The Death of the Hollywood Star System, Part 5,297…

I don’t think Hollywood can survive unless the audience defragments. Otherwise, Hollywood will be come somewhat of a clone of Bollywood. Instead of turning out streams of goofy musicals, it will be streams of inane CGI action fests. It’s already here to some extent with films like Avatar, Transformers, and GI Joe. I would say we’re already well into the Technology System. I don’t think it can last long but that’s where we are.

@BeckoningChasm: Yeah, I wonder… it’s already getting to the point where there’s often a 6 month-or-less turn around from theatrical release to home video release, even for movies that did ok (and if they poorly, it’s even greater; for example, 9, which came out theatrically in September, was released on video in December). It’ll be interesting to see when Avatar is released on DVD/Blu-Ray.

I’m no expert on the industry but part of the problem is that these days the major studios are dominated by boardrooms rather than individual entrepreneurs so the product they churn out exhibits the risk-averse medocrity you get when cautious group-think takes over. It’s like trying not to lose rather than actually trying to win. It’ll kill them on the long run.

i’m going to argue that boardrooms controlled the studios back in the day as well. I think it was Sam Warner who thought that Romeo & Juliet would have done better if the main characters had survived.

But I have no love for Hollywood and no particular desire to see it survive. It’s not like if Hollywood were erased from the face of the Earth by an angry God it would stop movies from being made. We’ll stil have movies, and many of them will be good. Losing Hollywood, IMO, might actually increase the average quality of films.

If I were to guess, based on the current flow of events with industiral history as a guide, I would say that the inflated budgets and lame production values will continue to rule until they can no longer sustain profits, ultimatly causing the Hollywood as we know it to collapse. This will lead enterprizing individuals to jump in and fill the void with modestly budgeted films which will generate greater gross on less investment, freer to peddle their own products when the studios have to ease their grip on the theater chains. With smaller, but better crafted films to offer (possibly on a regional basis), they may try to use special promotions -like double features to justify ticket prices or some such. If the public responds to these filmmakers, then what’s left of the studios will hire THEM to produce pictures with larger, but less gigantic than we have now, budgets. The new era of creative and budget concious producers and a renewed interest in craftsmanship could revitalize the industry, but it would only be a matter of time until we have a repeat of the 70’s model of outdoing the other guy with larger and larger but empty spectical that got us where we are today.

Believe it or not, I’m actually going to cite one of the most-mocked figures in Jabootu (and my personal) history, Mr. Tom “Billy Jack” Laughlin, in support of Ken. Laughlin’s theory states that the script makes the star, not the other way ’round…and he has tons of anecdotal and box-office evidence to back him up. (Though given his penchant for, shall we say, inventing statistics for his movies, I don’t know how seriously to take that. One of these days, I’ll do further investigating.)

His idea seems to be that a script should contain certain elements guaranteed to win wide audience favor. Assuming a competent-to-skilled writer, the more of these elements your script contains, the better your script will be. Further, he contends that the people we call “stars” gain that status by playing roles which encourage the development of audience sympathy toward them, and keep the status only as long as they continue to appear in those roles. I’m oversimplifying a bit, but not much. By this theory, the reason the star system is collapsing is because the movies are getting worse.

Idea for future Mr. Rational project: apply Tom Laughlin’s theory to Tom Laughlin films, and see whether it can explain both the astonishing success and the crash-and-burn that followed.

@Mr. Rational: See, I agree with one thing that Laughlin says–stars need to be recognizable. In days of yore, when ancient dinosaurs like myself went to theatres, you KNEW the character that John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, et al played because they chose roles that developed their perceived screen character.

Nowadays, actors want to prove how versatile they are, so you have a career like Jim Carrey’s–his comedies do well, but he wants to be known as a serious actor, so he makes the occasional serious film (which usually bombs). There’s no way to know what a “Jim Carrey picture” or a “Julie Roberts picture” will be without sitting through the damned things.

As for Laughlin’s idea that a script should appeal to the widest possible audience, I think that sort of thinking has gotten us the movies we have now–big slabs of visuals with interchangeable dialogue.

That leads into what I think another problem with Hollywood is, Globalization. A movie industry is or should be tied to the culture of the country. Let’s face it, Japanese anime, Hong Kong action films, French cinema, Indian musicals, they all have their certain charms. They just aren’t as good when they try to follow the norms of another society. Hollywood used to have an American sensibility. But, I think the quest for increased foreign revenue has killed that and is part of the reason for the decline. GI Joe is a great example of this. What can be more American than GI Joe, yet Hollywood turned it into…. It’s fine if Hollywood sells films oversees, but I think they hurt themselves when they intentionally make them for international audiences.