The Perfect Movie

A small percentage of the hundreds of motion pictures made each year are hard-core, X-rated stuff, reviewed only in specialized magazines and designed for a selected, if not select, audience. A few dozen are G-rated, most of them destined for short, profitless lives (the myth that there is an immense demand for “family” pictures is almost always exploded at the box office). The rest are rated PG—which means that parents will usually be guiding their children into films short on nudity but long on violence—or R, which category differs from X in the explicitness of the sex, but not in the amount of gore.

Therefore, as the range of high- quality pictures has narrowed over the last decade or so, the movie audience has narrowed with it. Since bearable children’s movies appear infrequently, and since every child now grows up with a TV set within immediate reach, the little kids are more or less lost to the movie theaters; their elders—if they are squeamish or prudish or too upset about the real world’s problems to seek them out as “entertainment”—tend to stay home and listen to radio talk shows. So the movie audience is now composed mainly of people from their teens to their forties; and the movies, following the law of popular entertainment—give ’em what they want to see —mirror their audience’s presumed tastes and values.

DB

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David Brudnoy

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A small percentage of the hundreds of motion pictures made each year are hard-core, X-rated stuff, reviewed only in specialized magazines and designed for a selected, if not select, audience. A few dozen are G-rated, most of them destined for short, profitless lives (the myth that there is an immense demand for “family” pictures is almost always exploded at the box office). The rest are rated PG—which means that parents will usually be guiding their children into films short on nudity but long on violence—or R, which category differs from X in the explicitness of the sex, but not in the amount of gore.

Therefore, as the range of high- quality pictures has narrowed over the last decade or so, the movie audience has narrowed with it. Since bearable children’s movies appear infrequently, and since every child now grows up with a TV set within immediate reach, the little kids are more or less lost to the movie theaters; their elders—if they are squeamish or prudish or too upset about the real world’s problems to seek them out as “entertainment”—tend to stay home and listen to radio talk shows. So the movie audience is now composed mainly of people from their teens to their forties; and the movies, following the law of popular entertainment—give ’em what they want to see —mirror their audience’s presumed tastes and values.