WHY THE MOVIES MOSTLY SUCK NOWADAYS

Since we’re now on the Holiday News Cycle, I’ll offer you something besides Current Events.

The other week, an old friend, a fellow veteran of the Wars in Okeefenokee West, and I were talking about our former lives in Duh Bizniss (I use “lives” not “jobs” because it was work you lived because you couldn’t live any other way - Francis Ford Coppola once said that no matter how much you got paid, you earned every penny at minimum wage, and he was right.)

Two years ago, Martin Scorsese wrote in the New York Times: “In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.”

Scorsese is right. And he’s absolutely right on the timescale of the change - the past 20 years. The movies didn’t mostly suck 20 years ago; in fact, back in the day, I used to go to the movies every Friday night, just to see what was being released, because there was ALWAYS a movie in its opening weekend that was going to end with me walking out of the theater thinking to myself, “Hmmmm.... you can do that....”

Since around the turn of the century, if I see three movies in a theater in a year, that’s a lot - there’s years where I don’t see any. For starters, I can’t stand being with what passes for an audience nowadays. I was once so irritated by a female real estate agent who couldn’t keep from answering her phone whenever it rang and talking in a conversational tone of voice - ruining the movie for everyone else in the theater while defining her sense of “Karen” entitlement - that I finally looked around, saw where she was, and then went up and sat in the row behind her. When the phone rang the next time, I grabbed it out of her hand and threw it. The rest of the audience applauded. The theater manager threw her out when she went to make her Karen Complaint. If it isn’t the droolers sitting near me in the darkness, it’s all the damn ads. Seating in a modern theater may be far, far better than those uncomfortable theater seats from back in the day, but the overall experience just sucks.

But you can put up with anything if what you’re going to see is Worth It. I had no problem putting up with a movie theater to see the last three movies I saw in theaters before the pandemic came: “Dunkirk,” “Bladerunner 2049,” and “1917.” In fact, I will tell you that once you saw each of those in a theater, it’s impossible to watch them on a home screen. Believe me. I tried. Some movies should be labeled “Theaters Only.”

There used to be a lot of those. But not anymore.

As it turns out, my movie career was spent living through the times and events that led directly to the situation we find ourselves, in which The Movies Mostly Suck Nowadays.

It very definitely wasn’t always that way. Oh, it was never easy. I was fortunate to arrive here in time to meet and become friends with some of the people from The Golden Age whose work I had grown up in awe of, sitting there in the darkness in the old Park Theater on South Gaylord Street in the Washington Park neighborhood of Denver, Colorado, never thinking for an instant that I would ever meet any of those magicians and sorcerers, let alone that they’d tell me I was one of them and welcome me. Watching all those movies every Saturday afternoon from age 8 when mom decided I could walk the four blocks to the theater on my own safely, and in the process figuring out the meaning of the words “good” and “bad,” and then being privileged to listen to their war stories about how they slogged through to create that Thing I Couldn’t Forget was my “film school.” Orson Welles might have been a caricature of himself by the time I came along, keeping the lights on and the bills paid by telling the world he would sell no wine before its time, but he was still Orson Fucking Welles, and listening to him tell how the 12 minute tracking shot at the beginning of “Touch of Evil” was his “fuck you!” to Harry Cohn was an education about more than film. Having Billy Wilder decide I was intelligent enough to understand his stories and being invited to a series of lunches to listen (I was probably the only person he knew who hadn’t heard them all 100 times) to one of the world’s truly great raconteurs was a Doctorate in how to live life on your own terms.

When I got here 40 years ago last May, that world wasn’t dead. The Threat was out there on the horizon, a distant storm cloud that might not blow this way, but at that point “Jaws” and “Star Wars” (the first one) were still almost flukes, standing out from everything else by their singularity of popularity.

It was still possible then, once you beat the 10,000:1 odds and got in the Writer’s Guild (someone once guessed back then that 50,000 people showed up every year in Los Angeles wanting to be screenwriters, while the Guild took about 50 new members a year, for having been hired to write a screenplay by a Guild-signatory company), to have a nice life (although a secretary at the Guild offices once told me she was amazed to find out how relatively simply most writers lived) in a good neighborhood. Writers lived “south of the boulevard” (i.e., in the hilly neighborhoods south of Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley) and if they were married, they could send their offspring to good schools. They even had good health care through a plan people called “platinum.” And they didn’t have to actually have many movies made from their work. In fact, most of them didn’t. “Development Hell” is a place many younger writers now wish they could live in, when I wax nostalgic about the Good Old Days.

However, I joined the Guild the year they killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. That was the year of the Great Writer’s Strike of 1988. The union let things go too long, but they weren’t wrong when guys like Jeffrey Katzenberg were talking in all seriousness about “killing the damn union.” But things went so long that the studios went and looked in their script files for completed work they could make something from, and they made the amazing discovery that Most Of This Stuff Is Crap. Hell, the people who wrote the crap could have told them that!

Once the strike was over, and guys like me had missed that Main Shot that was in negotiation just before the event happened, when the project was canceled, the Age of the Spec Script arrived, aka The Writer’s Lottery. Where before one could pitch their idea to a Development Executive, and if said executive was sufficiently wowed, be PAID to take the time and sit down and write it, now one was expected to sit down and write the whole thing, then have the thing auctioned for Great Big Bucks by their agent. How one kept the DWP bill paid to keep the electricity coming in to that brand new computer thingy on their desk was up to them in the meantime.

And, like all lotteries, many played and few got payoffs.

The result of that was that it now took money to make money, which it hadn’t before. Writers with other sources of income were better able to take the time to write their screenplay and play the game.

It didn’t used to be that way.

When I first got here, one of the things I did to pay the bills (when I wasn’t photographing wannabe rock stars) was doing interviews with people in the business for movie magazines. A regular was Starlog Magazine. Steven Spielberg might not spend 30 seconds talking to Tom Who?, but he would gladly spend an hour talking to Tom Cleaver From Starlog (particularly since I am a good interviewer). It was a good way to educate myself about my chosen field of endeavor.

Back in 1984, that very good actor (and friend) Lance Henriksen was making a movie with a guy doing his first movie not made for Roger Corman, “The Terminator.” I got introduced to that force of nature James Cameron, and eventually I did a long interview with him while he was in post-production. (One of these days, I’ll tell you the story of why, when you get to the end of the credits for any Terminator movie, you see “The Producers Wish to Recognize The Work Of Harlan Ellison,” since I am the only one still living who didn’t sign a lifetime NDA who knows the tale.)

He told me about being a kid who was “weird,” who grew up in the bustling metropolis of York, Ontario, who read science-fiction and watched anything science-fiction he could find, who finally came to Hollywood where Roger Corman let him play with his toys as he had and get paid (not a lot) to do the special effects on “Battle Beyond The Stars.” He had lots of good things to say about Roger, who let him do “whatever I could come up with that didn’t cost much.” And then Roger hired him to write “Piranha II: The Spawning,” and in the meantime people were impressed enough by “Battle Beyond the Stars” that he got hired to work effects magic on “Escape From New York.” With that resume, and a partner whose acquaintance he had made when she was working as Roger’s administrative assistant, Hendale Films hired him to direct the screenplay he’d submitted to them - “The Terminator.” The rest, as they say, is history. (BTW - the first one, which most people still consider the best, was made for less than he got paid to direct the second one)

He made an important point in that interview: “If I hadn’t gotten to work for Roger, I’d never have gotten anywhere. I didn’t have any money, and I needed to get paid for what I did.” He concluded, as he has in other interviews, with the statement “I studied at the Roger Corman Film School.”

So did many others of note. And they all got paid. Not much. But they all got paid. And it kept them alive till they got that shot that sent them off to become that Person of Note.

The next year, I obtained admission to the school. I had written the screenplay that would later be called “The best unproduced Vietnam script in Hollywood” in a famous movie magazine, and it got me an agent, and I got to know some of the other writers at the shop. And one of them called me up one day and told me there were two friends of his who wanted to make a Vietnam movie, and they’d asked him if he’d do it, “But I can’t, now that I’m in the Guild, so I gave them a copy of your script and they’d like to talk to you.” The result was “Saigon Commandos” which - amazingly - still gets good reviews from viewers as I discovered when Amazon decided to list it as one the TC things you can buy there. (I just discovered this afternoon that all these movies are now owned by a company in Communist China, so if there was any part of them that was ever mine, that’s not true now.)

It was enough money to move out of the friend’s garage I was living in.

And then, six months later, after it had been finished, I got a call one day from a guy who announced he was calling for Roger Corman and could I take the call? Well. Yes. I could. And thus I met the great man himself. He told me that script was “the best thing that’s come through here this year,” and asked if I could come over for a meeting because he had an idea he thought I might be interested in.

And thus my movie career began.

Concorde-New Horizons, Roger’s company, is over on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood, across from the VA hospital. Back then, when you drove in to park in the garage (since parking on the street was mostly impossible) you noticed that nearly all the cars jammed in there were clunkers. Like yours. Upstairs in the offices, people used to joke about whether or not their car would get them home that night. Everybody was getting paid. Not a lot. But if you kept your wits about you and did good on this job, you could do the next job, and you could get a certain momentum going that could sustain you until you got that Ticket Outta Here that most everyone eventually got.

Nobody had any money. They didn’t have an alternative income source. However, “interesting ideas” were thick on the ground. It was a very interesting place to be.

A year later I wrote “The Terror Within,” and it got noticed (It’s one of the movies that gets listed on Roger’s Wikipedia page) and shortly after I went from the Best Experience Writing A Movie to the worst (the lesson of which was, no amount of money can buy talent), I was able to move on to Doing Other Things.

After several good years, I was in a traffic accident that left me unable to write for long enough that the money ran out and people forgot me, and when I went back I found I had become Too Old To Work (in my 40s). But I had to work. So I went back to Roger, and he hired me to do “development” working with The Legendary Frances Doel. And that was when I discovered the Big Change that had happened in Hollywood.

The cars in the garage downstairs were no longer clunkers. They were nice BMW 323s, Mercedes 190s, Volvos. Not cheap.

And none of the kids upstairs were getting paid. They were “interns.” Lots of film school grads. But the one thing they weren’t was impressive. Back before, you generally weren’t surprised about who made it out - they were sharp, sources of good ideas. They had a certain “presence” you learned to recognize.

After talking to several of them, I asked Frances, “Which one’s the next James Cameron?” She laughed and said “Beats me.”

I can’t remember any of their names, but don’t worry, you wouldn’t recognize them either. The Roger Corman Film School wasn’t producing many graduates. Most of the stuff Roger did during the 90s was with people like me - people who had come back for awhile, for whatever reason.

And I found out about the interns: they were all graduates of top schools, and they were living on either allowances from Mom and Dad, or trust funds from Granddad. Or from Mom and Dad.

The only thing they knew were the old TV shows they’d grown up on, movies they’d seen, and whatever it was they’d learned to parrot back to the “fillum skool perfessers.” (I’ve never met one of those people who was impressive - outside of some of the old Golden Age People; if you’re any kind of good at what you do in the business, you make too much money to throw it away to teach. I have yet to meet a Film School Professor who is a serious talent.)

The people I’d worked with there before all had lives before they got there. They had experiences to draw on. “Writers write what they know,” and if all you know is old TV shows and lectures from Second Raters, that’s what you’ll write.

I soon realized this phenomenon was not limited to Roger’s office. These kids were everywhere in Hollywood, which had become “cool” with the Ivy League while I was off in my little house in the hills with my nose buried in a computer screen.

This change was coupled with a more significant change I had been aware of. Sony’s purchase of MGM back in 1990 had signaled the arrival of that little dark cloud that had been out on the horizon. Within a matter of a few years, all the major studios changed from stand-alone companies to minor arms of intergalactic widget-makers.

You need to understand Hollywood has ALWAYS been about making money. As Arnold Schwarzenegger once observed to me, “You have to remember that Show Business is two words. And if you don’t do the second one, they won’t let you do the first one.” Very true. But until this revolution that began with Sony’s purchase of MGM, everyone in the business knew - whether they liked it or not - that William Goldman was right when he said that the Three Rules of Hollywood are Nobody. Knows. Anything. He didn’t mean people in Hollywood weren’t smart; hell, many of them are some of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. What he meant was, nobody knew what would go on to be a hit. It was all a crapshoot, and nobody knew the outcome until the Monday after opening weekend, when the box office receipts were added up. Trust me, the biggest hit I was ever involved with started out as a Little Nothing in the eyes of everyone involved, and the greatest disaster I was ever involved with was seen by everyone who read the screenplay or kept track of the casting as their Ticket To Ride. So much for knowing what a hit is.

But the intergalactic widgetmakers did not want to hear that Nobody. Knows. Anything. They wanted to know there would be a dependable ten percent ROI. Every time. And if the movies wouldn’t do that, there were other widgets to invest in. The intergalactic widgetmakers knew that you can sell dog kibble, and call it steak, and if you keep people from ever eating actual steak, people will come to believe that dog kibble is in fact steak. Or, as Scorsese put it: “...if you’re going to tell me that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand and giving the people what they want, I’m going to disagree. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.”

The intergalactic widgetmakers took a look at “Jaws” and “Star Trek” and said “Give us more of that.” And the former interns who had moved up the food chain to become Studio Executives - who saw that as a life’s career, unlike most studio executives BITD who saw themselves as film-producers-in-waiting - came from that class that knows to Give The Boss What He Wants.

I loved the first Star Wars movie. It was everything I’d always known a good space opera could be if it was done right. I’ve watched it 42 times, and there’s a good likelihood I would watch it again if it came on. I watched “Empire Strikes Back” twice. I watched “Return of the Jedi” once. I walked out of “The Phantom Menace” and got my money back, and I didn’t watch the next two. I watched “The Force Awakens” all the way through, and then walked out and asked myself, “What was the reason anything that happened in that movie happened?” And there wasn’t an answer. And then I walked out of “The Last Jedi” because I was afraid my brain would melt from all the Stupid coming off the screen. Needless to say, I didn’t go see the last one.

The first one was actually About Something. Lots of people put down “Roger Corman movies,” but I will tell you that every single movie Roger ever made was “about something.” If the screenplay you wrote for him didn’t have that “something more” in it, whatever the subject, whatever the genre, that was a good way to be shown to The Egress. “The Terror Within” got a serious review from a serious reviewer who remarked on “the underlying pro-choice message of the film.” I plead guilty that I wasn’t even thinking of that at the time I was writing, but when I read that, I thought “Yeah, that’s how I think.”

Being a writer who doesn’t like to reinvent the wheel, I’ll allow Mr. Scorsese to make the essential point:

“The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other.

“For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.”

The last time I saw Roger was at his birthday party in 2011. The Greatest Actor Of His Generation showed up for the celebration, since Roger gave him his start. We got into a conversation at the bar, about the business, and he opined “I wouldn’t know how to break into this place, today.”

“Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.”

And that is Why The Movies Mostly Suck Nowadays.

Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!

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