Below, for your enjoyment, are excerpts from the article "On the Future of Movies," written by film critic Pauline Kael for The New Yorker in 1974, as they appear in the book "For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies."

I couldn't find this on the net, so I typed it up myself.  I have kept format and spelling consistent with the book.  Any typos are mine.  I did fix one typo in the book, from "grain" to "grainy".  Enjoy!  And sorry to TV-generation types for the length.

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There is no way to estimate the full effect of Vietnam and Watergate on popular culture, but earlier films were predicated on an implied system of values which is gone now, except in the corrupt, vigilante form of a Dirty Harry or Walking Tall.  Almost all the current hits are jokes on the past, and especially on old films – a mixture of nostalgia and parody, laid on with a trowel.  The pictures reach back in time, spoofing the past, jabbing at it.  Nobody understands what contemporary heroes or heroines should be, or how they should relate to each other, and it’s safer not to risk the box-office embarrassment of seriousness.  I often come out of a movie now feeling wiped out, desolate – and often it’s a movie that the audience around me has reacted to noisily, as if it were having a high, great time – and I think I feel that way because of the nihilism in the atmosphere.  It isn’t intentional or philisophical nihilism; it’s the kind one sometimes feels at a porn show – the way everything is turned to dung, oneself included.  A couple of years ago, I went with another film critic, a young man, to see a hard-core movie in the Broadway area, and there was a live stage show with it.  A young black girl – she looked about seventeen but must have been older – did a strip and then danced naked.  The theater was small, and the girl’s eyes, full of hatred, kept raking the customers’ faces.  I was the only other woman there, and each time her eyes came toward me, I had to look down; finally, I couldn’t look up at all.  The young critic and I sat in misery, unable to leave, since that would look like a put-down of her perfomance.  We had to take the contempt with which she hid her sense of being degraded, and we shared in her degradation, too.


There are a few exceptions, but in general it can be said that the public no longer discovers movies, the public no longer makes a picture a hit.  If the advertising for a movie doesn’t build up an overwhelming desire to be part of the event, people just don’t go.  They don’t listen to their own instincts, they don’t listen to the critics – they listen to the advertising.  Or, to put it more precisely, they do listen to their instincts, but their instincts are now controlled by advertising.  It seeps through everything – talk shows, game shows, magazine and newspaper stories.  Museums organize retrospectives of a movie director’s work to coordinate with the opening of his latest film, and publish monographs paid for by the movie companies.  College editors travel at a movie company’s expense to see its big new film and to meet the director, and directors preview their new pictures at colleges.  The public-relations event becomes part of the national consciousness.  You don’t hear anybody say, “I saw the most wonderful movie you never heard of”; when you hear people talking, it’s about the same blasted movie that everybody’s going to – the one that’s flooding the media.  Yet even the worst cynics still like to think that “word of mouth” makes hits.  And the executives who set up the machinery of manipulation love to believe that the public – the public that’s sitting stone-dead in front of its TV sets – spontaneously discovered their wonderful movie.  If it’s a winner, they say it’s the people’s choice.  But, in the TV age, when people say they’re going to see Walking Tall because they’ve “heard” it’s terrific, that rarely means a friend has told them; it means they’ve picked up signals from the atmosphere.  It means Walking Tall has been plugged so much that every cell in a person’s body tells him he’s got to see it.  Advertising is a form of psychological warfare that in popular culture, as in politics, is becoming harder to fight with aboveboard weapons.  It’s becoming damned near invincible.  If Hollywood executives still believe in word of mouth, it’s because the words come out of their own mouths.  These men were shaken for a few years; they didn’t understand what made a film a counterculture hit.  They’re happy to be back on firm ground with The Sting.  Harmless, inoffensive.  Plenty of plot but no meanings.  Not even any sex to worry about.
Much – perhaps most – of the students’ and educated moviegoers; unresponsiveness to recent fine work can be traced to the decisions of the movie companies about what will sell and what won’t.  With their overweening campaign budgets for The Great Gatsby and Chinatown, the Paramount executives didn’t even take a full-page ad in the Times  to announce that The Conversation had won the Grand Prize at Cannes.  They didn’t planon The Conversation being a success, and nothing is going to make them help it become one.  Gatsby and Chinatown were their pictuers, but The Conversationwas Francis Ford Coppola’s, and they’re incensed at his being in a position (after directing The Godfather) to do what he wanted to do; they’re hurt that he flouts their authority, working out of San Francisco instead of Los Angeles.  And they don’t really have any respect for The Conversation, because it’s an idea film.  It’s the story of a compulsive loner (Gene Hackman), a wizard at electronic surveillance who is so afraid others will spy on him that he empties his life; he’s a cipher – a cipher in torment.  There’s nothing to discover about him, and still he’s in terror of being bugged.  (Hackman is a superlative actor, but his peculiarity, his limitation, like Ralph Richardson’s when he was younger, is his quality of anonymity: just what is right for this role.)  The Conversation is driven by an inner logic.  It’s a little thin, because the logic is the working out of one character’s obsession, but it’s a buggy movie that can get to you so that when it’s over you really feel you’re being bugged.  Maybe the reason the promotion people didn’t try to exploit the Watergate tie-in was that they suspected the picture might also be saying something about movie companies.  If a film isn’t promoted, it’s often because something about it – the idea itself, or the director’s obstinate determination to make it – needles the bosses.
Executives show a gambler’s ardor in arranging the financing of a picture.  Sometimes they buy into one when it’s finished or almost finished, in what appears to be the absolute conviction that it’s a winner.  But almost any straw in the wind can make them lose confidence.  They’ll try out a tricky, subtle movie on a Friday-night preview audience that has come to see Walking Tall or John Wayne in McQ and decide that the movie has no public appeal.  They pull away from what they fear will be a failure; within the fiefdom of their company they don’t want to be associated with a risky eventure.  They all snuggle deep into the company’s hits; a picture like The Sting becomes a soft fur collar that they caress themselves with.  The company that has The Sting doesn’t worry about a real sendoff for the The Sugarland Express: where are the big stars?  The company with The Exorcist doesn’t give much thought to a campaign for Mean Streets: some of the executivs don’t find it “satisfying,” so they’re sure the public won’t.  The movie companies used to give all their pictures a chance, but now they’ll put two or three million, or even five, into selling something they consider surefire, and a token – a pittance – into the others.  And when an unpublicized picture fails they can always cover their tracks by blaming the director.  “There was nothing we could do for it,” the executives in charge of advertising always say, and once they have doomed a picture, who can prove them wrong?

What isn’t generally understood is that the top men don’t want to be proved wrong and the lower-echelon executives have a jobholder’s interest in proving their bosses right.  For all the publicity the companies get from giving a picture “a second chance” – never really having given it a first – I can think of only one or two cases when they honestly did provide a fresh chance, and there’s a whole morgueful of movies that were killed despite indications of public response; for example, Gillo Pontecorvo’s only picture after The Battle of Algiers – Burn!, starring Marlon Brando, which came and went so fast that hardly anybody knows it exists.
     If the company men don’t like a picture, or are nervous about its chances, or just resent the director’s wanting to do something he cares about (instead of takine the big assignments they believe in), they do minimal advertising, telling him, “Let’s wait for the reviews,” or “We’ll see how the reviewers like it,” and then, even if the reviews are great, they say, “But the picture isn’t doing business.  Why should we throw away money on it?”  And if he mentions the reviews, they say, “Listen, the critics have never meant anything.  You know that.  Why waste money?  If people don’t want to go, you can’t force them to buy tickets.”


There’s a natural war in Hollywood between the businessmen and the artists.  It’s based on drives that may go deeper than politics or religion: on the need for status, and warring dreams.  The entrepreneur class in the arts is a relatively late social development; there were impresarios earlier, but it was roughly a hundred years ago, when the arts began to be commercialized for a large audience, that the mass-culture middleman was born.  He functions as a book publisher, as a theatrical producer, as a concert manager, as a rock promoter, but the middleman in the movie world is probably more filled with hatred for the arts he traffics in than the middleman in any other are.  The movie entrepreneur is even more of a self-made man that the others; he came out of nowhere.  He has to raise – and risk – more money, and he stands to gain more.  In a field with no traditions, he is more of a gambler and less of an easthete than entrepreneurs in the other arts.  He’s a street fighter, his specialty low cunning.  Even if he’s a second- or third-generation movie executvie with a college education, or a Harvard-educated lawyer turned agent turned producer, he’s learned to be a street fighter if he wasn’t born to it, and he has the same hatred of the artist.  The artist, with his expressive needs – the artist, who, by definition, cares about something besides money – denigrates the only talent that the entrepreneur has: raising money.  Nobody respects the entrepreneur’s dream of glory, and nobody respects his singular talent – least of all the artist who needs him, and is often at his mercy.
     The entrepreneur has no class, no status; and, whether he was a scrambling junk dealer or a scheming agent or a poor little rich boy who managed to survive his mogul father’s ruthless bullying, he knows that.  A director or an actor doesn’t even have to be an artist – only to identify himself as an artist – to get the cachet, while the moneyman is likely to be treated as a moneygrubbing clown.  Some few – Joe Levine, and Sam Goldwyn before him – have been able to make celebrities of themselves by acquiring a comic status, the status of a shrewd, amusing vulgarian.  In no other field Is the entrepreneur so naked a status-seeker.  Underlings are kept busy arranging awards and medals and hororary degrees for the porducer, whose name looms so large in the ads that the public – and often the producer himself – comes to think he actually made the pictures.  Ross Hunter, Robert Radnitz, even Hal Wallis in recent years hardly have room in their advertisting for the writers’ and directors’ names.  The packagers offer themselves as the stars, and in many cases their pictures fail because they insist on employing nonentity direcors who don’t assert any authority.
     The hatred of the moneyman for the ungovernable artist is based on a degradation that isn’t far from that stripper’s hatred of the audience – furious resentment of the privilege people who, as he sees it, have never had to stoop to do the things he has done.  As in Mordecai Richler’s exultant novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (which really enables one to understand what makes Sammy run), and the teeming, energetic Canadian film based on it, the entrepreneur is, typically, a man who has always been treated like dirt.  And even after he’s fought his way up, finagling like crazy every step of the way, a profligate directo with the world at his feet may not only threaten that solvency but still treat him like dirt, as in Peter Viertel’s thinly disguised account, in the novel White Hunter, Black Heart, of the relations of John Huston and Sam Spiege during the making of The African Queen.  There are few directors who feel such disdain, fewer still who would express it so nakedly, but the moneymen keep looking for signs of it: they tap phones, they turn employees into sneaks and spies – all to get proof of the disloyalty of those ingrate artists.  It doesn’t help if the artists like the tough bosses personally – if they prize the unconcealed wiliness or the manic, rude drive.  In Richler’s later novel St. Urbain’s Horseman, the now rich Duddy Kravitz appears as a minor character.  When someone assures Duddy that his blond actress wife loves him, Duddy is exasperated: “What are you talking, she loves me?  Who in the hell could love Duddy Kravitz?”  Duddy’s view of himself doesn’t leave much of a basis for friendship, and any affection the artist may feel disentegrates as soon as the businessman uses his power to control the artist’s work.  The war of the businessmen against the artists is the war of the powerful against the powerless, based on the hatred of those who can’t for those who can, and in return the hatred of those who can for those who won’t let them.
The producers’ complaint about the hothead director who puts up a fight to try something different is “He’s self-destructive.  He’s irresponsible.  You can’t do business with him.”  And they make him suffer for it.  The artists in Hollywood are objects of ridicule because they’re trying to work as artists.  When a gifted director is broke and needs to work, the producers stick him on a project that is compromised from the start, and then the picture is one more failure to be held against him.  They frustrate him at every turn because he doesn’t respect them, and he is humiliated by men he doesn’t even respect.  The producers feel secure with the directors and actors who don’t have ideas of their own, who will take jobs because they need to work and don’t really care what they do.  Those are theones the producers call “artists with discipline.”

An actor or a director can become an “artist with discipline” when he has a huge box-office hit, and his reputation for discipline will soar if, like Paul Newman or Robert Redford, he has a string of hits.  Actually, to the moneymen discipline means success plus a belief in success.  The moneymen want a director who won’t surprise them.  They’re scared of a man like Altman, because they just don’t know what he’ll do on a picture; they can’t trust him to make it resemble the latest big hit.  They want solid imitations, pictures that reek of money spent and money to come, pictures that look safe – like those Biblical epics that came rujmbling off the assemly lines in the ifties.  Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Brothers are jointly producing a burning-skyscraper picture, The Towering Inverno, with Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Jennifer Jones, Robert Wagner, Fred Astaire, Richard Chamberlain, and other assorted big names.  IT’s Grand Hotel in flames at last.  Universal, for starters, has signed up Anne Bancroft and George C. Scott for The Hindenburg, described as “a multilayered drama with a gallery of international characters.”  In other words, Grand Hotel in flames in the sky.  Every couple of years, the American movie public is said to crave something.  Now it’s calamity, and already the wave of apocalyptic movies – which aren’t even here yet – is being analyzed in terms of our necrophilia.  The studio heads are setting up disaster epics like kids reaching hand over hand up a baseball bat – all because of the success of The Poseidon Adventure.  I doubt whether there’s a single on of the directors mounting these disaster specials – becoming commanders-in-chief in an idiot war – who wouldn’t infinitely rather be working on something else.  By the time the public is gorged with disasters and the epics begin to flop, the studio heads will have fastened on another get-rich-quick gimmick and the people who work for them will lose a few more years of what might have been their creative lives.  The producers gamble on the public’s wanting more of whatever is a hit, and since they all gamble on that, the public is always quickly surfeited, but the failures of the flaccid would-be hits never anger the producers the way the failures of the films that someone really fought for do.  The producers want those films to fail; they often make them fail.  A Sam Peckinpah film, an Altman film, a Kershner film – the executives get pleasure out of seeing those films fail.  It’s a punishment of the artist.
     Since all the businessmen’s energy goes into strategy and manipulation, they can outfox the artists damn near every time; that’s really the business they’re in.  Their right of “final cut” – one of the great symbolic terms in moviemaking – gives them the chance to chop up the film of a director who has angered them by doing it his own way; they’ll mutilate the picture trying to remove the complexities he battled to put in.  They love to play God with other people’s creations.  Movie after movie is mangled, usually by executives’ last minute guesses about what the public wants.  When they’ve finished, they frequently can’t do anything with the pictures but throw them away.  That’s their final godlike act – an act easy for them to live with, because they always have the director to blame.  To them, the artist is the outsider; he’s not a member of the family, to be protected.  A few years ago, when word was out in the industry that Brando didn’t mean anything at the box office, the producerr David Merrick fired him from a picture; I asked an executive connected with the production what Brando had done.  “Nothing,” he said.  “Brando was working hard, and he was cooperative with everyone.  But he suggested some ways to improve the sc ript; they were good suggestions – the script was a mess.  But legally that was interference, and Merrick could fire Brando and collect on the insurance.”  “But why?”  I persisted.  He shrugged at my ignorance.  “What could make David Merrick bigger than firing Marlon Brando?”  He said.


The star can be defined by what the producer says of him: “If he wants to burn down the studio, I’ll hand him the match.”  That was said, I think, of Jerry Lewis, but it applies to such Hollywood figures as Frank Sinatra and, of course, Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford and Steve McQueen.  What it means is very simple: the producers will hand them a match because the producers are banking the money.  The producer is saying, “He can degrade me as long as I get mine out of it.”  And undreneath that ht’es saying, “But wait until he has to come to me for something.”  The producers hate Brando for refusing to settle down and go for the money; they love-hate McQueen and Redford and Eastwood.  They need them; they court them.  And yes, they can make a deal with them, but only on the star’s terms, and the producers are never allowed to forget it.  IF the chance ever comes, they’ll make the star pay for that.
     The country has never been as star crazy as it is right now; there aren’t very man ymovie stars, but the phenomenon of stardom operates in television, in radio, in literature, in the academic world, in politics, in the women’s movement.  (The black movement hasn’t been getting much publicity recently, becauser it lacks stars.)  Yet one can watch a few TV “roasts” – those ugly-jolly orgies of mock insults and real insults and odious sentimental disclaimers in which celebrites are feted – without b ecmoing aware of the sense of betrayal that is just under the suface?  The best performer at the roast is obviously the one who dares to be the most malicious, and the person honored is forced to be a good sport while others “kid” him, letting out their aggression while he tries to laugh.  And then they embrace him and say they didn’t mean it.  The roast is the show-business form of Shirley Jackson’s lottery.  It’s a public display of the anger and self-hatred of those caught in the system, a ritual gathering of sellouts hitting each other with bladders and pretending it doesn’t hurt.  And that’s how they feel when they’re at the top.  Their contempt for the audience, like the stripper’s, is probably what makes it possible for them to keep going.  They begin to believe that Las Vegas is all there is.  The roast is a metaphor for the truth of the business; that’s why it has become impossible for the Academy Awards presentation to have any style or dignity.  The members of the Hollywood community can’t control their self-destructive impulses any longer; they can’t resist humiliating themselves before the whole world.  “If that’s what people want,” the performers say, “I’ll give it to them.”  Essentially, they’re all playing to Duddy Kravitz.  He’s the man backing the international motion-picture roast.

A reviewer who pans a producer’s picture is just one more person telling him he has no taste.  When the reviewers praise movies that are allowed to die, the moneyman’s brute instincts are confirmed, and the reviewers’ impotence gives him joy.  “Why must we sit back and allow the critics to determine if a film is acceptabler as a consumer product?”  Frank Yablans, the president of Paramount, asked this June.  He was speaking to some two hundred people who work in television, explaining to them that word of mouth, which can defeat downbeat reviews, will be Paramount’s target.  A reviewer speaks out once, or maybe twice.  The advertisers are an invisble force pounding at the public day after day.  Unfavorable reviews are almost never powerful enough to undo the saturation publicity.  Besides, curiosity about an event like The Exorcistis a big factor; as the woman quoted in Variety said, “I want to see what everybody is throwing up about.”
     When other values are rickety, the fact that something is selling gives it a primacy, and its detractors seem like spoilsports.  The person who holds out against an event looks like a loser: the minority is a fool.  People are cynical about advertising, of course, but their cynicism is so all-inclusive now that they’re indifferent, and so they’re more susceptible to advertising than ever.  If nothing matters anyway, why not just go where the crowd goes?  That’s a high in itself.
     People often make analogies between the world of live theater and the world of movies, and raise the question, “Don’t movie critics have too much power?”  But in movies it’s the businessmen who have the power.  A reviewer’s words can’t be heard above the din unless they’re amplified in the ads – which usually means reduced to a short, exclamatory quote and repeated incessantly.  But that’s only if the reviewer provided a quote forr a picture that the company “has high hops for”; if it’s a picture that the company has lost interest in, there will be a few halfhearted ads, with apathetically selected quotes.  Raves from even the dozen most influential papers and magazines can’t make a success of Mean Streets if the company doesn’t constuct a campaign around those raves.  The public indifference is a result of something that starts at the top of the movie company and filters down.
     The younger audience – high-school and college student – grew up with the rating system.  As kids, they couldn’t escape to the movies, the way their parents did, and so movies weren’t an important part of their lives (though television was).  When they say they love movies, they mean the old movies they’re just discovering, and the new hits.  Even the sub-teens want the events; they were born into sixties cynicism and saturation advertising.
     The students now who discover movies in college and want to get into film production have a different outlook from the young counter-culture filmmakers of the sixties.  They’re not interested in getting into movie work in order to change movies; they just want to get into movie work.  A young film student expressed anger to me about Elia Kazan, who had given a lecture at his university.  Kazan had said that the studios wouldn’t finance the subjects he was interested in, and offered him projects he couldn’t face doing.  The student, without a shade of sympathy for those caught in this basic Hollywood trap, said, “How can we listen to him?  We would do anything to break in, and he says he’s turning down projects!”  Students have little interest in why a person refuses to direct the forty-sixth dope-heist picture or a romp about sprightly, beguiling swindlers; they don’t care to hear some director say that he turned down The Exorcist.  A hit makes a director a hero.  A critc who speaks at a college now is almost certain to be asked such questions as “How many times do you see a movie before writing your critique?” and “Do you take notes?”  The students are really asking, “How do you do it?  How did you get to be a film critic?”  They sometimes used to ask, “What do you think Academy Awards?” – a question that was a sure laugh-getter from an audience that anticipated a tart rejoinder.  Now they ask, “What [or who] do you think will win the Oscars this year?”
     Stardom is success made manifest, success in human form, and, naturally, the yes-sayers are, in general, the biggest stars.  College students are impressed and contemptuous at the same time.  Can one imagine any picture so reactionary or vile that it would diminish Clint Eastwood’s standing at a university?  Even a reputation for corruption – for being willing to do anything for money – increases a star’s stature, and the money gained gives him power and stanidng that are admired in a way that no-sayer’s intransigence isn’t, especially if his intransigence puts him out of the scene.  There is nothing a star can do now that would really disgrace him.  “Celebrity” has destroyed the concept of disgrace: scandal creates celebrity, and public misbeahvior enhances it.  Maybe The Sting is such a whopping hit because it’s really a clebration of celebrity and stardom; it’s not about anything but the golden yes-yes images of Redform and Newman.  It doesn’t need sex; it’s got the true modern sex appeal – success.
     In Los Angeles this spring, busloads of high-school students were brought in to listen to a Best-Sellers Panel composed of Helen Gurley Bbrown, Garson Kanin, Jacqueline Susann, and William Friedkin on the subject of how it feels to sell fifteen million books or to gross a hundred and twenty-five million dollars on a movie.  From all accounts, there were no impolite questions, and no one made a rude noise when Kanin (Tracy and Hepburn) said, “We have to recognize that the public is smarter than we are.  As individuals, one by one, perhaps no.  But when that thousand-headed monster sits out there in the auditorium or sits reading your book of fiction, suddenly that mass audience is what the late Moss Hart called ‘an idiot genius.’”  This conceit of the successful – their absolute conviction that the crap that is sold is magically superior to the work that didn’t sell – is the basis for the entrepreneurs’ self-righteousness.  The public has nothing to gain from believing this, and everything to lose), and yet the public swallows it.

The hits are not uniformly terrible, and in themselves they don’t pose any great threat.  But if this is all that people want from movies – if even educated people and people of taste and some sensibility settle for the nihilistic brassiness of the hits – there’s no audience for new work.  In the past ten years, filmmaking has attracted some of the most inspired college studnets – the aces and prodigies who in previous eras would have headed into poetry or architecture or painting or playwriting.  There they are, poised and ready to take off, and there is no place for them to take off to expcet the same old Hollywood vise – tighter now, perfected.  And there are the high-fliers who have been locked out all along – the dozens of artist-filmmakers who work in film not as a collaborative storytelling medium but as a highly individual art form, more closely related to the graphic arts than to Hollywood.  Some of them, such as Ed Emshwiller, with his great trip film Relativity, and Jordan Belson, who has made flawless abstract visionary shorts, have already reached new peaks of film art; others, such as John Schofill, who works at scarily intense psychosexual imagery, may.  Right now, ther is no way for their work to reach movie theaters and no way for them to heat up and fertilize feature filmmaking, which needs renewal.  Everything is ready for an age of great movies, except the entrepreneurs and the public.
     Movies could easily go the way of the theater – and faster, since the moneymen have no aesthetic commitment whatever.  And probably there’d be less lamentation for movies than for live theater.  Because, of course, there’s television.  But it’s not the same medium.  And though if you don’t read a book when it comes out you can read it a year later, if you don’t see a movie when it comes out, and wait to see it a year later on television, you’re not seeing what you could have seen in the theatre.  (Nor do you see that movie if you wait to see it in a college, or at a film society in a cheap, grainy 16-mm. reduction.)  What’s lost on television is the visual beauty, the spatial sense, the fusion of image and sound – everything that makes movies an art form.  And movies made directly for television almost never have these qualities; one talks of TV movies in terms of pace and impact and tension, and occasionally – with the prestige ones – subject and performances, but who talks of television movies in terms of beauty?  Movies made for TV, or movies made for a big screen and shown on TV, are reduced to just what the businessmen believe in – the bare bones of entertainment.  There is something spurious about the very term “a movie made for TV,” becauser what you make for TV is a TV program.
     For perhaps most Americans, TV is an appliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on – there’s always something to watch.  If a hundred million people see a movie in two shoings on TV, that doesn’t mean what it would if a hundred million people saw it in theaters.  Sure, forty-two million saw The Autobigoraphy of Miss Jane Pittman, but they saw it sandwiched between two other shows.  TV stars with audiences larger than the world has ever before known are eager to appear in a real movie – which, evn if a hit, will be seen by only a handful, relatively speaking (until it, too, winds up on TV) – becauser they know that on TV they’re part of the furniture.  On TV they’re mundane, they’re reduced to the routinely, boringly tolerable.  There’s an aesthetic element in the phrase “larger than live,” and the artists working in the movie medium instinctively take that into consideration.  What is on the big screen has an aesthetic clarity denied to the box; when you’re watching a movie in a theater, you don’t need a voice telling you what you have just seen.
     There have been some few subjects filmed for TV which nobody would finance for theaters, becauser it’s generally understood that people won’t pay to see a film on a subject like that of I Heard the Owl Call My Name or Jane Pittman or The Execution of Private Slovik.  But a few TV shows with social themes shouldn’t become the occasion for big headlines in the press about how television “has been growing bolder.”  Bold is just what these shows aren’t; even when they’re made as well as possible, they’re mincingly careful.  And they’re not a key to new opportunities on TV so much as a key to the constriction of opportunities for moviemakers: moviemakers can’t get backing for pictures with social themes – or with any real themes at all.  Probably it’s true that people wouldn’t pay to see the films on social themes which they’ll watch on television, but that’s because those subjects are treated in the sober, limited TV manner.  We have no way of knowing how the public might respond if a hugely talented filmmaker with adequate resources and a campaign to back him took on a large social theme.  Nobody has had the chance in decades.
     Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control.  People’s TV expectations are so low and so routinized that Brian’s Song can pass for an event, and a pitifully predictable problem play like Tell Me Where It Hurts, in which Maureen Stapleton plays a middle-aged housewife who joins a women’s-lib group and has her consciousness raised, is received by the press as if it marked a significant advance.  And what sort of opportunities does normal television offer for the development of talent?  Here are the words of Brandon Stoddard, A.B.C.’s vice-president in charge of motion pictures for television:

     “I am interested in emotional jeopardy, not physical jeopardy.  I want the viewer to really care about the people and to feel something when it is over…  I have nothing against exploitative material if it is done right, and the way to do it right is to translate it into human drama rather than gimmicks.  I don’t want to know about the two Vampires in the casino in Las Vegas.  I want to know about the man they are attacking and how it will affect his life…  We are looking everywhere for story ideas and even calling colleges to get some new blood into this.”

Movies as an art form won’t die and go to the heaven of television.  If they die, they’ll be truly dead.  Even if the shift in the audience toward the crude and insensitive is only a temporary derangement, it could be sufficient to destroy movies.  The good recent films – all together – can’t possibly lose as much money as a single clinker like Star! or Camerlot, but even if each one of them should manage to break even, and some of them to show a small or moderate profit, the businessmen will still see them as failures.  The businessmen don’t collect medals for moderate profits; they get their medals for box-office killers, and they don’t want pictures by people who reject their values.  When they tell a director, “Listen, what you call crap is what the public wants,” it’s not just an objective comment; they want the public to want this crap, and they’ve made stark sure it will.  Since they’ve cold-decked public opinion, since they promote and sell only what they like, when they say, “That’s what the public wants,” it’s the truth.

Nathanael West got it upside down.  The locusts aren’t those poor bastards from Oklahoma who want to touch a movie s tar and die in the sun; the locusts run the studios, and it’s they who, in West’s metaphor, will burn Los Angeles – they’ll hand everybody a match.  It’s the smart empty people – not the dull-eyed but the beady-eyed – who are whipping up the orgiastic possibilities in irrational violence.  It’s the carnivore locusts at the top who tear the artists apart, but the writers and director have often (unwittingly) aided them.  Writers, who assume an ideal reader when they “do their own writing,” accept the moguls; view of the public when they work for the movies.  Not that they necessarily write down – probably most scenarists write as well as they can, considering the limitations imposed on them – but that they begin to subscribe to the moguls’ attitudes, which are endemic in Hollywood, and so they come to believe in the necessity for those limitations.  They don’t assume an ideal viewer – they assume a hollowed-eyed, empty-souled, know-nothing hick.
     And, in some crazy, vindictive way – as if the masses were their enemy – certain writers and directors enjoy satirizing the rootless, uncultured Americans.  John Schlesinger in Midnight Cowboy, Tony Richardson in The Loved One, Antonioni in Zabriskie Point – liberals all, but aesthetes first – spin a new baroque out of the grotesqueness of American bad taste.  They lose their socially conscious moorings when they treat American culture, just as American liberals and leftists from the East lose them in the West.  Nathanael West – and what misnomer he chose for himself – must have recognized that he was cuaght in an ideological bind in The Day of the Locust.  In the middle of his apocalyptic climax, when the hollow-eyed people are gathering, he carefully exempts himself from political criticism by having his hero, Tod, observe, “He could see very few people who looked tough, nor could he see any working men.  The crowd was made up of the lower middle classes.”  That handy, safe target of the left – “the lower middle classes.”  But, a few lines farther on, Tod describes the people and contradicts himself: “All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough.”  It’s nonsense to think that working people don’t get debased, and only the “lower middle classes” are susceptible to the deadening effects of mass culture, but if one makes this false split between the workers and the riffraff it’s one hell of a lot easier to take movie money.  Generations of screenwriters played the same game that West did, trying to convince themselves that they weren’t doing any damage to anyone who really counted.  The movie audience became a huge subhuman abstraction to them; it was a faceless joke, and they weren’t accountable to it.  In modern Hollywood, where most of the writing and directing are for TV, that is now the attitude toward the television audience.
     Perhaps no work of art is possible without belief in the audience – the kind of bleief that has nothing to do with facts and figures about what people actually buy or enjoy but comes out of the indivudual artists’s absolute conviction that only the best he can do is fit to be offered to others.  It’s what makes a director insist on a retake even when he knows he’s going to be penalized for it; it’s what makes young dancers drop from exhaustion; it’s what made Caruso burst his throat.  You have to believe in the audience, and believe that your peak effort just barely makes you worthy of it.  That’s implicit when an artist says he does it “because he has to,” and even when he says he does it “just for himself.”  An artist’s sense of honor is founded on the honor due others.  Honor is in the arts – and in show business, too – is giving of one’s utmost, even if the audience does not appear to know the difference, even if the audience shows every sign of preferring something easy, cheap, and synthetic.  The audience one must believe in is the great audience: the audience one was part of as a child, when one first began to respond to great work – the audience one is still part of.  As soon as an artist ceases to see himself as part of the audience – when he begins to believe that what matters is to satisfy the jerk audience out there – he stops being an artist.  He becomes a businessman, marketing a commodity – his talent, himself.


There’s no way for movies to be saved from premature senility unless the aritsts finally abandon the whole crooked system of Hollywood bookkeeping, with its kited budgets and trick percentages.  Most directors are signed up for only one picture now, but after the deal is made the director gets the full de-luxe ritual: fancy hotels, first-class travel, expense money to maintain cool, silky blond groupies for traveling companions.  The directors are like calves being fattened – all on the budget of the picture.  The thieving, high-salaraied executives and their entourage of whores and underlings are also traveling and living it up on that same budget; that’s how a picture that cost $1,2000,000 comes in on the books at $3,000,000, and why the idrector who has a percentage of the profits doesn’t get any.
     It isn’t impossible to raise money outside the industry to make a movie – the studios themselves finance some of their biggest pictures with tax-shelter money (Gatsby, in part) – but even those who raise independent financing and make a picture cheaply (Mean Streets was brought in for $380,000, plus $200,000 in deferred costs, Payday for $767,000) are stuck for a way to distribute it and fall victim to the dream of a big Hollywood win.  So they sell their pictures to “the majors” to exhibit, and watch helplessly as the films die or the swindled profits disappear.  And they are beggars again.  Brian De Palma’s Greetings was made for $20,000, plus $23,000 in deferred costs in 1968; back in the fifties, Irvin Kershner made Stakeout on Dope Street for $30,000, plus $8,000 in deffered costs.  If there had been an artists’ co-op to distribute the films, the directors might have been able to use the profits to continue working, instead of pouring energy into planning films that they could never finance, and seeing the films they did make get sliced to ribbons.
     If the directors started one distribution company, or even several (they could certainly get backing), they might have to spend time on business problems, but, with any luck, much less time on dealmaking sessions: those traumatic meetings at which the businessmen air their grievances while the artists anxiously vulgarize the projects they’re submitting, hoping to make them sound commercial enough.  If they have a book they want to film or if they try to get development money for a story idea, the lack of enthusiasm is deadly.  One director says, “You look at them and you give up.  And if, after a year or two years, they finally give you the go-ahead, they they cut you down to a twenty-five-day shooting schedule and dare you to make a picture.”  Right now, all but a handful of Hollywood directors spend most of their time preparing projects that they never get to shoot.  They work on scripts with writers, piling up successions of drafts, and if they still can’t please the producers and get a deal, the properties are finally abandoned or turned over to other directors, who start the process all over again, with new writers.  The directos spend their lives not in learning their craft and not in doing anything useful to them as human beings but in fighting a battle they keep losing.  The business problems of controlling their own distribution should be minor compared to what they go through now – the abuse from the self-pitying bosses, the indignity, the paralysis.  And if the directors had to think out how their movies should be presented to the public – what the basis for the advertising campaign should be – this mightn’t be so bad for them.  If they had t oworry about what a movie was going to mean to people and why anybody should come to see it, they might be saved from too muh folly  A fatal difference between the “high” arts and the popular, or mass-culture, arts has been that in one the artist’s mistakes are his own, while in the other the mistakes are largely the businessmen’s.  The artist can grow making his own mistakes; he decays carrying out the businessman’s decisions – working large, custom-made versions of the soulless entertainment on TV.
     There’s no way of knowing whether a new audience can be found; it’s a matter of picking up the pieces, and it may be too late.  But if the directors started talking to each other, they’d realize that they’re all in the same rapidly sinking b oat, and there’d be a chance for them to reach out and try to connect with a new audience.  If they don’t, they’ll never test themselves as artists and they’ll never know whether an audience could have been found for the work they want to do.
     The artists have to break out of their own fearful, star-struck heads; the system that’s destroying them is able to destroy them only as long as they believe in it and want to win within it – only as long as they’re psychologically dependent on it.  But the one kind of winning that is still possible in those terms is to be a winner like William Friedkin or George Roy Hill.  The system works for those who don’t have needs or aspirations that are in conflict with it; but for the others – and they’re the ones who are making movies – the system doesn’t work anymore, and it’s not going to.

The New Yorker, August 5, 1974

Perhaps no-one cares, but I shall try again!

http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/whymoviesbad.html

The above is a link to an excellent article by Kael from 1980 entitled "Why Are Movies So Bad?  Or, The Numbers."  It's unlikely, perhaps, to shock anyone now, but I think it's very interesting as a record of the time when people were first starting to realize what had gone wrong with movies.  It's also, of course, written with Kael's usual polarizing, opinionated verve, and is, I think, a very entertaining read.