Jabootu’s Book Beat
Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer
By Tom Shone Free Press 2004 $26.00
Even for someone like me, who’s inordinately interested in the movie business (if aggressively uninterested in the personal lives of those who make them), film books are a crapshoot. For example, the recent Open Wide (by Dade Hayes & Jonathon Bing, Miramax Books, $23.95) provided, if anything, too much information about how potential blockbuster films are released in today’s market. Anyone who’s sat through the end credits of a recent epic and seen the hundreds and hundreds of names file past has no doubt wondered at the armies required nowadays to make and market a single film. However, that doesn’t mean we want to read about the person who fabricates a promotional standee for the movie during its stars’ publicity tour.
The premise of Open Wide was to examine in-depth one big summer weekend and the fate of the various films that were then released. The authors chose the July 4th weekend of 2003, when the cinematic contenders were Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Legally Blonde 2: Red White & Blonde, and the animated Sinbad.
In a way, it was beside the point—although, no doubt, somewhat of a disappointment to the authors—that none of those titles dominated that summer’s box office. More pertinently, however, there remains the problem that none of those films are particularly interesting. The first two are solid but forgettable sequels (as we know now, since they’ve been largely forgotten), while Sinbad is one of several recent big budget, action-oriented animated films that seemed to have dropped off the radar even before they hit theaters: Treasure Planet, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Titan A.E.
We jump around from marketing meetings to test screenings to Cannes to the history of American theater chains to product placement details and on and on. (Meanwhile, Dreamworks, the makers of Sinbad, perhaps wisely chose not to cooperate in the writing of the book.) In the end, I found the writing overly dry, and the surfeit of information on all the aspects and behind-the-scene jobs and decisions that go into marketing these films a bit overwhelming. There’s no doubt that the book almost obsessively covers its territory. However, in the case I personally thought that perhaps less would have been more.
A somewhat similar but much better book was Peter Bart’s 1999 tome The Gross: The Hits, the Flops—the Summer that ate Hollywood. Bart is a long-time film journalist who also was at one time a major executive at MGM. As such, he’s written several of the best books examining the Hollywood of the last several decades, including the classic Fade Out, which detailed his experiences at MGM.
The Gross followed all the major films, weekend by weekend, that came out during the summer of 1998. The big gorilla (sort of) was Tri-Star ultimately failed—if still profitable—Godzilla. Other films covered at length include the surprise blockbuster There’s Something About Mary. By focusing on the entire summer and not just one weekend, the book fails to get bogged down the way Open Wide did.
On the other hand, I don’t want to make Open Wide out as a worthless read. If nothing else, it ably captures the terrified flailing and despair involved when one begins to realize that the project one’s spent several years and tens upon tens of millions of dollars on is in imminent danger of going off the tracks.
At the time, I had enjoyed Bart’s book so much that I hoped he would release a similar volume following each subsequent summer. Sadly, that didn’t happen, but still, the book is well worth seeking out. The Gross is now out of print, but you can find where to buy used copies for a buck or less (plus shipping) at the essential cost comparison site http://www.fetchbook.info. And, of course, there’s always your local public library.
Given that I felt somewhat burned by Open Wide, I approached Blockbuster with some trepidation. Certainly the book’s subtitle, a jape on the second most tiresomely over-parodied movie title, following Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, didn’t exactly reassure me.
However, Blockbuster proved one of the most enjoyable film-related reads I’ve read in years. Shone’s writing is a lot livelier than Hayes and Bings’; he has some interesting things to say on a subject that has not exactly gone unexamined in recent years, and the book is notably well over a hundred pages less in length than Open Wide. All it all, it’s about as good a book on this subject as one could hope for.
Shone’s tome is at least partly an explicit answer to Peter Biskind’s book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which he wittily dubs the Warren Report to the “Magic Bullet” theory “that all it took was a single shot from [George] Lucas’ laser cannons to bring down the Camelot that was American film in the seventies.” Shone’s tastes are rather more populist than Biskind’s, although he’s not dismissive of the more obviously artistic films of a Martin Scorsese or Robert Altman. He does believe, however, that while such pictures are more in line with the expectations of an often elitist critical community, this doesn’t actually make them more important, or even objectively better.
The author’s overall view may be best summed up when he later notes, “critics get to excoriate Jaws and Star Wars for failing to live up to the exalted standards set by Apocalypse Now or The Godfather, but nobody ever says of Five Easy pieces, “great, as good a chamber piece on the disintegration of the American family as could imagined, but it could have done with an aerial dogfight or two.” Nobody ever gets to come out of Nashville, going, “Wonderful, a classic really, but I could have done with more in the way of killer sharks.“”
Shone isn’t a reverse snob, either. If he defends Jaws as being a great film, it’s because it is, in his opinion (and mine, as argued rather extensively on this site), a great film, even if it does revolve around a killer shark rather than the existential dilemma of the American workingman. He also notes that many of the period’s most revered films were basically puffed up examples of venerable—and often disdained—Hollywood genres, from gangster movies (The Godfather, Bonnie & Clyde, Mean Streets) to detective pictures (Chinatown).
If Jaws gets a lot of attention here, it’s largely because it’s the traditionally recognized demarcation line between what is generally considered a golden age of American Cinema and the point where the ‘blockbuster’ film mentality began taking over Hollywood, a fact that has drawn upon Spielberg’s movie much unwarranted critical grousing. However, as Shone notes, “If you’re going to remodel the entire industry on a single movies, Jaws is, on balance, a pretty good movie to pick: it is fast and funny and tender and oblique and exciting in an intriguingly non-macho way.”
Shone goes through the major blockbusters chronologically, from Jaws to Star Wars to Close Encounters to Raiders to E.T. and on through Back to the Future, Die Hard, Aliens, Top Gun, Batman, Terminator 2, and then to latter day examples such as Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Titanic and The Phantom Menace. He also includes some films that weren’t blockbusters in the blunt financial sense, but which heavily influenced those yet to come, including Alien, The Terminator and Blade Runner. Finally, he examines a couple of failed wannabe blockbusters, The Last Action Hero, Speed 2 and the Tri-Star Godzilla, to see what went wrong. (Hint: All of them were really, really lame.)
Two things about that roster stand out when you look at it. First, the films that start off the list are a hell of a lot better than those that end it. Second, that the great early films are pretty much all the work of Steven Spielberg and/or George Lucas. (Although such second generation flicks as Die Hard and Aliens are close to being right up there.) On the other hand, neither the present day Spielberg nor Lucas seems able to make a film that comes close to scratching their early stuff. Indeed, the idea that directors make better films as they become older and wiser seems a theory without many all too many examples to support it, Clint Eastwood aside.
In many ways, Blockbuster is an almost perfect film book. Shone is extremely smart, but doesn’t fall prey to intelligese when writing about movies. He clearly loves films, and has thought about them a lot, and is a talented enough writer to both express his carefully considered musings on them, and to do so in an extremely entertaining fashion. A good writer is a pleasure to read solely in terms of how he smiths his words, and Shone is no exception. The book is chock full of highly cogent insights delightfully expressed, even on subjects that you’d have thought had been pummeled into the ground:
“What would An Officer and a Gentleman have been like had [producer Don] Simpson had fully his way with it? … What you would have been left with, in fact, would have been Top Gun, a high concept An Officer and a Gentleman, just as Beverly Hills Cop was a high concept 48 Hrs., and Flashdance was a high concept Saturday Night Fever. That is to say, versions of those films that had been shorn of peripherals, strip-mined for their pockets of triumph, their character arcs reduced to telegraphic shorthand, and strung out along a gleaming bead of hit songs—that’s what high concept was, or felt like to watch: like being told about another even better movie by a highly excitable intermediary.”
Moreover, this isn’t just an armchair reviewer’s book. Shone has done a lot of original interviewing (including apparently speaking with most of the stars and directors of the films he covers) and reporting, and mixes his subjective musings with production anecdotes that range from interesting to fascinating, and which are never less than entertaining.
Moreover, quotations aren’t shoehorned in, but are employed only when telling. In the chapter detailing the collapse of The Last Action Hero, a film that was sunk before it was even released, an anonymous Columbia employee compares the pre-release atmosphere at the studio as being “like Nixon in the last days of Watergate.” And even those who believe you reap what you sow can only wince when reading that Variety declared the picture “[a] joyless, soulless machine of a movie, enough to make you nostalgic for Hudson Hawk.”
For the film buff, Blockbuster proves that very best kind of book, one that in the end makes you feel as if you’re just sitting around with a newly met friend, who proves both able and willing to hold forth in the most intelligent and pleasing way on a subject that is dear to your own heart.
