How to Cure the Blockbuster Syndrome

BEN SOSKIN: Well, we’re slowly inching through the waste of time that is the spring movie season—meaning that we’re closing in on the waste of time that is the summer movie season. So, since summer’s on the way, I thought we might spin out some thoughts on the state of the summer action blockbuster.

We’ve been moving for several years towards a state of affairs where studios, wary of risking big money by backing an unproven property, instead greenlight sequel after sequel to their few profitable action franchises. Last year’s summer slate was the worst example yet of this trend, featuring sequels to The Matrix, Charlie’s Angels, X-Men, Terminator, Bad Boys, The Fast and the Furious and Tomb Raider—a bunch of exercises in money-burning, most of them roundly reviled by critics and many lapsing from the public consciousness even before they came out on DVD (the only impact that the second Charlie’s Angels movie made was to remind us that Demi Moore once had a career).

I couldn’t bring myself to see any of this crap crop last summer—after wasting ten bucks on The Matrix Reloaded, I confined my summer movie-watching to what I could get from Netflix and the local library; I got up to speed on Cronenberg and Polanski and saw a bunch of other classics that I hadn’t caught yet. The only ticket I bought for the rest of the summer was to see 28 Days Later (which I enjoyed a lot—I’m a sucker for evocative apocalypse movies).

Whether it’s because of the underperformance of a number of last summer’s sequels, or because the studios are now short on franchises to exploit, it looks like this summer’s crop of bad action films will feature slightly fewer movies with a “II” or “III” after their names. There are new installments of Spider-Man, Harry Potter, Shrek and The Bourne Identity on the way (not to mention Alien vs. Predator, which makes me wonder when Alien and Predator will face off against Jason and Freddy), but there is also a lot of big-budget product which should be perfectly craptacular despite not being a sequel to anything—among them Catwoman, I, Robot, Van Helsing, The Day After Tomorrow (my evocative apocalypse bias notwithstanding), King Arthur and Troy.

Is there a chance that some of those movies will be good? Sure, but action-y blockbusters as a group are so creatively and intellectually bankrupt that I don’t see any need to cut them any slack; we should consider them bad until proven good. And even at their best, such movies can’t match the worth of good dramas or intelligent, socially relevant comedies; I love Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back as much as the next movie man, but as creative as they are, they’re not much more than eye-candy adventures to eat popcorn by. It’s a miracle that America’s film critics aren’t so battered by high-decibel Bruckheimer clones by summer’s end that they lose all objectivity and shower kisses on the dumb, earnest Oscar bait of early fall.

Any interest in defending the big-budget summer shoot-em-ups? Are these dynamite-filled popcorn commercials worth the time that we spend watching them? Are they sufficiently transporting to give our imaginations a productive workout? Or would we be better off Netflixing our way through the season’s multiplex doldrums?

BEN B. CHUNG: You won’t hear too much dissent from me on this topic, Mr. Soskin. The reign of the summer blockbuster is an ugly, brutal one; long before the Bush administration made it a way of life, studios have relied on and thereby perpetuated a deep, long-standing ignorance within the American people. Far too many individuals have locked themselves into the mindset that film simply cannot exist as an art form comparable to its centuries-old companions in theater, painting and music. I’ve bore many an unhealthy grudge against friends unwilling to accept movies as anything beyond mere entertainment. The most unfortunate aspect of the whole situation is that the less people expect from their weekly excursions to the multiplex, the less they’re delivered. And voila: the monsters are unleashed.

Blame it on Spielberg and Lucas. The momentous rise of Jaws in 1975 and the astonishing popularity of Star Wars two year later are now widely recognized as gilded nooses - pinnacles of plebeian filmmaking that regrettably turned studio heads away from craftsmanship towards greener pastures. Marketing budgets ballooned to rival production costs, strategic release date positioning during the summer months became essential and, as you mentioned, inexplicable sequels popped up left and right. Studios now saw it fit to accompany Psycho with three full remakes, investing in tag lines like, “Norman Bates is back to normal. But Mother’s off her rocker again!”

At any rate, the summer’s genre-bound orgies of blood and guns are here to stay, and rather than upset the balance, the goal of studios should be to enrich what’s already available. It’s plain wrong to claim that blockbusters need to exist as brainless, heartless machines in order to succeed. There have been a number of superior action movies offered in recent years, with equal shares of proficient filmmaking and mass appeal. Dirty Pretty Things, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, City of God and Kill Bill: Volume One all have the key ingredients of a successful summer blockbuster, but all were judged too intelligent to take on such a heavy load, and were thus advertised as magnets for awards rather than audiences. Given the sort of massive promotional push reserved for bigger, dumber movies, these films could easily have quadrupled their final grosses.

As for that other sacred summer institution, the low-brow extended-play sitcom, I will admit I have a special place in my heart for them. I certainly cherish smarter, subtler comedic works more than any gross-out bodily fluid showcase, but there’s something to be said for a movie (Old School and Meet the Parents immediately come to mind) that can make me laugh continuously for an hour and a half. That is an accomplishment that is rarely replicated in the independent film community and holds merit far beyond the average half-assed comic-book adaptation.

So what is to be done with Tinseltown’s unfortunate state of affairs? Well, studios can start by moving away from its reliance on test audiences. Producers remain convinced that test screenings are the best way to gauge a film’s potential success and target audience. This is largely ineffective. Paramount Pictures must somehow have found the only ten people on the planet likely to enjoy Twisted, branded them a focus group and gave the movie a green light. The movie failed to recoup even half its budget. Most of the movies in this week’s top ten will fail to make their studios a profit until every last cent has been squeezed out of merchandising and television broadcast rights. With such an inefficient business model, it’s amazing that the system remains unyielding.

Any better ideas about how to reform the Blockbuster Syndrome? The post-Oscars months will always be lost to us, but maybe we can still take back the summers for the forces of good and out of the hands of Michael Bay.

Oh, and in rebuttal to your statement about undeserved post-summer doldrums acclaim, I present to you Entertainment Weekly’s largely respectable critic Lisa Schwarzbaum and her take on last year’s rigid, bland-as-glue Seabiscuit: “A rare pedigreed entrant in a summer of mules.” It seems many critics (79 percent of them, according to rottentomatoes.com) are not as capable as you think of keeping their cool after a summer of roasted, bloated turkeys.

BEN SOSKIN: You’ve made a lot of great points, Mr. Chung. I think that there’s a simple solution to the studios’ overreliance on “safe” summer product, but it’d be a tough solution to put into practice. Yes, Hollywood needs talented studio heads who will develop compelling ideas, and yes, they need to give directors the creative control they deserve. But, most importantly, the studios have to find better writers and better scripts.

When Spielberg made Raiders, he proved that a blockbuster could be smart at the same time that it was thrilling, and Lucas proved the same when he made Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. But you’re also right to blame them for the brainless excesses of today’s summer scene—not just as the fathers of the form, but on the basis of their own conduct since that time. Lucas’ pointless return to the Star Wars franchise hasn’t done much to dignify the season. Nor has Spielberg’s spotty summer-film track record; if I were to wander the circles of Hell today, I’d hope to find the suits who greenlit Temple of Doom, Hook, The Lost World and—if there’s any justice—Close Encounters.

Most of the time, it’s the writer who makes a movie work. It’s no surprise to me that the scripts to Raiders and Empire were both written by the same guy —Lawrence Kasdan, the great wit behind The Big Chill and Body Heat. Does this portend great things for Troy, whose scribe David Benioff last wrote the compelling 25th Hour? Probably not, if the preview’s dialogue is any indication, but the important thing is that Benioff’s working at Hollywood’s heart, and that can only strengthen the system.

The importance of quality writing may be why those gross-out comedies that you praise are sometimes the best product of the summer—their imaginative excesses often require more creativity than one needs to write dialogue of the “It’s gonna blow!” variety. In the summer of ’98, the only two movies that I paid to see twice were extreme comedies—There’s Something About Mary and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which, admittedly, was an arthouse pukefest, rather than a mainstream one). And two of the best things about the summer of ’99 were American Pie and the South Park movie.

There isn’t any shortage of intelligence in Hollywood; there’s just a shortage of talent. Harvard’s contribution to the summer scene has made that blindingly clear; we’ve spawned the presumably intelligent writers and/or directors of XXX, The Fast and the Furious, Wild Wild West, Terminator 3, Cats and Dogs, Bruce Almighty, Daddy Day Care, Blue Crush, Halloween: Resurrection and more. Hollywood needs to weed out all of its dead wood, be they Harvard-trained or not, and find writers who can make some kind of memorable contribution to the medium. I wish we could just create twenty clones of William Goldman in his prime and thirty clones of Aaron Sorkin and then let the fifty of them write the entire summer crop, but life doesn’t work that way.

BEN B. CHUNG: Hey Ben. I fully agree that the writer is most often responsible for a film’s quality. I find it almost impossible to enjoy a movie based on acting, cinematography or editing alone; alternately, a solid script can salvage even the most scantily budgeted, poorly acted production. As Sam Huntington might say, if films were chili, the cast and crew would simply be ingredients that could only enrich the essential tomato stock of the screenplay.

So if writers are so crucial to a film’s artistic success, and artistic success sometimes correlates with Oscars, which studios have a thing for, why aren’t there nearly enough of them to go around? It’s logical that for such an involved, multi-tiered process as direction, only a few individuals might rise above the fray and establish themselves in the critical limelight. But there are hundreds of decent novelists churning out product on a weekly basis, and yet consistently accomplished screenwriters are few and far between.

I suspect that this is largely due to the marginalization of the screenwriter in Hollywood. Once in a blue moon, a writer will become something of a household name, but this usually requires them to either simultaneously dabble in direction or actually write themselves into their screenplays. Granted, writers are not particularly a most glamorous, lovable bunch, but Ang Lee, Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg did not achieve superstar status with their chiseled jawbones.

There’s also the obvious consideration of the lack of artistic control often presented the writer. After the script is composed and put into production, the writer is rarely allowed to offer his or her input on a set. This might explain why writer-directors (David Gordon Green, Sofia Coppola and their ilk) often produce the most satisfying works; their undiluted vision makes for the most sound, unified art.

Anyhow, I must admit I am fairly pleased that the sequel craze has been toned down for this summer, and though I’m hardly looking forward to any of the epics Hollywood is attempting to ram down our throats this summer, I think we can all agree on one thing: the all-powerful hotness of Keira Knightley in a leather bondage outfit, sporting Celtic tattoos and one big-ass sword. Bring it on, Keira.

—Staff writer Ben Soskin can be reached at bsoskin@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Ben B. Chung can be reached at bchung@fas.harvard.edu.