A MODEST PROPOSAL: MAKE FEWER MOVIES

Look at the following lists. Look at them closely. Can you guess what they have in common?

* “Ernesto Che Guevera: The Bolivian Diary.” “Traveller.” “Female Perversions.” “Shiloh.” “Inside the Goldmine.” “I Was a Jewish Sex Worker.” “All Over Me.” “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.” “Volcano.”

* “Hollow Reed.” “The Turning.” “Nasser ’56.” “Truth or Consequences, N.M.” “Broken English.” “The Quiet Room.” “Men Lie.” “Commandments.” “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.” “Warriors of Virtue.” “Breakdown.”

Obviously, these are lists of movie titles. But not just any titles. The first list details the nine films that opened on but a single recent Friday; the second lists the 11 that opened on the next Friday. Twenty films opening in just two weeks. The question is not how many you’ve seen, it’s how many have you even heard of? If a gun were placed to your head and you had to give a one-sentence summation of every title, how long would it be before the trigger was pulled?

If there is one truism about the motion picture process that every filmmaker, independent or studio-oriented, shares, it’s how hard it is to get a movie made. Stories pile up about credit cards maxed out and juggled, favors called in, family members tapped, days, weeks, even months spent with minimum sleep. Climbing Mt. Everest in a T-shirt and shorts sounds doable compared to what filmmakers have to put themselves through.

But seen from the opposite end of the spectrum, from the beleaguered viewer’s point of view, a very different and almost perverse conclusion suggests itself. Given how few worthwhile movies are made, and how few of those anyone manages to even hear about, never mind see, the problem is not that it’s too hard to make a motion picture, but that it’s too easy.

Festivals almost without number start up with unnerving regularity in any town big enough to have a Burger King, and each one seems to have dozens of largely forgettable films to display. When a major festival like Sundance put out its annual call for entries last year, some 600 brand-new unseen features showed up to compete for but 18 dramatic slots. Given that a recent survey by the Motion Picture Assn. of America says that the average regular moviegoer (defined, believe it or not, as someone who sees at least one per annum) goes to the theater 8.1 times a year, doesn’t it seem like we’re making way too many films?

In a market economy, of course, where the glamour and the lure of the movie business ensures that people will always be willing to risk their time and their capital on the flimsiest chance for success, this is a problem without any hope of solution. One unheralded international sensation like “Pulp Fiction” can inspire years, even decades, of thrown-away money.

Even if you could somehow put a lid on the number of films made, how would you do it? How could you possibly decide which projects would live and which would die? Yet, paradoxically, some of the best work from Eastern Europe came not during the current post-Soviet rush of freedom but in the bad old days when film output in the countries in question was under rigid, totalitarian control.

More than that, the whole idea of creative limits runs contrary to conventional wisdom and frankly violates some of the most sacred taboos of our culture. These include the ideas that more is better, that talent is omnipresent and only needs to be nurtured, that stifling even the feeblest creative urges is tantamount to cultural genocide.

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To speak up for limits in this environment is to invite the kind of horrified response 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift got when he suggested, in “A Modest Proposal,” that the poor should raise their offspring to be sold for eating. The idea, neatly expressed in “Waiting for Guffman’s” ad campaign, that “there’s a good reason some talent remains undiscovered,” is anathema to modern America.

Despite such obstacles, the glut of films, both studio and independent, has such troubling implications that it’s important to at least raise the issue. The problem is not an elitist one; the current excess, as the lists above indicate, is at least as great with low budgets as elsewhere.

In both areas, regrettably, more films means not more chance at better films but more likelihood of worse ones. Unlike, say, the book world, where 50,000 titles a year can’t help but result in diversity, the increasing number of films leads to sameness, and to a system that perpetuates business-as-usual mediocrity.

To deal with Hollywood first, when upward of $35 million is spent on an average studio picture, films increasingly get made not because anyone cared about the end result, and not, as was the case in the old studio days, in response to what the moviegoing audience might like. Rather, many films get made nowadays simply to keep the system running. In Hollywood today, self-perpetuation is destiny.

When Irish director Neil Jordan was in the U.S. more than a decade ago to promote his “Mona Lisa,” he was asked why Britain, which at that time had no film business to speak of, was able to turn out such a high percentage of watchable films. In a country practically without an industry, he said, it was so hard to get anything made that without great passion for the subject it couldn’t be done.

In Hollywood, by contrast, all these films have created a machine that must be fed, screens that must be filled, slots that must be spoken for if the people who have jobs are to be perceived as productive. Like a shark, Hollywood must continue to keep moving or it will die.

Given this, the studios tend to care as little as a shark about exactly what they are ingesting or turning out. The more films are made to, in effect, fill

quotas, the less anyone in power notices exactly what’s in them. If potential films fulfill certain requirements, like a star big enough to “open” it and the kind of subject matter that sells overseas, few feel the need to look much further. More time is probably spent worrying about whether a film has the criteria to get off the ground than whether it’s worth putting into flight in the first place.

In the great days of Hollywood, it’s true, the studios made considerably more films than they do now. But that was before network television, before multichannel cable, before video, when the American moviegoer was a captive audience that had nowhere else to go for moving picture satisfactions.

And even with a captive audience, and ownership of their own theater chains, the studios tried hard to fit their product to what experience told them people might like. It’s hard to imagine them spending the 1930s equivalent of $125 million on an egotistical project like “Cutthroat Island,” a phlegmatic action-adventure picture starring two capable people, Geena Davis and Matthew Modine, whose names meant absolutely nothing to the core action audience.

For the problem with Hollywood today is hardly the multimillion-dollar-grossing films that critics sniff at. It’s rather attempts like “Fierce Creatures,” “Zeus and Roxanne,” “The Beautician and the Beast,” “The Pest,” “The Sixth Man,” “Eight Heads in a Duffle Bag” and “Gone Fishin,’ ” to name some typical examples from the current year. Superfluous films that mass audiences have no more patience with than anyone else.

There’s another negative aspect to the glut of Hollywood movies, one that’s both obvious, yet by industry standards naive and beside the point: It’s a phenomenal waste of money. Like war correspondents who train themselves not to dwell on the carnage around them, people who work in the studio system never consider all that money in real-world terms. And, yes, it is sacrosanct private venture capital that can go and do whatever it pleases, but wouldn’t it be nice if every studio found a way to make just one fewer film every year and give the resulting money to education, to cultural enrichment, to whatever?

It is no doubt a laughable thought, not in the least sense practicable, but to sit through a string of multimillion-dollar wastes of time, to see $100-million budgets become a matter of course, does do strange things to your mind. And if this business isn’t a bastion of creative financing, what is it?

When it comes to the independent film world, the movie glut is of a different nature. Here, once again, the audience is ignored, but the films are made not to feed the system but rather to nourish the filmmaker’s ego. In fact, sensitive, personal films have become so thick on the land that they have to a certain extent stifled other kinds of movie creativity.

A prime example is the kinds of films that year in and year out get the most slots in the competition section of the Sundance Film Festival, an event that, whether it wants to or not, sets the agenda for the independent film world.

What we’re getting more and more of are murky films about sullen teenagers confused about their sexuality and unhappy with their lot in life, vanity projects that often depend on indulgent relatives for funding. Given that filmmakers in their 20s who work from personal experience don’t have many other areas to explore, this trend is not surprising. But as more and more of these fake-sensitive films get made, they become the model for other films yet unmade, leaving movies that have, God forbid, an actual plot or a genuine sense of humor, out in the cold.

Contributing to this situation is the way the now-venerable auteur theory has been perverted to mean that the director is by definition a genius and anything he or she wants to do is worthy of veneration. How else can one explain the presence in 1996 as an official part of the august Cannes International Film Festival of “Schizopolis,” as doltish a piece of criminal self-indulgence as American cinema has ever produced? But since it was directed by Steven Soderbergh, who won the Palme d’Or for “sex, lies, and videotape,” it must be good. Right? Right? Is anyone still awake out there?

Yes, it’s true. With so many feeble and indifferent pieces of cinematic flotsam clogging up the system, audiences are tuning out, if not actually going to sleep. With so many chances to pick wrong, with films shuttling in and out of exhibition’s revolving door before they have the chance to find an audience, even searchers for adult fare (except for the true hard-core cineastes) seem to be throwing their hands up and sticking with what’s familiar or heavily promoted. Unable or unwilling to spend the time it takes to figure which of 20 films opening in a two-week span are worth serious attention, viewers opt for the brand names, which is how we got into this mess in the first place.

So though we’re more or less stuck with the movie business we’ve got now, it’s hard to be happy with the notion that what these systems are best at is not making films anyone wants to see but keeping themselves in business.

When irrelevant, not-very-good films get made and exhibited, it encourages people to make more of them. And more of them is not what we need.