Yes, the sharks are moving in and there’s nary a thing you can do about it.  Unless you happen to have a spare $800 million.  Do you?  If so, let’s talk Miramax.  I confess, I have a soft spot for the Weinstein’s creation. It brought us My Left Foot, The Crying Game, The Piano, Clerks, Pulp Fiction, Kids, Basquiat, Citizen Ruth, Shakespeare in Love, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Chocolat, The Others, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Cold Mountain, No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, and my favorite – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  Now, these may not be your favorite indie films of all time, but who else would have greenlit these scripts?  Who else would have had the TASTE to do it?  Taste.  Ahh… that old-fashioned word.  How often to we talk about taste in the movie business?  We’re so busy talkin’ BO (box office) that taste pretty much gets swooshed out the window.  

So what do we get?  Just look around. I hear SO MUCH complaining about the crappy movies being made.  Who makes these crappy movies?  Either A) people who don’t have taste and think they’re making good movies, B) people who don’t give a rat’s ass and make what they think will mesmerize the YOUNG public into spending billions, or C) corporations (yes, the big evil C) that are so convoluted by their own hierarchies that they wouldn’t know a good story from a hole in their… wall.

I just read a piece in the LA Times (I still get a hard copy, believe it or not) about the imminent takeover of Miramax from Disney by Ron Tutor, a real estate tycoon or “construction magnate” as the paper labeled him, and his semi-silent partner, David Bergstein who has left a trail of bankrupt companies in his wake. The article stated that, “Bergstein has said he is acting solely as an advisor to Tutor and an offshore investor, whom he declined to identify, in the Miramax transaction.”  CREEPY! I don’t know about you, but I get the heeby jeebies when considering the prospect of selling out our movie machines to “offshore investors.”  Will they have ulterior motives? Will they have an agenda that doesn’t fit my idea of a “universal voice?”

The problem is inherent to me, but perhaps it’s not a problem for others. I still believe that our movies bring messages. That they are a stealthy form of preaching to the masses whether we mean them to be or not. Even if you don’t consciously write a story with a hidden agenda, it will have a message based on your world view and personal philosophy. Unless you purposely manipulate it to say the opposite.  So even that would be a conscious message.  Life sucks.  Life is full of hope. You pick.  So why do I think it’s dangerous to give our stories into the hands of unseen foreign “creative dictators” (those who would dictate our creativity…)?

Because I believe that some of our voices would be squelched.  And nobody would really know it was happening. There are ALL sorts of inventible reasons to explain why one story was greenlit and another was not.  You may have a brilliant screenplay but if the “unidentified offshore investors” don’t approve the underlying message, “off with your head!”  If this was only happening in one company, I wouldn’t be concerned, but I sense a trend.
 
Ah, but what about the old studio days?  Weren’t the studios run by authoritarian dictators even in the hay day of Hollywood? Yes!  But they were like magnanimous, though strict, fathers to their little film families.  I know I romanticize it, but at least they were Americans and showed up to work every day and we saw their faces and they put their finger into everything and cared about every little aspect of their business.  There was PASSION for storytelling and TASTE back then. Yes, I romanticize it.  But lately, I’ve been renting a lot of old films and realizing what brilliant work was being made 70 years ago.  Honest, authentic, seamless acting, storytelling and production. Our studio films are on shaky ground these days.  They tend to be fly by night quilts barely stitched together by committees of 50 or more executives, fresh out of college trying to figure it out and answering to foreign bosses.

What’s the answer?  Make a billion and start buying up the conglomerates.  Break them into little pieces and break the distribution domination of the studios.  Let the little guys in.  Give the audience some choice.  Make great films and let them be equally marketed and available. Encourage our stars to support the small quality films so they can get into the world wide marketing/distribution machine.

And let Harvey and Bob Weinstein take back their baby.  I want them to keep making and distributing films.  They may not always be nice people (rumor) but at least they have TASTE!

 


Comments

Marie Rose link
06/28/2010 8:55am

I think you're really gutsy to call out the plebian corporate fatcats trying to horn in on our movie biz. It's an interesting discussion. Basically, the studios (except for Disney that has BECOME a corporate power, acquiring media and bands like ABC, ESPN, the Mighty Ducks the Angels, etc) are all owned by the corporations now - Columbia/Sony, Paramount/Viacom, Time/Warner, NBCUniversal/GE (30 Rock gets a lot of comic mileage out of GE being the soulless corporate parent company of a creative medium. Jack (Alec Baldwin) is VP of Network Programming and Microwave Technology for the network/parent company). The Miramax brand went into cardiac arrest as soon as the Weinsteins divorced Disney over the Mouse's refusal to distribute Michael Moore's Farhienhiet 9/11 - corporations don't like to offend any of their consumer demographics, after all, makes their stock plummet. For true filmmaking in the spirit of artistic endeavor, as opposed to a purely commerical cinematic product, one must turn to indie or foreign films, it seems.

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