The Lean Screen
Why have movies gotten so bad?

Mr. Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.
September 8-9, 2001

ast week I told you this summer had been the worst season for films in Hollywood history, and provided evidence that American moviemakers are driving American moviegoers away from the theaters for good. The question is: Why have things gotten so bad?

The answer: A century dominated by movies has left the movies starved for inspiration.

When full-length motion pictures came into existence at the turn of the 20th century, they represented an entirely new form of storytelling — maybe the first entirely new way of telling stories in millennia. And it wasn't just that audiences could see people living and behaving and interacting with the everyday world in ways startlingly similar to real life.

Because, for almost three decades, movies contained no spoken dialogue, the storytelling was almost entirely visual. What Hollywood pioneered was the use of a 24-frames-per-second canvas, which remains the really magical thing about the medium. There's more meaning in a raised eyebrow than in a 200-word speech, and more romantic emotion is conveyed in a smoldering look than by the recitation of a love poem.

Since the movies are a visual medium, most of the energy and enthusiasm of moviemakers derives from a command of the camera and an ability to manipulate images. What they don't know very well - what they've never known very well — is why one given story is better than another given story.

So they tend to steal their stories from elsewhere. And in the first half-century or more of the movies, that meant they turned to other media for material — to books and theater, primarily, and to the kind of stories they told. Novels and plays derive their power entirely from character and plot. Add a strong visual storytelling sense to a strong narrative line, and you have something wonderful and new.

But something happened around 1950. Movies increasingly began to draw their inspiration from other movies. The young French directors of the famous late '50s "new wave" were inspired by hack Hollywood filmmakers, not by Shakespeare or Balzac or Dickens. In the 1960s, their American stepchildren burst forth: Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorcese, Steven Spielberg, and others.

These men could do things with a camera nobody had ever been able to do. They had seen every movie ever made and had broken those movies down frame by frame, turning themselves into the Noam Chomskys of film — the world's foremost experts on the grammar of visual storytelling.

They brought a new snap and dazzle to film. When that was combined with both a new freedom in subject matter and new technological developments, the medium became exciting again, in the late '60s and early '70s — in a way it hadn't since the advent of television. And the movies they turned out earned more money than anyone had ever dreamt possible.

The problem was that all these brilliant moviemakers knew was the movies. They weren't well-read — most of them didn't attend college, or if they did, they studied only film — and they didn't seem to feel at all humbled by their own ignorance. As a result, they understood classical storytelling only through the bastardized versions offered by Hollywood. It was like fourth-generation xeroxing. Stories and characters grew weaker as their original sources grew increasingly distant and hazy.

These guys were genuinely gifted filmmakers with something fresh to offer. But the Hollywood they created has proved sadly hospitable to ignoramuses and illiterates who have far less talent, and whose influences are the fourth-generation xeroxes — and maybe not even that. Directors like Michael Bay, who made Pearl Harbor, were raised watching television commercials and sitcoms, and seem to have derived all their knowledge of the world from these two stepchildren of popular art.

Movies today are awful because Hollywood no longer knows what a good plot is, what an interesting character is, or what genuine conviction is when it comes to telling a story.

With the cooler months will come more serious films, which might surprise and please. Certainly things can't get worse. But the true horror of today is that when Hollywood wants to congratulate itself for its literary seriousness, it gives Oscar recognition to movies like Chocolat and The Cider House Rules — both drippy melodramas based on horrible novels and directed by the Titan of Treacle, Lasse Hallström.

Hallström has a movie out this fall, called The Shipping News. It's based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by E. Annie Proulx (which I hated). It stars two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey. It's going to make your skin crawl. It's going to be nominated for seven Academy Awards. And so the nightmare will continue.

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