jentleman film journal.

My Summer at the Movies

Since getting back from abroad, I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands, for a variety of reasons that don’t really bear mentioning here. Unsurprisingly, that’s meant a lot of time spent watching movies (and an equal amount of time when I’ve wanted to watch movies but have instead lain at my bed staring at the ceiling telling myself that I should really do work instead, but no matter). In particular, I’ve been trying to get myself into the theater as much as possible – both because I like going to the movies and because that’s how movies are really meant to be taken in. I’ve stuck to the local multiplexes, because, if you don’t drive, it’s really hard to get out to the indy places, and I guess also because I feel like multiplexes should be screening enough movies that you’ll get a pretty good selection any time you go.

Here are the movies that I’ve seen in theaters this summer: The Tree of Life, Super 8,The Hangover 2, Thor, X-Men: First Class, Horrible Bosses, Midnight in Paris, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2, Bridesmaids. Major pictures that I missed: Captain America, Bad Teacher, No Strings Attached 2 (err, Friends With Benefits, sorry), Cars 2, Green Lantern, Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Cowboys & Aliens, Transformers 3.

So much for a pretty good selection.

I don’t mean that in the sense that the movies I saw were terrible – really, most were perfectly adequate. It’s that, when I look at this list, I’m genuinely shocked at the lack of variety in my options. Among the movies that I saw (all, remember, movies available at my local multiplex AMC) were three raunch comedies (including one sequel), three comic book movies (two of which were sequels, and I’m counting Harry Potter in this group because whatever the source material it is, in its soul, a comic book movie – which goes for Pirates as well), and three ‘original’ films (that is, non-tentpole, non-sequel). Go outside of what I watched and you get an additional slew of comic book movies, sequels, and another raunch comedy.

I realize I’m in danger of reiterating my Inception post from earlier this year, which is the last thing I want to do. Let me instead take this in a different direction and ask: with the basic options that I have listed here, would anyone who didn’t really love going to the movies really want to go to the theatre as much as I have this summer? On a given weekend this summer, you’re basically given the option of choosing between a couple of raunch comedies, a couple of 3D comic book extravaganzas, and, if it’s a good weekend, a single non-tentpole, non-sequel film.

I think that what this points to is a sort of deterministic myopia on the part of studios, akin to what’s going on with the production of 3D movies: we keep getting more superhero movies and raunch comedies because studios believe that that’s what people will pay to go see, just like we keep getting more 3D movies because that, apparently, is what people want when they go to the theater.

Yet there is an obvious flaw in this logic: if I’ve already seen X-Men: First Class and Thor this summer, why would I pay to go see Green Lantern? There are only two possible motivations: either Green Lantern gets great reviews and word-of-mouth (it got neither), making me believe I’m going to have an elevated experience watching it, or because there’s simply nothing else to see. This, in fact, is exactly why I went to see Bridesmaids despite having already watched the thoroughly-crummy Hangover 2 earlier in the summer: I had heard a lot of good things about it, and it was the only movie that I hadn’t seen. People go to watch superhero movies about lesser-known heroes because those are the movies that are playing, not because superhero movies are predetermined to be popular or good. Hence what I’m arguing about 3D: 3D movies are supposedly a big box-office draw, but the argument is unsound because there’s often not an option to watch the movie in 2-D. I would much rather have watched, say, Thor in 2D and saved myself the five bucks or whatever it was that was basically a sunk cost of wanting to go to the movies. The problem was that that wasn’t an option.

I know that the film industry is a business and that studios are above all concerned with the bottom line. That’s exactly why it’s shocking to me that there isn’t more of an effort to produce at least a greater variety of movies. It seems clear that there’s a market for people who are looking for alternatives to explosions and eye-wrenching 3D – consider, for instance, that so far this summer R-rated comedies have outgrossed superheroes. By the same token, Super 8 hasn’t been a runaway hit, but it has earned three times its budget.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that people like going to the movies, but that perception of what people will watch is warped because there’s such a limited number of options to choose from. Fundamentally, I’m pretty sure that people will pay to go watch pretty much any summer blockbuster that meets the following requirements: looks cool visually, has a bankable male lead (attractive love interest preferred but not always necessary), and can be shoehorned into a compelling marketing narrative. I suspect that brand recognition, outside of a limited number of franchises, is actually less important than people think.

Put another way: the Batmans, Supermans, and Harry Potters of the world have a strong enough brand that they’re going to make money no matter what. Green Lantern, though, doesn’t have that kind of built-in appeal. You know what else doesn’t? Iron Man – but Iron Man looked cool (where Green Lantern looked dorky), had a charismatic lead (a newly-interesting Robert Downey Jr, as compared with the never-really-interesting Ryan Reynolds), and was the subject of an advertising campaign that made the movie look fresh and funny – which it could do because the movie was, in fact, both those things. Similarly, franchises that that are by now established enough that they can rest on their brand – ie, Transformers and Pirates — are based on first films that played to that formula.

A case in point: Inception. I know I keep coming back to it, but it’s the best recent example: bankable male lead (DiCaprio, right now probably the biggest movie star on the planet), great marketing campaign, and fantastic trailer production that highlighted the film’s incredible visual effects.

So why aren’t we getting more variety in the multiplexes? My best answer is that studios are caught in a sort of prisoner’s dilemma. Each studio wants to maximize its profits in the summer, and it arranges its slate of movies accordingly: roughly two tentpole movies, with an assortment of mid- and low-budget complementary options to be released throughout the summer. The majors can’t not build around tentpoles, because tentpoles make the most money and, if they play it safe and don’t put out anything that’s that high-budget, they’re almost guaranteed to see a big chunk of the summer pie divided up among the other majors. In other words, they’re forced to stake huge amounts of money on particular films so that they can stay competitive. Unfortunately, they also desperately need those films to make lots of money, because if a tentpole flops, they’re in a big hole — which means that they’re in the paradoxical position of having to be extremely conservative at the same time that they are, essentially, taking a huge risk. Hence their grabbing at whatever straws they can find to ensure a success – which, usually, is some kind of brand to build off of, be it a title (Harry Potter), a character (Captain America, Thor), a beloved ‘80s toy (Transformers, or, now, the sure-to-be-awful Battleship), or a theme park ride (Pirates). Unfortunately, there are only so many objects of recourse in this game, so we end up with a bunch of titles that look more or less the same. Innovation is stifled because it raises the stakes of what is already a high-risk, high-reward situation.

Of course, we won’t be subject to comic book movies and vampires forever – at some point, we’ll go beyond our saturation point and people will go from saying, “I guess I’ll go see Captain America, it’s the only thing that’s out,” to saying, “Jesus, another superhero movie? Let’s watch the baseball game instead.” Of course, then we’ll move on to the next set of preoccupations.

So settle in, cinephiles: it’s going to be a long couple of decades at the movies.

Gentleman of the Day:

Jumping the Shark: Some Thoughts on Television Production

I have to start this post with some embarrassing facts about me. To summarize: I watch the following TV shows: The Office, Glee, Entourage, True Blood, Community, Californication, Mad Men,and Hung. Before they concluded, I also watched: Battlestar Galactica, The Tudors, and Rome.

Almost all of these shows were, at one time or another, quality programming (only Hung was never any good). [EDIT: on further thought, Californication has never been all that great either.] Yet almost all of them sooner or later deteriorated into shows that were at best mediocre and worst downright preposterous. The only exceptions are Rome, which was saved only because it lasted only two seasons, and Community and True Blood, which haven’t really had enough time to go bad.

What I want to enquire, therefore, is this: Is there something inherent in the format of television that dooms TV programming to eventual mediocrity? Or is this more a problem of how viewers interact with programming?

As, it seems, with everything that I write about on this blog, the answer appears to me to be both. I’ll be more interested today in what I see as the problems of the television format, but at least some of the problem almost certainly lies with the level of investment that we, the audience, make in these characters. That we do invest, of course, is demonstrated by the fact that we continue to watch shows like Entourage or The Office that stopped being funny years ago: we feel we have some stake in what happens between Jim and Pam or in Vince’s now-great, now-floundering career. When we build up that level of investment, we develop some chimerical belief in our right to have some say over what happens to the characters – hence our dissatisfaction when something happens that we didn’t want to happen.

Be that as it may, the format of TV seems to me to present a set of unique challenges that so far no show I’ve watched has succeeded in working around.

First of all, there’s a basic problem in the scope of stories that are developed for television. TV shows, if they’re successful, will run for years, meaning that there are several years’ worth of people’s lives that need to be developed and explored. At the same time, though, television settings are relatively limited, with a circumscribed cast that can’t accommodate extensive use of new characters for a long period of time. This leads to a level of incestuous plotting that renders shows preposterous. Why doesn’t a single one of the kids on Glee have a significant other that isn’t another one of them? Why does almost every one of the regulars on True Blood have some sort of dark secret in their past? Because they’re the people the producers have to work with and the show has to be kept interesting, that’s why.

Beyond the plot structure of television series, however, there’s also the problem of the way that television series are produced. Where in film production the producers and director usually (though not always) work from a finished script towards the construction of a story with a pre-determined ending, television shows usually have no such clear endpoint. When a show gets a pilot made, the producers are hoping to get the studio to order enough episodes for a half or full season; then, if all goes well, they’re hoping that it gets renewed for further seasons. Often, shows aren’t renewed until after the last episode of the previous season has already aired.

What this means is that, even if producers have a general idea of where they want a show to go, their focus isn’t on constructing an overarching product so much as on making the immediate future of the show entertaining enough that it’ll keep getting renewed. And, indeed, the very idea of shows being able to be indefinitely renewed is inimical to the development of long-lasting storylines: what do you do once you’ve reached the end of the story you want to tell but you still have an audience? Similarly, why map out a five-season plan when you might get cancelled after only three?

Let’s look at Glee as an example of this. Beyond the club’s competitive dimension and the running rivalry with Sue Sylvester, the first season had three fairly involved plotlines: Quinn’s teen pregnancy, its mirror in Terri Schuester’s faked pregnancy, and Will’s ongoing non-romance with Emma. There was, in other words, some real serious shit going on, all of which got resolved, more or less satisfactorily, by the end of the season. In the second season, by contrast, there’s been – what? Curt’s problems with the football player thug? Sure, but even that was little more than a brief story arc. And, in the absence of any such thematic content to complement the more light-hearted aspects of the show, Glee has become little more than a series of loosely narrative public service announcements. Once it resolved the heavy plot issues of the first season, it had effectively spent itself; it had nowhere new to go. There had been no forethought about what would come after that first season.

Finally, television programming faces a challenge that is inherent in any narrative endeavor predicated on installments – that is, things like television series, film series, or book series; more abstractly one might also think of ongoing photographic or artistic projects. That is, such endeavors must find a way to balance what makes them effective and entertaining with innovation and evolution. With any artistic endeavor – indeed, with any long-term endeavor whatsoever – there comes a time when, no matter how good the product has been, one begins to want to stretch beyond it and achieve something more.

There’s strong reasoning behind this. How many shows have we seen that started off great but after not too long a time became stale? Think, for instance, of The Office. Initially, the mockumentary style and loose, situation-based style made it fresh and charming and funny. Once that style became familiar, however, the show found that it needed to find new ways to amuse, so it began to try to lean on increasingly tired plot-driven stories to keep its audience invested. This strategy made perfect sense. The mine of humor in Jim and Pam’s disguised pining for one another, for instance, could only run so deep.

At the same time, the main reason that we were drawn to the show in the first place was that it was funny, and it was funny precisely because of those things that producers were compelled to move away from in trying to keep the product fresh. Thus we come to the other side of the problem: in demanding artistic and stylistic evolution, the need to keep the product fresh often demands (or is understood to demand) a move away from, perhaps even the abandonment of, principles that were from the outset fundamental to that product. In other words, keeping a show good seems mean moving away from all the things that made it good in the first place. And there is a term for this, coming, appropriately, from an event in a television series: ‘jumping the shark.’

I don’t think this is a necessary fate for all television programming, but it is an extremely likely one. Without a set idea of how long something is going to last, how it’s going to end, and how it’s going to get there, innovation is both necessary and doomed. It’s the only way to keep people interested, but it’s also like throwing darts at a dartboard with a blindfold on. You might score a bulls-eye, but you’re much more likely to end up pinning your buddy who’s standing by with the beers.

So how can you avoid this? The answer is simple: don’t start producing a TV show until you know how it begins, how it ends, and have a rough road map of how you’re going to get there and in what time. Then, have faith in the version of you that made that plan and carry it out as planned. Alternately, know when to quit.

Unfortunately, this is all much easier said than done; indeed, this sort of system is both impossible in the current system and financially impractical for the people who are putting up the money. Like movies, as discussed in my post on comic book adaptations, television series are as much commercial investments as they are artistic projects. And, realistically, it’s the viewers, not the money men, who necessitate this system. I still watch The Office. I still watch Glee. What reason have I given the producers of these shows to walk away and start a new project that would be as good as these shows used to be? What reasons have I given studios to rethink the production process?

Exactly. None. On which note, it’s time to go back to slapping my head in frustration every time Hank Moody has another absurdly unlikely sexual conquest.

Gentleman of the Day: