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July 8, 2004
The Big Ones Vs. The Last Typhoon
Also via GreenCine: two very different narratives about the state of things in the Hollywood film industry. In "The Last Typhoon," Bruce Feirstein (IMDB page) describes a Hollywood business that "isn't working anymore," and sees a "perfect storm" developing that will transform the entertainment business. A slightly different story emerges from Ed Halter's Village Voice article, "The Big Ones," which discusses the relationship between internet communities and film audiences.
Feirstein's narrative is relatively familiar: he points to the relative box office failure (we'll soon find out if I, Robot continues the trend) of some of this summer's biggest event films and the declining Nielsen Ratings of the major networks (and the subsequent reliance on cheap and easy reality television) as mere symptoms of larger technological and sociological changes that might produce major changes in entertainment as we know it. These changes include the proliferation of cable networks, the popularity of home entertainment systems, the rise of computer games, and the expense of movie tickets.
With so many entertainment choices now available, audience attention is splintered, and films that don't find an audience quickly are consigned to the dustbin of cinematic bombs, or at least quickly shuffled off to video where the studio can try to recover their investment. More crucially, other media, specifically computer games now challenge film, competing for valuable human attention, with games having the advantage of being more openly interactive, not to mention being more time-consuming. These changes set the stage for major changes in the way that Hollywood does business. Feirstein notes, for example, that Disney is already scaling back motion picture production and speculates as to whether or not advertisers will be willing to pony up bigger bucks for increasingly small audience attention on the major networks.
I think he's right that were going to see major changes in the entertainment industry in the near future and that it's difficult, if not impossible, to predict how those changes will look. I think we can see how some of these changes in human attention and moviegoing cultures are already being felt today, and Ed Halter's Village Voice piece addresses some of these changes, notably the role of fansites and Internet communities, ranging from Ain't It Cool News to MoveOn.org to fundamentalist Christian film sites, in creating audiences for certain films.
Specifically, Halter is interested in the F9/11 juggernaut, noting that it might be ushering in "a new category of high-concept Hollywood product: the activist blockbuster." Of course the success of F9/11 is the product of a number of factors, including the film's ability to give voice to increasing disgust with the Bush administration, particularly during an election year. Moore's own controversial star persona (note that Halter provides a great overview of past Moore promotional activities) also contributed to what the authors of Global Hollywood would call "the cultures of anticipation" that have built up around the film. Of course, Moore's film feeds back into these "cultures of anticipation," creating what might be called "cultures of reception," (I can't recall if the authors of GH use this term) represented in part by the MoveOn house parties on opening weekend, which were attended by an estimated 55,000 people and provided people with strategies for defeating Bush in 2004, including voter registration drives.
I'm not sure I'll be able to weave these two narratives together as neatly as I would have liked, but I think that the popularity of Moore's film (whether you agree with him or not) illustrates one possible alternative in the crowded media landscape. While I'm aware that Moore's unprecedented popularity cannot be duplicated, I imagine we'll continue to see a renaissance of documentary films for some time. Now that an audience, or a culture of anticipation, has been created through the convergence of online communities and successful films, I think the tatse for these kinds of narratives will continue to develop. Most documentaries have the added benefit of being cheap to produce, comparatively speaking. And while the urgency of this year's presidential election has been noted many times, I think the resistance to Bush may be an outgrowth of a political community that was developing even before he was "elected" the first time.
In short, I think we'll see an increasing convergence between film and media event, between politics and entertainment (or vice versa), between the anticipation for a film and its reception. I hadn't planned on taking these idaes quite this far, and they still feel incomplete. I've become a little less comfortable lately with viewing my blog as a place where I can write first drafts of incomplete ideas, but this entry feels more like a starting point than anything resembling a conclusion or a complete, resolved idea or concept. Perhaps it feels too big for a single blog entry....
Posted by chuck at July 8, 2004 1:41 AM
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