PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "Does Hollywood Serve Us Right?"

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Transcript for:

Does Hollywood Serve Us Right?

SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 2000

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Think Tank is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

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MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg on the Sony Studio lot in Culver City, California, and they call this work. Hollywood movies and television are America's most influential export. Hollywood's enormous power has affected the way the world dresses, speaks, acts and thinks. What makes Hollywood so dominant? Is it good for America? Is it good for the world? Think Tank is joined by Sidney Pollack, actor, producer, and Academy Award winning director of Out Of Africa, his other works include Tootsie, The Firm, and Absence Of Malice, Peter Bart, editor in chief of Variety, and author of the recently published, Who Killed Hollywood, and Put The Tarnish On Tinseltown, and Elizabeth Daley the dean of University of Southern California's School of Cinema Television. The topic before the house, does Hollywood serve us right, this week on Think Tank.

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MR. WATTENBERG: As the center of the American film industry, Hollywood has shaped how Americans view themselves, and how the world views Americans for more than three-quarters of a century. Business is still good. Since 1990, despite the Internet, cable television, VCRs, DVDs, and a host of other competitors, the number of movie goers in America has gone up by 20 percent. Receipts have gone up even faster. According to the Motion Picture Association of American, the average American now goes to the movies somewhat more than five times each year. Business is even better overseas. In Europe 80 percent of box office admissions are for American made movies. But, not all is well in Tinseltown. Critics have turned up the heat on Hollywood, charging that it irresponsibly portrays sex and violence in America. Abroad, Hollywood is often reviled as a pernicious tool of American cultural influence. But, might that tool be a constructive one, is Hollywood giving us what we want?

Gentlemen, lady, thank you for joining us on Think Tank. Some decades ago there was a slogan of the movie industry that said, movies are better than ever. My first question, let's just go around the room starting with you, Elizabeth are movies doing better than ever? I hate to bring up money in this town.

MS. DALEY: Let me answer it from a little different angle for you. Yes, I think in many ways they are doing better than ever. But, from the perspective I see it from, which is the demand for being part of this business, it is utterly phenomenal, the number of young people that want to come in and be part of making them better than ever. We are now accepting about 8 percent of our applicants for film school.

MR. WATTENBERG: Peter Bart, are movies doing better than ever?

MR. BART: They're doing better than ever, but I think the principle reason is that ticket prices keep going up quite steeply. It isn't that the number of bodies in seats has increased that much. Also, enormous megaplexes are being built around the world, and there's a slight air of disappointment overseas that there are not quite the number of bodies filling those seats as had been hoped when the megaplex boom started a couple of years ago.

MR. POLLACK: Certainly, they're doing better than ever if you just measure a given number at the end of a year, in terms of how many millions of dollars have been grossed. We're always reading that the gross is up this percentage or up that percentage. But, I don't know that there's greater attendance. I don't say there isn't, but this doesn't prove that more people are going to movies.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, if you count the after market, there are more eyeballs than ever.

MR. POLLACK: A whole technological revolution has happened in the after market. Pictures that were four years old or more ten years ago were non-revenue producing assets, essentially, unless you sold the library. Pictures that are four years old today, between DVD, and high definition television, and syndication, and syndication, and the Internet are real income producing assets. So, in total, motion picture companies have more sources of revenue than they had before, and that's producing higher quarterly reports, and that's what you're reading. But, I still say what Peter says is right, are more people going to movies today? I don't know.

MR. WATTENBERG: The next question is, are movies better than ever? Are we putting out good stuff?

MR. BART: It's hard to say, because technically, indeed, movies are better than ever. Technological miracle defines film making today. But, a case could be made that now that the industry essentially is financed by multinational corporations, that the emphasis on star driven movies, on big event pictures, those films that focus on story, on character, and that push the envelope esthetically, they may be getting lost in the mix.

MS. DALEY: I think one thing that has happened, there's more windows for those kinds of pictures to get out now. And as we watch the Internet develop, and as we watch the multiplexes, I think, you've got simply more screens for those to be on. But, I agree with Peter, we are faced with this first weekend phenomenon, which often means that the smaller picture just get buried under what's the hot picture this week. I think there were some terrific movies out this year that got really ignored.

MR. POLLACK: You know, it's such a subjective thing to say, are movies really better than ever. In my opinion, they're not necessarily better than ever, but there are an awful lot of really good movies that are finding ways, with the rise of independent films, with the new little festivals and so on, but essentially the movie business is completely driven now by small divisions of multinational corporations, whose expertise is in repeatable products, where everything is marketing. If you find a recipe for a soft drink or a recipe for a food, everything else is dependent on marketing. The real strides forward, other than technology, I think, have been made in marketing. Also, the economics have gone up. So what's happening is, the downside is that movies are sort of getting -- the mainstream Hollywood movies are getting sort of homogenized, looking for a particular target audience, looking for, as Elizabeth says, this opening weekend phenomenon. I also look at the success of Sundance, and the Sundance Festival, and the great success of these little breakout small movies, that's pretty exciting.

MR. WATTENBERG: I was in Europe a few years ago talking to some producers there about why it was that American movies were so popular. And they came up sort of with the standard list, but there were some very interesting ones. I mean, you were talking about the new technology, one was they said, no one can do audio like Americans, I mean, where did that come from. And the other one, they said the really big one is no one can match American public relations on a movie. And I said why not? What's so hard about that? They said, you don't understand what the studios have, I mean, they've got all this.

MR. BART: They've got some other things to learn from us, I think. The French directors are downright Ononistic. I mean, they really make films for themselves. It's a perfect example of why government subsidies don't work when it comes to film making, or the arts, in my opinion, because all they do is encourage this sort of masturbatory film making, and no one will possibly be interested in those pictures, except your mistress, and maybe your mother. That to me is the big problem with so much of European cinema. And believe me, our young film makers miss it, because they grew up on Truffaut and Fellini and the great European cinema of the '60s. And that doesn't exist anymore.

MR. WATTENBERG: Why is it that the vast preponderance of movies around the world are American, that the people go to American movies?

MS. DALEY: Well, I'll give you a couple of answers. I think there's a bunch of answers. And I don't think it's PR only. I think American movies give pleasure, they give enormous amounts of pleasure. They're visually rich, yes, the audio is beautifully done, because we're one of the few places hat you truly shoot synch dialogue all the time. And the other thing that I've actually heard from the European folks is that they carry the American belief in the ability of the individual to be successful, they carry American optimism, and that we carry those values in a pleasurable environment. The other thing I would suggest to you is that we're a nation of mongrels. What's an American movie, it's got a British director, maybe a German writer, and Italian cinematographer, and an American editor. And we've never had that kind of national cinema. We've had a global cinema.

MR. WATTENBERG: The industry here was started by immigrant Jews?

MR. POLLACK: The whole country is immigrants, anyway. So we're making sort of homogenized European movies, re-conceived by some sort of commonality that is partially dictated by the fact that it doesn't require a culture to understand it, it doesn't require a tradition to understand it. You can't understand a lot of Japanese movies unless you understand Japanese culture. You don't have to understand American culture to understand our movies.

MR. WATTENBERG: Why is it, and how important is it, that this American ethos of the hero or heroine shapes destiny, is that a good thing for the world, is that what is causing the mullahs to dive into their bunkers in Tehran, because people coming out of the air are saying things about women, and alcohol, and freedom, and liberty and voting, or from their perspective is it the great Satan they're seeing, same movies, women, drinking, whatever it is?

MR. BART: I don't think your premise is right anymore in this sense, there was a time when the American pictures that dominated the world scene tended to be very simplistic action pictures, you had Stallone, and you had Schwarzenegger, and you had a plot of the hero, the protagonist wins. Today, the American pictures that dominate overseas are things like American Pie, and There's Something About Mary, even American teen pictures now are extraordinarily predominant around the world, for reasons that escape me. But, I think now what's happening is this very heterogeneous, niche oriented film making in the United States is the next part of the domination of the world markets.

MR. WATTENBERG: Domination of the world, because I mean, if you say there is a culture war going on, a contest for the culture, let's put it in more neutral terms, America, it would seem to me, is winning it because of these little celluloid people on the screen. I mean, for good or for ill, because some of it people hate it here in America. I mean, you go to foreign countries they say, I hate American movies, you say, somebody just told me that in Boston, they hate American movies.

MR. POLLACK: But, you don't want to win the cultural war to the detriment of the culture of the other countries. Part of the richness of our culture comes from the infusion of other cultures. And if what you end up with is an American cinema that's literally stifling and killing all of the other cinemas. That isn't good for anybody, including American cinema. You can't keep saying we're winning the cultural war, I don't think that's a good way to look at it.

MR. WATTENBERG: What I say is we have become the most influential country in the history of the world.

MR. POLLACK: Yes, it's good for us economically, but is it good in the long run for the vitality of movies? Absolutely not.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, insofar as the ethic being spread, success shaping destiny, I think even in some of those other movies there's a lot of individualism that is not that commonplace around the world, certainly in the less free countries. Isn't sending out this -- beaming out this message of sort of American style individualism, the American way of life, whatever you want to call it, democracy, is that not inherently a good thing we are doing? I mean, I think movies are in many ways the most important business in America or in the world, for those reasons, because that's what's shaping the ethic.

MR. BART: What will be better will be the Internet, in all likelihood, because the Internet will expose people, whether they like it or not, to all manner of cultural forces and influences around the world, and there won't be a choke hold exercise by a small number of distributors, hopefully. And there may be a more egalitarian pop culture that is available globally, and entertainment will be part of that. It may be half-hour entertainment, it may not be three hour long epics, but I have a feeling that the answer you're looking for is, in the future, not quite there yet.

MR. WATTENBERG: In my adopted hometown of Washington, D.C., what we hear about movies is they're full of sex, they're full of violence, that's responsible for the rise in the crime rate, you know, la la la, you're responsible, why don't you face up to your responsibility and stop putting out that crap.

MR. BART: I think the so-called 'cultural warriors' are a sorry lot. I mean, basically it's just the same Bible Belt rhetoric going back to the know-nothings of a century ago. I do not think movies are more violent, if anything I think they're less violent than they were back a generation ago, in the days of Sam Peckinpah.

MS. DALEY: I think I agree with Peter, the cultural warriors and defenders are kind of frightening, because yes, there's gratuitous violence in movies, of course there is, but we reflect a very violent society, we reflect what's around us. Should we be working with people? Sure, but to say the movie business is at fault I think is just a real quick way of ducking the real responsibility for a lousy education, leaving a lot of our people behind on the economic boom, and not really looking at the causes of crime.

MR. POLLACK: I think the present rating system is dreadful in that there's a rating called NC-17, which supposedly when it was invented was going to permit interesting, push the envelope pictures that may have had a little more sexual content, and effectively it's just bald censorship, because newspapers won't -- most newspapers won't advertise NC-17 pictures, and most of the big multiplexes around the country, the malls have leases that stipulate that you can't show them. So basically you're barring a whole genre of very interesting pictures that, frankly, I think it's appalling, it's criminal.

MR. WATTENBERG: Just hold on for one minute, I want to come back to that topic of censorship. I want to talk to our viewers for a moment.

We depend on your viewer mail to make this program better, particularly through email. If you would write us with your views and suggestions at

Should we have censorship?

MR. POLLACK: Nobody can advocate censorship, I also think this is a complicated question, because I don't believe that films have nothing to do with morals and mores. I mean, I think in my childhood I learned a lot about what I thought was admirable, or what I thought was worth aspiring to, I mean, my first ideas of what heroes were came as much from movies as they did from books, maybe that's a lack of my education. So I don't want to abandon the responsibility that I have as a film maker. On the other hand, I have to agree that this sort of fanatic blaming of movies for everything that's happened is a bit silly.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. I mean, let's stipulate that I'm not talking about, as Peter was saying, a Bible Belt fanatic, because I don't hang out with Bible Belt fanatics. And I don't think there are very many of them. I think a lot of them are conjured up in the imaginations of some folks out here. But, I am very interested, you are accepting the idea that what people see on the screen shapes their behavior?

MR. POLLACK: I don't say it shapes. I say it has something -- when you move someone, when you make them cry, or laugh, or admire something, you oftentimes have a greater effect on them than when you try to approach them intellectually, because they feel something.

MR. WATTENBERG: So if you show a movie with gratuitous sex, and gratuitous violence, and it happens to be a great movie with a wonderful storyline, and sort of nobody gets punished.

MR. POLLACK: Then it's not gratuitous sex. If it's a wonderful movie with a great storyline, it's not gratuitous.

MR. WATTENBERG: I mean, with one great storyline, with three great sex scenes, that's not --

MR. POLLACK: We have a real problem here because everybody tries to apply standards of democracy to art, and it's not possible. It's not even possible in mass pop culture. Everybody that makes movies is not equal. They really aren't. I mean, there are great artists that make movies sometimes that show nudity and show violence, and it's in the service of a great idea, and it's necessary and it's good. The problem is, everybody wants the same right, and not everybody is capable of making that judgment, but you can't do anything about that. It's the same with journalism. I mean, you have a completely free press. All journalists are not equal, there's bad journalism, there's junkie journalism, there's journalism that exerts bad -- there are bad media people.

MR. WATTENBERG: When I was growing up, not 100, less than 100 years ago, I mean, we saw movies about American heroes. Then you kind of hit this, I guess they call it the anti-hero, and you have movies called Bugsy, and Tucker, and stuff like that. Where are, and why are there not, I mean, if you guys want to get the monkey off your back of people saying, shame, shame, shame, shame, why can't you do a really good movie about George Washington, why can't you do a really good movie -- it doesn't have to be in the old style, about Thomas Edison, about Bill Gates, about whoever you want to.

MS. DALEY: I think you have to look at your society and say, where are the heroes in your society. The concept of heroism, when you've got a situation now, let's take the presidency, you survey American parents and ask them if they want their child to be president, and the answer is no. I mean, we have as a society eliminated the willingness even to have heroes, in many cases. I mean, Bill Gates would be very hard to sell as a hero.

MR. POLLACK: There was one of the older movies about Louie And Marie Pasteur. So why don't we have one about Watson and Crick, I mean, that's a pretty -- could you make an interesting movie about Watson and Crick?

MR. POLLACK: Yes, sure you could make an interesting movie about almost anything, depending on the person who makes the movie. And there isn't any rule that says you can't make movies about heroes, you can. But, there is a reflection always between this fancy word that I'm not sure I understand called Zeitgeist, and what is reflected in movies. There's an odd sort of collective unconscious that gets projected into movies. I've never been able to explain it and I don't know why. It's what Elizabeth says, we're not preoccupied with heroes as a society right now.

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, you see, and that is what the middle to the right of the American intellectual spectrum holds against Hollywood, is that your perception of the Zeitgeist is not what we all think it is, and that Ronald Reagan had it right, in that people are very optimistic, they do want to see heroes, heroes shape destiny, and you guys collectively are suddenly after 50 years of reflecting exactly that are saying, people aren't interested in heroes.

MR. BART: One of the most heroic pictures that got nominated this year was called The Insider. It redefined heroism in a different way. This was an amazing whistle blower, went out and beat a big corporation. Now, that was a very heroic picture, but the audience didn't exactly rise up and embrace it in massive numbers.

MR. POLLACK: If people really wanted movies about heroes studios would be making them. There's no way a studio is not going to make what people want. It's what they're in the business of doing. And to assume that they're deliberately not making what the audience out there wants --

MS. DALEY: You have to go to the Zeitgeist that he's talking about, because I think what the great film makers, the successful film makers do is they have an ability, which Sidney very well describes as something you cannot articulate, to tap into the collective unconscious, the public concerns of a period, and they reach out and they grab something. I mean, nobody expected American Beauty to do this well. But, boy, it grabbed something that touched people. I mean, you can go back to the Star Wars phenomenon. I mean, George thought he was making an experimental movie.

MR. POLLACK: Listen, I bring it up because you brought it up once about Tootsie, but the year that I did Tootsie Barbara Streisand made Yentel, and Blake Edwards made Victor Victoria. I didn't have any idea they were going to do those movies, and I thought, this is really weird to do a movie about a guy cross dressing, but I interested in some little part of it, which really had to do with men and women and whether a guy could learn to be a better man being a woman, and all the time knowing it was a comedy.

MR. WATTENBERG: It was a great movie.

MR. POLLACK: What I'm saying is, why were there three big movies that year about a cross dresser? The fact of the sexual revolution was having all kind of after effects on people. They wanted to re-look at what the parameters of masculinity and femininity were. Now, you can't make a movie about that, but that sensibility seeps into the point of view with which you make a movie.

MR. WATTENBERG: Suppose I told you that the beginning of the 21st century the Zeitgeist was going to return to an age of heroism?

MR. BART: Ben, you'd be happy to know that they're remaking High Noon as a television movie for TNT. So you're going to get some of your movies back.

MS. DALEY: But, it is violent, remember, please.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. On that note, we thank you very much, Elizabeth Daley, Peter Bart, and Sidney Pollack, and thank you.

Please do remember that we relish communications from our viewers at For Think Tank, I'm Ben Wattenberg.

ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036, or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS Online at pbs.org. And please let us know where you watch Think Tank.

This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in association with New River Media, which are solely responsible for its content.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

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