Those Were the Days

Some people are still arguing over when, exactly, the ‘60s ended. Altamont in December 1969? Kent State in May 1970? But if you ask the same question about the 1990s, the answer quickly becomes clear: Never mind millennial fireworks. In fact, never mind 2000. The ‘90s ended on Sept. 11, 2001.

Now, while the makers of high and low culture work out what to do next, perhaps the most useful way to look at events in arts and entertainment from those first 81/2 months of 2001 is to consider them part of the decade just before.

What did the ‘90s represent? Affluence, for one thing. (It was the longest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history.) Ascendant globalism, for another. (The Internet, the European Union and NAFTA, to name three great boundary-blurrers, each gained its greatest strength in the 1990s.)

The trends played out clearly enough in the arts and entertainment. With 1997’s “Titanic,” director James Cameron set a standard of global ambition and unpunished profligacy, spending an unprecedented $200 million to make a film that went on to gross more than $1.8 billion worldwide. Amid surging real estate and financial markets, the Getty Center opened its museum and research facilities on a Brentwood hilltop (1997); and Staples Center (1999) opened next to the convention center in downtown Los Angeles, signaling the occasion with a Bruce Springsteen concert.

Did the optimism of those days evolve into something close to hubris? Maybe. In May of this year, Disney saw fit to use the totem of the last surprise attack on American shores as the setting of a splashy movie premiere, the $135-million, Michael Bay-directed blockbuster “Pearl Harbor.” It was screened aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier John C. Stennis, only a few hundred yards from the flashpoint of the World War II attack.

In November, the Stennis was dispatched to the Arabian Sea to support U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“In the space of two hours, we left behind a happy era of Game Boy economics and trophy houses and entered a world of fear and vengeance,” novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote in the New Yorker’s first issue following the attacks. “Even if you’d been waiting for the ‘90s-ending crash throughout the ‘90s ... what you felt on Tuesday morning wasn’t intellectual satisfaction, or simply empathetic horror, but deep grief for the loss of daily life in prosperous, forgetful times.”

The term “shocking,” redefined by the images of Sept. 11, had heretofore been used to describe the work of pop culture miscreants, who in 2001 included Eminem, the white rap artist accused of promoting homophobia in his best-seller “The Marshall Mathers LP.” The controversy reached a peak when Eminem performed at this year’s Grammy Awards with an icon of gay rights, Elton John.

For a hint of how music might shock in the post-Sept. 11 world, consider the Boston Symphony. That orchestra had been planning to perform choruses from John Adams’ 1990 opera about Palestinian terrorists, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” in late November. Instead, over Adams’ objections, symphony officials filled their program with other music in place of “Klinghoffer.”

In the world of art, the escalating showmanship and climbing prices of the 1990s spilled over into a historic scandal that fully unraveled this year. Top officials at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, which together control about 90% of the auction market, admitted a long-term habit of fixing prices. Facing civil and criminal court actions, the companies agreed to pay more than $500 million in fines, and the Sotheby’s former chief operating officer, DeDe Brooks, admitted guilt.

Although former Sotheby’s Chairman Alfred Taubman wasn’t convicted for his role until a Manhattan federal jury’s verdict on Dec. 5 (sentencing is expected in April), the firms’ misdeeds fit neatly as a phenomenon of the last decade; prosecutors said the price-fixing lasted from 1993 to 1999.

In architecture, the Frank Gehry juggernaut (it’s a silvery sort of juggernaut, with curved surfaces and no 90-degree angles) kept on rolling. With high-profile projects already up in Bilbao, Spain, and Seattle, among other places, the architect’s design for Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles began to rise as a twisted skeleton, then took on its first layers of skin in 2001. Although the silvery building isn’t due to be completed until 2003, the project’s wavy walls are now apparent to all who gaze toward Bunker Hill.

In fact, from the late ‘90s through the first part of 2001, the Los Angeles cityscape was advancing on multiple fronts. Just a block from Gehry’s Disney Hall rose Jose Rafael Moneo’s austere new cathedral, in its fourth year of construction and scheduled to open in late 2002. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in early December followed through boldly on an architect selection process begun months before: Startling many in the art world, LACMA’s trustees gave a relative newcomer, celebrated Dutch modernist architect Rem Koolhaas, the commission to largely rebuild LACMA’s complex of buildings on Wilshire Boulevard.

As California historian and state librarian Kevin Starr noted in a recent conversation, it may be years before we have the music, poems, novels, films and other artworks that will evoke Sept. 11 in decades ahead. But already “we’re rethinking public space.” Our “sacred” public spaces, beginning with ground zero in New York, will get a new respect and restraint, Starr suggested, public architecture will more directly address security concerns, and “the great mega-high-rise is finished....We’ll never do that again.”

On Broadway, “The Producers” and “The Lion King” continued their reigns. Off-Broadway, Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright behind “Angels in America,” returned with “Homebody/Kabul,” a play written between 1997 and early 2001 about the disappearance of a fictional Englishwoman in Afghanistan in 1998. Its run began Wednesday at the New York Theatre Workshop.

The television story of the summer had a decidedly ‘90s ring to it: California Congressman Gary Condit’s romantic link to Chandra Levy, the still-missing Washington intern, fueled endless gossip-mongering by the cable news networks--and most of the broadcast networks too, except CBS, which drew headlines of its own for refusing to involve its “Evening News” in the daily scrum. As news treated as entertainment, the Condit saga seemed a sibling to that most famous of ‘90s imbroglios, Clinton-Lewinsky. Connie Chung’s gawking prime-time question to Condit on ABC--”Did you kill Chandra Levy?”--seemed striking at the time but echoed only faintly by year’s end, when Condit announced his intention to run for reelection.

If pre-Sept. 11 was business as usual in television, film and pop music, the year’s cataclysmic event served to bring the rampant commercialism to a respectful pause, followed by more--you guessed it--rampant commercialism. Before Sept. 11, the broadcast television networks were swept up in a chase for what now seems an ill-advised term, “reality television,” as CBS’ hit show “Survivor” proved that NBC’s sitcom juggernaut “Friends” was not immune to competition on Thursday nights.

Similarly, the big summer movies--”Rush Hour 2,” “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” “America’s Sweethearts,” “Planet of the Apes”--gave us little more to talk about than inflated box-office projections and, in the case of “A.I.” director Steven Spielberg, a bump in the road to critical knighthood.

In pop music, record conglomerates made millions of dollars off big-selling teen acts ‘N Sync and Britney Spears and testosterone-heavy rock bands like Limp Bizkit. Simultaneously, the same executives were desperately searching for the next big thing in pop, lest they find themselves unable to cash in on whatever trends replaced these lightweight acts.

Yet, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, when audiences were deemed sated by prime-time news coverage, and the tributes from rock musicians had been pressed into CDs, the ‘90s, or at least the whiff of them, became real again.

By year’s end, the cinematic “Harry Potter” and “The Lord of the Rings” were everywhere, the 20-year-old heavy-metal band Anthrax had resolved not to change its name, and local news channels had returned to live coverage of freeway chases.

New decade, same old us, it sometimes seems. But then we see that crawl at the bottom of our screens, distracting us from the entertainments at hand.

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Paul Brownfield and Christopher Reynolds are Times staff writers.