Ray Pride

In a recent book-length rant called "The Whole Equation," veteran eulogist of the moviegoing experience David Thomson leaned heavily on words by a fictional movie mogul, Monroe Stahr of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished Hollywood novel, "The Last Tycoon." Fitzgerald's narrator intones, "You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. It can be understood, too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads." The "whole equation" shifts all the time. From hundreds of possible examples, we could consider: What did the executives at the Warner Bros. studios do so right with their big-budget "tentpole" movies for almost twenty years before slipping away? What does Newmarket Films' head Bob Berney do correctly in the present moment with movies like "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," "The Woodsman" and now the less-violent edition of "The Passion of the Christ," to be resurrected at Easter? What have the Weinstein Bros., Harvey and Bob, done right and wrong as the marketplace has shifted? And in the Oscar soapbox derby, does Martin Scorsese at 62 want a little gold man more than anything on earth and does 74-year-old Clinton Eastwood, Jr., just want to tell a crackling good story?

Or, you could look at the roster of 2005 releases thus far: the director of "The Mighty Ducks" putting together "Man of the House," putting Tommy Lee Jones in a PG-13-protected house of cheerleaders who witnessed a murder; the PG-13 "Boogeyman"; a PG-13 Wes Craven vampire thriller, "Cursed," cut from an R; Keanu Reeves in an R-rated, but restrained exorcism thriller, "Constantine"; the unconscionably rotten "Son of the Mask." What do they have in common? They're movies that suit the new bifurcated marketplace which continues to pay the freight for at least the next year or so until another "equation" comes into play: First comes the multiplex, then the Best Buy, where teenage boys can stock up at $9-16 a pop, and then Netflix for the grownups. Smell the microwave popcorn? That's the not-so-Proustian smell of the "director's cut." In the latest incarnation of the decades-long MPAA shell game to insure a single classification system nationwide (the studio's own), all but the most powerful directors and producers cave in and then avail themselves of the "unrated" option offered on DVD. Give us a watered-down version and then your original, favored cut--the argument seems to follow--will go out in the longer-lasting format, even if it's only a few seconds longer, with a bit more "sustained intensity." No less an expert than scholar, screenwriter and studio executive James Schamus let the Cheshire out of the bag in a New York Times thumbsucker published during Sundance 2005: "We are not in the business of making movies. The movie experience you have when you buy a ticket is subsidizing an ad campaign for a DVD and a cable show. You are legitimizing that by letting us pretend that it is a movie." Clear-eyed romanticism: the equation of the day.

(2005-02-22)

Also by Ray Pride

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Adult fears, childhood fears: c'mon, one's not so different from the other
(2005-02-15)

Tip of the Week
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(2005-02-15)

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Tony Jaa: the world is his trampoline
(2005-02-08)

Kid power
Making a picture is a perilous feat
(2005-02-08)

Tip of the Week
(2005-02-01)

Conspiracy theory
(2005-02-01)

Tip of the Week
(2005-01-25)

The heart is a lonely reader
(2005-01-25)

Tip of the Week
(2005-01-18)

Morpheus descending
(2005-01-18)

Nixon Antagonistes
(2005-01-11)

Tip of the Week
(2005-01-11)

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