Why Are Movies So Bad?

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Why Are Movies So Bad?
August 3, 2021

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren’t draw­ing an audience—they’re inheriting an audience.
Alien (1979)
Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers

by Pauline Kael

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren’t draw­ing an audience—they’re inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They’re stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie—for any movie—is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up. “There’s one God for all creation, but there must be a separate God for the movies,” a producer said. “How else can you explain their survival?” An atmosphere of hope develops before a big picture’s release, and even after your friends tell you how bad it is, you can’t quite believe it until you see for yourself. The lines (and the grosses) tell us only that people are going to the movies—not that they’re having a good time. Financially, the industry is healthy, so among the people at the top there seems to be little recognition of what miserable shape movies are in. They think the grosses are proof that people are happy with what they’re getting, just as TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for. (A number of the new movie executives come from TV.) These new execu­tives don’t necessarily see many movies themselves, and they rarely go to a theatre. If for the last couple of years Hollywood couldn’t seem to do any­thing right, it isn’t that it was just a stretch of bad luck—it’s the result of re­cent developments within the industry. And in all probability it will get worse, not better. There have been few recent American movies worth lining up for—last year there was chiefly The Black Stallion, and this year there is The Empire Strikes Back. The first was made under the aegis of Francis Ford Coppola; the second was financed by George Lucas, using his profits from Star Wars as a guarantee to obtain bank loans. One can say with fair confi­dence that neither The Black Stallion nor The Empire Strikes Back could have been made with such care for visual richness and imagination if it had been done under studio control. Even small films on traditional subjects are difficult to get financed at a studio if there are no parts for stars in them; Peter Yates, the director of Breaking Away—a graceful, unpredictable comedy that pleases and satisfies audiences—took the project to one studio after another for almost six years before he could get the backing for it.

There are direct results when conglomerates take over movie companies. At first, the heads of the conglomerates may be drawn into the movie busi­ness for the status implications—the opportunity to associate with world-fam­ous celebrities. Some other conglomerate heads may be drawn in for the girls, but for them, too, a new social life beckons, and as they become social­ly involved, people with great names approach them as equals, and it gets them crazy. Famous stars and producers and writers and directors tell them about offers they’ve had from other studios and about ideas they have for pictures, and the conglomerate heads become indignant that the studios they control aren’t in on these wonderful projects. The next day, they’re on the phone raising hell with their studio bosses. Very soon, they’re likely to be summoning directors and suggesting material to them, talking to actors, and telling the company executives what projects should be developed. How bad are the taste and judgment of the conglomerate heads? Very bad. They haven’t grown up in a show-business milieu—they don’t have the back­ground, the instincts, the information of those who have lived and sweated movies for many years. (Neither do most of the current studio bosses.) The conglomerate heads may be business geniuses, but as far as movies are con­cerned they have virgin instincts; ideas that are new to them and take them by storm may have failed grotesquely dozens of times. But they feel that they are creative people—how else could they have made so much money and be in a position to advise artists what to do? Who is to tell them no? Within a very short time, they are in fact, though not in title, running the studio. They turn up compliant executives who will settle for the title and not fight for the authority or for their own tastes—if, in fact, they have any. The conglomerate heads find these compliant executives among lawyers and agents, among lawyer-agents, among television executives, and in the lower echelons of the companies they’ve taken over. Generally, these executives reserve all their en­thusiasm for movies that have ma