What are Movies Anyway?

With all the movies that have come out in the past few years based on old TV shows ("The Beverly Hillbillies", "Lost in Space", "The Brady Bunch Movie", "Get Smart"), toys and games ("Transformers", "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider"), and comic book characters ("Iron Man", "Superman", etc.), and all the movies that have come out as series ("Lord of the Rings", "Pink Panther", "Harry Potter", etc.), it has often been difficult to get the clear distinction that we are watching movies. The addition factors of "made for TV movies" and before movie television type advertising at many theatre chains have blurred the distinction even more.

With smaller attendance in the theatres and sky rocketing costs (of the movies themselves, and the cost of attending one), this form has been threatened. In fact on many movies, the theatre run is a loss leader with DVD sales being the goal, along with the sales of soundtrack albums and assorted merchandise.

For those of us who are movie makers and those who love the movies, here is a quick definition of what a movie is" A movie - a feature film, that is - is a self-contained story with a beginning, middle and end that can last as little as an hour and has been known to last as long as 4 hours, but typically runs in length between 90 minutes and two hours. There is another factor to a movie which distinquishes it from a TV show episode: the main character changes. Typically on a TV show, things happen but the characters always return to the way they were when the show started. In a movie, however, the character is not the same as when they began. They either learn something becoming stronger characters at the end and triumphing over the antagonist or the don't change and experience tragedy when the story ends. TV just doesn't to this. TV represents a static situation, movies represent growth and change.

There is something else that makes a movie different from television, even "made for TV" movies: Movies have an audience. Not an audience of people sitting in separate rooms watching separate televisions but an audience made up of a group of people. It is a community experience. The experience is different from television and can most keenly be felt when you are in a packed auditorium watching a good comedy. There is nothing that can replace the magnified feelings you get from a movie when you are in a full auditorium. The poor way the business has been run very much threatens this experience and drives people into home theatres. Although home theatres can replicate much of the experience of being in an actual movie theatre in projection and in sound, it cannot satisfactorily replace the audience experience because the numbers are simply not there. The large theatre chains have successfully driven away the audience numbers that it takes to have this experience out of the home except for the big tent pole franchises that people find worth paying high ticket prices for.

Will movies - the kind you go out to see - die? It's hard to say. Most likely it would survive in pockets of experience, if the current leaders of the movie studio establishment and theatre chains manage to kill it. It is just that there is nothing really to replace the experience you get in a full audience and someone is likely to find a way to make it continue. As for filmmakers themselves, there will always be a market for long form self contained stories no matter where they are seen - movie theatres, DVD, the Internet, or TV (cable or broadcast).

Hollywood is Losing Its Power

A lot of us haven't noticed it yet. It's been happening quite slowly, but it is becoming more and more obvious that Hollywood is losing its grip as the center of the motion picture universe. Sure all the major and minor movie studios are still there and they still dominate the business but it is just not the same.

Was it the cheaper costs of Canada that got it started? Or the various incentive programs offered by the other states? That is just one reason. This day of reckoning has been a long time coming.

That entity called Hollywood had it pretty good for a very long time. World War I crippled its European competitors, and its great PR machine worked its wonders to make sure that talented people and all that thought they were would funnel themselves into Hollywood's gates. But what has been the cost? With everyone storming the gates to get their chance connections (who you knew) became much more important than what you knew and quality movies became more accidents than expected occurrences. Once someone did something "good enough" to meet standards, those standards took second place to whatever the current trend was.

Once the agents got their grip in the late 40's and early 50's, the end was on its way because deals then became more important than movies. The studio system took all through the 50's into the 60's to collapse. There was television, the outlawing of block booking, and finally the prohibition of the studios owning movie theatres to remove the power, leaving the studios for the most part with distribution. With their weakened state the studios became vulnerable to takeover. Studios became mere appendages to international conglomerates whose love wasn't movies but profits. To satisfy this lust for profits, movies were no longer made for everyone but for mostly males who were 15 to 25 years of age.

While the studios were being raided, there was a brief time when the executives were distracted during the 1970's where some creative experimentation could slip through. But when the conglomerates discovered how lucrative blockbusters could be, a lot of smaller movies became much harder to make.

With all talent flowing toward Hollywood, these self-appointed gatekeepers just could not keep up. More and more elaborate barriers went up in place to stem the flow. Agents found every way they could to avoid reading new scripts. Unions made the barriers to entry so formidable that it was a wonder that any new talent made it into the ranks at all.

Then came the lure of shooting in Canada. Because of government intervention, shooting became cheaper there and run-away productions became the topic of conversation. States within the United States soon followed with various incentive schemes and the flow out of established Hollywood borders had begun. But it still took a lot of money to shoot with film, so it was still mostly the established players making the films.

Then digital video happened. Gradually at first but then more quickly, independent productions began springing up shooting feature films for a fraction of the cost of those on film. But these still had to be put onto motion picture film to be shown in theatres. That barrier soon began falling away with help from the established players themselves. Thinking they could save on distribution themselves, they began lobbying theatre owners to switch over to digital projection. Why? Because they could send their films via satellite and get those expensive film prints out of their budgets. Of course this eliminated a barrier to the independents for getting their films screened.

So where are we now? Hollywood is in one of its worst periods ever. Beyond its television industries being reduced to reality TV shows and game shows, its movie industry has been so contaminated by focus group studies and executive "safe bets" that most of the films are sequels, remakes, retreads of old TV shows, and superhero films which are reaching out to more and more obscure characters as it goes on. More productions are taking place in states where government subsidies have been enacted than in the place where you expect it to be the film making capitol of the world - Hollywood.

Independent filmmakers around the country are rapidly getting up to speed on how to make entertaining and profitable movies. Once Hollywood-based distribution (and along with it the practice of "Hollywood Accounting") is displaced by distributors based elsewhere and the sharp business practices of the establishment is replaced by more sensible and fair ways, the shift of power will be well on its way to being complete.