DB again:
A story in today’s New York Times [1] highlights a point I’ve made elsewhere on this site (“Down in the Valleys”) [2] and in The Way Hollywood Tells It. My claim is that scholars, journalists, and moviegoers have come to identify contemporary Hollywood with stratospherically budgeted blockbuster movies. Several films scholars have gone on to suggest that the megapicture has redefined moviemaking. If the studio era, pre-1960, was a “classical” filmmaking era, perhaps we’re now in a post-classical one, when principles of story and style have collapsed.
Now I don’t think that tentpole pictures stray much beyond the classical norms. But even if they did, the program pictures, released week in and week out, do so quite seldom. In addition, I argued that the programmers are more reliable as investments exactly because they’re easy to assimilate. A breakout midrange picture like The Devil Wears Prada is a good example. Did anybody out there find it fragmented, postmodern, or incoherent?
Today’s NYT story is about the rise of hedge funds and other investment instruments that are becoming more involved in film financing. The relevant quote is: “A result for moviegoers is that they could begin to see even more thrillers, comedies, and horror movies at the multiplex–the types of movies Wall Street favors because of their more predictable payoff.” The relevant player is Joel Silver, who has just signed on to make “a mix of horror, comedy, and action movies that will cost $15 million to $40 million apiece.” These are just the sort of midrange pictures that can yield the reliable profit percentages Kristin has talked about earlier this week [3], and that are likely to be quite directly linked to the classical Hollywood storytelling tradition.