In and Out of Sync With Audiences

Zeitgeist--n. [German, from zeit, time, and geist, spirit.] the spirit of the time; the moral and intellectual trend of any age or period.

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Bill Clinton sensed it early, at a private White House screening. Bob Dole chased its spirit three weeks ago, with press cameras, popcorn and a seat at the Cineplex Odeon.

But it didn’t take a president or White House wannabe to confirm the obvious: “Independence Day”--or “ID4,” as its studio cannily short-handed it before release--was the hottest topic in the American movie zeitgeist.

Catching that pop culture wave hasn’t been much easier for movie-makers than it has for politicians. For every “ID4,” or low-budget sleeper smash like 1969’s “Easy Rider,” Hollywood has created a stack of unsuccessful clones as studios try to catch up with the culture. (Remember those “Easy Rider” follow-ups, “The Strawberry Statement” and “The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart”?)

“You can’t figure out what audiences want to see,” insists “ID4’s” co-writer and producer, Dean Devlin. “When you try, you’re approaching your project completely cynically, and the audiences smell that and stay away.

“Before we made ‘Stargate,’ everybody said science fiction is dead. Now it’s all over the place. Things are in the air. You’ll find three scripts with the same subject matter selling the same weekend. They can’t be copying each other; scripts aren’t written that fast.

“What happens is, people who make films are part of the culture. As they’re inspired by ideas, other people are inspired.”

But while some films have benefited from perfect pitch for the zeitgeist, others--now considered audience favorites--were snubbed on original release, usually due to forces outside the filmmakers.

A survey of past hits and misses suggests

a few possible lessons:

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Sure, It’s Great--But Are Audiences Ready?

In 1937, Walt Disney proved himself the master of trusting his gut, turning “Snow White”--rumored to be “Disney’s folly”--into an Oscar-winning top grosser. Three years later, his fledgling studio experienced box office meltdown with “Fantasia”--a bestseller on video 50 years later but a theatrical bust in 1940.

The reason?

“There was a perception at that time of what an animated feature cartoon was,” says film historian Rudy Behlmer. “And this was not it. It didn’t have a narrative and it was perceived as highbrow.”

Making matters worse: Disney’s costly efforts to get theaters to install Fantasound--an early stereo system--and the closing of the European market with the start of World War II.

In the late 1960s, just after Walt’s death, the world started catching up with Disney’s vision as the movie was sold to “Sgt. Pepper”-era youths as the ultimate head trip. “People started asking the surviving animators if they were on drugs when they made it,” recalls author Leonard Maltin (“The Disney Films”). “Young people of the psychedelic era couldn’t picture that film coming purely out of people’s imaginations.”

Equally a downer in its time: 1946’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” A rushed-into-release Oscar campaign and an East Coast storm helped sink Capra’s masterpiece at the box office, but audiences also seemed to reject the film’s mix of postwar desperation and “Capra-corn” sentiment.

“It’s not hard to imagine why the film did not do so awfully well,” historian Jeanine Basinger has written in her study of the film. “Given the way it was advertised, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ looked like either a light comedy or a romantic love story. Actually, it was something much darker, much deeper. Its ad campaigns told people to come for love, for laughs, for escape. If they did, they probably went home not only disappointed but a little disturbed.”

Comedies--usually the quickest type of film to date--have also been fatally ahead of their time. The Marx Brothers’ war satire “Duck Soup”--now considered by many their funniest film--was a box office disaster in 1933, enraging theater owners and losing the team its contract at Paramount.

Depicting world politics as pure insanity may have been too close to the bone for Depression-era audiences, and the film wasn’t embraced until that busy age of rediscovery, the 1960s.

But even a light, star-driven comedy like 1938’s “Bringing Up Baby” (now often cited as the height of the screwball genre) could tank at the box office. Star Katharine Hepburn “was so different from the normal American woman,” according to film historian Tony Thomas. “She was a New England Yankee, austere, aloof; that Bryn Mawr accent didn’t go over in Peoria, and men couldn’t imagine going to bed with her.”

Ultimately, Hepburn’s East Coast steeliness would define her uniqueness, from her comeback hit “The Philadelphia Story” through today.

The most imitated movie of the 1980s was also a monumental flop when it premiered in 1982.

“Blade Runner’s” grim look at America’s crumbling infrastructure tasted especially bitter after the feel-good mood of that summer’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”

John Carpenter’s gory remake of “The Thing” also suffered that year from a similar backlash against feel-bad cinema: “People still think of it as a little bit above pornography because it was so strong at the time,” Carpenter recently told DGA Magazine. “I had an agent tell me he had to get up and walk out. . . . It wasn’t a friendly, fun movie. It was a bleak and grim film.”

Now, in the age of “Seven,” “The Thing” is getting a “special edition” video re-release.

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Check Your Watch . . . You May Be Too Late.

In 1970, “Hello, Dolly!” seemed to have everything--hit source material, a bottomless budget (more than $25 million) and Barbra Streisand.

Everything except what audiences wanted to see.

“It was the period of ‘Easy Rider,’ anti-establishment movies,” recalls Aubrey Solomon, author of “Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History.” “ ‘Hello, Dolly!’ was steeped in establishment. Musicals were dead.”

Filming the quintessential ‘60s musical “Hair” in 1978 proved as bad an idea as it sounded. Producer Allan Carr’s 1980 disaster “Can’t Stop the Music” was a wake, not a party, for the disco era. And in 1995--a year before it hit the jackpot with “Independence Day”--Twentieth Century Fox released “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” at least a year after anyone cared.

Tapping into the invisible force of the zeitgeist is naturally harder than missing out. Invariably, every success makes perfect sense with hindsight--but at the time. . . .

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If the Studio Hates It, You Might be Onto Something.

Universal said no when George Lucas came knocking in 1976 with an idea for a space epic. Fox said yes--as long as “Star Wars” cost an atom-sized $8 million. The result was perhaps the most tremendous example of zeitgeist magic, because its success seemed to come out of nowhere.

But Lucas had perfectly sensed a desire for movie escapism, and good guys winning, after the real-life forces of darkness--Vietnam, Watergate--had been winning for a decade. (Devlin has a similar theory for “Independence Day’s” success: “Audiences are desperate to have fun with a movie.”)

Fox also got lucky in 1970, when it gave director Robert Altman a mere $3 million ($22 million less than the concurrent “Hello, Dolly!”) to make “M*A*S*H.” The anarchic war satire was a smash, earning domestic rentals of more than $40 million--”more money than ‘Hello, Dolly!,’ ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!,’ ‘Star’ and ‘Doctor Dolittle’ combined,” points out Aubrey Solomon.

Studio chief Jack Warner despised 1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde”--and audiences seemed to agree when the movie flopped. But in a near-unprecedented move, star-producer Warren Beatty convinced the studio to re-release the film; the second time around, its anti-establishment tone and groundbreaking violence, reflecting its era, helped make it Warner’s top earner of the year.

And in 1960, Paramount executives quietly distanced themselves from Alfred Hitchcock’s latest, low-budget effort. Even its director was stunned when “Psycho” became Hitchcock’s greatest success; looking back, its jarring, out-of-nowhere murder sequence and sense of moral chaos anticipate much of the decade to follow.

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Play It Again . . . and Again . . .

Television can take some credit for pushing borderline hits full force into the zeitgeist. “It’s a Wonderful Life” directly owes its legendary status to repeat TV viewings, thanks to the film’s falling out of copyright. Forty years of TV telecasts of “The Wizard of Oz” made that title an American favorite; although it had enjoyed a successful theatrical release, the film was too expensive to earn a profit in 1939.

“Neither MGM nor CBS probably thought it would be good for more than a couple of TV showings,” says “Oz” chronicler John Fricke. “But the kids who had seen it in 1939 were parents now and wanted their children to see it.”

Adds Maltin: “It was repetition, television’s endless repetition, that really made those films part of the national consciousness, not just timing. When I told my daughter that there were no computers or VCRs years ago, she asked me, ‘How did you see a movie again?’ I told her you didn’t. That was a concept she had a hard time grasping.”

Ultimately, as movie-makers have learned--usually the hard way--the key to catching the zeitgeist at the box office seems to be . . . don’t try.

Says “Independence Day’s” Devlin: “If your approach is, ‘What is the world thinking about, what would they like?’--as soon as you’re thinking that way, you’re in trouble.

“But if you think, ‘What do I want to see Friday’ and it’s not playing--’Hey, I’ll go out and make it’--then you’re onto something.”