Hey, long time reader, first time poster. I'm actually a student at Emerson, so this letter in particular caught my eye. It depends on the professor as to how much the classics are stressed - many professors I've taken (I'm entering my Junior year) are quick to point to them (2001 and classic noir get a lot of play) for basically every trick in the book.

As for the point at hand, first, I love movies from all different times. No discrimination. Network, Casablanca, and Barry Lyndon are three of my all-time favorite films. But I think a lot of people forget two things: One, Hollywood has ALWAYS been out to make money. And two, for every Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Network, or Psycho that was put out back in the day, there were hundreds upon hundreds of films that just flat-out sucked. I wasn't around, so I don't know what the success rate was, but it is my understanding that Citizen Kane completely flopped, which is not so different from what happens to the masterpieces of today.

Look at last year - movies like The Fountain, Marie Antoinette, United 93, A Prairie Home Companion, Children of Men. Or this year's Zodiac. You can debate their quality, as you can any classic film (I just found out someone who's opinion I otherwise trust hates The Godfather, of all things), but there's no question of the strong artistry and vision behind every one of them. And, more to the point, they were all funded (at least in part) by major Hollywood studios.

So I always find the argument that "everything was better back in the day" a little stale and stubborn. Sixty years from now, MANY films will have endured (still watched, enjoyed, and celebrated, not just still be available through some futuristic downloading rental system). I'm sure in 1941, it was far from the popular consensus that anyone would care about Citizen Kane after a matter of months.

Agreed. I think that's all babble.

You've already mentioned Marie Antoinette, United 93, Children of Men, Zodiac, and The Fountain.

I would also add The Departed, Birth, the Kill Bill films, Magnolia, Solaris, Traffic, Lost in Translation, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Eyes Wide Shut, Saving Private Ryan, maybe Munich but I prefer War of the Worlds, The Thin Red Line, The New World, Ratatouille.

I mean, seriously.

i couldn't agree more with the above responses. it always seems to me that when someone starts crying about how horrible movies are today, and about how he/she doesnt't think that anything will be able to stand up like "casablanca" or "citizen kane", they simply don't have anything to say about movies, and so they say these silly things.

how can you say those things? ten years is barely enough time to give a movie to stand on. it took at least that for people to really start catching on to "citizen kane". in fact for many years "the grapes of wrath" was thought to be the holy grail of film. it is not, as we see now (though it's not anything to scoff at).

20 years from now we may be anointing movies we haven't even begun to consider now. i thought that "breach" was wonderful. but did anyone really care about it last winter? no. in the future critics and people who write about film might find that movie and start talking about it. and soon a wave of enthusiasm for it will swell over all of cinemaland. or we might start rethinking a movie like "the fountian". at the time of it's release critics seems divided (even within themselves)

haven't we been through enough film history to understand this? this happens with all arts. work is not noticed, it goes neglected, and then one day someone finds it again, and the word spreads. there may be high and low points in the history of movies, but theres never really been a time where there wasn't at least something of interest.

the present can never seem as glorious as the past. but sooner or later the present will become the past and it will be glorious.

Well said, nathan. I'll re-submit a comment that I made to an earlier post ("Gimme them old-time ferrin pictures"):

Modern moviegoers sometimes don't realize or remember how much dreck has always been produced. (See "Hollywood: Just shut it down" post, above.) Much of the great stuff we remember from the past remains with us precisely because it's good enough to be worth remembering. The studios cranked out hundreds of movies a year, most of which are either lost or remain in obscurity for other reasons. Mainly, I suspect, because they were bad to mediocre.

Was the basic level of craftsmanship (not just technical) higher in the days of the "dream factories," when professionals worked largely on assignment, from one picture to the next? Maybe. There are big-budget movies today that look and sound great -- excellent SFX and production values -- but play like gussied-up Grade-Z cheapies of yesteryear. But the whole business of making movies has changed. Young directors don't apprentice on Roger Corman exploitation films, or rise through the ranks while working steadily at a studio. I've often wondered how anybody who has to raise financing for an indie movie has any energy left to make the picture once the money comes through....

There seems to be one difference between Then and Now: Today it is [relatively] independent film makers coming up with the extraordinary material; in olden tymes the extraordinary films - how much some writers, directors and producers had to fight on the way - were part of the mainstream. They were not coincidental to studios because studios bred their creative personnel. Casablanca, Robin Hood [2 times Michael Curtiz, formerly from Europe], The Women, everything by Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, John Ford [I need some truly American in here], to name but a few films and directors, were products of a system in which creative people lead! And I do mean the likes of Jack Warner and Sam Goldwyn, who may have been hard-headed, who may have been difficult to deal with, but they were not primarily accountants, and surely not quarterly revisors. They wanted to entertain people to their [the producers] visions.

One of the big mistakes following the now 3 decades from Jaws and Star Wars, the defining moments of 'blockbusters', is the treatment of the moviegoer as a pre-pubertal teen; if male he gets American Pie, if female What Women Want. It took a long time till Judd Apatow gave us romantic comedies resembling adult life without forsaking the fun.

Luckily Apatow is just one of the new generation of filmmakers, a generation that seems to forego the accountant's mindset, instead look for ways to come up with interesting movies.

The Hollywood industry may change for the better if it would tap into the proven effectivity of the Long Tail business model. I believe Netflix and Amazon.com make more money on the combined sales of relatively marginal titles than of mighty popular items sold at large volumes.

This means that it DOES make sense to invest in quality artistic fare. It all depends on the way you choose to distribute.

To quote Wikipedia:
"Where the opportunity cost of inventory storage and distribution is high, only the most popular products are sold. But where the Long Tail works, minority tastes are catered to, and individuals are offered greater choice. In situations where popularity is currently determined by the lowest common denominator, a Long Tail model may lead to improvement in a society's level of culture."

This is going to happen. It's already happening. Wake up, Hollywood, and get with the program.

One thing that is great about TCM is that you get to see plenty of movies from the golden era that aren't that golden. Check out the Blondie series if you want to witness some truly incompetent filmmaking.

The best always float to the top. And yes there has been many a film that passed without notice by audiences and critics when first released that became recognized as great years later. I was recently re-reading my favorite critic of the forties, James Agee, on Out of the Past. He was so dismissive I checked out a few other archived sources. This movie was considered mediocre to bad when released. And now... well, I think it's fantastic. And to borrow from Jim (on the House of Games post) it's on Ebert's Great Movies list.

But to address the original letter quickly which hasn't been referenced yet. As to the person the letter writer struck up a conversation with may I just say that I find it abhorrant that anyone studying film would have little to no interest in older or foreign films. Then what the hell, exactly, are you going to learn? I'm sure you can learn plenty from modern film but you won't understand the original inspiration for many of the techniques you're using. And many techniques used in the pre-seventies films seem to be slowly falling away, particularly long, uninterrupted takes or tracking shots, which Michael Atkinson recently highlighted on his Zero for Conduct blog.

Sometimes I think those are the guys that make it in Hollywood like the bumbling buffoon in The Untouchables who stammers with Sean Connery before Connery remarks, "He'll be the next Chief of Police."

Anyway, a friend from college became very successful in the film industry as a writer and producer on both television and feature films. I won't mention who he is because I don't want to open that can of worms but suffice it to say his interest was in blockbusters. He wanted to make money and that he has. My interest was in the art of film and well, here I am commenting on Scanners and writing on my own blog, with bills to pay and no pool to relax in after work. So take that how you will.

There are plenty of artists who make it through the independent circuits and Hollywood is very important in getting those films distribution once made so it's a nice symbiotic (or maybe parasitic) relationship and I'm not going to say that Hollywood is worthless by any means. But the people who run it and make many of the decisions are along the lines of my friend from college and the guy at the diner. So don't expect Hollywood to lead the charge for high art in film but also don't blame them when the product's bad. It's a business. That's why we have independent filmmakers to keep the fires burning.

A quick note on Casablanca. It was churned out as just another movie-of-the-week by Warners. Bogart was not known as a romantic lead, Bergman was relatively new on the scene, and Curtiz was basically assigned the directing job. That the film turned out a masterpiece was lucky - the right talent meshed together at the right time. To hold this movie up as an example of the good old days misrepresents the genesis of the film.

How many modern films are there that attain high art as a (mostly) unintended consequence? How about The Departed, The Shawshank Redemption, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Usual Suspects, and The Silence of the Lambs.

Agree with all of the above responses, and would echo and expand on Nathan's: if you're going to complain about the degredation, routinization and cliche-ridden landscapes of contemporary Hollywood, you might want to make your "cri de couer" a bit less, well, cliched. Is there anything in that letter that hasn't been said, in precisely that same way, a million times before? Go back to commentary on film from the 30s and 40s, and you'll find variations on it, lamenting the loss of the "silent art" in favor of the crass commercialism of today: and this is when Hawks, Cukor, Welles, etc., were turning out their masterpieces!

I also just think it's funny-- I know every school is different, but having been through film programs at the undergrad and grad level, and now finding myself part of one as a teacher, I've never encountered programs where classics weren't taught and emphasized (individual classes might not all contain them, of course-- not if you're doing "hollywood of the 70s," or something more recent); and yet, here's this person extrapolating from ONE conversation!

Also, what counts as "Art" and "Philosophy"? Pretty broad, slippery categories, methinks.

I agree with most of the previous responses, but I don't think we should dismiss outright the possibility that Hollywood films today are, in fact, worse than in the past. I"m not saying they are, but I've never believed in the notion that nothing ever really changes much. Today's Hollywood business model has changed; more films than in the past are geared to teenage audiences, and more films are designed expressly to maximize business on the first weekend AND to appeal to a global audience, the latter quality almost demands a more generic feel to the films to ensure a broad, cross-cultural appeal.

That doesn't mean there aren't great H'wood films today, but the H'wood business model has changed significantly enough that we shouldn't just fall back on an easy sentiment like "things never really change."

Does it bother anyone that when people say "they don't make 'em like they used to" then go off and say movies suck because they aren't Casablanca or every other film from the 40's? This is a great cliché of film. During this time it was a studio system that made almost exclusively genre films, and if they released half those movies today, we'd call them preposterous. How can a film that has been around for only 10 years hope to have the impact of a Kane or Vertigo? Also, we remember the ones that don’t age or have that glow that transcends time, but go back and watch Meet Me in St. Louis or Spartacus. They are ancient. Though I haven’t seen anything as inept as say American Wedding or Battlefield Earth from any decade, no one is going to take the time to release the old truly awful ones on DVD anyway.

I personally think that it wasn't until the 50's that film really blossomed and the 60's was by far the most artistically product. Then the 70's lulled a little, but seem great compared to the 80's. The 90's had a blip of independent film that was bought out and now we have studio films just like the 40's again. I honestly think that maybe 5 decent films are produced each year by the studio system. I’m only 25 and grew up on the films from the late 80’s and 90’s and have gone back to see the classics or flawed films. Before falling in love with medicine, I loved film and wanted to be a director. When I looked at film programs most had very little history involved, usually only few class offered (film history in general then another course in the history of editing or cinematography) and only rarely would history be a focus in other classes. It simply wasn't marketable to make history a larger part of the curriculum and this emphasis on making commercial crap ultimately made me look in other directions for a career and I think this mirrors an anti-intellectualism that has grown in our society.

I have to say that overall, there are fewer important works being developed now and few important directors at work since the 40’s, and almost all of these directors are 60+ years old. If you want a challenge, develop a list of directors under the age of 50 whose work is artistically and emotionally challenging. And no Spike Jonze, Ms. Coppola, Gondry, Braff, Fincher, or Nolan don’t count. They are all major light weights who are at best competent (you can’t deny Fincher and Nolan make handsome work) and at worst Zach Braff. Once they break through, they take forever to follow up with another project, so they can’t effectively challenge their craft, though I can’t complain too much because most of them weren’t competent to begin with. The youngest filmmaker I see with great potential is Todd Field (age 43) and I can’t think of another.

Also of note Citizen Kane wasn't a major flop. This is another of the great myths of Kane. It did very well in cities and with critics when it released. Even though it died in the rural areas, it turned a profit. It was nominated for count 'em 9 oscars. Not that awards mean squat, but it was a critically highly regarded film though it was largely forgotten for about a decade (in part thanks to a certain Mr. Hearst). It just wasn’t the all-time-#1-movie like Gone with the Wind or Titanic.

Joss,

I think the 70s was maybe the best decade of all for American film. More accurately, I think the best "decade-ish" period for American film comes from the mid-60s to the mid 70s. I call it the "Strangelove to Taxi Driver" era, though I only use those two films as loose guidelines. Looking over my own personal Top 100 list, nearly half (!) of the American sound films on my list come from that period. I'm no saying I'm not biased or that I don't need to see more films from the 30s and 40s.

As for the under-50 directors, do you mean only Hollywood directors? 'Cause I got plenty of names for you.

Great current Hollywood directors under 50, though? That is a tough one. But if we wound the clock back to the so-called Golden Age, how many great Hollywood directors under 50 were there? John Ford probably was considered great after the troika of Stagecoach-Young Mr. Lincoln-Grapes of Wrath, but he was in his mid-40s by then (and still with most of his "famous" movies ahead of him.)

Preston Sturges didn't direct his first film til he was 42. When was Hitchcock dubbed one of the greats? Probably not until his 40s when a critical reevaluation upgraded him from a director of mere thrillers. Lubitsch made it big relatively young (late-30s).

So maybe it's not a fair question. Today's great under-50 HOllywood directors have probably only made a handful of films so far, and are just on their way to building up their future resumes. So I wouldn't rule out Ms. Coppola just yet.

And I deny that Fincher makes handsome work. His movies usually make me physically ill to look at. Never tell me what I can't do. :)

joss: If anybody wants to know more about Hearst's campaign against Welles and "Citizen Kane," a good place to start is the doc "The Battle Over Citizen Kane," which is available separately on DVD and paired with "Kane" itself.
It was "Ambersons" (a film I think is as great as "Kane") that premiered on the bottom half of a Lupe Valez Mexican Spitfire double-bill.

The Coens, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and many others got their starts in the '80s. Who are the equivalents in the '00s? I'll have to think about that, but I'm pretty sure they're out there...

I would argue that, in fact, Hollywood cinema is in a very bad place right now, significantly worse than most of it's history.

Reasons:

1. Effectively, almost all mainstream Hollywood projects are now organized under a single very narrow and strict plot construction: action movies (which can be superficially dressed as many other genres) which have accelerating action scenes, with bursts of ever-increasing violence/thrills every 10-20 minutes minimum. Or "comedies" with fairly vulgar (near-vaudeville) comedy bits enacted in similar 10-20 minute length maximum sketches. (And twenty minutes is really pushing it - many action movies now have violence close to every 10 minutes). Numerous other plot constructions have vanished, or are rare.

2. Films which address serious and mature adult situations (i.e., involve relatively believable people above 35 in relatively believable situations) are fairly rare, while they were often the center of Golden Age and Silver Age Hollywood practice.

3. Very little connection to any real-world occurances at all. Of course, Golden Age Hollywood cinema was hardly realistic either, but it at least shifted and changed - as well as current-day politics and events being at least mentioned. Current Hollywood, to me, is effectively stuck.

4. I think it's disingenuous to compare Hollywood-financed work by directors who developed their careers primarily as independent film-makers with Golden Age Hollywood. There were numerous figures in the Golden Age whose careers were entirely at major studios, and consistently made either a good or great film on average every year. I.E. Hollywood was actually developing great talent. Almost all of the major young film-makers today built their careers as indie directors first before eventually getting funding from major studios.

"If you want a challenge, develop a list of directors under the age of 50 whose work is artistically and emotionally challenging."

Andrew Buljaski
Frank V. Ross
Richard Linklater
Caveh Zahedi
Miles Montalbano
Ira Sachs
Phil Morrison
David Gordon Green

but the point is NONE of these directors built their careers on studio product.

"Effectively, almost all mainstream Hollywood projects are now organized under a single very narrow and strict plot construction: action movies (which can be superficially dressed as many other genres) which have accelerating action scenes, with bursts of ever-increasing violence/thrills every 10-20 minutes minimum."

burritoboy, it sounds like you just gave the formula for the era of musicals and film noir, just replace "bursts of action" with "song and dance numbers" or "murder by death" (heh, heh). Film noir began as a low budget under the radar style of film making, much like our horror films of today and the 80's, a place for directors to get their start. The moment studios saw that people were eating them up they began to churn them out factory style. The same goes for every era, with many different kinds of films. Even the edgy movies of the 70's. I remember a film spit out that starred George Segal as a junkie (DeNiro played a small part.) It was really, really mediocre. How many other forgotten lumps of coal were there like this because "Easy Rider" and "The Godfather" did so well (another film that was never expected to be a hit.)

Joss has it right, just because we don't see the multitudes of crap the studios churned out then, doesn't mean they weren't churning them out. There was a plethora of really god awful sci-fi films made at one point, FOR THE PREPUBESCENT to PUBESCENT age range of boys...sounds a lot like today to me folks! Certainly some things change and some things are cyclical, but with movies and audiences who the hell knows which genre or form will become popular next, because that will dictate what the true classics are and which genre the studio system will rape next.

Even right now each studio has an "Independent" division. If this isn't the studio system trying to plunder another potential box office money maker made lucrative this time by "Sex, Lies and Videotapes" and a hand full of other indies in the 90's, I don't know what it.

It was mentioned above that a movie could never have the impact of say "Vertigo" or this and that or that and this.

I think more now than ever before movies are a mesh of genres that have already been around for some time. I don't think there has been a new genre in a very long time. That however doesn't mean that a movie won't have an effect on the industry or be just as effective to a wider audience. It just takes a visionary to do so.

David Fincher's "Seven" first had a huge impact on the way crime films were made, and now that visual "stylizing" has spread to the entire industry. That he got his start with an Alien film maybe makes him a now day Ridley Scott! And "Seven" was just as emotionally charged and well written as "Vertigo" (and actually did better business.)

"Toy Story" pretty much created one of the biggest modern film upheavals.

"The Matrix" was a wonder to behold on the big screen. Reinvented the action genre as "Die Hard" did 15 years before.

While these genres perhaps existed before the release of the film, the mystery crime genre certainly existed before "Vertigo" and the romantic film noir existed before "Casablanca". The difference is these directors leave their stamps on their material, whereas many other directors follow the broad strokes.

And pertaining to my last post - the Western is another genre that hit big that the studio system grabbed and milked for all it was worth. Thankfully we don't have to see all the junk they made then (as we have plenty now) and only have the good ones to contend with. It's interesting to think about the ones now that will be remembered some day and which ones will perhaps be swept under the rug. I guess you can already kinda tell when a lot of movies are being sold for 5 dollars at Target. I really don't think "Resurrecting the Champ" will be remembered, but perhaps "Zodiac" will be? "Transformers" is the new "Towering Inferno", so it may not go away as quickly as we'd like it to. Anyone?

I think it is somewhat false to correlate “real world” subject matter or independent origins with good film. For one film as a medium is ultimately a deceptive one.

What I meant by my under 50 comment is who are the masters and who are the next directors who are going to challenge me and the medium? I associate mastery of film with the ability to control and manipulate, so I know the director will be able to reproduce good works regularly. Kubrick had it, as does Fellini, Scorsese, and Spielberg when he isn’t committing self-sabotage. Cronenberg, Eastwood and Visconte took years to develop it. Did we see these guys coming? I honestly don’t know. But I doubt that Kubrick could even become a director today.

Anyone can make one good movie, look at Michael Moore and Roger and Me. He was in the right place at the right time made a good movie and parlayed that into a career of shtick and propaganda. It is about being able to develop your craft no matter the age (unless you are Terence Malick or something).

I think it is somewhat false to correlate “real world” subject matter or independent origins with good film. For one film as a medium is ultimately a deceptive one.

What I meant by my under 50 comment is who are the masters and who are the next directors who are going to challenge me and the medium? I associate mastery of film with the ability to control and manipulate, so I know the director will be able to reproduce good works regularly. Kubrick had it, as does Fellini, Scorsese, and Spielberg when he isn’t committing self-sabotage. Cronenberg, Eastwood and Visconte took years to develop it. Did we see these guys coming? I honestly don’t know. But I doubt that Kubrick could even become a director today.

I kind of agree. This is a subject that I have very conflicted feelings about. I'm reluctant to celebrate filmmaking for the sake of filmmaking; as I'm afraid that we'll produce a generation of filmmakers who can make films that are cinematically innovative or textually complex, but aren't about anything.

But indeed, I don't think that Phil Morrison is the next Fellini or Kubrick, to say the least. I'm not sure that I would be able to tell one of his films from any one elses. What did Junebug do for the cinema? What exactly did Morrison bring to it as cinema? I found the film visually inert and when I thought that that might be the point (the compositions are razor thin, is he trying to make the film into a mural) I was enraged that the guy was being a smartass.

"burritoboy, it sounds like you just gave the formula for the era of musicals and film noir, just replace "bursts of action" with "song and dance numbers" or "murder by death" "

You're missing the point. The point is not that Hollywood made such action movies before - of course it did. The point is rather that that was only some genres among the many genres that Golden Age Hollywood produced.

Second, our two current genres rely on extremely primitive and emotionally limited pushing of gut emotions. Sure, there was always plenty of that in Golden Age Hollywood, too. But there were more openings for more complex presentations.

Finally, the "emotional hit" points are steadily moving together, whereas these hit points were much rarer earlier in film history. An example like Bullitt has three or four action hit points (two of which are non-fatal, by the way), whereas current movies can have three times that amount of hit points.

"But indeed, I don't think that Phil Morrison is the next Fellini or Kubrick, to say the least. I'm not sure that I would be able to tell one of his films from any one elses. What did Junebug do for the cinema? What exactly did Morrison bring to it as cinema? I found the film visually inert and when I thought that that might be the point (the compositions are razor thin, is he trying to make the film into a mural) I was enraged that the guy was being a smartass."

Well, I don't think we necessarily even want the next Fellini or Kubrick. You're basically isolating a single strand of film history and demanding that that be the only one in which we can recognize ability.

I just don't think that's true - and it's precisely along other lines in which Morrison might be interested in. He seems to be much more interested in human relationships, characters, evoking moods and so on. We can only grade an artist along the parameters that she herself sets. I think Morrison is successful in achieving what seem to be his goals. (Of course, having only made one movie, it's still hard to judge - but that would be true of any other director).

This isn't really precisely on-topic, but I wanted to respond to one of the above posters who seemed to equate realistic people and situations with great cinema.

I'd say that realistic people and situations are best portrayed in theatre. In film (and in novels) I much prefer escapism. Limiting yourself to realism seems to be wasting the awesome potential of film (and the written word in the case of novels) unless you just have no budget.

For myself, when I pop down my 15 bucks for a movie, I want to see great acting, plotting, editing, directing, and so on, but I want to see it without having to watch normal people doing normal things. I quit my job and moved to China precisely because I was sick of normal life!

This article is absurd. You must be one of those indie film lovers who watches those weird movies all the time. Seriously, just because it's old doesn't make it the best. Artsy people always assume that. What sucked back then still sucks today. I would rather watch The Departed than Casablanca. I would rather listen to Audioslave than Elvis Presley. But you probably like elvis better because his music is old, which according to you, makes it good