The Puzzling Land of the Blockbuster : Why Do ‘Fatal’ Attractions and Flaccid Distractions Thrive?

Screenwriter William Goldman put it best in his book, “Adventures in the Screen Trade”: Nobody knows anything.

Goldman employed the phrase in his trenchant, half memoir, half history of a book every time some inexplicable Hollywood event occurred--especially when a film deemed D.O.A. by Those Who Should Know hit it big. Seminal examples of this are “Easy Rider” and “Bonnie and Clyde.”

Informed Wisdom didn’t realize that America’s rebellious spirit in the late ‘60s could embrace both a low-budget road movie and a violence-saturated film elegy to gangsters.

But what really set me to puzzling over why some plays and movies reach the Land of the Blockbuster and others don’t was a work just the opposite of “Bonnie and Clyde”: a truly retrograde play, “Daddy’s Dyin’ (Who’s Got The Will)” at the tiny Theatre/Theater in Hollywood.

What I saw was a standard, by-the-numbers family comedy that intermittently triggered a quick chuckle. But no more. Against the vast backdrop of hundreds of Equity Waiver productions in houses of 99 seats or fewer (last year, I saw nearly 150 of them) “Daddy’s Dyin”’ was indistinguishable from its competitors.

Indistinguishable, that is, except in box-office figures. The show has done so well (it just enjoyed the first anniversary of its Theatre/Theater engagement) that the producers can pay the cast a weekly salary. For the actors, that is Equity Waiver heaven.

More amazing than the fact that they’re getting paid is the fact that they’re getting paid for this show. Why such bland fare, informed by the values of commercial videotaped comedy and bereft of the catharsis unique to theater, continues to sell out ($12.50 to $15 a seat) remains a mystery to me. Any weekly visit to “Frank’s Place” on CBS ( not a hit) leaves a much more memorable aftertaste--and that visit is free.

Informed Wisdom says that audiences who attend Los Angeles’ better smaller theaters want adventurous, new stage experiences. They are the ones who made Steven Berkoff’s “Greek” a smash hit in 1982.

But the numbers on “Daddy’s Dyin’ ” send a direct message: so much for Informed Wisdom. Nobody knows anything.

More often than not, the big stage hits are the big shows, like “Evita” or “Cats.” These are the triumphs of deeply ingrained middle-brow taste, which may plague the theater more than the movies. “Cats” violated basic principles of dramaturgy with its plodding episodic structure and a sloppy second act. But with all those great costumes and John Napier’s set, audiences couldn’t have enough of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s dancing felines.

It makes sense that solid, entertaining musicals with large, embraceable characters and indelible songs should pack them in. Most of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s canon did that. The trashing of that tradition by “Cats” marked a conquest of effects over craft, as did the “Star Wars” series for the screenwriting art. The only explanation was that audiences had changed.

Still, it doesn’t make sense that a badly constructed thriller with pat devices and a predictable climax like “Fatal Attraction” should become a socioeconomic phenomenon. This is a seriously inept effort within the psycho-thriller genre; plots that resort to aimlessly inserted roller-coaster rides simply to get the heart pumping are manifest cheats.

People didn’t go to this movie to be thrilled, they went to see what all the talk was about. Otherwise, Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” would have gone through the roof. A year before “Fatal Attraction,” here was a movie with a straight-arrow guy (Jeff Daniels) getting in over his head with a dangerously attractive woman (Melanie Griffith), both butting heads with an even more dangerous psychopath (Ray Liotta). Liotta, like Glenn Close’s woman, is an unstoppable sexual beast without reason. He is also killed in a terrifying struggle in a bathroom. The suspense, such a shock from the film’s rollicking first half, terrified because it emerged out of the characters. By comparison, “Fatal Attraction” was, to my eyes, a flaccid distraction.

“Fatal Attraction’s” hit status only makes the quiet death of “Something Wild” a greater enigma. (Informed Wisdom says that timing was all: AIDS paranoia adorned “Fatal Attraction” with more horror than it really had.) The deafening death of last summer’s “Innerspace”--a pristine model of the kind of formula movie that has done so well in the Lucas-Spielberg era--might even rate an entry in an updated edition of Goldman’s book. (Informed Wisdom says it was done in by a poor ad campaign.) Maybe. Maybe not.

Beyond these mysteries, though, is a darker side: movies deliberately consigned to oblivion. For me, Bill Forsyth’s “Housekeeping” is a resounding masterpiece that explores the American mind as penetratingly as a Eudora Welty short story. Nevertheless, this David Puttnam-nurtured film was flung into the marketplace like shredded confetti by Columbia Pictures during the Christmas parade of films. The title meant nothing, the ad was all wrong, the trailer was banal. Precisely because Puttnam, the ex-chief of Columbia, took “Housekeeping” under his wing (and partially financed it himself), the movie represents everything he wanted to inject into Hollywood films. The studio’s disgraceful treatment of Forsyth’s personal but hardly inaccessible work, guaranteeing it a quick demise, is almost like firing Puttnam again.

“Housekeeping” could have been a “sleeper.” Instead, it’s being put to sleep.

Nobody knows anything.