19 Jan Film Fund-amentals: A Cinema of Exclusion

These days, it seems as if almost everybody feels excluded. This is as true in the film industry as it is in the rest of life. Sometimes the exclusion list looks to be as long as the number of conspiracy theories available at a convention of political paranoids. However, truly paranoid people are sometimes right. Same goes for the excluded camp.

For example, George Lucas has recently blown the whistle on latent racism in Hollywood film production. Sure, this has also provided a neat PR plug for his upcoming release of the movie Red Tails, but Lucas is right in his assessment of mainstream Hollywood. Black directors have become more common, but they are more widely employed in TV than in the movies, and when a studio wants to drop $150 million on a tent pole epic, they  will hire someone like Michel Gondry before they’ll go scouting for a brother. I don’t even mean this as a slap at Gondry, but he was a really weird choice for The Green Hornet movie, and I can think of several black directors who would have made more sense.

But the same is true across the board. Back in the 1990s there was the brief appearance of movies by American Indian filmmakers, most notably Chris Eyre with his production of Smoke Signals. Eyre went on to do a pretty fine job for Robert Redford with the TV movie Skinwalkers (the Hillerman adaptation, not the horror movie). Thank God for television, because that is where Eyre is primarily working. Again, when a studio executive has a hot $150 million burning a hole in his pocket, he doesn’t think of signing up a Native American for the director’s chair. Heck, not even when the movie is about Indians.

And let’s not even get started about women. Sure, Kathryn Bigelow got the Oscar last year. Would you care to hold your breath until the next time this happens? Didn’t think so. Heck, until the recent release of Bridesmaids there was a moronic debate about why women can’t be funny (a dumb theory presented at great boorish length by Christopher Hitchens before he died and became inexplicably beatified). Women have been successfully doing comedy longer than Betty White has been alive, but it is still treated as a kind of bizarre mutation. Same goes for women directors (most of whom are employed in TV). Even Bigelow is rarely considered in the tent pole range.

By now, you may have noticed that TV is much more progressive in these zones than movies. Of course, TV pays less. It also runs through a lot more material. But mostly it is not as locked into the more limited mindset that currently predominates in the upper echelons of the film industry. Women have long been a major force for comedy in television. The black audience is one of the bigger viewer blocks. The Hispanic market has its own growing list of networks. Only the Indians have been largely ignored (with the exception of occasional PBS programs such as We Shall Remain, directed by — you guessed it — Chris Eyre).

For some, this suggests that TV is really part of a massive liberal conspiracy to ram political correctness down our throats. Most people who have ever worked in television can tell you that this theory is utter gibberish. TV is just as profit-focused as movies (in some ways, even more so). TV’s main focus is on viewers, not hidden political agendas. The demographic diversity of the viewership is what drives TV. This is in part dictated by television’s need to have various target markets for their advertisers. As annoying as the lousy commercials are, they actually force TV to seek a wide and divergent sense of the marketplace.

Mainstream movies basically don’t. In the old days, folks in Hollywood often referred to the rest of the land as fly-over country. There was Los Angeles and then New York. In between was some strange primitive place called “Kansas.” Occasionally, they would hear about Chicago. It seemed to have been located somewhere near “Kansas.”

Today, modern studio executives have the ability to access a wide range of thoughts and opinions concerning the tastes, views and attitudes of Americans across the country. Well, not first-hand or anything. They get various studies and reports, most of which are simply tests to see if they could find enough folks in the Los Angeles area who were up for going to a free screening. Otherwise, most people in Hollywood are without a clue regarding the rest of the country. They largely operate in a La-la Land bubble and still can’t find Kansas on a map.

TV has increasingly been dealing with an expanding structure (cable, DVDs, the Internet, etc.). This has forced television to plan for smaller audiences and concentrate on various approaches to niche marketing. The Hollywood movie industry is currently in a state of artificially-induced contraction as the major companies focus on fewer films, bigger budgets and an increasingly desperate drive to score huge audiences. Because of this, they are still operating with a homogeneous model of audience development. In this view, the audience is one big blob that will ooze into the theater seats every weekend for whatever over-produced piece of fluff they throw out there.

Of course, this isn’t working. Actual attendance is dropping hard (gross ticket income has dropped by at least 6 percent, but actual individual ticket purchases are plummeting by somewhere around 20 to 26 percent). Such a drop in TV would result in numerous shows being canceled and countless executives getting booted. In the film industry, it has convinced Hollywood to make even fewer films with even bigger budgets. This less than sterling example of responsible thinking would suggest that Captain Francesco Schettino may yet have a job at a major studio.

Which means that George Lucas is right, but for reasons far more institutionalized than he may even care to think. Things like racism and sexism are all part of the problem. But massive institutional stupidity is also a pretty big part of the picture. Especially when it comes to the audience. Many major players in Hollywood don’t have a clue who their audience is or what this audience might really want. To be honest, some of them don’t even care.

And a few still think that Kansas was a mythic place created by L. Frank Baum.