Passage of the Day: Tammy Bruce on Hollywood’s Current Funk (The Long-Term Looks Worse)
On the cusp of the “most disappointing box office performance in 15 years,” (noted in its earlier stages here) this story shows that Hollywood doesn’t want to understand why it’s happening.
Tammy Bruce explains the current funk (HT Instapundit):
Hollywood honchos continue to wring their hands over why you’ve stopped going to the movies. They blame ticket prices and DVD availability. They had better start considering the fact that filmmakers are so disconnected, so nihilistic, that the hopelessness and hostility they feel toward the world now permeates their work. Americans will no longer go see movies which are nothing more than the manifestation of the backwash of malignant narcissists. We’re also sick and tired of listening to actors lecture us about how awful the US is, and more recently, why a cold-blooded mass murdering gang founder should have been given clemency. Enough is enough.
Not only will we not go see films which insult us, we refuse to support an existential worldview. We happen to think life does matters (sic), that decency is a good thing, and that people are inherently good, not bad. We also have stopped believing the lie that Americans are bad people. We looked away for 4 decades as that lie was spread, but that time is over.
So you can take your gay sheepherder, noble communist supporting reporters, big-business is evil, Americans are hopelessly and inherently corrupt and violent and unfaithful movies and go to Cannes where at least the Parisian set will love you. But that won’t exactly pay the bills, will it?
Ms. Bruce didn’t even get to the BIG long-term problem, which will be hastened by the elitism described above: Technology is getting so good that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet with a few thousand bucks and a little creativity can make films that look and feel nearly as good as Hollywood’s best–without the megamillions stars and the megamillions production budgets. For more on this, go here, and to John Dvorak’s column on the subject (Dvorak limits his thoughts to the end of theaters; I obviously think it will go much further than that). Then what will they do?
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UPDATE: Clive Davis piles on: “I’m always struck by the uniformity of views among the artists and literati I’ve interviewed. For almost all of them, the notion that there might just be another point of view simply doesn’t exist. It’s their religion, really, which is ironic, since they usually make a point of saying how much they distrust religion. Other people’s religion, that is.”
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Dec. 14: Outside the Beltway Jammer.
