X, ‘Bites’ and Hollywood

Regarding “When ‘X’ Doesn’t Mark the Spot,” by Patrick Goldstein (April 24):

After reading your article, I was reaffirmed in my beliefs about Hollywood’s inept idea of what we so-called X-ers are and believe in. So, Hollywood, this is who I am.

I’m a 23-year-old junior at Cal State Northridge. My major is radio/TV/film. I’m a Republican who voted for Bush twice. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, the Constitution and Little League baseball. I believe Lincoln was our greatest President, and people are born good. I believe that power can corrupt and that corporate America doesn’t give enough back. I also believe in the power of the volunteer, and that one man or woman can make a difference. I don’t care what’s politically correct or who wore what at the Oscars.

I listen to “alternative music” as well as classic rock. I choose death before disco and hate “The Brady Bunch.” I watch “Sports-center,” “Seinfeld” and “Jon Stewart.” I prefer the ‘80s to the ‘70s. I drive a beat-up VW. I’m a member of the Surfrider Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund. I feel all hippies grew up to be planet-destroying yuppies who only look out for themselves. I prefer Tim Burton, Harrison Ford and Dennis Hopper over Tom Cruise and Madonna.

Hollywood, this is me, and for everyone like me there are 20 who aren’t. If you think a simple marketing plan will bring all of us in, you’re as wrong as we are different. Instead of trying to find this generation’s “Graduate” or “American Graffiti,” just make a film that is realistic and doesn’t insult us with overgeneralizations.

RYAN J. GOODMAN

Northridge

Simple question: Why don’t Generation X-ers see Generation X movies? Simple answer: Hollywood insults our intelligence.

Is it too much to ask for an interesting, maybe even stimulating, film about us, about anyone? One can’t expect the impossible. One can’t expect Hollywood to remove its slick, glamorized, commercialized gold lenses and create original, insightful, imaginative work. One can’t expect Hollywood to prize art before the dollar. Keep dreaming. We want art, but Hollywood doesn’t make art; art isn’t a lucrative industry.

We don’t see Hollywood’s stupid films, because we know they’re stupid. Hollywood has disappointed us too many times with the painfully embarrassing and formulaic crap they call movies. Of course there are exceptions, but good films are rare, bad ones are ubiquitous. Ditto for television and its programs.

If a movie features Johnny Depp, Christian Slater or Winona Ryder, regardless of its content, it’s a “Generation X” flick. If we cannot escape this label, let’s at least define it responsibly. Hollywood treats us like a gimmick. Is it so mysterious, then, that we refuse to see its garbage?

If the studios want our money, give us quality. It makes no difference whether a movie is about Generation X, geriatrics, Germans or Gumby. A great film’s themes transcend its particular subject and story line.

SHERRY WALSH

Sherman Oaks

There’s a no mystery to why Generation X movies aren’t selling. This is a generation on hard times in a way that mirrors the Great Depression.

Today we remember the important “social commentary” pictures of that era, but by and large they were not popular successes, because then as now, troubled audiences crave not a rehashing of their problems but an escape from them--whether in the guise of “Gunga Din” or “The Fugitive.” Perhaps the purveyors of Generation X Angst should run Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels” and learn a little more about what depressed people want to see.

Incidentally, when box-office dollars started dropping after the crash of Wall Street, the studios were quick to respond to audiences’ need for a better entertainment deal by cutting ticket prices and instituting double features. Today, exhibitors have, instead of cutting ticket prices, cut their own throats, by giving more and more of the business away to the video stores.

HENRY C. PARKE

Van Nuys

I am a 29-year-old cultural historian with, as yet, a merely clinical interest in Generation X fare. I would also like to offer some tips on why films like “Reality Bites” leave audiences cold.

In the early ‘80s, baby boomers used movies such as “The Big Chill” to romanticize the ‘60s and to define youth itself as a moral and generational attribute--theirs. Unfortunately, Generation X--both movie-makers and moviegoers--bought into this formula.

The result? Young people are characterized on screen as moral and emotional ciphers, pawns of the ultra-conventional love-triangle plot (e.g., Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Ben Stiller), while actual twentysomething filmgoers prefer movies about the ‘60s. Young people in Generation X films are not young people. They are old, cynical people who look like androgynous adolescents.

Creative self-scrutiny is required here, Hollywood. The important questions are: When the status of being “between high school and getting married” is common among fortysomethings no less than twentysomethings, what happens to the meaning of youth and age? And what happens to relations between the sexes?

The dilemma of Generation X, effectively represented via comedy, drama or whatever, would focus not on love triangles or “overeducation and underemployment” but upon the struggle over the meaning and status of youth.

ANNE-MARIE SCHOLZ

Costa Mesa

After racking my too hip and jaded brain, I’m wondering if the reason no one’s going to these Generation X movies--and I hope you’ll pardon my overeducated and underemployed post-baby-boomer cynicism--is because they’re bad.

“Reality Bites” executive producer Stacey Sher didn’t make “a really good movie for people who can’t afford to see it.” She made a shallow and creatively bankrupt borefest that deservedly fell prey to substandard word of mouth. Studio heads and producers shouldn’t blame cable TV, VCRs or high ticket prices for poor box office. The blame lands squarely on their own shoulders for green-lighting inferior product.

So-called youth films like “The Graduate,” “Five Easy Pieces,” and “MASH” appealed to audiences of all ages because of brilliant writing and innovative direction. That’s right, amazingly enough, it was the talent that made those films popular. Mike Nichols, Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman . . . Ben Stiller. Maybe the generation everyone’s aiming for simply feels it deserves better.

ROBERT TILEM

Reseda

For me, at 28, the prospect of enduring two hours of Angst- ridden pseudo-intellectuals is about as exciting as watching “thirty-something” reruns: Oh, boy.

Most of the characters in movies aimed at my generation are ex-hippies without the ponytail. They wallow in self-pity, rejoice in LSD flashbacks and wonder how the ideas in their “little red book” turned into tanks in Tian An Men Square. The whiny brats of “Reality Bites” are no different from the bed-hopping boomers of “The Big Chill,” and Hollywood should rid all of us of both.

I’d rather see films that embody the qualities that will carry us through the Clintonian future we face: independence, self-reliance and a strong sense of purpose.

For my money, I’ll rent “Rudy,” “Working Girl,” “Swing Kids” and “Flashdance.” They may not be classics, but at least they offer a bit of heroism in an age when we need all the heroes we can get.

SCOTT HOLLERAN

Glendale

As I read your list of films made for Gen X-ers in the past five years I was surprised that the most successful one was omitted.

I’m talking about a major blockbuster that has spawned a sequel, embraces the slacker subculture, has strong ties to campy ‘70s TV as did “Reality Bites” and the others on your list, and caused people of my generation (and the ones above and below) to flock to the theaters across the land and even abroad. Of course I’m speaking of “Wayne’s World.”

Although I loved “Reality Bites,” it seems pretty clear that the post-boomers or whatever you want to call us would rather pay $7.50 for some lite comedy than shell out hard-earned cash to wallow in mid-20s Angst . We can do that at home for free.

EJ KAVOUNAS

Playa del Rey

Patrick Goldstein tried to discover why the twentysomethings of today aren’t going to see the movies targeted toward them, specifically “Reality Bites.”

However, Goldstein failed at his task and in fact unknowingly restated in the format of his piece what I see as the main problem. He carefully arranged his quotations to fit in convenient thought categories and put trite headlines above each.

What Goldstein doesn’t realize is that’s what kept people away from “Bites.” There was so much Diet Coke drinking and commercial jingle quoting in this film that it was rather offensive to anyone of that age group.

I was born in 1973 and raised on microwave dinners and prime-time television, but I have tried to transcend these things through reading and creating. What the makers of “Reality Bites” have portrayed is people who have been broken by the ‘70s and ‘80s. I think we are stronger than that, and I certainly think that anyone at my age is capable of reading a full-length article without kitschy titles to help them through it.

CECILY DAVIS

Irvine