A blockbuster effect on art

The Big Picture

The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood

Edward Jay Epstein

Random House: 416 pp., $25.95

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Blockbuster

How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer

Tom Shone

Free Press: 352 pp., $26

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In the course of writing “The Big Picture,” Edward Jay Epstein learned that movie stars often lie about their age, are known to submit to cosmetic surgery to preserve the illusion of youth and sometimes tell fibs, great and small, about their pasts in interviews and press releases. He also discovered -- hard-charging reporter that he is -- that action heroes claim not to wear makeup in front of the cameras when, in fact, they often do, and that they pretend to do their own stunts when, actually, stuntmen are almost always called in to do the dirty work. He observes that among the many perquisites placed before Hollywood’s elite, none ranks higher in their estimation than gadding about on one of the studio’s private jets.

Do you need to sit down? Would you like a glass of water? No? Well, take a few deep breaths to steady yourself before we press on. Better now? Good. You’re perhaps ready to handle Epstein’s more substantive news: Studio pictures nowadays make more money in foreign release and DVD sales than they do in domestic theatrical rentals; expensive and risky blockbuster movies, driven by expensive special effects, burdened by monumental star salaries and promotional budgets, as a rule do better in the “ancillary” markets than smaller, more traditional films do.

Epstein carefully notes that these pictures can turn into “franchises” for the studios, meaning that they have the potential to encourage the making of ever more profitable, ever-dopier sequels. He also observes that these movies both dehumanize the movie-going experience and threaten traditional Hollywood roles and relationships. By this he means, for example, the director with several hundred computer-generated images in his film has surrendered some of his autonomy to the anonymous techno-geeks at Industrial Light & Magic, and that the star, performing alone in front of a green screen, pretending he’s about to be crushed by a rogue meteor that will be tricked in later, is not engaged in acting as that profession has traditionally been defined. He notes that it is now possible to electronically paste the star’s face over a stuntman. (They did it in “Gladiator.”)

Epstein’s disdain for this method of doing business is muted but palpable. And it is difficult to disagree with him -- especially if you are a moviegoer of a certain age and are used to seeing real people behaving in ways that are constrained by the limits of what can and cannot be physically accomplished in the real world. But though it may be useful to pull all this information together in one place, none of what Epstein reports is new. Everyone knows everything he has to say -- and I mean everyone, not just Hollywood insiders. The media (including bloggers), increasingly avid for behind-the-scenes stories (and increasingly uninterested in critical evaluation), have preceded him. If you live in Omaha and care about this stuff, you already know The Big Picture.

And that says nothing about the manner in which Epstein imparts his information. His style makes the average corporate annual report look, by comparison, as if it were written by P.G. Wodehouse. Whatever else the movie business is, it is populated by shrewd, cynical, funny and often desperate people who -- especially under the pressure of opening a $200-million movie on 3,000 or 4,000 screens, as they pursue their all-important first-weekend grosses -- say and do the damndest things. There is no reason to turn them into witless drones. (For a lively, detailed report from the distribution and marketing trenches, the reader is advised to turn to “Open Wide” by Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing, which was published last fall. Not only did these Variety editors scoop Epstein, they wrote rings around him.)

But Epstein’s crucial failure -- and I don’t want to hear any snickering from the back of the room -- is an aesthetic one. His book offers only the slightest evidence that he has actually seen any of the movies he writes about. Indeed, aside from the odd reference to “Casablanca,” there is no evidence that he has seen many movies of any sort. Yet if the blockbuster is the dominant movie form of our era, and if the studios are putting so much effort and money into them, some of them are bound to be better than others. It therefore behooves us to figure out why “Spider-Man 2,” “The Bourne Identity,” “Finding Nemo” or “Pirates of the Caribbean” turned out to be such satisfying experiences -- infinitely more so, in my opinion, than were “The Hours” or “Cold Mountain,” strangling in their hoity-toity intentions.

This is the hard work Tom Shone makes light of in “Blockbuster.” He’s a youngish English critic whose formative moviegoing years coincided with the early years of the modern blockbuster -- “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Alien,” “Terminator” et al -- and he remains faithful to the possibilities he perceived in them when he was a kid. To greatly oversimplify his argument, Shone believes that all of them, whatever special effects wonders they offered, also plugged in to matters primal to all of us -- the loss of a father (or, in the case of “Nemo,” a straying son), the ferocity of mother love. Spidey claims our affection because the protagonist, when he’s not in superhero drag, is something most of us have been -- a tongue-tied, romantically inept post-adolescent. “Bourne” succeeds not entirely because of its high-voltage action set pieces, but because its hero is living one of our worst nightmares, a life in which he is robbed of the memories out of which we form -- well, yes -- identity.

But wait, there’s more. At one point Shone notes that when the movies began they were all action because they could not speak. All right, he’s forgetting intertitles. But the point is essentially true. If thought and emotion were not conveyed through “visual hieroglyphs,” as one early critic prettily put it, a movie would not, could not have its way with the audience. Mary Pickford once rather sadly observed that it would have been more logical for silent films to develop out of pictures with sound instead of the other way around. And George Lucas once said to me that the arrival of the talkies cut off a line of development, the ability to tell stories through silent symbols, just as it reached its apogee with such silent masterpieces as “The Crowd,” “Sunrise” and “City Lights.” Shone argues that the good blockbusters return us to the very roots of moviegoing.

Among the several blockbusters for which Shone makes a passionate case is Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “that deep push on the bass pedals of straightforward awe and wonderment.” He evokes the director’s great eye for ordinary American features -- “squidgy-faced cops, beaker-featured technicians, hairy hillbillies.” Melinda Dillon is quoted saying she felt like Lillian Gish being directed by D.W. Griffith as Spielberg coaxed reactions out of her. The result: “A tense well-knit immobile mass of faces, their eyes alertly fixed on the screen” -- except that Shone’s quoting a description of the crowd at New York’s Bijou Theater watching some forgotten masterpiece of 1909.

I’ll go one step further than Shone. I think the best Modernist filmmakers -- guys who are not in the blockbuster business -- are at least sometimes trying to make movies whose meanings are carried primarily through imagery. Think Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun.” Or Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” or “Barry Lyndon.” Or almost anything by Jean-Luc Godard in his great days. And recall that films of this sort are often as harshly criticized for their inarticulateness as routine action-adventure films are. That’s because movie reviewers are essentially literary people, condemned to summarize in written language a medium that often produces its greatest effect through purely visual means. The critics naturally love snappy dialogue -- in short supply lately -- and complex, novelistic narrative structures. Also, I can tell you, it is easier to quote a few good lines than it is to describe the effect of a subtly orchestrated sequence of images.

I’m not saying, nor is Shone, that all expensive, high-action studio summer releases achieve the status of art. Most of them are merely loud, stupid and ephemeral (especially the sequels, though that’s a rule that “Spider-Man 2” challenges). I am saying, however, that the percentage of good work to bad work is roughly the same in movies costing hundreds of millions as it is in more consciously aspiring low-budget movies. In a popular art, creative energy is naturally going to flow toward the place where the most money is being spent (and earned). This leads Shone to the following riff: If Spielberg, historic master of the blockbuster, turns out to be, in history’s eyes, the most talented filmmaker of his generation, “then, what, frankly, was the point? What was the point of all those hours passed in the dark confines of the art house, boning up on Ukrainian cinema, watching the unwatchable?”

This is not a universal truism. And I don’t think Shone thinks so either. He is prone to exaggeration. But he is also something that Epstein is not -- a witty and observant writer with a rather radical case to make. It is possible that the alleged lowlifes who fashion the tent poles on which, every summer, the studios pitch their big tops, are, in fact, brothers under the skin to the likes of Scorsese and Kubrick. It’s certainly true of the demonic complexity of their techniques -- these guys have studied the masters (possibly even the Ukrainians). It is worth considering the possibility that the future of cinema rests with them. At the very least, it’s an idea -- one more than the clueless Epstein has on offer. *