I Work In A Movie Theatre

When I meet people for the first time and tell them this, sometimes they get around to asking "How come movies aren't any good any more?" Ignoring the fact that I'm not in charge of Hollywood (not yet), I tell them they're asking the wrong question.

The question isn't why movies aren't good any more. This is a question which has a complex answer, or many answers, a whole collection of effects, interconnected like chaos theory and feeding off each other in a tangled network of relationships. The question, more accurately, should be, how can we stop the downward slide? They wouldn't know how to make a good movie to save their life -- the system simply conspires against it. Good movies are practically accidents.

It's The Audience

It is what the public buys and responds to (whether they like it or not) this season that dictates what is in theatres next season. I mean, if "Batman Forever" didn't have the biggest one-day gross in Warner Brother's history, with a new actor as Batman no less, they certainly wouldn't be throwing another $75 million Joel Schumacher's way to do the next one ("Batman Fivever" I believe it's called) with George Clooney, a new new Batman.

It's the audience that needs to be retrained. Congress, right-wingers, Rush Limbaugh and Bob Dole, Michael Medved (Whatever happened to him? He used to be Mr. Golden Turkey? That's another essay...) all bemoan the "conspiracy of left-wing Hollywood" injecting destructive values like violence and sex into mainstream movies. I've got news for them. Hollywood's in business to make as much money to pay overinflated egos, drug habits, and production costs. Not to destroy the moral fiber of the youth of America. If the moral fiber of America were truly corrupted, they'd sneak into movies and steal the video tapes (even more so) and no money would be generated.

No -- Hollywood's agenda is all different. They can't pay those kind of massive sociological games on the public. (Christ, what an amorphous, unruly, target group, anyway.) Why not? Because movies cost too fucking much. Film as an art form has gone the way of...well, TV as an art form. The "press" is free to everyone who owns one. When the average minute of 35mm Hollywood screen time costs over $300,000 to produce, you don't see a new generation of Jean Renoirs, Robert Bressons, or Howard Hawkses going into the movie business.

Movies Are Made by the Large Financial Players

As more multimedia mergers are completed and more of all media are owned by a smaller number of companies, the rules changed. 80% of the movies last year [1995] were produced by only 5 companies and made 90% of the domestic gross. It's a passive monopoly, the reasons for which will become clear. Suffice to say now that the pie is shared by fewer and fewer people, and it costs even more to get a seat at the table.

It wasn't always this way. Producers once advertised their large budgets as a lure to audiences in the 50s. ("A Multi-Million Dollar Production!") There used to be a lot of cheap movies in the old days, and it was a badge of honor to spend money. Now it's a badge of excess. An inflated budget is cause for bad press and accusations of waste. It shouldn't be this way now, either, frankly. "Showgirls" should not have cost its reported $45 million. Do you believe that? It had no costumes for chrissakes and took place practically exclusively backstage in Las Vegas, full of pre-made sets and famous for the publicity-friendly attitude towards filmmakers. There was no expensive talent -- director Paul Verhoeven got scale to insure he got final cut approval (and I guess he got exactly what he wanted), and Kyle McLachlan isn't getting no $20 million per picture (certainly not now).

(America did not respond to "Showgirls" and we will not be seeing any more expensive movies about strippers filled with nudity. The producers of "Striptease," Demi Moore's title opus due this summer, are shitting bricks -- their P.R. materials are already re-spinning the story into one about a single mother forced to strip to pay for a custody battle.)

"Fair Game," Cindy Crawford's entry into cinematic immortality, also didn't fare well (it wasn't that bad either -- just stupifyingly typical) and would have made perhaps a small profit -- except for the fact that it cost a reported $35 mil. What? There is absolutely nothing production-value-wise in that movie to indicate such an outrageous cost. Even the "high-tech" infrared effects of the spy-scope are out of a '70s "Mission Impossible" episode. Hasn't Hollywood figured out how to make these films assembly-line cookie cutter fashion yet?)

You Didn't Think I'd Forget 'Waterworld,' Did You?

"Waterworld" is another, and the prime one from last year, example of what Hollywood spends too much time and money wroughting when anyone reading a synopsis of the film during the previous nine months of preproduction could have told them: this doesn't sound like a very interesting movie, guys. This thing cost $200 million (and that's the conservative end of the estimates.)

They had incredible production problems, not least of which was their artificial island sinking in the first week. There's a small multitude of reasons why a film like "Waterworld" gets into production before it's completely thought out both in terms of a compelling concept, before a study's been done of the amount it might make vs. how much it might cost, and before a proper amount of preproduction's done so things go smoothly and islands don't sink.

Most of the fault may have to do with a big star (like Costner) agreeing to sign onto the project and suddenly, it's a green light to make the picture. Suddenly, can they get it done in time for the summer market? Suddenly, rewrites, the least expensive part of preproduction in theory (it's just a guy and some paper, typing in a room) fall by the wayside. They think they'll fix it in the editing. YIKES! Wouldn't you rather see a good movie in August than something shitty in June? But then, if the picture doesn't open during the summer months, head-to-head with all the other big guns, it wouldn't be so properly competitive, would it? So things are rushed out, half-baked, mis-judged (this is probably why "Last Action Hero" turned out to be what it was, as well).

Art Is No Longer An Issue

The point is that the money isn't going to increase the art form. "Art" is no longer an issue. Movies no longer satisfy. The people making movies do not know how to make movies good. That quality is too intangible, and art's in the eye of the beholder, anyway. Law school and accounting degrees don't prepare executives to identify (let alone create) good art that will reach and enlighten the masses. (I happen to think editing a 'zine is probably better experience for that.)

So the people in charge no longer can consider art. Now movies are made based on its bankable elements, on the ability to sell the movie, as product -- overseas, on video, in the ads during the first week of release -- and all that is in spite of its ability to satisfy the audience.

They can do one thing well. Sell things. And the audience lets itself be sold to. The audience doesn't know what it wants. (Not quite.) People will think...What I tell them to think. This has become standard operating procedure. The audience has been trained to take what's given to them by Hollywood.

How Do Movies Make Their Money?

It's probably no secret that most movies make most of their money in the first weekend. The 3 "Batman" movies each had opening weekend (3-day) grosses of at least $50 million. This is an incredible amount of money. You cannot conceive of having $50 million at your disposal. (Gee, you could make a movie, like "Showgirls.")

What most people don't know is that the studios generally keep 90% of the first week's gross, while only 10% is kept by the theatre. That means the movie theatre only makes 70 cents on each $7 ticket sold. (Now you know why the popcorn and candy cost so much.) The studios keep 80% the second week, then 70% the third week, and things generally even out at a 60/40 split after that.

Obviously the studios prefer that the gross be the biggest the first week, and spend upwards of $10 million to promote pictures to make sure they become "events." Then everyone must see them.

Theatres, conversely, prefer pictures that start slow and build week after week, but there are few and far between, depending as it does on a positive word-of-mouth; freaks like "Crying Game," "ET," and "Smoke" have been such pictures in recent memory.

Movies do not satisfy.

The advertisers know this, and are spending more and more money on these "events," casting bankable stars, buying publicity to get as many people into the theatres that first week ("Stallone 'opens' pictures, so give him $20 million," Savoy said, for a picture, as yet undetermined! (Hope it isn't "Oscar 2." (Savoy has since reported they're getting out of the movie business. It costs too much!))), before: 1) word gets out that it sucks, and 2) the gross percentage starts to deteriorate into nothing.

(A new development in the distributor's money arrangement has been the introduction of "floating weeks," in which the distributor demands 90% from the week that has the highest gross, regardless of where it falls. Although generally it is the first week anyway, sometimes pictures open at odd times, like before a holiday weekend, when it starts slow (like the week before Christmas) and then gets busy after the holiday's past (like the week between Christmas and New Year), thereby robbing the theatre of even this little perk of having a better percentage on the more profitable weeks. "Home Alone," the surprise hit of the end of 1990 (which opened Thanksgiving week), was the impetus for this policy when Universal noted how the grosses kept getting bigger and bigger as their percentages went down.)

Another Strategy

Movies don't satisfy anymore, and don't last very long in theatres. So another strategy of squeezing as big a gross out is to open pictures as widely as possible, in upwards of 2000 screens in the US alone. There's no lines any more. Multiplexes have three or four prints of a movie, showing it in four houses, and a half-hour apart. They don't want to turn anyone away, because over the course of the next week the moviegoer might hear the movie isn't so good -- and won't be back the following weekend.

It seems to work. The opening weekend grosses get bigger and bigger.

An important fringe benefit of getting a big gross of the weekend is to be able to advertise for the next week triumphantly, "Number One Movie in America" (or "Number One Comedy in America," "Number One Kelsey Grammer Movie in America," or the like, if you didn't place quite at the top). There are many people who decide to see films based on what's popular. "Gee," they must be saying to themselves, "what does everyone else know that I don't? It must be good after all."

Working in a movie theatre, many times I've had people come up to the box office, ask what the line outside was for, and change their first choice to what everyone else was seeing!

So momentum matters. To the point where studios don't want to open their film against another film that's perceived as a juggernaut, that will sink their films chances during that crucial opening weekend. I cite as example the week "Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls" opened, which was two weeks before Thanksgiving 1995, and was the sole opening that weekend, since no other studio wanted to go head-to-head against it. Consequently everyone who wanted to see a new film that weekend saw AV:WNC, and the damned thing grossed $25 million -- in the middle of November, non-holiday weekend!

(And it sucked, even worse than the first one, some say. I'm not sure that's possible.)

And since movies don't satisfy, the public, increasingly, ARE flocking to these "event" movies in hopes that their hard-earned money will, this time, be paid back.

But It Sounded So Good

In this age of instant gratification, there is no excuse for not knowing a movie is bad -- reviews are on TV and in every paper. Comments are on the internet by 4 PM on opening day, posted from people who saw the noon show the first day. Heaven forbid, at work on Monday morning, everyone's talking about the movie -- they've all seen it and you haven't for some reason, and now you're not in the "in" crowd having missed the movie everyone else did, and worst of all, that everyone's telling you is no damned good!

You have to keep your social standing and you end up feeling like an idiot going to see it the second weekend. "Don't you have friends? Didn't you see any of the reviews? Can't you read?"

It's practically a survival tactic to see it quick, the first day, to avoid the buzz (probably bad), and at least get that thrill of standing in line (sometimes for hours) saying to yourself, "maybe this one is going to be good. Maybe this is going to be a good movie-going experience." "Interview with a Vampire," the last two "Batman" films, "T2," all had incredible lines the first day, which fell off at least 33% the second day.

That's terrible when a movie's "played out" by Saturday. "ET" played 9 months straight back in 1982. "Jurassic Park," ten years later, was out of theatres in only ten weeks. [In 2005, "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith," although having grossed $370 million in 5 weeks, was off 90% of its screens 60 days after it opened.]

It's become a badge of honor to see it first. To avoid the bad word. Keep yourself naïve. Too bad that movies are so bad that it's reduced to taking a bullet so others don't have to.

Patron Of The Arts

Where will it end? When even though minor movie costs $15 million to produce (even any Pauly Shore movie), the age of time-filling programmers have ended. The market demands more responsibility if the resources of Hollywood are to be effectively mined.

Viewer, patron of the arts, your first step is to educate yourself as to why you see movies. IF it is a social need for you to see the movie every one else is seeing this weekend, then you should continue to place your hard earned vote (which is what your $7 is, a vote) on the biggest movies best advertised. Follow the crowd. Be a patsy. Risk seeing the likes of "Ace Ventura 2" and "Congo." You've been warned.

But if you're really going to be entertained, by a good story or your favorite actor or film genre, or perhaps to learn something about a topic you're interested in, read the reviews and find out what other people say about the movie before you go. then go, forewarned and forearmed.

(I know, there's a school of thought that says don't read any reviews before you see the movie - don't taint your opinion with others. But you'll soon train yourself to take what the reviewers say with a grain of salt, only gleaning what you need. Especially if you go ahead and see the movies you're interested in anyway, in spite of the bad reviews. Guess what, you'll discover that the reviewers don't know what the hell they're talking about most of the time. And if critics were called to task more, maybe they'd learn to critique better or get more articulate, at least not be so cocky. And if they're right about a movie, they're usually right for the wrong reasons ("Diabolique" is bad because it's too complicated -- wrong!))

Back To The Point

You do lose that virgin anticipation of "anything can happen," but by knowing in advance what's going to happen -- and what's not going to happen -- you're not disappointed, and you might even enjoy the movie on its own terms. And on yours.

You're there because you want to be. Not because someone -- or some statistic, or some list -- told you you were supposed to be.

You also avoid wasting 120 minutes of your life on the likes of "Flintstones" (easily the worst movie I've seen in ten years, so lame-brained and misguided, and yet the director, Brian Levant, has a new multi-million dollar deal to direct! (The new Arnold Schwarzenegger picture, "Jingle All The Way," due this Christmas; this is a big picture!) How can that be? Oh, "Flintstones" grossed $100 mil (40 of it in the first long weekend, the next through sheer momentum and dumb luck!) Or "Star Trek 5" (Shatner, on the other hand, won't be directing again).

And you may find some gems you'd have passed on: "Popeye" and "9 1/2 Weeks" are examples of movies that found an appreciative audience after a few weeks in release, in spite of horrible reviews and bad word-of-mouth early on, and managed to do something right for somebody who was willing to search it out and tell their friends.

If everyone picks movies a little smarter, maybe we won't have to worry about the likes of "Father of the Bride 2" in the future. All of you who bought tickets to this and helped it gross $75 million last year: I hate you.