A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : FILM COMMENT : No Mystery: Four <i> Real</i> Reasons Moviegoing Is Off

At the end of a recent New York magazine article analyzing the slump in the movie division at Walt Disney Studios, a former Disney executive is quoted as saying, “I honestly believe the Movie God flies around this town and settles down at a commissary for a couple of years and then flies on. That’s part of what keeps people going in this business--the magical and mysterious nature of it.”

The suggestion from a major studio executive that the fate of Hollywood hangs on the whims of a fickle Movie God has much to offer those of us who believe the movie world could be a better place, and who fear that the people running the studios really do operate on a wing and a prayer.

First of all, there is the assumption that the Movie God is more interested in box-office grosses and market shares than in the quality of movies themselves.

And you cannot blame anyone with a career in Hollywood for feeling blessed. The salaries of studio executives is on a par with those of Third World dictators and actors with more teeth than talent.

But given the quality of most Hollywood movies these days, and the audience apathy evident, studio executives would do well to quit looking up to see if the Movie God is on his way and start listening to moviegoers. If they went to theaters, they’d learn why their grip on their audience has weakened:

* Ticket prices. Since 1980, the average cost of admission to a first-run movie has gone from $2.69 to about $5 (add $2.50 if you are a resident of L.A. or New York). With concession prices also doubling, and with the recession crimping budgets, “a night at the movies” is no longer considered an entertainment bargain.

* Too much supply, not enough demand. Working on the spurious assumption that having more movies in the market means a larger market share, many distributors are over-committing themselves. Actual film production has continued to go up, even while ticket sales have been going down. The resulting glut means that even a good movie, should one slip through, can get lost in the crowd.

* Lack of diversity. A few years ago, the studios made movies mostly for kids; today, they’re making them mostly for older (age 25+) adults. The big losers at Disney this year were “The Marrying Man” and “V. I. Warshawski,” while its biggest success was the reissued “101 Dalmatians.” A good movie will usually do well regardless of its target audience, but when Hollywood narrows its target to one group, the returns are necessarily limited.

* Weak stories. For all the talk of getting back to basic storytelling, for all the reports of bidding wars over “hot” scripts, most major studio releases are pretty routine and often downright exhausted. We need more movies like “Dead Again,” a genre movie told from a fresh perspective with lively acting, and fewer like “Deceived,” a genre movie laced with cliches and made only as a star showcase.

Hollywood got to this point for a lot of well-discussed reasons: the rise of the power agents, who dictate not only exorbitant star, writer and director salaries but entire creative packages; the over-reliance on audience demographics and marketing; the fact that most production executives and many filmmakers are TV babies, working from a literary vacuum.

Whether the major studios can reclaim creative control from the dealmakers, whether they can stop talking about the importance of good stories and go find some, will determine how long the box-office slump will last. In the meantime, they’d better not count on divine intervention. If there is a Movie God hovering over Hollywood, he is--as Woody Allen might put it--an underachiever.