Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (75 page)

Siskel & Ebert was the first and often the only television show of any kind to deal with many of these subjects. It would be fair to say that most mainstream Americans who have formed an opinion on colorization and letterboxing were inspired to do so because of our program. (Video retailers say the Siskel & Ebert program on letterboxing caused a noticeable swing in the opinions of their customers on the subject.)

Corliss regrets TV's lost opportunities for doing a "shot by shot" analysis of films, and I do, too. I continue to use the shot-by-shot approach for the close visual analysis of films at least five or six times a year, on cam
puses or at film festivals. This is partly to keep in training, which is also the reason I teach a film class; a mind that considers movies only at review length will atrophy. Laserdiscs make shot-by-shot analysis infinitely easier than the old stop-action 16 mm projectors did; Donald Richie and I made our way a shot at a time through the Criterion disk of Ozu's Floating Weeds last December at the Hawaii International Film Festival, and every frame seemed to reveal a new treasure. I would like to go through an entire film a shot at a time on television-or, more to the point, I would like to see a Scorsese or a Jarmusch go through one of his own films a shot at a time. Corliss and I both know this is not likely to happen. There is now the happy alternative of Laserdiscs with running commentary on the sound track.*

And yet television is a useful medium for showing things about film that cannot easily be explained in words. Gene Siskel and I have exploited the possibilities of the medium on many shows, as when we contrasted the colorized and black-and-white versions of the same movies, or when we showed the cropped and letterboxed versions of a film at the same time on the same split screen. Our show does more of this kind of hands-on analysis than an infrequent viewer might realize.

Of course our program could be better. Progress comes slowly. We no longer work with Spot the Wonder Dog, for example, and I for one was able to contain my grief when the little beast died of kidney failure. We no longer waste a segment on the week's worst movie-there are too many interesting movies to review. But I would like it if we took a scene by an interesting director and went through it with a voice-over analysis. And I would like it if we reviewed more independent and foreign films. If there is a malaise eating away at the heart of film journalism these days, I submit it should not be blamed on the reviewers who work on television. We are addressing a different audience from the passionate elite who followed the Kael/Sarris Wars of the 196os. Some of the critics on TV address them better than others, and all of us operate under Sturgeon's Law ("9o percent of everything is crap"). There is room for improvement. Give me the opportunity and an audience that will watch, and I know where and how some of those improvements could be made. So do a lot of other people, but the daily reality of national television is unforgiving and not very flexible, and PBS provides even less leeway than our commercial syndication. Yet we are not the evil empire of film criticism.

submit to Richard Corliss that he missed the real source of distemper in today's American film market, and that is the ascendancy of the marketing campaign, and the use of stars as bait to orchestrate such campaigns. Reviewers, after all, can only offer their opinions on a new movie. Some like it, some don't, and together they do not have the impact of a wellcoordinated national campaign that lands a popular star simultaneously on the covers of a People-type magazine, a newsweekly, several glossy monthlies, and the talk shows. Hollywood has never been more star-driven than it is at this moment, and publishers and producers have never been more eager to get their piece of the star of the week.

Isn't it obvious that the auteur period is over with now-that we have passed through the age of the director, and returned to the age of the powerful studio and the star system? The most creative directors in America today mostly came from the 1970s; nobody since Scorsese has been better. For every 198os director with a style and something to say-for those like Gus Van Sant, Jr., Spike Lee, and Jim Jarmusch-there are countless film school technicians who know how to manufacture glossy generic entertainments and would have been right at home on the B-picture assembly lines of the 1940s. (The difference is, in the 1940s, visual style was still prized; now most new directors depend on art directors for their visual impact, and give only perfunctory thought to camera style.) After a period in the 198os when talented executives seemed to avoid studio jobs, the most successful Hollywood studios are now headed by men (and a rare woman) who demonstrably know what moviegoers want-up to a point, of course.

In the 1970s we went to see the new Altman, Coppola, Fassbinder, or Mazursky film. The i98os mass audience goes to see a star, special effects, or a high concept. Martin Scorsese says the monster hit-the $200 millionplus movie-is a new genre, and he's right: the studios lob the blockbusters into the choice summer weekends, and lesser movies scatter out of the way. Today's average moviegoers follow the works of Tom Hanks and Michelle Pfeiffer in the way moviegoers used to wait for the new Hitch cock or Huston. Audiences cannot identify many directors, and hardly care. Just as in the days of Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford, stars are seen as the auteurs of their films-and why not, since what difference does it make who directed the next Schwarzenegger film when Arnold has the final authority?

Most big movies these days are packaged by agencies, who like to see their directors, writers, and actors working together. The director who has, God forbid, a personal vision to express will have to recruit support from an important star in the same stable to get his vision out of the agency doors and into production. Actors who regularly work at scale or discount for directors they believe in-actors like Matt Dillon, Jane Fonda, Morgan Freeman, Gerard Depardieu, Genevieve Buj old, William Hurt, Peter Coyote-are in effect subsidizing what's left of the auteur film.

In the meantime, popular film journalism has become starstruck with a vengeance. Not since the glory days of the glossy movie fan magazines have stars been viewed so uncritically, so fawningly. Where did it start, this rhetorical hyperbole that attempts to transform the star of the moment into something more than human? I was among the many admirers of Emily Lloyd's work in Wish You Were Here, but after reading some of the profiles I wondered how I had failed to properly appreciate her translucent skin, her sparkling eyes, her grace, her effervescence, her brilliance. We should fall on our knees in gratitude, that she should walk among us. Then Emily Lloyd went on to create more difficult performances (flawlessly using American accents unfamiliar to her) in two box office flops, Cookie and In Country, and where were her idolaters? Lighting candles before Laura San Giacomo and Julia Roberts.

In Hollywood's golden years, worship of the stars was usually confined to the cult-like fan magazines. Now it has infected the mainstream, as the media lines up and volunteers to be part of the hype. In the closing weeks of 1989, the hottest new movie was Born on the Fourth ofJuly and its star, Tom Cruise, was the most desirable magazine cover subject in America. According to reports published a few months later, Cruise had promised his friend, Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, an exclusive national magazine cover. But when Born on the Fourth ofJuly turned out to be a powerful and controversial picture, his promise seemed unwise. Time magazine, for example, wanted Cruise for its cover. And so, according to the reports, Cruise asked Wenner for a favor-could he be released from his promise, so he could be on the cover of Time? And Wenner, aware that such a cover could help his friend's chances of an Academy Award nomination, agreed. Cruise's publicists then agreed to give him to Time-and not, for example, to Newsweek.

Do you see what's wrong with this picture? Any hardboiled old-time newspaperman could tell you. A publicist should not be able to give a newsweekly "permission" to run Tom Cruise on its cover. Time magazine should run who it damn well pleases on its cover, as it used to do. And if Newsweek wanted to run Cruise the same week, it should have. The key, of course, is that the favored magazine is being offered two carrots: exclusivity, and access to the star for an interview and photo session. It is never spelled out that the magazine's critics will subsequently give the movie in question a favorable review, but any reasonable publicist would assume that a magazine would not want to feature someone who was in a bad movie.

Here is the definition of an "exclusive interview" with a star: he will say the same things he always says, but for a two-week window he will say them only to you (and to one, but only one, of the morning TV talk shows). Usually this means the writer has his work cut out, since the editorial space available for a cover profile far exceeds what can intelligently be written on the subject, unless the star can be pumped up into a trend or a demigod. (The really interesting talkers-Teri Garr, Harry Dean Stanton, Albert Brooksare not usually cover material.) In a process possibly designed to silence his own doubts about the newsworthiness of his subject, the writer then inflates the star-of-the-week with prose that approaches hagiography.*
The superlatives used in Time to describe Tom Cruise would have seemed embarrassingly inflated if applied to a philosopher, poet, religious leader, or statesman. Whatever happened to the Time that used to be known for its sneaky puns and wise-guy cynicism? When did it join the packaging team?

Stars are marketed to local TV and newspapers in the same way. Lest anyone think I am singling out the newsweeklies, I hasten to confess that my own editors sometimes treat their entertainment writers as a journalistic version of the old Frank Buck radio program, Bring'em Back Alive. No Sunday newspaper is complete without an endless "celebrity profile," and papers like the New York Times, where the critics do "think pieces" on Sundays and never interview anybody, are rare indeed. First the star sells the medium, and then the medium sells the star and his movie. Around and around.

There is little room in this circle for a movie without a star. That is why Hollywood stars are worth the salaries they are getting, and why some stars now make as much as a movie used to cost. The new releases used to open in New York and roll out across the country. Now they open everywhere on the same day, and in the seven days before they open you can see their stars on magazine covers in every checkout line and hear them talking on every interview show-backed up, of course, by TV spot commercials.

Then, on the Monday after the movies open, the box score appears in USA Today. We learn the "box office winners" of the previous weekend, and the "per-screen average" of the leading contenders. USA Today was the first to turn trade information into a national scoreboard, but now the totals are carried by the wire services and faithfully announced by disk jockeys. Corliss is disturbed that potential moviegoers only ask "What's it about?" and "Who's in it?" He should examine his feelings the first time he is asked about a film's per-screen average.

Do people still read and care about serious film criticism? That is the real question in the Corliss piece, and I think the answer is, yes, they dothe same people who always did, and probably a few more. To which we can add the greatly increased numbers of people who read and care about serious film journalism, as provided in Premiere and many other magazines and local newspapers. Are the movie critics on TV preempting the audience for such writing? No. They serve a different function, for a different audience, and in an age when celebrity puff pieces are a sponge soaking up the available media time and space, at least they offer critical opinions, not fan letters. Often, shows like Siskel & Ebert are the first contact a young moviegoer might have with the notion that films are to be thought and ar gued about, and not merely experienced. And they are the only way issues such as colorization will get wide national exposure.

Then why are the movies not as exciting as they used to be, and why are there fewer unconventional ones, and why is there no audience for repertory, revival, and campus film societies? Because (i) home video is killing 16 mm exhibition and all the film communities and programming that revolved around it, and (2) modern marketing techniques have consolidated exhibition patterns, so that movies can be block-booked onto thousands of screens at once, and sold in a media blitz.

Let's face it. The sad fact is that film criticism, serious or popular, good or bad, printed or on TV, has precious little power in the face of a powerful national campaign for a clever mass-market entertainment. The marketing of stars has become synonymous with the marketing of movies. Stars have become the brand names of the industry. Bring 'em back alive.