Moving Closer to the Movies

You should see the view from our office. I once lived near the beach, but some of the prettiest western skies I’ve ever seen are right here in the San Fernando Valley, especially in winter. The sun dips behind the rugged Santa Susana Mountains and the afterglow can make reporters on deadline pause and gape.

Lately, however, our view has gone through some changes. The old Winnetka 6 Drive-In had its charm, but when it came down, our vista dramatically improved. A few months ago, however, a big new building started going up, with a design that shouts “Look at me!” and a garish purple and blue crown tall enough to interrupt the ridgeline beyond.

It’s a shame, we would say. Look at what’s happening to our lovely view.

But we’ve adjusted. The building is the new Pacific Theatres Winnetka 20, the largest Cineplex in the Valley. “Huge screens! Stadium seating!”

And so now we say, cool, let’s go see a movie.

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“Titanic” is playing there, of course, a megamovie at the megaplex. Blockbuster movies required blockbuster theaters on their way to the neighborhood Blockbuster. As director James Cameron quipped upon winning the Golden Globe, size really does matter.

Yes, everything about Hollywood seems big these days, as the movie business just keeps growing and growing and growing. More big movie houses, more big movies, more big stars, more big special effects. Bigger budgets, bigger profits. Bigger flops, too, but even “small independent films” seem big, as the Independent Film Channel on cable would attest.

And what I want to know is: Why? Why is America, indeed the world, going nuts over the movies? Is it a need for escapism? A lust for the vicarious to get away from our drab lives?

“I don’t have the answer, and I don’t know anybody who does,” says retired cinema professor Arthur D. Murphy, founder of the Peter Stark Motion Picture Producing Program at the USC School of Cinema-Television. The former box-office analyst for the Hollywood Reporter, Murphy’s expertise is the biz end of show biz.

The craze is documented. For the last six consecutive years, Murphy says, total box-office receipts have gone up, and ’98 is looking good. Never before has Hollywood had such a winning streak.

“In the ‘80s, it was more a pattern of three up, one down,” he says. That pattern more or less tracks back to cinema’s birth, Murphy says, and the reason why is obvious: “Box office has gone up and down as a function of the relative popularity of films out there.”

Qualitative judgments still count, but Murphy senses that something fundamental has changed, and the change was driven by technology.

Consider some history. By some measures, 1946 was the peak of American moviegoing. Many people went to a new movie every week or so. Then TV came along and, for a while, dragged at box-office receipts. But once TVs were in 90% of American homes, Murphy says, the movie business again took off. Big screen and little screen have flourished together ever since.

Many people, Murphy says, wrongly assumed the proliferation of VCRs, cable, movie channels and home satellite dishes would keep people home from the cinema. The opposite is true, and tremendously so. Our VCRs, in a sense, built these megaplexes.

“Every time a new market comes along, business has actually improved,” Murphy says. Market research, he says, has shown that people who have VCRs and movie channels and dishes are actually more likely to go out to the movies “than all the people who don’t have the high technology.”

And while the secondary markets have helped pump up the primary business, he says, “theatrical success drives all the post-theatrical markets. The big box-office hits are the big cassettes. They are licensed by the networks for the sweeps. It rings a bell all the way down.”

And the fans are more fanatic, not just going to the movies, but shopping at mall stores owned by Disney and Warner Bros. Toys, action figures, soundtracks, videos--all are bigger business, as is the media promoting all this show biz fluff. And all of it contributes to the blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy.

Film historian Leo Braudy, author of “The Frenzy of Renown,” has tried to make some sense of all this. Moviegoing was huge in 1946, but now there are so many more means of amusement. The dubious quality of the alternatives--all those channels and nothing on--may help explain why droves are going to the big screen, he says. Certainly movies look more “real” than ever.

“I don’t like the term escapist, because all art can be called escapist,” Braudy says. “The more interesting question is what you’re escaping from and what you’re escaping to.”

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A good question, but here in Tinseltown, the answer may not be considered so important, so long as the people keep coming. Certainly, the box-office receipts are bound to dip one of these years. But the global market keeps expanding, and there are no icebergs in view.

Yet the question lingers. Maybe it’s nothing really much to worry about, but sometimes I wonder if my old friend Leah has the right idea. Last time I checked, she and her husband were one of those unusual couples who kept a home without a TV. No news, no entertainment, no “Sesame Street” for the kids. They loved art, and Leah loved the movies, but they regarded TV as a mind-numbing force of evil, and an unnecessary evil at that. It all seems admirable in a way, but it also seems pretty weird, and a bit snobbish.

And yet, yes, it makes you wonder, this battle between, as the pun goes, real life versus “reel” life, and reality versus virtual reality, genuine experience versus the vicarious kind. Too much amusement can’t be a good thing.

But cosmic questions are much easier than cosmic answers, and now sunset is long past and it’s time to go home. No big plans tonight, but I’ve been thinking about sprucing up the one and only screenplay I wrote with a friend, gosh, 11 years ago. Or maybe I’ll just veg out and watch a video a colleague thought I might like to see.

Others may find it odd that a woman who loves sunsets would have a copy of Jerry Springer’s “Too Hot for TV!” But I understand. As I’ve said here before, I like to watch.