CONT'D: Talking Pictures | Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Where did this amazing year come from?

I started the Slate dialogue by saying that I began reviewing movies in the mid-eighties, and I think we'll look back on that as the most depressing time for cinema in history, at least in America. It was an awful convergence of events. In Reagan's America, you couldn't do a movie that didn't have a happy ending anymore. Rocky became a template. Or, more specifically, Rocky II and Rocky III, in which Rocky clobbered the other guy. Suddenly everybody had to win.

Let's go back further: The two movies that changed cinema in my lifetime were Jaws and Star Wars. Before that studios wanted hits but weren't always shooting for blockbusters. Jaws was first summer blockbuster-it raked in hundreds of millions. Stars Wars came two years later and had merchandising attached. The idea of the "franchise" was born. And as the old studios were taken over by entertainment conglomerates with their eye on the bottom line, we started to see marketing divisions becoming umbilically attached to development offices. For the first time, movies were actually coming from the marketing departments.

In the '80s a studio commissioned a very expensive study to see what sort of genre made the most money. This way, they could try and make only those movies. It turned out that one type of movie did make more money-sequels. So studios didn't just want to make movies, they wanted to start franchises.

The mid '80s were also a time when studios were making teenpix by the bucket. John Hughes was the best of them and I mostly couldn't stand John Hughes. There was Mischief and Weird Science, and Real Genius and Real Weird Science...to see them one after another week after week was so depressing There was no indie film movement. There was the barest trickle. I remember in '84, '85, when the first self-financed gay independent film, Parting Glances, came out. It was like, What's this? There was no system in place because nobody had ever done it before.

In the 60s there was Shirley Clarke and the early on-the-fly John Cassavetes movies but Sundance hadn't really been born and the movies that I loved, the ones I thought stood out, were considered freaks. Blue Velvet was a watershed movie, and it was only was made because Dino DeLaurentis was so desperate to get David Lynch to adapt Dune and make him a Star Wars type movie that he financed it.

What's happened since the 1980s that's changed all of this?
I think that the independent film movement has really transformed moviemaking as we know it. The lines have become blurred between an indie movie and a big studio movie in a way that is very exciting and very healthy. Major studios are not developing these movies on site. People like Michael Stipe and Sandy Stern with Single Cell productions spearheaded Being John Malkovich. MTV Films took Alexander Payne's Election to Paramount.

The studios are starting to recognize that as long as it doesn't cost them that much money-and none of these movies relatively speaking cost them that much money-there's really an opportunity to capture a younger, hipper, audience, which is the name of the game these days. And the younger, hipper, audience is more cinema literate now.

I think also, as we said on Slate, digital editing has had a lot to do with these changes. Virtually no movie nowadays with any size budget is edited the way it was even ten years ago. Somebody who slept for ten years and walked into an editing room would no longer recognize it. You transfer everything onto video and then edit on video and then transfer back onto celluloid. You have extraordinary freedom in the editing room. You don't have to cut and paste every little strip of film any more. You can try a scene literally a hundred different ways, changing it by the millisecond each time.

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