---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 4 Aug 1994 14:30:31 -0500 From: Steven Mintz, U. Houston <[log in to unmask]> To: Multiple recipients of list H-FILM <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: Audience manipulation in recent film From: Julie Jenkins <[log in to unmask]> I have been following this exchange w/interest but it seems to me that people want to have the studio period both ways. All of the accomplishments that you laud from the 30s are the direct result of a factory system that produces a model for every taste. I don't think it's fair to praise the message & still beat the messenger. And I think the economics of the studio system can never be repeated too often. Of course, a clever script can be cobbled together fairly often, if a company can afford to keep on staff a stable of writers each w/their own fairly well defined fields of expertise. And a company can afford this stable if there is a locked in outlet for its product that guarantees a profit base sufficient to keep the machine rolling over, year after year. As long as there is a guaranteed source of income, everything else is possible. It is possible to keep everyone on contract, which makes tailoring possible. It was the production-distribution-exhibition combine that made everything else possible. And the most interesting aspect of today is that people are still trying to accomplish this. It's interesting but not coincidental that under Reagan production companies tried pushing the edge of the envelope-very quietly trying to buy theater chains, in a modest way, and waiting to see if anyone would object. And this vertical integration was the point behind the entire Paramount fracas as well as Sony etc. buying production facilities. The irony in Paramount was that in all the discussion of Viacom and egos etc. no one mentioned that Paramount was the original US company that showed everyone how it was done. Wherever Zukor is, he must have been in hysterics. When you ask where are the Lives of Emil Zola today, I think you're really talking about the star/genre nexus that was so carefully husbanded by the stu- dios because they could afford to. They could afford to keep Muni on payroll for just those prestiege, Oscar worthy "films" that made everyone seem serious & worthy, not picture makers. Because we still get bio pics, we call them GAndhi, or the Last Emperor and they win Oscars by the bushel basket. We just don't have a system that can keep Ben Kingsley on contract specializing in those roles. (It's interesting that he can play gangsters too, just like Muni. What do Gandhi & Meyer Lansky have in common?) But when a movie is made like a studio film, w/3 writers each doing his specialty it sometimes works, just like SOME old films worked and it's called Clear & Present Danger & everyone praises the script, the star/genre fit, the professionalism, the overall panache of a class A Hollywood product. Clear & Pres. Dang. also starts from solid middle brow popular literary sources just like so much of the "classic" studio product. The old family reading mag- gazines are gone--the Saturday Evening Posts, etc. so Hollywood turns to their late 20th cent. equivalent--pot boiling, door stopper reads and gets good movie movies from them. But Hollywood also tries to make movies out of real books that are unfilmable like Billy Bathgate. In the old days, wouldn't a studio dragon--Jack W. for instance, since Hoffman would have been at Warners--have said, no Dustin, there isn't a movie here, and you're definitely NOT Dutch? (But I don't mean to say that all real books are unfilmable--Age of Innocence was a SUCCESS in my minority opinion.)