Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (74 page)

That was a good time for the movies, as who needs to be reminded. Something called the "Film Generation" made a newsweekly cover, and films like The Graduate, Blow-Up, Weekend, Bonnie and Clyde, Persona, and 2001 were opening. Revival theaters flourished in the larger cities. Film societies did standing-room business on every campus. Harvard students knew Bogart's dialogue by heart, and in Chicago the Second City nightclub cleared its stage on Monday nights for screenings of underground films.

Now all of that is long, long ago. It is probably true that today's average, intelligent, well-informed American university undergraduate has never heard of Luis Buiiuel, Jean Renoir, or Satyajit Ray, and if you find one who can identify Hitchcock, Truffaut, Kurosawa, or Bergman, hang on to him-he's got the fever.

The death of the repertory and revival houses in most cities has been appropriately mourned, but who is there to grieve the death of campus film societies, which have shut down on one campus after another? Douglas Lemza of Films Incorporated, the largest 16 mm film rental company, tells me that classic and foreign film exhibition on the campus is dying or dead, replaced by videocassettes on big-screen TV. The campus auditoriums where once we saw Ikiru are silent now on Sunday nights, but down in the lounge of the campus dorm, the kids are sitting in front of the Soinch Mitsubishi, watching Weekend at Bernie's.

The most depressing statistic I know about patterns in American film exhibition comes from Dan Talbot, the veteran head of New Yorker Films. He says that an average subtitled film will take 85 percent of its box office gross out of theaters in only eight North American cities, and will never play at all in most of the others. The vast chains like Cineplex Odeon have gobbled up the smaller local and regional exhibitors, and Chicago's Biograph, which used to be an art house, was playing a Steven Seagal thriller the last time I drove past. The Cinema Studio, home of subtitled films, is the latest Manhattan art theater to close. In the late 195OS, more than forty college towns had theaters booked by the Art Theater Guild. Such a chain is unthinkable today. The growth of the Landmark chain of revival theaters in the 19705 was brought to an end by videocassettes. The bottom line is that mass-produced Hollywood entertainments dominate American movie exhibition, and most moviegoers seem to like it that way.

In the days of my youth and Corliss's, the film societies and art houses provided the environment where a serious film community flourished. People stood in line together, sat in the theater together, and hung out afterward to talk about the best new movies. Places where that kind of gathering can take place no longer exist in most cities. A few revival houses survive, and the largest cities have film programs at the art museums, or in subsidized cultural centers. There are more film festivals than ever before. Every city worth its salt has one, and specialist festivals like Telluride, Park City, and Mill Valley specialize in showcasing independent films. Even so, a young person seriously interested in film has little sense, these days, that he is part of a community. The collapse of campus film societies is the single most obvious reason for this. Serious discussion of good movies is no longer part of most students' undergraduate experience.

ow, what about film criticism in these dark ages? It is thriving. There is more of it than ever before. Richard Corliss can be forgiven, I think, for the elegiac tone of his farewell article; he is saying goodbye to Film Comment after many productive and valuable years, and his leave-taking must be painful because a large part of his life was invested in the magazine. But at least part of his discontent is a textbook case of midcareer crisis. He started with grand ambitions, he has achieved most of what he hoped for, and now he asks with Peggy Lee, is that all there is? Like many others his age (which is more or less my age), he finds the cause of his malaise in the general disintegration of everything in general and other people's standards in particular.

What strikes me as slightly disingenuous is his lament for serious film criticism; here is the brilliant critic of New Times in the 1970s, now a captive of the space and style restraints of Time, where the best way for a writer to get more space is to sell the editors on a cover story about a star, and then try to sneak criticism into the crevices of a personality profile. He praises my program Siskel & Ebert with faint damns (we are the best of a bad lot; I am personally a jolly chap, etc.) and then says, "I simply don't want people to think that what they have to do on TV is what I'm supposed to do in print." But that is not the real challenge facing Corliss, who might better have asked himself why what he has to do in Time is what he's supposed to do in print. This is particularly sad because, with this farewell article, Richard Corliss's distinctive critical voice may actually disappear from print: that isn't his own voice in Time, but a chirpy patois that he would not, I am sure, want to have collected under his signature. To put it another way, his manifesto would read more convincingly if he were leaving Time to join Film Comment.

Corliss's apocalyptic vision notwithstanding, good film criticism is commonplace these days. Film Comment itself is healthier and more widely distributed than ever before. Film Quarterly is, too; it even recently abandoned eons of tradition to increase its page size. And then look at Cineaste and American Film and the specialist fan magazines (you may not read Fan- goria, but if you did, you would be amazed at the erudition its writers bring to the horror and special-effects genre). At the top of the circulation pyramid is the glossy Premiere, rich with ads and filled with knowledgeable articles that are not all simply puff pieces about the stars, although some of them are. It is Corliss's opinion that good film books are no longer published, but has he read David Bordwell on Ozu, Patrick McGilligan on Altman, or Linda Williams on pornography?

Kael, our paradigm, continues at the New Yorker. Kauffmann gets more sense into less space than any other critic alive, at the New Republic. David Denby is at New York, Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Reader, Hoberman at the Village Voice; Mark Crispin Miller has a cover story in the Atlantic, and on and on. The weekly Reader in Chicago, born in 1969, has spawned a new kind of national newspaper, the giveaway lifestyle weekly, and each of these papers-the Phoenix, the L.A. Weekly, etc. -has its own resident auteurist or deconstructionalist. Daily newspaper film criticism at the national level is better and deeper than it was in Corliss's golden age, no matter what his impression is. He mentions the invaluable Dave Kehr of the Chicago Tribune. Has he read Michael Sragow in San Francisco, Sheila Benson and Peter Rainer in Los Angeles, Jay Scott in Toronto, Howie Movshovitz in Denver, Jay Carr in Boston, Philip Wuntch in Dallas? And what about the college newspapers, where the explosion in film education over the past twenty years has generated dozens of undergraduate film critics who already know more than some of their elders will ever learn? Yes, they are writing "journalism" for the most part, and, yes, their reviews will yellow with age as those of Corliss's fondly remembered Cecelia Ager also did. But then they are journalists. It is not dishonorable to write for a daily deadline.

No art form is covered more completely and at greater length in today's newspapers than the movies. A lot of papers review virtually every film released; many review no books at all. All of this film criticism has not resulted in a more selective North American moviegoing public, nor has it created larger audiences for foreign or independent films or documentaries. It exists in a time when alternative films, theaters, and audiences are in disrepair.

ut what of movie criticism on TV? Is it the culprit? What about Siskel & Ebert? I am the first to agree with Corliss that the Siskel & Ebert program is not in-depth film criticism, as indeed how could it be, given our time constraints.*
But Corliss has not bothered to really engage the program, to look at it closely and say what he thinks is wrong. He disapproves of the idea of Siskel & Ebert, but leaves it at that. (I wonder if Corliss watches Siskel & Ebert very much-he gets the title of the show wrong in his article and cites not a single moment from any show. He would be incapable of writing a movie review as unfocused as his dyspepsia about S&E.)

The weekly program takes two basic forms-the review shows, and the "theme" shows. The review shows are indeed as formatted as Corliss reports; a typical show involves reviews of five movies, with an ad lib discussion after the written portion of each review, and then a summary fea turing the famous thumbs. Although Corliss thinks he has heard us telling jokes, in fact we have a house rule against any deliberate or scripted jokes of any kind-especially puns on names. Nor are our reviews limited to Corliss's "five W's-warm, winning, wise, wacky, wonderful." In fact, his invention of this witty formula shows him using the very sort of jokey criticism he accuses us of practicing, although I will not deny the formula applies to many TV-based critics. Siskel and I have an advantage over many other critics on the tube in that we both still write for newspapers, where we have spent most of our time for more than twenty years. Most TV-based critics have never written a movie review longer than eight sentences.

I wish we had more time on the program. It would be fun to do an open-ended show with a bunch of people sitting around talking about movies, but we would have to do it for our own amusement because nobody would play it on television. The program's purpose is to provide exactly what Corliss says it provides: information on what's new at the movies, who's in it, and whether the critics think it's any good or not.

The program reaches audiences in nearly 200 cities, and from some of the smaller markets come letters like one saying, "None of these movies ever play within so miles of here, so thanks to your show at least we know what we are missing." In the golden age of the late 196os, no film commentary of any sort reached most of the households in most of these markets, although faculty members on the local campus knew who Kael was, and huddled over the glow from their 16 mm projectors like monks in the dark ages treasuring manuscripts from far lands. When we review a film that is not being released simultaneously on 1,6oo screens, our review is the only local exposure that film receives in many cities. When we have an opinion about a movie, that opinion may light a bulb above the head of an ambitious youth who then understands that people can make up their own minds about the movies. And when we try to explain why Do the Right Thing is a better film than Driving Miss Daisy, although admittedly less enjoyable, it is a message not previously heard in many quarters.

This is not deep criticism-it is informed and sincere opinion. We do it better now than we used to, and we are still trying to get it right. There is another thing we do on the Siskel & Ebert show that I am more proud of, and which Corliss does not mention. Over the past several years, we have devoted many "theme shows" to a single subject or issue. As a national program, we have been influential on some of these issues.

When we devoted thirty minutes to an attack on colorization in October 1986, we were the first national TV program to mention the subject, and for a year we were the only one. We have renewed the attack several times. We were the first program to illustrate the virtues of letterboxing (March 1987 and subsequently), contrasting it to the butchery of cropping and pan-and-scan. The TV medium was ideal for illustrating specific examples, such as the disappearance of Mrs. Robinson in her key scene with Benjamin. We devoted a show to Spike Lee in August 1989, while Do the Right Thing was still in theaters. We did an entire program in celebration of black-and-white cinematography in May 1989, and we filmed the show itself in black and white. It was the first new syndicated program shot in black and white in twenty-five years. We were the first program to feature Laserdiscs (May 1987) and demonstrate their features, such as simultaneous commentary on a parallel soundtrack. We attacked product placement on another program, with shots of the stars seen clutching their Cokes and sitting behind their Dunkin' Donuts boxes. In March 1987 we did a show explaining how the MPAA rating system was de facto censorship. We asked them to add a new "A" rating for films intended for adults, since the X rating is not controlled by the MPAA and means the automatic exclusion of a film from mainstream distribution and exhibition channels.*