THB# 598: The Meaning of The
I am not a big believer in the sky falling.
Every new thing that we like does not need to be the end of something we used to love.
But we are in a transitional moment that makes me more uncomfortable with my faith in the ongoing power of and ongoing string cultivation of institutions than I have seen in my adult life.
I often speak of my father, born in 1917, seeing the evolution of so many things, from the advent of individual phones in homes to direct dialing to commercial aviation to television to cable and the beginning of the computer revolution (he passed in 2017). My dad liked toys. He had a car phone when you had to call a ship-to-shore operator to make a call and the apparatus took up half of the trunk. We never went to 3/4” videotape route, but we had those early big screens and one of those 2 ft by 18” VCRs and cable back when it wasn’t 24 hours.
I’m often surprised to realize how much transition I have gone through in my nearly 60 years on earth. The computer and then the internet were the biggest. But I was conscious before cell phones, I remember when phone answering machines became a thing, and I grew up without access to many movies outside of a movie theater until I was a teenager, whether by VHS or cable. How I cherish the 3 double features a week at the Varsity movie theater in Evanston, IL, even as one was able to start renting movies on VHS at Blockbuster and mom & pops.
I have long defended the business of theatrical movies, in part because I remember going way out of my way to see movies in local theaters in Miami and then getting more access and then more… and now, huge libraries of movies, old and new, available on my 75” TV set with great sound at any hour of the day.
It’s not nostalgia. It’s perspective. When I was little, there were 3 broadcast networks and a few local channels in Baltimore and then Miami. The movies were the movies and TV was TV. And I have been around and interested through the entire transition from the mid-70s on.
I was not conscious of the classic movie studio system dying when it was dying in the 60s and early 70s. I checked into awareness of the business side of the business with VHS vs Betamax and the early years of that model as it grew in my local hardware store… which also sold TVs, early VHS and Beta, and the tape-playing machines.
I remember the then-new phenomenon of watching the same movie more than 5 times because it was “always” playing on HBO and being pissed off when the station shut down around 2am. I became a Yankees fan because in Miami, the city didn’t yet have a team and the Yankees were played more than any other team. And I was only a passing basketball or hockey fan because they weren’t on the TV much, except for the playoffs. I remember when FOX launched.
I have lived through the sitcom becoming the dominant kind of programming… and then it dying and hour-longs being everything… and back. Cop shows were dead… and came back. I remember when Saturday Night was The Night for TV… but at one time, it was Tuesday, and soon after, it would be Thursday. 10p was always the most important hour of network programming because it was the lead-in to local news. The weekday late night shows were the biggest profit makers for years. I remember when they pushed them to 11:35p to make it even better for local news and then expanded into the 12:35 and even the 1:35 slots. There are hundreds of examples of these changes.
And every time it has changed, the sky has fallen until it stopped and the public and the media could come to accept that the delivery systems may change, but the song remained the same… just with a wider circumference.
I still believe, with no question, that the power of content will remain relentless. The balance of older content and new content will constantly shift because it tastes change and change back and change again. But people want to be entertained. I don’t question the power of YouTube because it facilitates a kind of interaction that, literally, did not exist before they democratized streaming content by making publication free. It was a more revolutionary idea than Netflix and similarly impactful… because make no mistake, Netflix deserves its trophy in the cabinet as well.
Why is the Western genre nearly dead? Because historically, the audience that remembers that that time in history ever happened is aging out. It’s been 50 years since The Western was a major genre… which makes the audience that pines for them 50 years older. There are still great Westerns made now and again, but the period is - as it really always was - a tool for telling stories. Post-1900 technology is not in the way. Modern social beliefs are not in the way. Etc.
In a weird way, the success of the current comic book movies are another variation on Westerns… only the technology and range of characters is so expansive that, kinda like a Western, they all get cancel their importance out. The stories of good and evil are specifically different, but in so many ways, the same.
What, ultimately, is the difference between a horse chase into a canyon where good guys and bad guys can find advantage in the landscape and a WWI or WWII aerial dogfight movie or a strike team invading German-occupied territories in WWII with a mission or the rebel fleet trying to defeat The Empire and its latest Death Star or Thanos seeking world domination with the snap of his fingers and The Good Guys trying to stop him?
Yes… of course… a million details… but its all good guy/bad guy play.
Shakespeare gets redone hundreds of times… but there are thousands of dramatic portrayals pushing off of the core ideas of Shakespeare’s plays that never acknowledge the old guy (if it was him who wrote all or any of that). Those plays tap into many basic human truths. This is also, dare I say, true of the Bible and other religious texts that are, ultimately, about human behavior.
The only reasons we haven’t seen the end of WWII movies are, 1. that there are still people who claim the events of the jewish holocaust never happened, and 2. we haven’t had World War III, so there is no “next” for the movies and TV to move on to.
But what inspired me to write this piece in the first place was none of this, specifically. What inspired the piece was The Emmys, on TV tonight. And Venice/Telluride/Toronto which has now wrapped up for another year. And Sundance moving… the indie equivalent of having The New York Film Festival in New Jersey. And the Rotten Tomato-ization of Film Criticism.
Awards Shows and Festivals and Critics are part of an ecosystem - really, heavily the same ecosystem - than may actually be over as they have been known.
This ecosystem is very personal to me. I have cherished and been party to and made a living and enjoyed the experience of all 3 of these arenas.
But at the moment, I feel like all 3 parts of this culture in which I have lived for more than 25 years have wandered into a kind of irrelevance beyond any that we have experienced before.
It’s not that there aren’t awards worth giving or no great festival experiences to be had or a dearth of thoughtful, worthwhile film criticism going on every day. It’s that there is a loss of connectivity between these valuable endeavors and their purposes of long-standing.
It’s not a feeling that there is a loss of importance, in the way that endless number of wrong-headed media writers misunderstand the core value of theatrical movies. Their disappointment is layered in a weird inverted nostalgia that has been misguided for most if not all of their lives. Movies have not been the most dominant medium for the last 50 years… more, really. Perhaps the movies have been the thing that media could hang its hat on to find a return from the audience that was outsized, above television or music or internet characters, etc.
I find that we are all better at measuring self-importance than the “importance” of almost anything in our culture… but are less likely to embrace the truth of that.
Film Festivals had been, in a few cases, places for filmmakers to show their new films to the world and to get both commercial attention and critical attention in one fell swoop. Most film festivals, including some of the biggest, existed in local communities to bring films that were not terribly likely to appear in those communities without some non-traditionally-commercial effort being made for them to appear, serving that local audience. In the case of many films that had distribution plans, it was an opportunity to gather media attention and to offer a sampling in the market, leading to a full distribution of the (usually arthouse) films.
Cannes is one of those rare multipurpose festivals. It literally has a film market, though that market is not built for the films in competition in the festival or held in that level of esteem playing outside of competition. Traditionally, most European films come to play at Cannes or any festival with a lot of the distribution pieces in place because that is how they are funded before they get made. But still, there are many titles - more now than in the pre-2000 era - that come looking to fill out their distribution dance card, especially with American distribution. But also, more than pre-2000, more titles go to Cannes fully locked down with worldwide distribution or limited available markets to sell. There are a handful of titles that are “in the festival” that are in play and you read about all of those. And there are a lot more in the actual market, not shown to the public or press in their effort to get sales. On top of all that, it is an annual reunion… a convention for a segment of the industry. Deals and relationships will be ignited and continued.
We could have a long discussion about what has happened to Cannes over time. Industry realities have changed the event. Those who run the event have adjusted as they feel is best for the festival.
One thing that has protected Cannes from too many damaging changes is the lack of weight in the North American commercial and awards market. For Hollywood, it is a place to sell to the rest of the world. And even if you have or buy an “awards movie” at Cannes, the job of selling it to the primary market for Oscar, America, was and is a separate track. There’s nothing wrong with winning stuff or being bought at Cannes… but it is only a laurel on a golden string. For award season, it is just the very beginning of the pitch.
Toronto, on the other hand, was started as a direct reflection of Cannes and the world of festivals. Literally a Festival of Festivals, bringing the hot, new films to Toronto when most were unlikely to ever see the light of day in The Clean New York of Canada. A quarter (3 months) after Cannes, there would be films that would play at TIFF that had either been refused a berth at Cannes or were not ready in time. And there would be some business done. TIFF was also a good centralized spot for many films that were going to be released in North America in the last quarter of the year or before the next summer and they could earn the benefit of a gathered press. There was also a very specific lean into the Canadian film industry, those films highlighted in their own section for many years.
But then, Award Season infected TIFF, starting, really, with American Beauty in 1999. Terry Press of DreamWorks SKG used the festival as the launching pad for the film and a few months later, the film won Best Picture. 25 years later, we are still simmering in the pot of expectations started by that rather brilliant marketing choice… and I don’t mean the simmering part as a compliment.
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