2 ms·

I don’t know if hollywood has ever been anything else. I watched a documentary recently on the action movies of the 80s and 90s [1]. The part that was eye openi

by cm2187 5y ago

I don’t know if hollywood has ever been anything else. I watched a documentary recently on the action movies of the 80s and 90s [1]. The part that was eye opening was the interview of Mario Kassar, who produced some of my favorite movies as a teenager in the 90s: Rambo, Total Recall, T2, Basic Instinct, etc. He talks about what he puts in his films literally like a farmer talks about grain for his pigs. It has always been primarily a business targeting the lowest possible common denominator of the largest possible audience. And as the developed world expanded, that denominator shrank. Hence everything Marvel now. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8840400/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8840400/

DanielBMarkham 5y ago
This is the best rebuttal to my thesis. Thanks. There is a tension between art and commercial art. Beethoven should have never written that battle symphony. When done well, I think you can get both. Start with the story and then weave in the commercial aspects. Or start with the story and only choose to finance movies that have both art and commercial value. What you can't do is start with the commercial side and then try to hammer in a good story. There have been a few masters that managed to pull that off, but it's rare. Add in committee-management instead of having an artist's eye and it becomes total crap. It's in nobody's interest to only have arthouse flicks that nobody watches. Happily it's not an either-or decision. Good drama will draw in the commercial part than can then be exploited. Everybody's happy. What I'm seeing now is that majority of films start with a locked-in fanbase and then try to do their best at creating an n+1 episode. That's how they're getting around the quality problem: they make it moot. They know the locked-in fanbase is coming no matter what they produce, and if it's a real stinker? Well hell, all of the press and arguing about how bad it is will just drive up interest for n+2. Not only is that not trying to mix a good story in with a commercial line, that's putting the story quality pretty far down the list. It's noticeable. ADD: I'd say that in the heyday of arthouse flicks, say 65-80, you had the peak of movies that covered both bases well. Nobody's doing another Midnight Cowboy.

by cm2187 5y ago

DanielBMarkham 5y ago

This is the best rebuttal to my thesis. Thanks. There is a tension between art and commercial art. Beethoven should have never written that battle symphony. When done well, I think you can get both. Start with the story and then weave in the commercial aspects. Or start with the story and only choose to finance movies that have both art and commercial value. What you can't do is start with the commercial side and then try to hammer in a good story. There have been a few masters that managed to pull that off, but it's rare. Add in committee-management instead of having an artist's eye and it becomes total crap. It's in nobody's interest to only have arthouse flicks that nobody watches. Happily it's not an either-or decision. Good drama will draw in the commercial part than can then be exploited. Everybody's happy. What I'm seeing now is that majority of films start with a locked-in fanbase and then try to do their best at creating an n+1 episode. That's how they're getting around the quality problem: they make it moot. They know the locked-in fanbase is coming no matter what they produce, and if it's a real stinker? Well hell, all of the press and arguing about how bad it is will just drive up interest for n+2. Not only is that not trying to mix a good story in with a commercial line, that's putting the story quality pretty far down the list. It's noticeable. ADD: I'd say that in the heyday of arthouse flicks, say 65-80, you had the peak of movies that covered both bases well. Nobody's doing another Midnight Cowboy.