Adventures in the Screen Trade (20 page)

To prove that point they picked a couple of classics that endure because of story line. One of the movies was Bambi, forty years young. The other was E. T., which, at the time of the article, had been released for twenty-two days. I don't mind anybody raving over E. T.

But before we start praising a movie for it's endurance, I think we ought to wait till it's been around at least a month. . . .

THE ECOLOGY OF HOLLYWOOD

(or, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Gunga Din)

Hollywood has never been short of boy wonders.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz received his first Oscar nomination when he was twenty-one years old. Stanley Donen was twenty-four when he co-directed On the Town. Most notable,! suppose, is Orson Welles, who received four nominations for Citizen Kane, a feat never accomplished up to that time. Welles was twenty-five.

But nothing in memory comes close to the dominance of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Both are extraordinarily talented, have been working successfully for a decade or more, and are still in their thirties. And when I say "dominance," consider this: Lucas and Spielberg have been crucial to the five most successful pictures in history.

Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back belong to Lucas. Spielberg directed Jaws and E..T. The fifth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was a collaboration, Lucas being the inceptor, Spielberg calling the shots.

Not only have these films made the two among the richer young men in America, the four released prior to this year have all won various prizes and awards and been nominated for a lot more. But none of the four has won the Oscar for Best Picture. E.T. will change all that.

This is the middle of '82, and next year's awards are nine months away. And half the films for this year have yet to be released. I don't care.

There's no doubt in my mind that E.T. will win. So?

Just this: What the five films have in common, besides their worldwide appeal, is that they are all comic-book movies.

If you think I am putting down comic-book movies, you could not be more wrong. Not only have I written my share of

them, my favorite movie of all time is a comic-book movie: Gunga Din. (I have seen it sixteen times, still start to cry before the credits are over, and will return to it shortly.) But first, the matter of definition.

Having used the term "comic-book movie" several times now, I think it's only fair that I tell you precisely what it means- -except I can't do that.

Primarily because we get into matters of personal taste: What I find a comic-book movie you may totally disagree with, and you may be right. For example, I think The Deer Hunter, that searing indictment of American involvement in Southeast Asia, was a comic-book movie, and I think Bambi-yes, I know it's an animated cartoon-is not.

But if I can't give a precise definition of what the hell I'm trying to say, at least I am able to give a few parallels, which should help set the parameters of what I'm after.

Food: empty calories. (Not, underlined not, junk food, which has a pejorative connotation. Please remember that in none of this am I making a critical judgment against the comic-book movie.) But as an example of empty calories, put down potato chips.

Television: The only prime-time entertainment series that is not a comic-book program is M*A*S*H. Not because of its out-standing quality, but because every scene in M*A*S*H, no matter how wildly farcical, is grounded in the madness of death. That is what gives it its tone, that is the heart of the piece. You can make M*A*S*H into My Mother the Car easily enough. Just keep those same wonderful actors and stick them in a giant Army training camp here in the States. And the wounded are simply guys hurt in fights or drunken-driving accidents-of which, by the way, there are more than plenty near any major Army post.

And what you've got then is a bunch of goofy surgeons grousing because they're stuck in the service and not out in the civilian world, making a fortune. It might be just as funny, and just as successful, and absolutely would be exactly like every other series on the air. Music: bubble-gum songs. Billy Joel, Elton John, etc. The kind of singer-songwriter who basically appeals to pop music's target audience, the teenyboppers who buy albums. (The Beatles began as bubble-gum musicians-"I want to hold your hah-hah-hand" and the like. Then they changed. Lennon, in his solo albums, did not write bubble-gum music; McCartney, the most successful songwriter in history, still does.)

Now let's try and take some of this and apply it to comicbook movies. None of these are meant to be strict rules, but more often than not I think they're true:

(1) Generally, only bad guys die. And if a good guy does kick, he does it heroically.

(2) There tends to be a lack of resonance: Like the popcorn you're munching, it's not meant to last.

(3) The movie turns in on itself: Its reference points tend to be other movies. If, for example, there had been no Saturday afternoon serials, there would have been no frame for Raiders of (he Lost Ark.

(4) And probably most important: The comic-book movie doesn't have a great deal to do with life as it exists, as we know it to be. Rather, it deals with life as we would prefer it to be. Safer that way.

Let me briefly explain now my feelings about Bambi and Deer Hunter.

Does anyone remember, say, the last part of Deer Hunter" Saigon is going up in flames and Robert De Niro, an ordinary guy with no contacts in high places, is out of service and back in Pennsylvania. He hears about his old buddy, Christopher Walken, who's still back there.

Skazam-De Niro's in Saigon. Now the entire world is trying to get out, but somehow De Niro gets in. He finds Walken. Do you know what Walken has been doing all this time? He's been playing that game of Russian roulette with real bullets. (The Russian roulette ploy was made up by the movie's creators, by the way; it didn't happen in reality.) For months and months, Walken has been taking on all comers in this loony tunes Russian roulette, and guess what?- Whappo-he's undefeated, untied, and unscored on. It would take a computer a while to give the odds against that

happening, but never mind, because now we're into the con- frontation scene.

De Niro versus Walken at Russian roulette. If you looked at the billing of the picture on your way in, did you ever doubt who was going to win?

Zap-De Niro is unscathed but Walken dies-with a touch of the heroic smile on his lips.

All this was exciting, and I enjoyed it every bit as I used to be enthralled by Batman having it out with the Penguin- -and precisely on that level.

What Deer Hunter told me was what I already knew and believed in: No matter how horrid the notion of war, Robert De Niro would end up staring soulfully at the beautiful, long-suffering Meryl Streep.

So I say in spite of its skill anil the seriousness of its subject matter, we have here a well-disguised comic-book movie. Nothing shook my world. Okay, Bambi.

If the shower scene in Psycho was the shocker of the sixties, and for me, it sure was, then its equivalent in the entire decade of the forties was when Bambi's mother dies.

And what about that line of dialog: "Man has entered the forest"?

And the fire and the incredibly strong antiviolence implications. (The National Rifle Association would probably picket the movie today.)

I know it was a cartoon, I know Thumper had one of the great scene-stealing roles, I know there was a lot of cuteness. But I left that movie changed.

It had, and has, a terrifying sense of life to it, and not life as we like it to be. You may think I'm crazy and you may be right, but Bambi still reverberates inside me.

Now let me circle back to Gunga Din and make strictly a judgment call: It is my absolute opinion that in every conceivable way-direction, script, star performances, special effects, emotional power-it is infinitely superior to any of the five Lucas- Spielberg prizewinners.

Gunga Din was released in 19S9, and when it came time for the Oscar balloting, it received a grand total of zero nominations. Granted, 1939 was an exceptional year for Hollywood. (I am going to start playing games now, but please bear with me, I hope and believe there's a point to it all.) You probably don't remember the Oscar winner for '39, but let me list five movies and then you guess:

Golden Boy The Hunchback of Notre Dame Intermezzo Juarez The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex

To help you along, a few refreshers: Golden Boy introduced us to William Holden; Intermezio to Ingrid Bergman. Charles Laughton played the Hunchback, Paul Muni starred in Juarez, and Bette Davis was Elizabeth, one of her more famous performances. The envelope please.

Answer? None of the five. In fact, none of the five even got a Best Picture nomination. But here are the five that did:

Goodbye, Mr. Chips Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Ninotchka Of Mice and Men Stagecoach

Again, please, the envelope.

Same answer: none of the above. (They nominated more than five pictures back in those days.) And one of the five I didn't list was Wuthering Heights.

Which also didn't win because '39 was also the year of The Wizard of Oz.

Which also didn't win because Gone With the Wind did. Pretty impressive year.

So impressive that in spite of my passion for Gunga Din, I can't complain. It's a glorious adventure film; I may prefer it to any other, but I don't think it belongs up there with the prize- winners.

And I don't think any of the Lucas-Spielberg films do either.

The subject here, remember, is the ecology of Hollywood. Ecology, as I am using it, means balance.

Hollywood has always made great comic-book movies. The Great Train Robbery was not intended as a sonnet, and let's not forget that early wonder that was these two little girls having a pillow fight.

Bill traditionally the money made from pillow-fight pictures was ploughed back in, and sometimes what emerged was Citizen Kane. Several years ago, a studio head told me this: "If I've got to come up with a slate of sixteen pictures a year, I know going in that four of them are turkeys. I just hope they're not too expensive and I don't lose too much on them. Eight or nine are going to be programmers-decent enough entertainment if I'm lucky; money-makers. The last three I have hopes for." (Italics mine.)

He meant, he went on to explain, quality; the kind of movie he might be proud of.

Now, I assume it's clear by now that 1982 is not 1939 in terms of quality.

But let's go back twenty years: Laurence of Arabia won Best Picture. I thought it was a great epic and deserved everything it got. But the following pictures didn't even get nominated:

Birdman of Alkatraz Days of Wine and Roses The Miracle Worker Long Day's Journey into Night Sweet Bird of Youth David and Lisa The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Freud Lolita

I'm not suggesting any of them should have been nominated; I'm just saying that's a pretty good list of non-comic-book pictures. In a year that was not considered anything special.

That was twenty years ago, now let's try again. Another unremarkable year, but these were some of the non-comic-book pictures that came out in '72:

The Godfather Cabaret Deliverance Slaughterkouse-Five A Separate Peace Play It as It Lays Lady Sings the Blues The Heartbreak Kid Fat City

The Candidate Jeremiah Johnson

The summer movies of '82 are now half done, and by the time you read this, most of them will have blissfully faded from your memory. But this is what's come out so far: Conan the Bar- barian and Rocky III and Poltergeist and Hanky Panky and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and Annie and Star Trek II and E.T. and Firefox and Grease II and Author! Author! and Blade Runner and The Thing and Megaforce and Tron and- -and they're all comic-book movies.

Okay, let's put as positive a tight as possible on things: Sum- mer, after all, has always been the time for kids' pictures be- cause that's when the kids are out of school. And Woody Alien has directed a film and George Hill has directed a film and there's a strong advance word about An Officer and a Gentleman.

You can be as Pollyannaish as you want; me, I think it's scary.

Why? Because in the entire first five months of this calendar year, there were almost no films you can think of that also weren't comic-book movies. A few: Victor/Victoria and Diner and Missing and Shoot the Moon.

Maybe you can come up with some others; I can't. And none of the above four did the kind of business that tends to win at Academy time. Which is why E. T. will take the Oscar: There's nothing else.

And why do I find this all scary? - because the basic ecology of Hollywood is. I'm very much afraid, radically changing.

Remember that italicized quote from the studio head: "The last three I have hopes/or"? Well, those "last three" aren't being made anymore. The money made from E.T. is only going to give us, if we're lucky, something like Mandrake the Magician.

Jaws began the present cycle: It did business far beyond what anyone dreamed possible. Then Star Wars shattered all the records set by Jaws. And now every executive in Hollywood is trying to figure out how the hell to topple Star Wars.

Which, of course, is only right and proper: It's their job. But in their quest, they have altered the tradition of ploughing back profits in pursuit of an entire range of different sorts of films. Right now-today-comic-book pictures are only breeding more comic-book pictures, something that has never happened to this extent before.

Will the ecology shift back to what it's been? "Absolutely," the studio executives will tell you. When? "When the public demands it."

Of course, there's a certain element of truth to that-but basically it's a cop-out. Change will only come when the executives stop ignoring the churning in their guts. These are bright people, never forget that. They don't personally enjoy the movies they're okaying. Do you think they're happy going home and saying to their families, "Hey, guess what, a great thing happened today, we decided to make Megaforce."

The ecology can only shift when these people decide that there's got to be more to life than a remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. When they suck it up and decide to find mate rival like Ordinary People and Cuckoo's Nest.