Suddenly, Last Summer

Having grown up in Kansas, I know how it feels to be disconnected from the mainstream of pop culture. No question, church youth group meetings, miniature golf and baby-sitting did not dominate teenage social life anywhere else on the planet in the 1970s. Politically speaking, not much had changed in the Wheat Belt since favorite son Ike had gone to Washington. Walter Cronkite never even mentioned our state on the evening news.

There was one place, however, where I believed I was an insider: Working at the Boulevard Theater. After serving up the last tub of popcorn at our neighborhood movie palace, I could slip into the back row and experience something--a thrill, sadness, a laugh--the same way people did in New York City, Washington, D.C. and even that unimaginable place, Los Angeles. At the end of the night, I called the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood to report our one-screen theater’s box office. I loved reading the reports the next week to see if the movie at the Boulevard was a hit everywhere.

I still get a kick out of tracking box-office scores. For the studios that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars producing these movies and for the talent that has knocked themselves out making them, the game is more Russian Roulette than Trivial Pursuit. Corporate fortunes and personal careers are made and lost. I feel their pain, and it makes the game more fun to play. Listen, this is Hollywood. No one ever really dies. When things go to hell for folks here, it’s more a purgatory of meaningless production deals and bad seats in restaurants. Abysmal failure rarely translates into financial ruin.

So I was surprised at how seriously Peter Bart takes last summer’s box-office cook-off in his book, “The Gross.” His thesis--that the summer of ‘98, dominated by wildly mediocre yet financially successful movies, was a watershed in thinking about artistic quality--is tough to buy.

Bart knows the movie business inside and out. Reading Daily Variety, the Hollywood trade magazine where he is editor-in-chief, is like checking the daily racing form at the track. You can’t bet without it. Bart is a master-class player of the box-office guessing game. His book, absolutely chockablock with fab little factoids about last summer’s movies and how they performed, is essential reading if you want to handicap this coming summer’s. He writes as the ultimate insider, yet he remains a journalist who relishes throwing a few cherry bombs.

But when he tries to make it add up to something meaningful, some greater understanding of the business of making movies, it just doesn’t ring true. He states that “the purpose [of the book] is to reveal why particular films got made, who was responsible for their creation and who were the true heroes and villains in the making and the marketing and distribution. The overriding question to be examined relates to the system itself, the way it inhibits the true innovators and encourages the mediocre. ’98 was a wake-up call.”

In summer, when 40% of the year’s movie tickets are sold, it is Hollywood’s job to entertain the masses. There is a great desire in America, along with the rest of the world, to go into a darkened room and experience the same thing that people everywhere are experiencing. One year’s it’s to scream in “Jaws,” another it’s to chase aliens in “Men in Black.” We all felt the force in “Star Wars.” It costs money to capture the summer audience these days. Spectacular effects are literally $1 million per minute. The big stars make gobs of money. (Bart reports that Tom Hanks was paid $30 million to star in “Saving Private Ryan.”) Bart quotes well-paid studio chiefs, directors and writers whining that the pressure of winning the box-office race overwhelms any artistic sensibilities. Bart, a former studio executive himself, is nothing but sympathetic to their plight.

So, instead of dismissing a badly made film like “Godzilla,” he wants us to take heed of the greater threat it represents. “In a quiet insidious way, just about everything has changed over the last several years in the way movies are created, edited and marketed,” bemoans Bart. “The auteur of the movie is as much the techie as the director.” The story of the making of “Godzilla,” however, doesn’t illustrate this point at all. Bart doesn’t show how anyone in Hollywood learned anything profound from “Godzilla” beyond the obvious lesson that humiliation follows failure.

Sure, Hollywood will be releasing fewer movies this summer. But rather than make less expensive movies, they are putting more eggs into fewer baskets. The “Star Wars” prequel and “Wild, Wild West” were slotted to be summer movies precisely because they are expensive special-effects extravaganzas. Bart goes way out on a limb when he supposes that it bothers Hollywood executives that some of the more financially successful movies of last summer, like “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact,” were basically eye and ear candy for teenagers. Quite the opposite. One disgruntled studio president told me the real problem with summer movies is that they are cinema’s Henny Youngman. “There should be an Oscar for ‘best visceral experience,’ ” he offered as a way to improve their image.

Personally, I wish there had been better summer movies. But that’s no different than in any other summer. And, yes, the marketing hype for movies that cost $100 million to make, most of the showcase summer flicks, now is deafening. The global entertainment conglomerates with their multitude of movie theaters and television channels need big hits, and they’ll shove them down our throats if that’s what it takes. The risks are great. The rewards are huge. The game’s more interesting.

The summer of ’98 taught the same lessons as every other summer. The sure-fire hit (“Godzilla”) wasn’t. Lowest common denominator is a smart call: “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact” entertained the masses and became financially successful whether critics liked them or not. And there are always surprises: “The Truman Show” and “Saving Private Ryan” were intelligent, emotionally involving movies you think you’ll only see during Oscar season in December. And teenagers go to the movies a lot in the summer: “There’s Something About Mary” was their movie. Last summer set a record for box-office gross revenues, the second year in a row that saw overall attendance increase in American multiplexes. Bart may want to call the summer of ’98 “a wake-up call,” but those numbers dictate more of the same.

“The Gross” is a book with minimal dramatic tension and no big story to tell. Bart goes studio by studio, week by week, detailing the minutiae of a summer already ancient history in a town fixated on “the next great thing.” Back at Wichita’s Boulevard Theater, maybe they still care.

One Hollywood truism that Bart correctly defends is that Steven Spielberg is the perfect card to play in the summer movie game. Releasing his deadly serious World War II battle tale last July may have made “Saving Private Ryan” a distant memory in the minds of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, costing him the best picture Oscar last week. At the same time, it made him buckets of money at the box office. “Ryan” had lofty ambitions and the explosive action that summer audiences love, propelling it to the second biggest box office of the year. Still, it won five Oscars, including best director. “Shakespeare in Love” and “Life is Beautiful,” the other big Oscar winners, were released in the relative calm of the traditional high-brow season: winter.

The only thing anyone in Hollywood has learned in the wake of the biggest movie of all time, last year’s phenomenal “Titanic,” is that bigger works better. With the “Star Wars” prequel opening this summer’s movie marathon, that’s a lesson that only will get reinforced. And the tradition of offering up at least one seriously intelligent movie with big stars continues with the late Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” a murder mystery starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Gentlemen, place your bets.