Over the weekend, Mark Harris, the author of two instant-classic movie books (“Pictures at a Revolution” and “Five Came Back”), sent out a few tweets that launched a fruitful discussion:
"Number of 2014’s ten highest-grossing movies that are not remakes, sequels, or adaptations of material for children: 0”
"To those who are saying 'What else is new?', through 2000, half of each year's top 10 movies were often originals aimed at adults.”
As many people noted (and as one anonymous blogger at anthonyisright.com traced out in detail), the year is still cinematically young: most of Hollywood’s presumptive artistic heavyweights get released in the fall. Nonetheless, Harris rightly noted, “BTW, the top 5 in 1975: Jaws, Cuckoo's Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, Shampoo and a Pink Panther sequel. So some things have changed.” I agree, but I think that the shift goes beyond distribution patterns or studio priorities to the world at large—and that it’s not a shift that’s unique to the movies.
Here’s an example. For all the backloaded releasing of Hollywood art films, two came out early in the year that will certainly end up among the year’s best, and would be among the best of any year—Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (released March 7th) and James Gray’s “The Immigrant” (released on May 16th). Anderson’s film is a hit, having taken in fifty-nine million dollars domestically and a hundred and nine million dollars abroad, on a budget reported as thirty-one million dollars; Gray’s has barely broken two million dollars in domestic ticket sales and $3.8 million in foreign markets. (The budget was estimated at sixteen and a half million dollars.)
In 2009, Gray and Anderson also went head to head: “Two Lovers” came out on February 13th and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” on November 13th. The animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book took in only twenty-one million dollars domestically; the story of a Brooklyn man fighting depression and romantic disaster took in three million dollars (but thirteen million dollars abroad). The odd part is that Gray’s films are much more classical in style than Anderson’s. Certainly, Anderson’s films have had a vigorous release and marketing campaign from the studios that released them; these two most recent films by Gray have been more or less silently dumped into a few theatres by distributors, who didn’t commit substantial resources to their release.
But the difference in the release of these films also reflects a difference in the worlds of these two directors: Gray’s is operatic, and Anderson’s, for all its exquisite aestheticism, is pop-centered. Anderson doesn’t merely adorn his soundtracks with pop music; his aphoristic dialogue has the incisive precision of lyrics, and his freewheelingly impulsive characters—despite their punctilious stylization—are essentially rock revisited and revived. Gray, by contrast, fills his films with opera, and they’re akin to opera in their layered, swelling and billowing, thrillingly structured emotionalism. Both filmmakers are, in their way, exemplary modernists; both transform manners and styles derived from their absorption in artistic classics into personal and original forms. But Anderson has turned his method into a marker of a generation (and I think that the generation that has grown up Andersonian has helped to make “Grand Budapest” a hit); Gray has made his method a marker of what is now a circumscribed and marginalized format (whether rooted in Verdi or in Berg).
The subject of the decline of an “aimed at adults” genre has come up before: in the late sixties, rock—young people’s music—supplanted diluted varieties of jazz and classical music as the mainstream music of the United States, and ultimately did so throughout much of the world. (The days when a major commercial radio station would form and maintain its own world-class symphony orchestra for its world-class conductor, as WNBC did with Arturo Toscanini, aren’t coming back.)
The equivalent shift in Hollywood movies didn’t happen until the nineteen-eighties, for a few peculiar reasons. The technical complexity and financial magnitude of movies made the boomer generation’s cinematic gestation take longer. So did that generation’s new role models and new modes of training, the New Wave and film school: the young directors of the sixties and seventies studied movie classics and built on templates that they found in the past but had to create for themselves. To put it differently, the cinematic equivalent of three-chords-and-out wasn’t a rough-and-ready film but the elaborate aftermath of an extended course in Hitchcock and Fuller (or Kubrick and Kurosawa).
In the eighties, the industry found that it had left its largest market, that of young people wanting to get out of the house, untapped or shunted to ludicrous beach-blanket anachronisms. After that market is served, what’s left is the equivalent of the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera—or, for that matter, Bargemusic, The Stone, or IRCAM. When Martin Scorsese has a hit with “Shutter Island” or “The Wolf of Wall Street,” or Darren Aronofsky makes a minor mint with “Black Swan” or Steven Soderbergh does the same with “Magic Mike,” it’s still on a smaller scale (if perhaps at a much higher rate of return) than the money that’s made with “Fast and Furious 6” or “Iron Man 3.”
That’s why the world of movies tends now to pull toward the extremes. Its overtly commercial productions are intended to be universal; its director-driven, personally motivated productions are exceptions from the start. And those exceptions depend on exceptional modes of financing. The independent producers who make the films of Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Sofia Coppola, and other visionary directors possible are cognate with major donors to opera companies and orchestras. The analogy is imperfect, because the films in question may well become profitable, and can certainly bring at least some return on investment, and sometimes a superb one. Occasionally, things will turn out as they did for “To the Wonder,” one of the finest movies of last year, which cost many millions to make (the precise budget is unclear) and took in $587,615 at the box office. In any case, the investment in these directors’ work comes with a full vote of confidence in their distinctive artistry; the originality, the authorial exceptionalism is a central aspect of the product.
The often-told story of the rise of the auteur is the discovery that artists—headed by Hitchcock, the master showman—lurked within the most mercantile provinces of Hollywood. And so they did; for that matter, they didn’t need young French critics to tell them that they were good. But once word got out, self-consciousness set in. The New Wave filmmakers worked within the mainstream of their national film industry (in fact, taking the place of the old guard, exactly as they had intended) without for a moment sacrificing their individuality to the system, just as the New Hollywood filmmakers did a decade later. Both the French and the American generations were glorious anachronisms from the very start, fulfilling and perpetuating classical artistic ideals in places that could hardly sustain them. The mainstream French film industry is, for the most part, kept going artificially, through a complex system of direct and indirect subsidies. Hollywood remains a business. The commercial realm places even less value on Hitchcockian-type imagination than the classic studios did, but the artistic realm of filmmaking now allows creators extraordinary freedom, even if it turns each new production into an uphill battle to exist. For the exceptional filmmaker, each film is an exception, each success a happy accident. It’s only the unflagging enthusiasm of independent producers, cinematic Medicis, that provides any sense of continuity, of normalcy. The big difference now, in other words, is that the gap between great and moderate success has grown. The authorial filmmaker is less likely to make a killing, and is fortunate to make a steady living. The diversified field of cinematic and paracinematic activities that Spike Lee works in seems likely to be the way of the future.
P.S. What’s so great about adults? Classic-age Hollywood is full of movies for and about adults that are dull, stodgy, and uninventive—writerly and actorly, honoring traditional values with a secret whiff of piety and an eye on the cash box, rather Mantovani than Beethoven, rather Don Sebesky than John Coltrane. That kind of movie isn’t gone; it now occupies screens in art houses. It’s the rule to the exception.