A ``divide on the list,'' as Clark terms it. Well, perhaps. But it seems
that the debate between Michael and Clark regarding Hollywood's global
supremacy and the theoretically alternative cinema presented in Cannes also
reflects a genuine reality abou the film culture and business today.
     As a film critic and writer for Variety, I have to be, by nature,
keenly aware of the art and business of cinema--it just goes with the
territory--for just as Variety has more reporters than any other publication
covering the business of Hollywood, the Cannes market and the globalization
of the movie marketplace, so we had more critics at Cannes covering the
films premiering in every section. I even reviewed some in the market, where
some hidden gems (like the beautiful docu, ``War Photographer'') tend to
screen far from the red carpet of the Grand Palais. There's an ongoing
awareness on the part of every writer and editor I work with about the
interplay and balance between the art and the business. In moviemaking,
neither can be divorced from the other; business decisions inform artistic
choices, just as casting choices--an artistic stroke--can have an enormous
business impact.
    But for all that, both Michael and Clark have a piece of the truth.
Clark's defense of Hollywood might have been termed a bit better, in that
the studios' decisions are business decisions above all, decisions based on
mostly gut instincts about what the market will bear. The recent expansion
of multi-racial casting, for example, is not really the result of political
pressure from groups and organizations, though the pressure was surely felt.
Rather, the studios saw that audiences were open to multiple colors
represented on screen, that the hero could be black, and the white audience
wouldn't mind. Even more, the black hero could be a bad-ass, like Denzel
Washington in ``Training Day,'' and white audiences would actually turn up.
    That's just one of countless examples in which studios gained courage
because the marketplace allowed them to. Hollywood is unmistakably led by
its audience as much as it tries to lead them. The audience will make a
trend on its own, like the gross-out teen comedy, and then the studios will
churn them out until we're sick of them. Thus turns every cycle in
Hollywood. And William Goldman's truism that, in Hollywood, ``nobody knows
anything'' has not expired, but is truer than ever.
    What this truism actually means is that, outside of certain ``tentpole''
projects and proven franchises, the studios' line of product is the result
of several bets. The bet that Star X (read: Harrison Ford)still has it. The
bet that Star Y (read: Hillary Swank) may have it. The bet that
Director-for-hire Z is right for the material. The bet that the budget is
right to make the best possible movie that also won't break the bank. An
endless string of bets, in fact.
    Hollywood's continuing success is, simply put, based on the right bets
far outnumbering the wrong ones. Right now, studios--like record labels, TV
stations and radio networks--are betting on blandness. What's the latest
trend? Not teen comedies. Not horror flicks. Definitely not action movies.
No, it's the ``hard-G, soft-PG'' movie, the sort the whole family is
comfortable going to. Evidence? ``Harry Potter,'' ``Lord of the Rings,''
``The Rookie,'' ``Spider-Man.'' (``Clones,'' too, but that's again part of
that proven pack of franchises--no news there.) Most of these aren't just
hits; they are enormous blockbusters. (``Spider-Man'' is actually on a track
to potentially match or top ``Titanic'' as the all-time b.o. champ.) The
first two have a box office potential of unimaginable proportions. ``The
Rookie'' was a surprise hit, but a hit nevertheless because it connected
with the family crowd. ``Spider-Man'' is the third Hollywood movie released
in the past nine months to inaugurate a new franchise. And franchises are
what this side of the business is about now. Safety, in a sea of bets. This
must be understood if one is to understand Hollywood today.
    This safety is deeply valued now, because, as I have mentioned in this
forum before, the studios are no more than lines on the conglomerates'
profit-and-loss quarterly statements. The Vivendis and Sonys of the world
expect a certain reliability out of the studios, since they're part of a
regular product-line production squad, as it were--making movies, instead
of, say, booze, but still making a sellable product. The more the studios
can show to their conglomerate parents that they can increase a reliable
return, care of the guarantee served by franchises and tentpoles, the more
secure they are under the mother firm's big umbrella.
    I have also mentioned here before, however, that this particular
business formula is fraught with hazard, and ultimately doomed to failure.
It doesn't recognize that movies aren't booze, aren't widgets, but highly
unpredictable cultural artefacts, sometimes unmeasurable, unquantifiable,
given to bouts of surprise when least expected. Hits can come out of
nowhere. (Remember ``The Fast and the Furious''?) Sure things, like a Jim
Carrey movie at Christmas (``The Majestic''), can crash and burn. Who knew?
No one.
    So, Clark is at once right that Hollywood make what audiences want, but
wrong that Hollywood knows what audiences want. Hollywood always has  a
sense of where audiences are, but are never near as clear on the subject as
you'd think. Hollywood can also make assumptions about the pop cultural mood
that are just plain wrong, or myopic. Hollywood is incapable of foreseeing
the hit that has been ``Y Tu Mama Tambien.''
    That brings in Michael. He's right, in the global sense, that the
Hollywood product line has glutted the world market. It is so bad in some
countries that the entire top ten list of money makers in a given week is
entirely from Hollywood. This is due to too many factors to get into here,
but it ranges from exhibitors that have sweetheart deals with distributors
tied in with the Hollywood studios, to the sheer weight of marketing
machinery that tilts the playing field so much in Hollywood's direction.
Only in a country like France, which imposes quotas for French-made films
and restrictions on exhibition of non-French titles, do the native
filmmakers actually have a chance to get their films seen and discussed. A
movie like Dominik Moll's ``Harry, He's Here To Help/With a Friend Like
Harry'' could never have been a hit in France under a wide-open,
unrestricted system.
    A pattern has occurred all over, from Spain to Japan, where certain
domestically made movies will take off, audiences in the country will love
them, and Hollywood goes begging--or at least gets a smaller piece of the
pie. There is not, as Michael puts it, ``strangulation.'' Where a strong
movie culture is built up in a country--reflected by festivals, awarded
national film artists (at such fests as Cannes) and a commercial momentum to
match the artistic rise--a strong domestic b.o. occurs. South Korea is
currently a very good example of this, with a range of S.K. hits in various
genres, and art film heroes like Im Kwon-Taek winning at Cannes.
    What this speaks to is a balance. A strong hit should theoretically help
fund other riskier ventures that would otherwise not get made. Miramax was a
company that used to do this. Now, it's a Sony Pictures Classics, or
possibly, a Focus (Universal's new baby, from USA Films and Good Machine
getting together).
    I'll leave aside my own personal distress, which I completely share with
Michael, that this forum is much too much in love with Hollywood movies at
the expense of discussing far more substantial--even from the standpoint of
philosophy!!--work from non-American filmmakers and a few (not many)
American filmmakers who work outside the system. I frankly don't get the
love affair, and I'll never, ever get it.
    But what I do want to stress to Clark is that the artists who premiere
their work at Cannes (and Berlin, and Rotterdam, and Palm Springs, and
around the world) are making films which are absolutely vital for the movie
art and business to survive. What a Michael Haneke or a Bela Tarr may be
doing today is going to have huge ripple effects on younger Hollywood
moviemakers, if even indirectly. At no point in Hollywood history have the
movies coming from the studios been unaffected by artists making movies
outside of Hollywood. There is a profound symbiotic relationship that
exists, and has always existed. It is lived out by actors, for example, who
work in a range of contexts (John Malkovich comes to mind), from studio work
to making films with Manoel De Oliveira in Portugal. This symbiosis may be
stronger now than it has ever been, because of globalization, but it has
always been there. It is this quite silly and pointless to raise the spectre
of ``elitism'' in this matter, since the businessmen on the Croisette are as
keenly interested as the cinephiles in what the jury led by David Lynch at
Cannes awarded last Sunday night. To wit, both Palme D'or winner (``The
Pianist'') and Grand Jury winner (``The Man Without a Past'') were instantly
bought up for US release after the awards were handed out. Art feeds the
business. Just as the business feeds the art. It has to work this way, at
least in the area we call commercial narrative cinema.
    I'll leave for another post or time the problem with the US distribution
of world cinema. In this area, I think, sheer cowardice has been at work,
and not a sound balance between what is healthy for the art form and what
keeps the business going. For this, blame the buyers at distributors, and
blame many exhibitors for going with the ``safe'' art film over, say, Bela
Tarr's ``Werckmeister Harmonies.'' That film should have long ago had a run
at my local movie house. Instead, it's restricted to two nights at an art
museum. But like I say, another post, another time...
Robert Koehler