Muscled aside

“Drama: A composition in verse or prose intended to portray life or character or to tell a story usually involving conflicts and emotions through action and dialogue and typically designed for theatrical performance.”

Remember dramas?

Remember the electricity you felt the first time you watched Gregory Peck in “To Kill a Mockingbird”? Or Paul Newman in “The Hustler”? Then think back on such other memorable dramatic screen performances as Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard,” James Dean in “East of Eden,” Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in “Midnight Cowboy,” Marlon Brando and Al Pacino in “The Godfather,” Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline in “Sophie’s Choice,” Ralph Fiennes in “The English Patient,” Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich” and Tom Hanks in “Cast Away.”

There was a time when Hollywood studios seemed to churn out dramas and melodramas the way the Denver Mint spits out FDR dimes. In the process, the studios made stars of actresses like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford and actors like Peck, Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy. Their films weren’t always great, but they enjoyed major runs in cities across the land and, in the process, helped younger audiences appreciate drama as well as other genres.

But today, the drama is under siege. Studios have soured on making them and audiences avoid them like the plague. Some observers of the entertainment scene say that an entire generation of young moviegoers has turned off of dramas and won’t be coming back until they’re middle-aged.

Frank Pierson, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who recently directed the drama “A Soldier’s Girl” for Showtime, said dramas today “stand the least chance of being made at a major studio.”

Each autumn, sandwiched between the summer fluff and big-budget holiday spectacles, Hollywood traditionally releases many of its smaller, character-driven dramas -- and this fall’s lineup is no exception. But given the fate of big-screen dramas in recent years, it will take more than clever marketing for the films to find a wide audience. Some of this fall’s higher-profile offerings present particular challenges:

* In “The Human Stain,” Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins star as May-December lovers in a big-screen adaptation of the acclaimed Philip Roth novel. The film poses an intriguing premise: a college professor hiding his past battles against accusations of racism that lead him to quit the faculty and go on an odyssey to clear his name. But Roth’s novel is complex and downbeat, usually not a winning combination for literary adaptations.

* In “Mystic River,” Clint Eastwood is back behind the camera in a gritty adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s popular crime novel about the murder of a young woman. The film comes with a knockout cast -- Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon just for starters -- but despite receiving raves at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the disturbing nature and stark violence contained in some sequences may be a turnoff for some.

* “Secondhand Lions” is a drama/black comedy/fantasy rolled into one. It stars two certified giants of acting, Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, as eccentric old-timers with a mysterious past who take under their wing their teenage nephew (played by a squeaky-voiced Haley Joel Osment). But is this film too quirky for its own good?

* “Veronica Guerin” and “Wonderland” are gritty dramas ripped from the headlines. In the first, Cate Blanchett stars as a crusading Irish journalist whose life is threatened when she delves deep into the drug underworld, while the second is a drama about the late porn star John Holmes and the brutal 1981 quadruple murders on Wonderland Avenue in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon. Neither story is the kind of feel-good real-life tale (think “Remember the Titans”) that plays well in the megaplex.

* Meg Ryan trades her usual perkiness for graphic and steamy sex in the erotic thriller “In the Cut,” director Jane Campion’s big-screen adaptation of Susanna Moore’s bestseller. But will audiences want to see Ryan in this kind of role?

And those are the projects with brighter commercial prospects.

At the movies, the disparity in box office between drama and other genres is stark. This year’s highest-grossing films are “Finding Nemo” (animated); “The Matrix Reloaded” and “Terminator 3” (sci-fi); “Bruce Almighty,” “Anger Management” and “Bringing Down the House” (comedy); “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Bad Boys II” (action-adventure) and “X2: X-Men United” and “The Hulk” (comic book).

The only drama to break into the Top 30 this year has been “Seabiscuit,” which ranked 14th by Labor Day. The last time a drama cracked the Top 20 annual grossing films was the Oscar-winning film “A Beautiful Mind” in 2001. More often, dramas make for dismal box office: witness “The Insider,” “The Majestic,” “White Oleander,” “The Emperor’s Club,” “Moonlight Mile,” “Pay It Forward,” “The Shipping News,” “All the Pretty Horses” and “The Life of David Gale.”

It’s not surprising then that dramas tend to be ghettoized in the “art house” world, where they open in small theaters to largely upscale, adult, urban audiences. Or they have migrated along with skilled actors and directors schooled in serious filmmaking to the small screen, where cable TV networks like HBO, Showtime and TNT have filled a void left by the studios.

“Quite shamelessly, we at HBO are trying to fill the gap,” said Colin Callender, president of HBO Films. “We do feel that there is writing and directing talent that feels disenfranchised by the main studios and there is no doubt that we are trying to find a home for them.”

Callender has reason to crow. HBO Films produced this year’s top prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival, director Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” (which is being released in October), and the network has won critical acclaim for other original feature-length dramas like “The Gathering Storm” and “Live From Baghdad.”

“Anyone who writes a drama now thinks first of all of going to HBO or Showtime just to get it made,” Pierson said. “I used to feel, 20 years ago, that if there was a good screenplay, eventually it would get made -- maybe not right away. That is no longer true.”

Studios today are in the business of creating blockbusters -- movies that can be turned into cash-cow “franchises” that can generate alternate revenue streams like video games, toys, soundtracks, clothing and other merchandise. As a result, the studio drama often takes a back seat to other genres like sci-fi, comic book, fantasy, action-adventure and comedy.

Screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, who adapted “The Human Stain,” blames the corporate takeover of Hollywood studios for drama’s plight.

“These corporations have accumulated mountains of debt,” Meyer observed. “All they can think of to do with a movie is make huge profits and siphon them off. As a consequence of the siphoning off of these profits, there is not only no incentive to make a movie that makes smaller profits, but development money dries up as well.”

Broadway drought as well

THe decline of drama is not only a Hollywood phenomenon. This past season, Broadway musicals like “Mamma Mia!,” “Hairspray,” “The Lion King” and “The Producers” ruled the box office with standing-room-only audiences at many performances. By comparison, only the revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” was a runaway dramatic hit, although “Take Me Out” saw ticket sales surge after it captured the Tony Award for best play.

But remarkably, “Take Me Out” remains the only nonsinging, nondancing attraction on the Great White Way this month because “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” ended its popular but limited run Aug. 31, and two other plays -- “Enchanted April” and “Say Goodnight, Gracie” -- also shuttered last month. Playbill On-Line editor Robert Simonson, in an Aug. 29 story, wrote that the lack of dramas on Broadway this month is an “unusual and worrisome state of affairs” and noted that last year at this time there were five plays running on Broadway.

Doug Belgrad and Matt Tomlach, the co-presidents of production at Columbia Pictures, said that for dramas to work, everything needs to click, beginning with a good script and top director.

The executives have high hopes for a coming Tim Burton fantasydrama called “Big Fish,” but they concede that Burton’s participation was crucial to getting the project off the ground.

“We all felt here that the movie had a powerful script,” Tomlach recalled. “But who is going to bring the vision to the screen? That really is what it’s all about. Had it not been Tim Burton, I don’t know if we would have made it.”

“I don’t have any empirical evidence to support this, but I think the number of great dramas being written and getting made is the same as in the past,” Belgrad said. “But the number of dramas produced by the studios and released theatrically are fewer. I don’t think the marginal or middling dramas are being made anymore. The cost is so much higher than it was 10 or 15 years ago.”

Tomlach adds: “I feel like, in our town, ‘drama’ has become sort of a bad word.”

New York literary agent Jody Hotchkiss said the word “drama” has developed such a negative connotation at the studios that whenever he pitches a script he tries to “disguise” the dramatic elements of the story and emphasizes the humor, romance, action or other ingredients.

“That’s how I feel I have to present things--to disguise the drama and bring out other aspects of the story that fall into acceptable areas,” Hotchkiss said.

Younger audiences and directors

It wasn’t too many years ago that studio executives coveted dramas. Richard D. Zanuck, who is producing “Big Fish,” said that his father, the legendary 20th Century Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck, made his trademark with dramas like “The Snake Pit” and “Gentleman’s Agreement.”

“The drama was always a staple [of the old Fox], but the audience today has changed almost 180 degrees from the days of my father,” the son remarked. “... If you go back and see what the average age of the audience was in my father’s day, it was much older. There was a much more mature group going to movies on a regular basis. I think the audience today -- this young demographic -- they want to go in and be thrilled. They want a real ride. They are interested in the ride more than the content. In the days of my father, the content was the ride.”

Another problem facing dramas today is the scarcity of young directors schooled in making dramatic films.

Doug Richardson, whose screenwriting credits include “Bad Boys” and “Money Train,” said today’s younger directors are primed to make action films, not dramas. He calls them “Michael Bay guys,” a reference to the quintessential action director of “Pearl Harbor” and “Bad Boys.”

“All these guys have gotten very, very good directing with special effects and directing big set-piece scenes,” Richardson said of today’s young directors. “But who do you get to direct a drama? I suppose you get Sydney Pollack to come out of semiretirement, or Carl Franklin or Taylor Hackford.”

If there is any medium that has embraced the drama these days, it’s cable television.

To stand out from the crowd, TNT took the bold step two years ago of branding itself as the network that knows drama. As with any corporate entity, TNT did not make its move without first conducting marketing research. What it found was an untapped segment of the TV audience who found dramas to be “stimulating to the mind,” “stir their emotions,” “guarantee a satisfying experience” and “entertaining.”

“We researched thousands of viewers [and found] there was a demand for [programs] that touched their hearts and minds,” recalled Steve Koonin, executive vice president and CEO of TBS Superstation and TNT. “They wanted a place they felt they could call their own.”

As a result, TNT revamped its programming and, under the slogan “We Know Drama,” began airing a variety of dramas from hit network reruns of “Law & Order,” “ER” and “NYPD Blue” to feature films like “The Perfect Storm” and “Erin Brockovich.” TNT also produces original films and recently announced it would air an as yet untitled 12-hour dramatic series, to be executive produced by Steven Spielberg, that tells the story of life in the Old West through two multigenerational families -- one an American frontier family, and the other American Indian.

The key to TNT’s programming is what officials have dubbed “The Drama Club.” This key demographic is defined as viewers ages 25 to 49, married, living in large urban areas and making at least $75,000 in annual household income.

David Thomson, author of “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” said there was a time when a coming-of-age drama like 1955’s “Rebel Without a Cause” could attract massive numbers of teens. “I don’t think teenagers want to go to that [kind of film] anymore. If they have problems, they want to work it out themselves.”

Thomson said young moviegoers today are saying, “Don’t give me story, give me spectacle, give me roller coaster, give me a big thrill. When I get middle-aged, then I’ll go for story.”