AMERICAN FILM IN THE DIGITAL AGE New Directions in Media Robin Andersen, Series Editor Blogging America: The New Public Sphere Aaron Barlow Celeb 2.0: How Social Media Foster Our Fascination with Popular Culture Kelli S. Burns Politics on Demand: The Effects of 24-Hour News on American Politics Alison Dagnes AMERICAN FILM IN THE DIGITAL AGE Robert C. Sickels New Directions in Media Robin Andersen, Series Editor Copyright 2011 by Robert C. Sickels All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sickels, Robert C. American fi lm in the digital age / Robert C. Sickels. p. cm. — (New directions in media) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-275-99862-2 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-275-99863-9 (ebook) 1. Motion pictures. 2. Motion picture industry. I. Title. PN1994.S532 2011 791.43 — dc22 2010034690 ISBN: 978-0-275-99862-2 EISBN: 978-0-275-99863-9 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America The sun shines every day in Hollywood. —Ernst Lubitsch This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix 1. INTRODUCTION: AMERICAN FILM IN THE DIGITAL AGE 1 2. FROM THE BUSINESS OF FILM TO THE BUSINESS OF ENTERTAINMENT: HOLLYWOOD IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY (BY YANNIS TZIOUMAKIS) 11 3. THE GUILLOTINE HAS FALLEN AND THE BEACHES OF MALIBU ARE LITTERED WITH CARCASSES: THE DEATH OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENT MOVIES 33 4. SEX AND CENSORSHIP SINCE MONICAGATE: WHITHER THE ARTISTIC “X”? 55 5. GENRE GOES PASTICHE: GENRE IN CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD 75 6. NAVIGATING THE CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD BUSINESS MODEL: DIRECTORS IN THE DIGITAL AGE 99 7. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE $100 MILLION PAYCHECK: HOLLYWOOD STARDOM SINCE 1990 (BY ANNE HELEN PETERSEN) 123 8. TV: THE LAST BEST HOPE? 143 9. “THE FUTURE, MR. GITTES. THE FUTURE”: NEXT WAVE FILMMAKING AND BEYOND 163 INDEX 181 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS irst and foremost, special thanks are due to my editor Daniel Harmon, who was infi nitely patient and supportive in his shepherding of this project. I’d Falso like to thank Yannis Tzioumakis and Annie Petersen for their willing- ness to write pieces for this book, which is much better as a result of their con- tributions. Thanks to my home institution, Whitman College, for helping to support this project via their generous sabbatical policy. Thanks to the Fulbright Scholar Program, which afforded me the life-changing opportunity to live and work in Hong Kong. Thanks to Tim Meade for helping to ease my culture shock while I was doing so. Thanks to Professors Tom Reck, Robert Merrill, Michael Branch, and Robert Withycombe for what has now been many years of guidance, mentoring, inspiration, and friendship. Thanks to Ben Kegan for turning me on to the young Next Wave fi lmmakers whose work found its way into this book. Thanks to the men of The Green Lantern and old Mr. Overholt for their staunch companionship during the very necessary fun breaks I took from the writing of this book. Thanks to Bishop Allen, Drive by Truckers, and KEXP Seattle’s Song of the Day podcast for providing the primary background soundtrack to which this book was written. Thanks to my children, Dutch and Tallulah, for allowing me to see the magic of the movies through their eyes. Lastly, thanks to my Mom and Dad for everything. This one is for Ginny. This page intentionally left blank Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: AMERICAN FILM IN THE DIGITAL AGE Creations of the spirit are not just commodities; the elements of culture are not pure business. Defending the pluralism of works of art and the freedom of the public to choose is a duty. What is at stake is the cultural identity of all our nations. It is the right of all peoples to their own culture. It is the freedom to create and choose our own images. A society which abandons to others the way of showing itself . is a society enslaved. —François Mitterand, 1993, quoted in Jeancolas (57–58) ot long ago I was a part of a global studies seminar in which college pro- fessors from across the academic disciplines met to exchange ideas about Npossible ways we can work together to make our departmental curricula more global in nature. As part of the endeavor, we had nightly homework for which we read various articles about a variety of subjects. For our fi nal assignment we watched James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and read a number of pieces on it. In our discussion the next day, my colleagues were almost exclusively interested in discuss- ing whether or not the fi lm was racist and sexist. They all thought it was and were quite concerned with what they saw as the reinforcement of negative stereotypes that the fi lm propagates. As a college professor, I’ve certainly spent my fair share of time analytically interpreting and discussing texts in ways that revolve around race and gender (and class, for that matter). More often than not, whether with colleagues or students, these have been fruitful, illuminating, and rewarding con- versations. While there may be truths in some of my colleagues’ points of view, this was nevertheless not one of those instances. Avatar provides a unique lens through which to think about the context of globalism as it applies to the fi lm industry; the movie is, after all, the most fi nancially lucrative fi lm in the history of the world. As such, while I value specifi c interpretations of the fi lm, in this case I believe thinking about and understanding the production, distribution, and exhibition of Avatar tells us much more about the landscape of global media than a more strictly singu- lar, close textual analysis ever could. I mentioned this to my colleagues, and they vociferously disagreed; in fact, when prodded to consider what kind of thinking might have been behind the decisions that ultimately led to the green-lighting of 2AMERICAN FILM IN THE DIGITAL AGE the fi lm, one colleague went so far as to say, “Who cares about what a bunch of guys in a room are talking about? That’s just boring.” And my colleague may have a point. Having never been privy to the rarifi ed high-level, insiders-only conversations that result in movies being produced, I con- cede he may well be right. Those types of conversations may well be boring as all get out. But where I respectfully disagree is that even if the conversations are boring, the decisions that result from them are anything but, as the choices studio execs make dictate what the whole world will be watching and that’s no small thing, especially given that global or world cinema doesn’t mean the same thing it once did. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that world cinema as we once knew it is dead. I know the rebuttals: “What about the DIY Nollywood phenomenon in Nigeria?” “What about Bollywood?” “What about Iranian cinema?” “What about this great French fi lm I saw?” “What about this amazing Brazilian movie I saw in South America last summer?” These are all valid points, but they also serve to un- derscore my argument. In the not too distant past there was a global cinematic ex- change. You may have had to look a bit for foreign fi lms, as they were not often widely distributed nationwide, but if you wanted to see one in America, you could. Indeed, the entire generation of young American fi lmmakers that so electrifi ed Hollywood and the world in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s was inspired in no small part by the innovations of the great European fi lmmakers of the late 1950s and early 1960s, whose fi lms that generation of American fi lmmakers saw in movie theaters. And that has become increasingly diffi cult to do. So my answer to the rebuttals is simple: “When is the last time you saw a Nollywood/Bollywood/ Iranian/name-the-country, etc., fi lm in an American movie theater or on Ameri- can television?” It’s not a question people typically have an answer for, unless they’re both hardcore cinephiles and lucky enough to live in one of the handful of U.S. cities that may intermittently play these kinds of fi lms. As A. O. Scott plaintively asks, “The whole world is watching, why aren’t Americans?” But the opposite isn’t even remotely true. Go to any country in the world and you can see just about any mainstream American movie, à la Avatar, playing on the big screen. The primary exceptions are in countries whose governments prohibit or limit American media. And even then, there’s almost always a fecund market for pirated American movies. Take Iran, for example, in which, as Brain T. Edwards observes, their most internationally celebrated fi lmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami, isn’t much cared for by many Iranians. Conversely, among the most popular images in Iran’s capital is that of DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek, which “appears everywhere throughout Tehran: painted on the walls of DVD and electronics shops, featured in an elaborate mural in the children’s play area at the Jaam-e Jam mall,” and so on (6).