II helped dissolve the conventional wisdom that sequels must always be of an inferior quality, and Rocky II and Jaws 2 along with The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi proved that these sequels could be a massive source of profit in their own right. Instead of reaching out to discover a new world, audiences could now simply return to the comfort foods of their past.

            The studios would also look towards exploitation films for inspiration during this time Friday the 13^th, despite being shot in the style of typical Poverty Row thriller, was distributed by Paramount, who would earn a substantial profit on an investment of less than five million dollars. Other studios would once again follow suit, taking on the exploitation films that once existed outside of the traditional studio system and turning them into yet another corporate product. As this exploitation fare increased over the subsequent decades, studios began orienting their films more towards the teenagers who they saw as exploitation’s biggest audience. Films were infantilized, with the adult cast of Jaws eventually replaced by the teenage victims of the latest slasher film.¹ Where are the tent pole pictures that appealed to adults such as The Godfather or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? These kinds of films are long gone, and audiences are left to fend for themselves in a lobotomized and infantilized culture.

            What incentive that the studios did have to make prestige pictures began to dissipate even further in the wake of the 1996 Oscar Season where the boutique studios showed up the majors both in terms of critical and commercial success. After a string of failures this year, the majors would follow the lead of Disney, buying up the smaller boutique studios like USA Films (later Focus Features) and pushing their prestige products off onto them, failing to provide them with any of the resources that they needed to thrive. The year that was heralded as the rise of the Indies at the Oscars would end up being their undoing, as these smaller studios would increasingly take on films that they did not have the funds or knowhow to properly market and produce. It might have been possible in earlier times for the smaller studios to adjust their plans and budgets accordingly, but as long as the major conglomerates have their tentacles enmeshed within the film industry, it will be a slow and grueling march towards any sort of change.

            But despite all of this industrial history, isn’t the decline of the studio prestige picture simply giving people what they want? Prestige pictures have noticeably fallen off in popularity over the past decade, and while part of that could be because the boutique studios don’t know how to market them, it’s also clear that we are in a different time then the one where movies like Rain Man, Forrest Gump, and Saving Private Ryan were the number one films of their respective years. If you adjust for increases in the price of movie tickets and in the nation’s population, a film like The Color Purple did noticeably better than The Help, to pick just one comparable example. It is an accomplishment when a prestige picture can break 100 million dollars at the box office, but adjusting for current popularity levels, prestige pictures were once able to clear the 200 and 300 million marks with ease.

            The way that people go to the movies today has also changed what they choose to go see. In today’s ADD addled generation, young people lose track of movies after the opening week, and a movie’s box office in its opening weekend has become a greater and greater part of its overall gross. The Phantom Menace, a film that fits all of the stereotypes for a frontloaded release (incredibly hyped, part of a series, disappointing word of mouth) made only 15 percent of its total in its opening weekend, a number far lower than that of virtually any wide release film today. Amongst the releases of 2011, it is common for a film to make a third of its total on opening weekend, with anything under 25 percent being considered good. Compare that to the blockbusters of the past, which oftentimes made 10 percent or less during their openings. In such a frontloaded climate, it becomes even harder for films to rely on quality to succeed. If a film is to rely on word of mouth like it once did, it can improve on its opening numbers, but in a climate where a 50 percent drop off between the first and second week of a film’s release is commonplace, the studios don’t rely on quality, but instead rely on gimmicks and sequels to get people in theater seats immediately. Quality doesn’t attract an audience right away, and thus its use as a marketing tool has become quite passé.

            Youth culture today is fractured. While young people were once able to unite around the rebellious auteurs of New Hollywood, it is oftentimes difficult to get young people today to join together in anything. The Internet has been championed as a place of infinite community, but a side effect of our increasing interconnectivity is the desire for people to insulate themselves with those things that are familiar and comforting to them. People are extremely hesitant to venture outside of the cultural boundaries they have set up, and while society once forced cultural exposure on those who were more hesitant, it is now possible for people to increasingly live their lives ignorant of the world and culture around them. Marketing a non-franchise film in a society that only cares about what it already knows is more difficult, and one of the ironic culprits in this new packaging of culture is the “rebellious” youth who sees themselves as taking a stand against authority. People claim that they want independence from the establishment, but then don’t even bother to see films from outside the major studios, their need for superheroes overwhelming what they claim are their actual tastes.

            We have a crisis of taste in this country, brought on partly by industrial factors, but also brought on by the actions of the grass roots as well. The film going public should not simply get a pass for their role in dictating the films that get made. It is after all, their tastes that the studios are attempting to capture. There is, after all, no accounting for tastes, and there is little one can do (or perhaps should do) to change them. Each franchise that arises slices the pie smaller and smaller, and eventually films won’t simply fail to appeal to everyone, they will fail to appeal to anyone. The most that one can hope for is for matters to run their course and for the next generation of Americans (and global citizens for that matter) to emerge with something more than franchises on their minds. 

¹ Begg, Ken. "Jaws 2 Review." Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension http://www.jabootu.com/jaws2.htm -- This was the review that helped me make the connection between the adult leads of Jaws and the teenage leads of its many imitators.

Edited on 12/4/2013 to add a source.