Ready, Set, Rewind

“What the mass media offers is not popular art but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”

That’s a line from the British poet W.H. Auden. His is not a name that trips off the tongues of moguls as they dine on Cobb salads at the Grill, or of rabid development executives hunting down their next big script. Indeed, Auden’s final book of poetry, “Epistle to a Godson,” was published in 1972.

That was the last golden age of Hollywood, when such films as “The Godfather,” “Cabaret” and “What’s Up, Doc?” were rolling into theaters. Imagine what he might have said if he had had to contemplate a year filled with “Star Wars” 5, “Jason” 10, “Bond” 20, “Austin Powers” 3, “Lord of the Rings” 2, “Harry Potter” 2, “Men in Black” 2, “Stuart Little” 2, “Spy Kids” 2, “Santa Clause” 2, and new installments in the Jack Ryan, “Star Trek” and “Desperado” franchises. That’s not to mention such live-action comic strips as “Spider-Man,” “Constantine,” “Daredevil” and “Scooby-Doo” (whose trailer got a big cheer from the audience when I saw “Harry Potter” 1).

Unlike Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the movie business appears to be percolating along. In 2001, the industry earned a record $8.3 billion. Six films grossed more than $200 million each, five of them with significant kid appeal. “Family entertainment was king last year,” Columbia Pictures Chairman Amy Pascal notes. “If we learned anything last year, it’s that families like to go to the movies together, and if you give them good movies, they will go.”

Kids will have plenty to see next year. Besides the juggernaut fantasy sequels, there is such Nickelodeon product as “Clockstoppers” and “Hey Arnold! The Movie,” as well as an Imax prequel to the 1979 “The Black Stallion” a prequel to “Peter Pan,” and Disney’s “The Country Bears,” which has the dubious distinction of being the first film derived from a theme park attraction. (“Pirates of the Caribbean” is coming--this is not a joke.)

Just because box office was up didn’t mean, however, that more people flocked to the pictures. As veteran prognosticator Tom Sherak of Revolution Studios points out, “The admissions don’t change. The box office goes up because the price of the tickets goes up.” Adding an ominous note, Sherak explains that to get really big grosses, the studios need to win the hearts and minds not of those who live in New York or here in L.A., but of the residents of Wichita, Decatur, Omaha and Rapid City. “The philosophy is if a movie is to be really big, it works from the middle of the country out. A picture can do well working on the coast, but to be really big, it needs to be working in the middle of the country.”

Moreover, it was a year of unprecedented turmoil behind the scenes as the studios geared up for a strike that never happened, jamming pictures into production willy-nilly in the first quarter of the year. They then sat around for a number of months trying to digest what they had wrought, until they were sideswiped by the events of Sept. 11 and sat around for a few more months trying to figure out how pop culture should respond.

The net result appears to be a collective grasp for the familiar. It’s a year long on marketing concepts, and short on films that can’t be described in 10 words or less, although as ever there are a few hardy souls beating against the tide of corporatization and the prevailing assumption that movies are simply widgets that talk.

At least half the films coming appear to be retreads of past hits. “Rules of Engagement” is recycled into “High Crimes,” and “Sleeping With the Enemy” has morphed into “Enough,” now starring J. Lo instead of Julia Roberts. Eddie Murphy updates “48 Hours” with “Showtime,” trading in former partner Nick Nolte for new comic superstar Robert De Niro.

“The Full Monty” has spawned an entire genre--the band of misfits makes good--that includes “Welcome to Collinwood” (“The Full Monty” does a heist), “The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest” (“The Full Monty” goes online) and “Lucky Break” (“The Full Monty” in jail).

There is also the progeny of “The Sixth Sense,” films that combine thrills and new-age mysticism, such as “Dragonfly,” in which Kevin Costner is contacted by the spirit of his dead wife through the near-death experiences of her patients, and “Sin Eater,” a Heath Ledger thriller about an ancient order of priests who can absolve the guilty of their sins, but, as the promotional material points out, “the absolution is fatal!”

“I started a genre; I didn’t realize it,” sighs “Sixth Sense” writer-director M. Night Shyamalan. “I guess I’m supposed to be flattered, but it bothers me.” This year Shyamalan returns with “Signs,” about a farmer (Mel Gibson) who wakes up one morning to find his land imprinted with crop circles--perhaps made by aliens. “I’ve seen footage of them,” Shyamalan says of the phenomena, which have appeared in several Midwestern states. “It’s quite a magical thing to be inside one of these things, even the ones we made.”

Like Shyamalan, others are trying to make films that are not simply product extensions or prefab insta-movies in which the concept has been tried five times before and the studio has just added water. Below is a list of hope, potential beacons of ingenuity that might keep the brain cells alive during your next trip to the multiplex. Some of next year’s best films will undoubtedly not be on this list, as they’re lurking in the independent netherworld. (Last year at this time, “In the Bedroom,” now a critical darling, was just getting a distributor.) Others on this list will inevitably fail, but at least they dared.

Big Directors Who Can Do Whatever They Want

After a three-year hiatus, Martin Scorsese returns with his long-awaited epic “Gangs of New York,” a sprawling tale of a young Irish immigrant seeking revenge on his father’s killer. It’s set amid the racial clashes and draft riots of Civil War-era New York.

For film lovers, this has the highest wanna-see factor. It boasts a spectacular cast that includes Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, lavish sets, and a director who generates cult-like devotion. For Hollywood cognoscenti, the film’s $90-million budget is more than what any Scorsese film has ever grossed domestically. It went six weeks over schedule and spawned tales of an epic battle over length between Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein and Scorsese, someone who can actually go mano a mano with Harvey Scissorhands.

Scorsese says he’s been fascinated with the period since childhood and has wanted to make this movie for more than 30 years.

“I found the book [‘Gangs of New York’ by Herbert Asbury] on Jan. 1, 1970, and I read it in one day. It had all the folklore of old New York, particularly about the Five Points area, and the struggle of poor people and the underworld of New York, which was very colorful and very political, and in 1850 and early 1860s how the Irish gangs would fight the nativist gangs,” Scorsese said.

“It made me begin to think how the first wave of immigration was really a test of what America is supposed to be. [The motto is] ‘Give us your homeless and your poor.’ Was America to be open for everyone in the world or just those who were there [first]? A lot of it was worked out on the streets of Manhattan.”

Scorsese contemporary Steven Spielberg has a trio of films coming: the 20th anniversary re-release of “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial”; “Catch Me if You Can,” starring DiCaprio and Tom Hanks in the true story of master forger Frank Abagnale Jr., the youngest man ever on the FBI’s most wanted list; and “Minority Report,” a film noir set in the future, starring Tom Cruise as a police detective who uses psychic technology to arrest murderers before they strike. Problems ensue when, accused of a future murder, he finds himself victim of his own scientific methods. Scott Frank and Jon Cohen scripted.

Steven Soderbergh, by contrast, is going ultra-low-tech with “Full Frontal,” a super-experimental quickie shot on digital video and film during a hectic 19-day period last fall. Scheduled to debut in March, it is being craftily marketed by Miramax as the unofficial sequel to 1989’s “sex, lies, and videotape,” which appears to mean the movie Soderbergh would make if he were going to make “sex, lies, and videotape” now. Get it? The actors, who include Catherine Keener and Soderbergh’s old partner in crime Julia Roberts, did their own hair and makeup and shot some of the video themselves.

Literary Properties With Buzz

Here’s what insiders are talking up: “About a Boy” with Hugh Grant; “White Oleander,” “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” “Possession,” “The Hours” and “About Schmidt,” which has little of Louis Begley’s original novel but the divine premise of a man--Jack Nicholson--tooling around America in a rented Winnebago.

Wholesome Films

“Ice Age” might have come too late to save Fox’s incipient animation division, but this computer-generated film, set in prehistoric times, features a woolly mammoth, a sloth and a squirrel with a distinctly Wile E. Coyote flair for disaster.

“Pinocchio” boasts the acting and directing services of the joyous human pinball Roberto Benigni, although some children might be surprised to find their beloved wooden puppet being played by a grown man.

Meanwhile, although the Disney stock price is flagging, the mother ship of family entertainment is reputed to have reversed the slow degradation of the famed animation machine with “Lilo & Stich,” which features an adorable alien puppy dog-like creature, a ukulele-playing Hawaiian girl and songs by Elvis Presley.

Disney is also betting on “The Rookie,” the true story of a middle-aged high school baseball coach who tried out for the major leagues ... and made it. Texan director John Lee Hancock wanted to make sure “not to embarrass my home state, which is always cartoonish and caricatured in its presentation. The guys always have on 10-gallon hats and wear suspenders, and I was sick and tired of that.”

Actors Stretching

“The very first day of shooting I had Sam Rockwell standing completely naked in front of a TV set. That typifies the way the film is going,” says George Clooney from location in Toronto, where he is making his directorial debut on “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.” It’s based on the “unauthorized” autobiography of game-show host Chuck Barris, creator of “The Dating Game” and “The Gong Show,” who claims to have been a covert CIA assassin with 33 kills on his record.

Inside wags have already dubbed the film the comic version of “A Beautiful Mind,” but Clooney says, “I choose to believe him because he’s a nice guy and a fairly honorable guy. The things he’s willing to tell about himself aren’t very flattering, so it’s fun.”

Robin Williams, the cuddliest man in show biz, explores inner darkness as a murderer in “Insomnia,” Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to “Memento,” and as a creepy, obsessed photo processor in “One Hour Photo.” In the black comedy “Death to Smoochy,” he’s Rainbow Randolph, the corrupt ex-star of a children’s show out for revenge on his replacement, goody-two-shoes Smoochy, a pink rhino played by Edward Norton.

“We wanted to do an ad that said, ‘Everyone wants a movie to take their children to. This is not the film,’ ” Williams says of “Smoochy.” “It’s got a real edge. It’s dark, nasty, funny, which is great to do with a comedy.”

After sitting 2001 out, Adam Sandler returns with three films, a return to “Wedding Singer” terrain with a remake of Frank Capra’s “Mr. Deeds,” the still-untitled Paul Thomas Anderson offbeat romance in which he plays the owner of a plunger factory who must contend with a rapacious phone sex operation, and who finds love and harmony with Emily Watson. Last is “Adam Sandler’s 8 Crazy Nights,” an animated comedy in which Sandler plays the three lead parts and sings five songs. “It’s Adam, Adam, Adam all the time,” Columbia Pictures’ Pascal says, adding, “I believe in Adam Sandler 100% of the time. I do.”

Wacky and Different

“Had I known it was going to be made, I wouldn’t have written it. It’s a sort of unflattering portrait of myself,” Charlie Kaufman says about “Adaptation.” It was supposed to be a straight adaptation of Susan Orlean’s best-seller “The Orchid Thief,” but the “Being John Malkovich” scribe, unbeknownst to the studio who hired him, made it a story about a confused, self-hating screenwriter struggling to write an adaptation of “The Orchid Thief.” Nicolas Cage plays Kaufman as well as his freeloading twin brother, and Meryl Streep is Orlean. Spike Jonze directs.

Bringing the same comic insouciance he brought to “The First Wives Club” and to his literary alter-ego, Libby Gelman-Waxner in Premiere magazine, writer Paul Rudnick drops a Manhattan heiress into the world of gangsta rap in the wild romantic comedy “Marci X,” starring Lisa Kudrow and Damon Wayans. “It’s a real interracial love story,” Rudnick says. “That’s an area that’s been somewhat neglected or only treated like an NBC white paper or a ’60 Minutes’ spotlight. It’s wonderful terrain for a romantic comedy to have two really terrific comic stars going for each other.”

A different kind of love story awaits in “Frida,” the tale of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her tempestuous relationship with muralist Diego Rivera. Directed by Julie Taymor, director of “The Lion King” stage musical, and starring Salma Hayek, it brings Kahlo’s paintings to life with a series of vivid tableaux vivants: “It looks like a painting, but then you realize it’s alive,” Taymor says. Hayek “breathes and moves.”

David Fincher was sent the script for “The Panic Room” with a caveat from his agent that he probably wouldn’t like it because it took place in one house. “I thought it was kind of interesting. Always a contrarian, that’s my mantra,” Fincher says. He brings his stylish touch with suspense to this tale of a young divorcee (Jodie Foster) and her daughter who are locked in their New York brownstone’s “panic room” during a vicious home invasion.

When You Have More Money Than God

CNN founder Ted Turner is making sure the country gets a big dose of American history with “Gods and Generals,” the big-screen prequel to the New Line Civil War extravaganza “Gettysburg.” Robert Duvall plays Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, and Turner has a small part as Col. Waller Tazewell Patton and even sings. Some 100,000 Civil War re-enactors volunteered to play the fighting armies.

“They brought their own weapons and uniforms,” Turner says. “We couldn’t have made the movie without them. It would have cost more than ‘Harry Potter.’” As it is, Turner shelled out all $53 million of the film’s cost from his own pocket.

“It’s all my money. Every penny. That way nobody can blame me if it doesn’t work.”