Thompson on Hollywood has this account of a talk Steven Soderbergh gave on the "State of Cinema" at the SFIFF:

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsono...killing-cinema

I know there are a lot of Soderbergh fans on this board, but if, like me, you're not, it's still an interesting talk that covers a lot of ground. Some of his complaints, of course, have been a constant in Hollywood history. Some are relatively new.

Full speech is on page two of that link. It's better to listen to it, instead of reading the article.

Soderbergh brings up the usual point: people financing movies aren't really fans of movies - they like money - and it's up to the talent to coheres financiers into funding a production. And they don't much care to take risks of any kind or recognize creative talent. Unabashedly creatively bankrupt.

Hollywood lost its soul when MBAs started making all the decisions.

How different is Hollywood now from what it was for Leone in the Italian film industry in the 1960s?

You answered your own question there in a way. Two different worlds.

Things starting changing in the mid to late 70's and have never gone back.

Thankfully there are still actors/directors who care more about their craft than money so we still have some good films being made.

Do you hear that De Niro?

"WHAT'S WRONG WITH HOLLYWOOD" by JOHN CASSAVETES

Hollywood is not failing. It has failed. The desperation, the criticisms, the foolish solutions, the wholesale cutting of studio staffs and salaries, the various new technical improvements, the "bigger picture", and the "ultra-low-budget picture" have failed to put a stop to the decline.
The fact is that film making, although unquestionably predicated on profit and loss like any other industry, cannot survive without individual expression. Motion pictures can not be made to please solely the producer's image of the public. For, as has been proved, this pleasure results neither in economic or artistic success.

On the other hand, the audience itself, other-directed and mass-minded as it is, may condemn pictures such as Twelve Angry Men or The Goddess. These pictures may lose money, but they have inspired applause from those who still think freely and for themselves. These pictures have gone beyond Hollywood "formula" and "ingredients", and will affect strongly the future of American motion pictures.
More often than not, the mass audience will not accept a new idea, an unfamiliar notion, or a different point of view if it is presented in one or two films only, just as it will not immediately accept new ideas in life. However, the new thoughts must eventually lead to change.
This is not to say that individual expression need only be so called point-of-view films or films that stimulate thought. Certainly the standard of the musical can and must be improved too; the treatment of comedy should reach in other directions; the "epic" and "Western" pictures and the "love story"must also search for more imaginative approaches and fresher ideas.
However the probability of a resurrection of the industry through individual expression is slim, for the men of new ideas will not compromise themselves to Hollywood's departmental heads. These artists have come to realize that to compromise an idea is to soften it; to make an excuse for it, to betray it.
In Hollywood the producer intimidates the artist's new thought with great sums of money and with his own ego that clings to the past of references of box office triumphs and valueless experiece. The average artist, therefore, is forced to compromise. And the cost of the compromise is the betrayal of his basic beliefs. And so the artist is thrown out of motion pictures, and the businessman makes his entrance.

However, in no other activity can a man express himself as fully as in art. And, in all times, the artist has been honored and paid for revealing his opinion of life. The artist is an irreplaceable figure in our society too: A man who can speak his own mind, who can reveal and educate, who can stimulate or appease and in every sense communicate with fellow human beings. To have this privilege of world-wide communication in a world so incapable of understanding, and ignore its possibilities, and accept a compromise--most certainly will and should lead the artist and his films to oblivion.
Without individual creative expression, we are left with a medium of irrelevant fantasies that can add nothing but slim diversion to an already diversified world. The answer cannot be left in the hands of the money men, for their desire to accumulate material success is probably the reason they entered into film-making in the first place. The answer must come from the artist himself. He must become aware that the fault is his own: that art and the respect due to his vocation as an artist is his own responsibility. He must, therefore, make the producer realize, by whatever means at his disposal, that only by allowing the artist full and free creative expression will the art and the business of motion pictures survive.

Just embed it.

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Is the 1970s to blame? I'm being honest here. To me, being a kid born in 1986, it seems like the 1980s are to blame. Seems like a lot more stuff got filtered to general money making mindset in there. I could be wrong. I'm a kid from that decade but I didn't really grow up in it.

I don't really think the 70s is to blame in the sense that it was a bad film decade. For me at least, the 70s is the best film decade in American cinema, but what you mention about the 80s began in the 70s.

If anything, Pandora's box was opened in the 70s, but everything really flew out and took hold in the 80s.

Things like the summer blockbuster (Star Wars and Jaws) and opening films wide (The Godfather) began in the 70s, not entirely by design, but as Hollywood tends to do, they quickly seized on those successes and generated a formula for future success based on past results. Ironically, those films were outliers and probably the least personal films made my directors that in that decade that were all about making personal films.

So, the exception essentially swallowed the rule by the end of the 70s. The smaller pictures that created the renaissance were all, but fazed out and the 80s brought us the Hollywood model that is somewhat still working today full of sequels (some great, some bad), franchises (Rocky, Star Wars, Rambo), and wide blockbuster releases.

The only thing that I think has continually changed is summer blockbuster season. I feel like it has steadily, but slowly begun sooner and sooner. In a few years, I wouldn't be surprised if the summer blockbuster season began in April instead of May.

Being about 15 years older than you, and oddly someone who followed this business at an early age, I would say yes, it was the start. It was the beginning of the home video revolution, and directors such as Lucas and Spielberg had just started making films.

While there was a lot of experimental film making during the late 60's and early 70's, including many great films, the film industry was in the dumper. Then out of nowhere films like American Graffiti, Jaws, Star Wars and Close Encounters hit, and started the trend of the summer block buster, making the studios tons of money.

The irony would be that Lucas and Spielberg originally were looked upon as the next great generation of maverick film makers, along with people like Coppala, Scorcese and yes, even John Carpenter. - In many ways they were, since they wanted more control of their projects, having learned from their friends, and since the studios we're desperate for hits, they gave it too them.

fitprod

a good listen.

Many great points. Things I've been saying to my friends for years.

Quote from Cassavetes: Soderberg's speech is very interesting and the most interesting part points out where Cassavetes got it wrong. In the '60s and '70s the "bigger picture" concept was flopping for the studios, but since that time the studios became media conglomerates, the international market has become just as important as the domestic, and the "big picture" is now all that the studios are good at. Soderberg does all the math: It costs $60,000,000 to release a film. If doesn't matter if the budget was $10,000,000 or $200,000,000 it costs $60,000,000 to release a film. At this point in time the studios see greater return and they simply "feel better" about putting their marketing and distribution behind a massively budgeted event film then a small budgeted work.

I think we will see a fundamental shift very soon where the studios will only make event pictures and furnish them to B&M theaters, films that are more and more like theme park attractions than cinema, while real cinema will be distributed through new media.

It was the financial success of the 1970s blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars that killed the old ways in Hollywood. Once studios realized they could make hundreds of millions from one film, it led the industry down the wrong path.

Almost everything can be traced back to the changing economics of the mega-blockbusters. Hollywood followed the money and decided to leave niche films to smaller players. You simply can't take creative risks on a film that costs $200 million to produce. It has to be aimed at the lowest common denominator, which is always going to be young teenagers aged 12 to 16.

My god, why does it cost $60,000,000 to release a movie?

Advertising, premieres, promotions, prints, blu-rays, dvds, etc;

imo, it was high at $30m and now it's just ridiculous.

30 seconds during the super bowl goes for $4m
30 seconds during The Voice on NBC goes for $280,000 (You have to imagine the number of times you see the same ad during a typical run of a big tv show)

The state of cinema worldwide couldn't be better. Way more countries have thriving film industries. Independent American films as well still are making it on to the market just as much as they were 20 years ago. Hollywood being reduced to pander to an every younger and younger demographic at home is not too good but saying Cinema itself is going downhill cause of is either him just being a dramatic old fuddy duddy or he just has a narrow Americacentric and more specifically Hollywood centric world view.

I tend to agree there - Hollywood is dying, Cinema is not.

And I'm not even sure I believe Hollywood is dying, just more shitty movies get greenlit based on "mass appeal".

In other words...the quality of is going down.

Shitty movies get made, good movies get made, great movies get made... Pretty much the same as its always been. People like to be overly dramatic and nostalgic at the same time.

From the Soderbergh audio:
I would love to see Soderbergh start a small studio based on this type of plan.

Yeah. That sounds exciting. How much is he worth btw?

No idea, but you can't talk about net worth without watching this:
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About $40,000,000

are you being serious or are you pulling that out of your firm and toned ass?

What's killing cinema are audiences who will go to see any bullshit as long as it's big and flashy and heavily marketed, even if they know its going to suck.