Retro Hollywood

A quick glance at the movie listings shows that yesteryear is hot. Ray Charles and Bobby Darin are singing, Alfred Kinsey is reporting and Howard Hughes, before his creepy Vegas days, is conquering the skies and Hollywood.

The real granddaddy at the multiplex, though, may be “Million Dollar Baby,” a movie that flowed from “Rope Burns,” a collection of short stories published when author F.X. Toole was 70 years old. The movie stars a buffed Hilary Swank, but it also features 74-year-old Clint Eastwood, who also directed, and Morgan Freeman, who is closing in on 70. They’re youngsters, though, compared with production designer Henry Bumstead, who is 89. So much for the fiction that older folks don’t have much of interest to say to youngsters.

Hollywood is smart to look to the past for captivating tales, but absent the occasional “Million Dollar Baby,” the exercise doesn’t conjure up much work for actors and actresses with gray hair. When the Screen Actors Guild releases its annual survey of who got what roles in 2004, the results are likely to mirror 2003, when 65% of 816 leading roles went to actors and actresses under 40. Older women fared noticeably worse than their male counterparts.

Yet Hollywood, which is poised to see the number of tickets sold slip for a second straight year, probably has good reason to consider thinking gray, at least in terms of its audience, if not its talent. The big screen skews young because moviegoers between the ages of 12 and 29 purchase half of all movie tickets. Yet that demographic was flat in recent years, while the number of moviegoers between the ages of 40 and 59 has risen -- a boomer-fueled trend that will continue.

Many older folks have time and money, yet Hollywood prefers to pour money into glitzy marketing campaigns designed to lure teens and those in their 20s. Older customers tend to see past the hype. As one movie company marketing executive put it during a panel discussion sponsored by the AARP, “an older audience, as opposed to a younger audience, demands the one thing that Hollywood cannot seem to manage to turn out a great deal of, which is quality.”