COVER STORY : MOVIEMAKERS MOVIE CRITICS AND YOU : There are more people reviewing movies than ever before. But the big question is: Are they helping moviegoers make intelligent choices or helping studios sell movies?

If you have been reading movie reviews in newspapers and magazines the last few years, you are well aware the movies have gone to hell. The critics whose job it is to see 150-250 movies a year explain with painful regularity that a great percentage of the pictures coming out of Hollywood represent the shriveled imaginations and market-minded proficiencies of a generation of film school gnomes and moral pygmies.

Yet if you have read the box office figures, you also know that the movies are making more money than ever. Despite sharply rising costs and bookmaker’s odds, Hollywood seems to be setting new records each year when the studios tote up their loot.

Which suggests, if nothing else, that the relationship between America’s film critics and its moviegoing hordes, not to mention the people who make the movies, is quite possibly a distant one.

Take, for example, the sentiments of Mark Crispin Miller, an essayist on Hollywood for the Atlantic Monthly and the editor of a new anthology, “Seeing Through Movies.” Miller had this to say recently about the state of the cinema: “I wish somebody could convince me that the movies are not just about over. They’re so sensationalistic, they’re so empty, they’re so cruel, they’re so fast-paced. The only thing that convinces me I’ve been to the movies is that I’m sick to my stomach.”

But while many of our most eloquent film critics have reached similar states of alarm, the movies are being plugged, encapsulated, numbered and rated with increasing vehemence by a swelling chorus of less-exacting TV personalities whose thumbs-up/thumbs-down style has spread to the print media as well and moved Time Magazine critic Richard Corliss to ask in an essay in the journal Film Comment, “Is There a Future for Film Criticism?”

Indeed, almost no movie today is too dimwitted or dreadful that it cannot collect a few testimonials from someone somewhere whose idea of an opinion is to shout, “BREATHTAKING!,” “HEART-STOPPING!” or--a new favorite--”THE FEEL-GOOD MOVIE OF THE YEAR!”

The fact is, there are more people now engaged in various forms of critical commentary or puffery about the movies than at any time since D. W. Griffith passed his first winter in Southern California. The lure of fame and money are partly responsible, elevating mere journalists to the status of celebrities in cities and towns across the country and in television offering reviewers a chance to make as much money as the film folk they pass judgment on. Who would have thought it possible even 10 years ago that two Chicago newspapermen (Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert) would become millionaires chatting about the week’s new releases?

But the mere size of these armies of the noir and legions of the upraised thumb led by the totemic Siskel and Ebert may not be the truest indication of their rank and independence in Hollywood. Amid the soaring influence of marketing and the lowering of literacy, there are signs that serious criticism is losing its impact while the rest of what passes for criticism moves closer to becoming an adjunct of the studios’ publicity departments.

Is it possible that the influence of critics is declining as their numbers increase? Are their opinions felt at the box office? Do the directors, screenwriters, actors and other leading industry players read the critics or listen to them? Has a film student ever learned anything from Gary Franklin?

Paul Schrader, the screenwriter, director (“Taxi Driver,” “Cat People”) and former film critic, is one who believes that criticism has been minimized by the avalanche of “light journalism” devoted to movies in TV programs like “Entertainment Tonight” and the shelf full of new magazines led by Premiere that “focus on issues relating to gossip as opposed to issues regarding the caliber of films.”

If, in general, reviews count for so little, then why do movie companies continue to rely so heavily on quotes from critics in their advertising campaigns and in the process boost the reputations of the more prickly critics like Pauline Kael, David Denby and Stephen Schiff, as well as such otherwise insignificant blurb manufacturers as Joel Siegel, Rex Reed, Pat Collins, Gene Shalit and Michael Medved?

“They do it for the filmmakers,” a leading studio publicist says about quote ads. “A quote only means something (commercially) if it comes from Siskel & Ebert or one of the national TV critics like Joel Siegel who is beamed into hundreds of cities. But if a filmmaker gets a good review in The New Yorker, he wants everyone to know it. Part of it is just ego.”

Schrader and others make the case that the increased visibility of critics through television and advertising has simply become a way for the studios to co-opt and control critics. “What the studios and the conglomerates have done,” observes Schrader, “is to make a contract between the marketing departments and the audiences and to somehow get the critic out of the influence business.”

Critics--or at least their excerpted ecstasies and endorsements--still count at the box office, say the studio marketing executives responsible for gathering all those quotes packed into movie ads. But the impact of critics varies widely depending on the type of movie and the city in which it’s playing. Many of these executives say the influence of critics is limited to what seems to be the decreasing number of films made for adults since the bulk of the under-25 audience evidently does not read newspapers or magazines.

In June, The New Yorker’s Terrence Rafferty wrote about the Arnold Schwarzenegger film “Total Recall”: “ ‘Total Recall’ is so terrible that it wipes out the last, stubbornest images of the brief pleasure Schwarzenegger gave us when he played an automaton. We may even begin to believe that ‘The Terminator’ never really happened--that it was just some kind of brain implant, a trick designed to lure us, again and again, into a dark room where a giant will knock us senseless and take our money.”

Despite this and many other negative notices, “Total Recall” sold in excess of $115 million worth of tickets across the country by Labor Day. It was one of the summer’s major hits.

Other critic-proof successes of the summer proved to be “Bird on a Wire,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Another 48 HRS.” “Days of Thunder,” and the sequels “Young Guns II,” “Robocop 2,” “Die Hard 2” and “Back to the Future Part III.”

The more recent films “Problem Child” and “Exorcist III” managed to do big opening weekend business without the benefit (or detraction as the case might be) of advance reviews since critics were not allowed to see the films ahead of the general public. This policy of “hiding” movies from critics is not new, although a late summer string of such movies, including “My Blue Heaven,” “The Lemon Sisters” and “Shrimp on the Barbie,” spurred talk of a trend.

This practice, which generally signals a stinker to the critical fraternity, would seem to be an acknowledgment that critics do wield a certain clout. Gordon Armstrong, head of marketing at Morgan Creek, the independent studio that made “Young Guns II” and “Exorcist III,” explains his company’s reasoning: “We’ve created a situation where if we expect great reviews then we want to screen the picture far out in front; it gives us some excitement in the marketplace. On the other hand, if we feel a film is not going to be reviewed to our satisfaction, then we want to hide it.

“A lot of our pictures are (aimed at ages) 12 to 21. That’s the demographics. And the kids aren’t necessarily reading the newspapers. They’re not looking at the reviews. They’re going by what their friend has heard about the film or it has music in it or it has a hot star. That kind of stuff. The newspapers really aren’t valuable to us in that regard. But you want to play down anything negative on a film as much as you can before opening.”

In market-obsessed Hollywood, the increasing importance of the opening weekend’s box office returns is another reason to screen out critics when their judgment is feared. The percentage of money returned to a movie company from a theater owner is generally the highest on opening weekend, with the ratio declining afterward.

The marketing chief at another Hollywood studio who asked not to be identified points out that the rise of “the 2,000-print break,” meaning the opening of a picture on 2,000 screens at once, “tends to diminish the importance of the reviewer. You can make so much money or lose so much money in the first weekend that a review doesn’t have as extreme an effect on success or failure.”

Yet the executive acknowledged that critics nevertheless have power. “People are influenced by critics. I can tell you that I’ve seen pictures tested in the rough before the reviews come out and the audience reaction is negative. And then all of a sudden the reviews come out, and the reaction to the picture is positive.”

Says Armstrong, “The television critics are extremely important. Especially if it’s a positive review. The visual medium sells our product. Let’s face it, our audience is generally a young audience--it’s getting older--but it’s a young audience for the most part and they’re accustomed to television. They’re not accustomed to reading.

“ ‘Exorcist III,’ we chose not to review the film, and the opening was the biggest opening I think in our history. On the other hand, the film fell off quite quickly. But the point is, if we had had reviews up front, it might have killed some of that pre-opening excitement that we created in the marketplace. We just did what we felt was right.”

“We’ve never really been able to gauge the impact of a TV review,” says Bob Laemmle, the owner of the 16-screen Laemmle theater chain that shows many of the smaller, prestige films seen in Los Angeles, plus mainstream pictures. “Sometimes we don’t even know about it. Every once in a while a film gross has jumped in a way we can’t explain, and I’ve found out that there was a review on National Public Radio. They repeat their reviews several times. A one-time review (on TV) doesn’t seem to have the same impact.”

Some local TV critics, Laemmle notes, will mention a movie “six or seven times” in addition to their initial review, and that can make a difference. KABC-TV’s Gary Franklin, who gave us the infamous Franklin Scale of 1 to 10, mentioned the 1985 thriller “Runaway Train” repeatedly (and favorably) to measureable effect, Laemmle remembers. “I credit him with that movie taking off when the other reviews were not so good.”

“There are some movies that need a cachet that only critics can give them,” says Barry Lorry, executive vice president of marketing for MGM/UA. “Whenever you have a film that takes a little thinking about, the voice of the critic speaks very loudly.”

But sometimes not loud enough. Such critical favorites of the last few years as “Say Anything,” “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” “The Dead,” “Housekeeping,” “Salvador,” “River’s Edge,” “The Stepfather” and “Enemies, a Love Story” failed to catch the public fancy.

Yet Lorry echoes the prevailing wisdom that critical opinion is important to the smaller breed of “adult” films. Independently produced, mature-themed films like “My Left Foot,” “sex, lies & videotape,” “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” “High Hopes,” “Drugstore Cowboy” and “Babette’s Feast” are much more likely to rise or fall based on support or rejection by a few high-profile print critics. Indeed, it was largely an action by the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle in 1986 (voting Terry Gilliam’s offbeat comedy “Brazil” best film of the year) that prompted Universal Pictures to release “Brazil” to the public at all.

Back in 1980, the Robert Duvall film “The Great Santini” was deemed by Orion as unworthy of a theatrical release until critics began seeing it and writing favorably about it. Critical campaigning also helped launch the small films “The Stuntman” and “Diner.”

Critical support can be crucial to the success of foreign films as well, though by no means assuring it. Michael Sragow’s four-star review in the San Francisco Examiner of the 1986 British film “Dreamchild,” written by Dennis Potter, was thought to have been one reason “Dreamchild” was a hit in San Francisco while it failed to catch on elsewhere in the U.S.

A respected studio marketing executive says, “I don’t think ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ would have done anything without the glorious reviews it got. I don’t think ‘War of the Roses’ would have done as well as it did without those reviews. But if you’re talking about the typical Eddie Murphy picture, for the most part, they’re review proof.

“I know that across my desk at various points in my career I’ve seen stuff which tells you what the most important critics are. There are seven that tend to be important, and they are: Time magazine, Newsweek, New York Times, L.A. Times, ‘Siskel & Ebert,’ ‘Good Morning America’ and ‘The Today Show.’ One alone usually can’t do it, but you get four or five of those seven, you’re in pretty good shape--for a picture that’s a review-driven picture.

“When (The New York Times’) Vincent Canby likes a picture, you can see what happens on the East Side of New York immediately. You might not see it all over the country. I would say that (L.A. Times critics) Sheila Benson and Peter Rainer are not so important as Canby in New York. The New York Times, whether it’s in the theater or in the movies, has a lot more cachet than the critics out here. As I said, the L.A. Times review is one of the seven, but by far the New York Times review is much more important than the L.A. Times review. If you look in quote ads, a positive review in the New York Times usually gets close to top placement.”

But where small films are concerned, the L.A. Times is “the gorilla in the jungle” locally, says Bob Laemmle, a veteran of 30 years in the exhibition business. “The impact of reviews is almost inverse to the ad budget,” Laemmle says. “If a small film gets a negative review in the L.A. Times and a positive review in every other paper here, it still usually fails.”

At the same time, a positive review in the L.A. Times, such as the one Sheila Benson gave Denys Arcand’s “Jesus of Montreal” this summer can make a local hit of a movie that was overlooked or reviewed badly in other major media.

Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, who made “The Big Chill” and the recent “I Love You to Death,” offers his own perspective on this, saying not long ago that he thought many filmmakers considered the L.A. Times review the most important “because it’s your hometown paper. That’s the one your friends see. You can get 60 good reviews across the rest of the country, but if you get a bad review in The Times, your friends think your movie was a flop.”

The cheap celebrity offered to critics who can be counted on to be quotable is one of the changes in criticism since the 1960s, when Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were still in high school and movies were not something you heard about on the local news. As movie reviewers became television personalities and cultural town criers, those who cried loudest were rewarded by seeing their names splashed across coast-to-coast ads for movies, right underneath (or sometimes above) those of Nicholson, Streep, Pacino and Stallone.

It’s well-known that some oft-quoted critics are so chummy with studio marketing departments that they make a practice of offering approving reviews in advance of publication or broadcast in order to make their endorsements available for a film’s early publicity. At least one longtime Hollywood reviewer routinely calls up the studios and volunteers “box office” blurbs.

To people who take criticism seriously, as well as those in the general public unaware of the personal ties that sometimes bind certain critics to certain studios or filmmakers, this sort of behavior might border on the scandalous. Yet in Hollywood no one much gives it a second thought.

Peter Travers, the critic at Rolling Stone whose name is among those most often seen in Hollywood quote ads, says he has no personal contact with marketing people and doesn’t consider quote ads to be important anyway. “A quote is a generic thing,” he says. “I don’t think the public pays a lot of attention to it. I don’t think it’s interesting to read a list of adjectives. There’s no harm in (being quoted) if you like something, but it’s an advertising gesture.”

Is it possible the temptation to be quoted has shaped or shaded his sometimes boosterish opinions? Not so, says Travers. “When you’ve been doing it as long as I have, you don’t think about it.”

Nevertheless, the pressure to be blurbable, upbeat and hyperbolic in order to be influential is the trend Richard Corliss observed in his elegiac Film Comment essay mourning the disappearance of serious criticism of the sort practiced over the past half-century by James Agee, Andrew Sarris, Manny Farber and others. “Soon it may perish,” Corliss wrote, “to be replaced by a consumer service that is no brains and all thumbs.”

Not all critics agreed with Corliss, beginning with Roger Ebert, the only film critic ever awarded a Pulitzer Prize, of whom Corliss said, “ ‘Siskel & Ebert at the Movies’ is a sitcom starring two guys who live in a movie theater and argue all the time.”

Ebert responded in a subsequent issue that film criticism was, on the contrary, thriving (“there is more of it than ever before”) and that Corliss’ argument was undermined by his own decision to wedge his analytical mind into the air-tight columns of Time, “where the best way for a writer to get more space is to sell the editors on a cover story about a star.”

Michael Sragow, critic for the San Francisco Examiner and editor of a new collection of reviews from the National Society of Film Critics, “Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen,” says about Corliss’s lament, “I think it’s less the fault of movie critics themselves than it is tied in with everything else that’s happening in our culture. Which is away from literacy, away from extended comment and into flash and the 15-second soundbite.”

“At the risk of sounding wishy-washy or diplomatic, they’re both right in a certain sense,” says Terrence Rafferty, the lapsed fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the man who shares reviewing duties with Pauline Kael at The New Yorker. “Yes, I think that TV criticism has had a sort of negative influence. But I don’t think Siskel and Ebert have been so negative. I do think that the general level of daily film reviewing is as high as it’s ever been. I mean, there are a lot of not-very-good film critics writing for dailies and for magazines, but there are probably more truly informed and truly interested critics writing about movies now than perhaps there have ever been.

“It’s clear that the advertising and publicity and marketing of movies is spectacularly more sophisticated than it used to be. And the intention clearly is to get people into the theaters before they know if a movie is any good or not--either from critics or from their friends.”

“We live in a complete media culture now,” says Mark Crispin Miller, who heads the Media Studies program at Johns Hopkins University. “By which I mean the culture’s central concern seems to be media. Movies have become ubiquitous. We live in ‘Dick Tracy’ for two months; we lived in ‘Batman’ for months. You can’t escape it, it’s all around you. And it’s because we live in a culture of TV. Through TV, the season’s blockbusters become inescapable.”

In such a world, critics have their work cut out for them. “I think it’s an occupational hazard of movie reviewing,” says Miller, “that one’s standards slowly sink ever lower. I mean, if you watch a certain kind of movie day-in and day-out, week-in and week-out, I think you gradually come to lose your sense of what a movie can be and ought to be. I think that’s what’s happened to a lot of critics: they find things praiseworthy that they would have found unacceptable 10 years ago. I’m talking about a certain amount of narrative incoherence, a certain level of violence, an overreliance on profanity.”

Paul Schrader, who in the early ‘70s wrote about film for the L.A. Free Press and other publications as a self-described protege of Pauline Kael, believes, “Criticism really doesn’t have much weight at the moment. It doesn’t have a message either, which also hurts. When I first got involved in criticism, it was a very evangelical period--carry the message of Godard and all that. There doesn’t seem to be much of a gospel out there now.”

Instead, what Schrader sees in the expanded coverage of Hollywood in publications is a preoccupation with “tracking the careers of executives and pointing out who’s hot and who’s not. If those are the kind of values that are gradually built in, then it becomes harder and harder for people to publish good criticism and for films that are not immediately accessible to get any attention.”

Critics may be irrelevant to the success or failure or most movies being made today, but that doesn’t mean filmmakers don’t take notice of them, either as pests or handy suppliers of hype.

“We’re always bitching and moaning about critics,” says screenwriter Roger Simon, who wrote last year’s “Enemies, A Love Story,” computed by Premiere to be the best-reviewed movie of 1989. “But, you know, basically everybody wants a good review. Doesn’t every little boy want to be patted on the head?”

Dustin Hoffman walked the streets at night brooding about the reviews of “Ishtar.” Oscar-laden Oliver Stone and critical darling Spike Lee both fret about hostile critics and have been known to call them up to complain. Walter Matthau can recite verbatim a disputed sentence about him from a 1974 Pauline Kael review of his movie “The Laughing Policeman” (“His hair, like John Wayne’s autumnal crop, shrivels his stature”).

Is it also possible that some filmmakers see their work anew through the eyes of critics?

“I think that’s a rare thing,” says Roger Simon. “I think it’s dangerous for an artist to let himself be led by criticism of any sort. The minute you’re led by criticism, whether it’s intelligent of not, you’re not being led by your own feelings.”

“Do I let it affect my work? No, you can’t do that,” says Paul Brickman, director of the 1983 hit “Risky Business” that made Tom Cruise a star. “Unless you had nothing to say on your own, and you were just floating with the commercial winds or attempting to. But for anyone who who has anything real to offer, you’re always operating on your own standards. And you just hope that those standards find an audience.

“Unless something was confusing in a film which was totally misinterpreted by a number of people. You could learn from that.”

Brickman had the experience of watching “Risky Business” do booming business despite not-so-great reviews while his recent film “Men Don’t Leave,” starring Jessica Lange as a mother holding her husbandless family together, drew raves but failed to become a hit.

“I like serious criticism,” Brickman says. “I want to learn something. I want to see something I didn’t see before, to ascertain another point of view. Which can be a very strong point of view, albeit different from my own.”

Nicholas Meyer, the London-based writer and director who was nominated for an Oscar for “The Seven Percent Solution,” says, “The great ruck of them have no influence on me at all. But you have to make a distinction between reviewers and critics. The first group, which includes all these people on television, serve a pragmatic function of getting people out to see your movie. Or that’s what you hope. The second group, the ones whose response to movies is challenging and provocative, probably has no effect at all on the mass audience.

“But they serve a vanity function. To be well-understood by one of those people is extremely rewarding. To know that there is someone who got your message--even, I might add, if they didn’t like what you did. That’s better than being praised by idiots.”

“The truth of the matter is,” says a screenwriter, “that everybody in Hollywood who’s semi-serious or serious wants to get a good review from Pauline Kael. I don’t think it has any particular effect on the box office. It’s usually a little late, it’s not a huge audience, etc., etc. What makes her so well respected is that she writes beautifully. Her opinions are her opinions, but she’s fun to read.”

Kael’s prestige in Hollywood remains something of an enigma in light of the ruling box-office mentality and her own inconsequential stint in the 1970s working as a producer for Warren Beatty. Nevertheless, there’s no denying she has become the literary arbiter of our visual culture in the way that Edmund Wilson was once the grand don of American letters. It’s proof perhaps that the written word is still a force to be reckoned with, even in the city where Don Simpson and Dawn Steel are leading role models.

And Kael’s power extends beyond relatively small circulation of The New Yorker to the influence she is widely believed to exert over a fleet of younger critics now in high places, many of whom, according to legend, she either inspired or helped to acquire their jobs. These so-called Paulettes, identified by writer Philip Lopate in an article in New York Woman magazine last year, are said to include Michael Sragow, Peter Rainer, James Wolcott, Hal Hinson of the Washington Post, Gary Arnold of the Washington Times, David Edelstein of the New York Post, Elvis Mitchell of National Public Radio and David Denby of New York Magazine, among others. Whether or not Kael actually commands the like-mindedness of these critics, the fact that many people in Hollywood think she does is a sign of her aura.

Still, the limitations of her power, and by extension, that of film criticism itself, can be seen in the case of last year’s “Casualties of War,” the Brian DePalma-directed movie about Vietnam that Kael extolled, calling it “a life-changing experience.” Many of the Paulettes were equally rapturous in print and, according to an eyewitness, voted (in vain) in a bloc for the film as best movie of the year at the National Society of Film Critics meeting in New York. With the force of Kael behind it, “Casualties of War” was embossed with a sheen of critical acceptance much brighter than its actual record of reviews across the nation, but in any case the movie sagged at the box office and proved a major disappointment for Columbia.

“Casualties of War,” like all movies, ultimately depended on word of mouth, and even the massively financed studios cannot (at least not yet) control what people say to their friends about a movie they’ve seen.

By writing about what’s important to them, critics certainly play a role in shaping what people think they want or think they should want. But their influence is doubtless limited to people who think at all--not necessarily a requirement for getting a full reading of “Die Hard 2” or “Days of Thunder.”

“I think there’s a tendency,” says Paul Schrader, “for everyone to say that critics don’t matter. They do matter and they can matter, and our entire business is impoverished because we disregard their importance. You need that valuable push from critics. They are part of the creative life cycle of the community. And the studios are trying to devalue their currency, and they’re succeeding--by buying them out and turning them into stars. I mean, it’s Paramount that finances ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and Disney that finances ‘Siskel & Ebert.’ So they must see that as an adjunct of publicity. (These programs) are not there to make audiences think and want better films. They’re there to make audiences interested in what’s coming out on Friday.”