Out of My Mind

Joe Morgenstern has part of the story but accurately so. Films are made by dopes for dopes in a dumb and sub-literate market. (But I still can't wait for X3.)

Film's Know-Nothings
The young careerists of Hollywood need to get out more

May 13, 2006; Page P4

At breakfast a couple of weeks ago in a restaurant in Santa Monica, I happened to overhear -- all right, happened to eavesdrop on -- a conversation between two young screen writers at the next table. One was telling the other about a feature-film idea he planned to pitch to a studio: "It's, like, 'Kill Bill' meets 'Napoleon Dynamite.' "
That's not exactly what he said, though his concept was equally dim. I've plugged in substitute titles because it's not my purpose to sabotage a real-life pitch that I shouldn't have been listening to in the first place. But that X-meets-Y formulation is a familiar one among writers, directors and the studio executives who listen to their pitches. (An equally familiar variant is the verbal-pie-chart pitch: "It'll be two-thirds 'Wedding Crashers' and one-third 'Wedding Singer.') As useful as these shorthand descriptions can be, they're symptoms of a cultural wasting disease that has beset Hollywood in recent years. Many -- though certainly not all -- of today's filmmakers know very little, and care less, about the real world. Their movies derive from other movies. Clever with shorthand, they've never learned longhand.
That's not to suggest there's anything wrong with drawing from a deep knowledge of one's medium. The young rebels of the French New Wave -- Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Malle -- knew what they loved in their nation's film history, as well as what they found ossified and risible. The same was true of our own great innovators of the 1960s and 1970s -- Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman.
It's a far cry, though, from those artists to the shallow careerists of contemporary Hollywood, fixated by whatever seems to be selling at the moment and striving to sell more of it. A producer friend recently elicited a blank stare from a young screenwriter when she mentioned Fredo, the unforgettably sad, troubled brother played by the late John Cazale in the seminal "The Godfather" trilogy. I've been told by a number of film-school students that they don't like to watch black-and-white films -- many of which represent Hollywood's Golden Age -- because the past (meaning anything before "Jaws" or "Star Wars") says nothing to them.
Sometimes the present says nothing to me -- the present, that is, as expressed by studio films made of interchangeable, recyclable and utterly disposable, parts. Every now and then, though, I'll be startled to find a movie that's inexplicably original. Such was the case when I first saw David O. Russell's "Three Kings" (1999), a fearlessly funny, deeply felt film about the Gulf War, and one of the most unlikely features to be produced by a major studio in decades. As I left the screening room in a happy daze, I thought to myself, Where in the world did that come from?
The answer was fairly simple -- from a writer-director who'd already done two interesting features, and who, in addition to being steeped in film culture, had taught literacy in Central America and Boston's South End. The same explanation applies to many other movies of distinction and lasting value -- they're the products of filmmakers who have been out in the world, doing more than making films.
Worldliness was once the industry norm. Billy Wilder was a reporter before he became a screenwriter. John Huston became a boxer after growing up in vaudeville and around racetracks. Preston Sturges was a rich kid who attended private schools in America and Europe, then served some time in his mother's cosmetics business. (He invented kiss-proof lipstick.)
Howard Hawks studied mechanical engineering. George Miller ("Mad Max," "The Witches of Eastwick") was a practicing physician in Australia before he went to film school. John Boorman ("Hope and Glory") was a journalist and documentarian. Pedro Almodóvar worked for Spain's telephone company. Robert Altman was a bomber pilot in World War II, experimented with sound, dabbled in such inventions as a dog-tattooing system, then churned out scores of industrial films, educational films and employee training films before making his mark as a feature director with an unquenchable appetite for unusual projects. And Orson Welles, that peerless genius of American film, spent a prodigious childhood and young manhood performing magic, painting, writing poetry and sketching on a tour of Ireland, all of it before he founded the Mercury Theatre and the Mercury Theatre of the Air.
Worldliness was also once a consequence of Hollywood careers. John Ford was no intellectual, far from it. But he, like Alfred Hitchcock a few years later, came up through the ranks in an era when feature films were low-risk undertakings ("Making a film was not a big deal at that time," Jean Renoir once told me as we talked about his glorious 1932 comedy "Boudu Saved From Drowning"), when young directors worked constantly, gaining priceless experience in a vast variety of productions. Unworldly though today's Hollywood careerists may be, they are surely to be pitied as well as censured. So many meetings, so many calls to agents and managers, so many studio notes, so much ignorance in high places, such ardent input for such negligible output. "Hope and Glory" meets "The Brain Eaters" every day.