On April 27, 2013, director Steven Soderbergh walked up onstage and gave a speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival about what he saw as the state of cinema. Now, as he was the leading force behind the rise of independent filmmaking in the late eighties with the release of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh focused largely on the crushing of the independent film sector. But as he is also the man who has proven studios can make stylish and interesting commercial films, such as Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven, and Magic Mike, he also had some thoughts about how studios are crushing the movie business as a whole:
Speaking of meetings [at Hollywood studios], the meetings have gotten pretty weird. There are fewer and fewer executives who are in the business because they love movies. There are fewer and fewer executives that know movies. So it can become a very strange situation. I mean, I know how to drive a car, but I wouldn’t presume to sit in a meeting with an engineer and tell him how to build one, and that’s kind of what you feel like when you’re in these meetings. You’ve got people who don’t know movies and don’t watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you’re going to be allowed to make. That’s one reason studio movies aren’t better than they are. . . .
Well, how does a studio decide what movies get made? One thing they take into consideration is the foreign market, obviously. It’s become very big. So that means, you know, things that travel best are going to be action-adventure, science-fiction, fantasy, spectacle, some animation thrown in there. Obviously the bigger the budget, the more people this thing is going to have to appeal to, the more homogenized it’s got to be, the more simplified it’s got to be. So things like cultural specificity and narrative complexity, and, God forbid, ambiguity, those become real obstacles to the success of the film here and abroad. . . .
If you’ve ever wondered why every poster and every trailer and every TV spot looks exactly the same, it’s because of testing. It’s because anything interesting scores poorly and gets kicked out. Now I’ve tried to argue that the methodology of this testing doesn’t work. If you take a poster or a trailer and you show it to somebody in isolation, that’s not really an accurate reflection of whether it’s working because we don’t see them in isolation, we see them in groups. We see a trailer in the middle of five other trailers, we see a poster in the middle of eight other posters, and I’ve tried to argue that maybe the thing that’s making it distinctive and score poorly actually would stick out if you presented it to these people the way the real world presents it. And I’ve never won that argument. . . .
Now, I’m going to attempt to show how a certain kind of rodent might be smarter than a studio when it comes to picking projects. If you give a certain kind of rodent the option of hitting two buttons, and one of the buttons, when you touch it, dispenses food 40 percent of the time, and one of the buttons when you touch it dispenses food 60 percent of the time, this certain kind of rodent very quickly figures out never to touch the 40 percent button ever again. So when a studio is attempting to determine on a project-by-project basis what will work, instead of backing a talented filmmaker over the long haul, they’re actually increasing their chances of choosing wrong. Because in my view, in this business, which is totally talent-driven, it’s about horses, not races. . . .
The most profitable movies for the studios are going to be the big movies, the home runs. They don’t look at the singles or the doubles as being worth the money or the man hours. Psychologically, it’s more comforting to spend $60 million promoting a movie that costs $100 million, than it does to spend $60 million for a movie that costs $10 million. I know what you’re thinking: If it costs 10 you’re going to be in profit sooner. Maybe not. Here’s why: OK, $10 million movie, $60 million to promote it, that’s $70 million, so you’ve got to gross $140 million to get out.I Now you’ve got a $100 million movie, you’re going to spend $60 million to promote it. You’ve got to get $320 million to get out. How many $10 million movies make $140 million? Not many. How many $100 million movies make $320 million? A pretty good number, and there’s this sort of domino effect that happens too. Bigger home video sales, bigger TV sales . . .
The sort of executive ecosystem is distorted, because executives don’t get punished for making bombs the way that filmmakers do, and the result is there’s no turnover of new ideas, there’s no new ideas about how to approach the business or how to deal with talent or material. But, again, economically, it’s a pretty straightforward business. Hell, it’s the third biggest export that we have. It’s one of the few things that we do that the world actually likes. . . .
Taking the 30,000-foot view, maybe nothing’s wrong, and maybe my feeling that the studios are kind of like Detroit before the bailout is totally insupportable. I mean, I’m wrong a lot. I’m wrong so much, it doesn’t even raise my blood pressure anymore. Maybe everything is just fine. But . . . admissions. This is the number of bodies that go through the turnstile, ten years ago [in America]: 1.52 billion. Last year: 1.36 billion. That’s a 101/2 percent drop. Why are admissions dropping? Nobody knows.
Movies are filled with clichés, and so are books about movies. Probably the biggest cliché of all in a film book is to bemoan that movies aren’t as good as they used to be. Well, I love eighties movies so it seems apt that I should run to the cliché.
I quoted Soderbergh’s speech at some length because it seems to me that when you have a phenomenally successful studio director—as opposed to, say, a thirty-something woman in her bathrobe writing a book about her Ghostbusters obsession—saying that movies are getting worse, and for specific, very real reasons, he probably has a point. At the risk of sounding like Mad Ol’ Granny Time, sitting in my rocking chair and reminiscing about the glory days of art when people made PROPER movies like Twins and Weekend at Bernie’s, clearly the movie business is very, very different from what it was thirty years ago, and that is reflected in the movies it makes. It is simply impractical now for studios to make movies that aren’t (seemingly) guaranteed bankers. No longer is there the model that a studio would make one, maybe two big blockbusters a year and that would support smaller, weirder projects like Field of Dreams; now the whole business model is predicated on tentpoles. In 2013 George Lucas predicted that cinemas would soon be reserved for the special and few blockbusters, and they would be seen as a luxury pastime, like the theater: “You’re going to end up with fewer theaters, bigger theaters with a lot of nice things,” he said. “Going to the movies will cost 50 bucks or 100 or 150 bucks—like what Broadway costs today, or a football game.”
To a small degree, this is already happening, with big blockbusters going to IMAX theaters. Studio movies have become too expensive to make, market, and distribute, and too dependent on foreign markets, and so they increasingly feel like monolithic identikit juggernauts, because that’s what they are. The formula is safely conservative.
Ah, but what about the independent sector? you cry. Indeed, many of the best films of the past twenty-five years have come from the independent sector, from 1994’s Pulp Fiction to 2001’s Mulholland Drive to 2014’s Boyhood. In fact, some of my favorite movies from the eighties were produced independently, from Dirty Dancing (obviously) to Spike Lee’s wonderful Do the Right Thing, which still looks extraordinarily modern almost thirty years after it was made.
However, it has never been harder to get an independent movie released, despite all the advances in technology that have rendered them, ostensibly, cheaper to make. Soderbergh said:
In 2003, 455 films were released. Two hundred and seventy-five of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released. So you’re not imagining things, there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. Five hundred and forty-nine of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100 percent increase in independent films, and a 28 percent drop in studio films, and yet, ten years ago: studio market share 69 percent, last year 76 percent.
You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That’s hard. That’s really hard.
But this doesn’t mean that good storytelling is dying. Far from it.
No one is sitting around now and claiming this is “the Golden Age of American Movies.” Instead it is roundly agreed to the point of cliché to be the Golden Age of American TV, illustrated by the success of prestige box-set shows such as The Sopranos, Sex and the City, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Orange Is the New Black, and Transparent. All these shows were made by cable networks such as HBO and AMC, and streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. This is where filmmakers and screenwriters can experience the luxury of making stories that aren’t intended to appeal to everybody, and where they can write stories about women, abortions, sex, and older people. Shortly before Soderbergh made the above speech, he released his film about Liberace, Beyond the Candelabra, on HBO because “the feeling amongst the studios was that this material was too ‘special’ [that is, gay] to gross [the necessary] $70 million.”
Filmmaker Jill Soloway has worked in theater and TV (she was the co–executive producer of Six Feet Under) and had made well-regarded independent films, including Afternoon Delight (2013), for which she won the Directing Award at the Sundance Festival. But when she got that award, instead of celebrating it, she immediately started worrying how she could make another film. “I was with all these other filmmakers and we were asking the question ‘What’s next?’ Everyone there was so focused on distribution, and when you make a movie you have to beg and scrabble. And then this turned up.”
“This” was Amazon Prime, Amazon’s streaming service, which makes original films, and, through them, Soloway made the critical smash hit series Transparent, starring Jeffrey Tambor as a transgender father. “They don’t need everybody to watch something, so I can make something that’s very niche-specific, something for women, Jews, intellectuals, queers, not necessarily heterosexual white middle-class men,” says Soloway.
The way Soloway sees it, the American entertainment business is now divided in two: “There’s old Hollywood, that’s owned by traditional corporations. There are your Time Warners and your Viacoms, and all of these organizations where you have the feeling that the people in charge of the decisions are being made on the golf course by old, white golfy men. Then you look up to the north in Silicon Valley and you think the people in charge of these companies have probably all been to Burning Man and maybe aren’t so good at golf, but are people of a different generation and are able to see without waiting for their ratings and testing results, because they use their instincts.”
Whether or not people at HBO have been to Burning Man, it is clear that TV has become the place for filmmakers and actors who want to tell interesting stories. It is also far more welcoming to women than movies. So many of the actresses who triumphed in film in the eighties, after finding that forty years old was still considered the sell-by date for women by Hollywood studios, have increasingly moved over to TV: Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Glenn Close, Sally Field.
“I remember I was in bed, online, watching Twitter and Facebook blow up when Orange Is the New Black started, and watching the critical reviews come in,” says Soloway. “Here was a show featuring ten women in prison and the only guy was the villain. There was nobody mediating the experience of whether the women were pleasing to men. That felt like such a change.”
“Actors are running now to content,” says Jeffrey Tambor, the star of Transparent. “Amazon Prime has Malcolm McDowell, Gael García Bernal, John Goodman—they’re running over there because an actor will always go to a good script. The revolution is here now and those not paying attention will go to the dinosaur area. It used to be the agent saying, ‘If everything goes well [in TV] you’ll get a movie,’ and they don’t say that anymore—it’s flipped. And that’s the big surprise.”
This is great, of course. Maybe kids in two generations’ time will dress up for Halloween like Walt and Jesse the way adults today still don proton packs for fancy dress parties. But as great as those shows can be at giving depths to characters and layers to plot, there is also an argument to be made for concision over flabbiness, punchiness over pretension. My test of a great movie is to ask myself two questions:
1. Do I want to see this movie again right now?
2. Does it make me view the world a little bit differently?
The eighties movies I’ve mentioned in this book fulfill both those criteria and then some. I’ve watched every one so many times they have become part of my mental landscape. But it takes a person with more stamina than me to watch a fifty-hour drama as many times as my generation has watched Back to the Future, getting to know its every nook and cranny.
There is something to be said, too, for the collective experience of seeing a movie in a theater with others, as opposed to watching it on your own on a tablet, tweeting to others, like a vision of dislocative solitude from a dystopian sci-fi novel. It is easy to get sentimental about the excitement of a movie (and alarmist about modern technology), and I’m afraid I’m a total sucker for stories about that.
“I remember going to see Ghostbusters on opening night and it was like a rock concert on Long Island—the line went down the whole street!” Judd Apatow recalls.
“One of the great movie experiences of my life [was 48 Hours],” Bill Simmons writes.
We went on opening weekend in December (me, my mother, my stepfather and a friend) to the old Avon Theater in Stamford, Connecticut. The crowd couldn’t have been more jacked up—it was about 70 percent black and 100 percent pro-Eddie. If you remember, Eddie didn’t appear onscreen for the first 15 minutes. When he finally showed up (the scene when Nick Nolte’s character visits him in jail), there was an electricity within the theater unlike anything I can remember. People were hanging on every line, every joke, everything. At the end of the scene, when Nolte storms off and Eddie screams, “Jack! Jack! (Defiant pause.) FUCK YOU!,” someone who had already caught a few showings stood up on cue and screamed “FUCK YOU!” with Eddie. And it went from there. The scene when Eddie rousts the redneck bar practically caused a riot. Bullshit, you’re too fucking stupid to have a job. People were doubled over. People were cheering. I’ve never seen anything like it.
“There’s that gag in Coming to America about the [black characters’] hair leaving a [grease] mark on the sofa,” says John Landis. “If you saw the movie with a white audience, that scene got a little laugh—a scandalized laugh, but a laugh. But if you saw it with a black audience, they went crazy! It was terrific!”
These are collective experiences future generations simply won’t have because the kinds of movies that will make it to cinemas won’t inspire that same kind of love and excitement. It’s fun to talk about box-set series on social media with friends and fellow fans, follow critics who live-tweet the shows. But it’s not quite the same. What we’ve gained in fifty-hour dramas on prestige cable channels, we’ve lost in ninety minutes of pure pleasure in local cinemas.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from eighties movies, it’s that you should never end on a downer. And there is nothing to be down about! Even if there is never a Hollywood studio movie that affects people the way Ghostbusters or Back to the Future did, we still have all these wonderful, hilarious, and deeply formative movies they made in the eighties that we can watch forever. A friend asked when I started writing this book if I was worried that writing about eighties movies would make me sick of the subject. This was a fair question: after all, this friend had been to university with me and saw firsthand how studying for a degree in English literature made me incapable of reading a novel if it wasn’t written by Danielle Steele for three years after graduation. With apologies to my university tutors, the same, to my huge relief but not in any way to my surprise, has not happened with this book, which conclusively proves that Coming to America has more depths than To the Lighthouse. Indeed, writing this book has achieved what I heretofore would have thought was impossible: it has made me love these movies even more.
The man who is lucky enough to share a home with me spent nine months dwelling with a strange creature who lived in a tracksuit and was incapable of fitting conversation with him (or washing herself) into her busy schedule of watching about six hours of eighties films a day, emerging only to bark out some catchphrase from Three Amigos! at him (like I said, he is a lucky, lucky man). In fact, just typing “Three Amigos!” has made me need to watch that movie again, so excuse me for a few minutes. (This, actually, was a very common problem in writing this book: every time I typed out a film’s title, I had to go watch the movie again, which explains why it ended up taking so long to write. Sorry, editor people, but such are the obvious risks when you commission me to write a book that entails the typing of words like “Tootsie,” “Ghostbusters,” and “Moonstruck” repeatedly.)
But what’s been an even more delightful surprise has been the reaction of others to my eighties film binge. I assumed, when I started writing this book, that people of my generation (ages, roughly, thirty to forty-five) might enjoy it and everyone else would shrug, a little bemused. Instead, the more I spoke about it to others, the more I realized these movies still occupy such a huge place in culture today, and for people of all ages. Okay, so the over-fifties in my office looked at me a bit askance when I explained I couldn’t possibly work late as I was writing a ten-thousand-word essay on the genius of Beverly Hills Cop that evening. But twenty-somethings and teenagers would all happily squeal and tell me how much they love Molly Ringwald, how their favorite film of all time is Back to the Future, how much they love Die Hard. Often these bursts of excitement would come from teenage girls, expressing their love for Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, or Mary Stuart Masterson in Some Kind of Wonderful, or Winona Ryder in Heathers. And, of course, this thrilled me—there are few things more likely to warm a thirty-something’s heart than the realization that the pop culture that shaped you as a teenager is still relevant and adored today. But it also made me a little sad because the fact that young people today feel such a connection to Ringwald et al. underscores the sad lack of brilliant young female characters in movies today. Studios are now too keen to appeal to as many people as possible to include a character like Pretty in Pink’s Andie, one who might—maybe, probably not, but who knows—scare young male audiences with her fearlessness in calling Andrew McCarthy and James Spader out for their cowardice.
Damn, there’s that downer again. Let’s look at the positives here and take reassurance from the fact that, clearly, audiences are a lot more sophisticated than studios think, more than able to enjoy movies about difficult girls, about abortions, about black guys being better than all the white dudes. Maybe we all knew that already, but it’s nice for that suspicion to be validated.
The reason I—sorry, WE—love movies such as Back to the Future, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Trading Places, and Ghostbusters is that they are sweetly specific in their references and completely universal in their humor and stories, whether they be about parents, friendship, or money, and that’s a key combination and one that won’t ever change. One question I did get asked a lot when writing this was why I like eighties movies so freaking much. The simplest answer is also the most honest: because they make me happy. I think—hell, I KNOW—they make other people happy, too. I hope this book has captured some of that.
Obviously, the only way to end this is with an eighties film quote and, when it comes to eighties films, you’re spoiled for choice for quotes. Originally I thought I might go for “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet—but your kids are gonna love it.” But it didn’t really make sense (not that that has ever stopped me from using an eighties quote before). Then I considered some timeless life advice: “If someone asks if you’re a god you say YES!” But then I thought, The hell with it, let’s go for the obvious jugular here and use the quote that sums up the message of this book, which is that movies are changing and it’s easy not to notice it—with added Ferris: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
I. Soderbergh explained earlier in his speech that exhibitors take half the gross; therefore a movie needs to make twice what it cost in order to break even.