Bob Fischbach, my favorite local columnist-critic, had this passage in his "Cartoonish blockbusters fail to enlighten" in the July 12, 2007, Go section of the Omaha World-Herald: Referring to an interview with Richard Walter, a co-chairman of the UCLA film school screenwriting program, "In the old days, he said, studio moguls were cantankerous but believed in stretching, taking chances, being creative [in making movies].
"But today? 'Franchises are testimony to the craven cowardice of movie studios. These guys are all accountants. They have a business plan instead of a screenplay. If you can get a franchise up, you don't have to be creative anymore. People come because they know they will get what they expect.'
"Copies, in other words. And sadly, Walter said, expectations appear to be lower than they used to be. To him, Hollywood's obsession with franchises is testimony to that lower expectation. What he expects of a franchise is for it to rise to its own level of failure. . . . To Walter, the most hazardous thing you can do in art is to play it safe. 'And that's bad news for those who love movies that touch us, move us and change our lives forever. As a viewer, I want to take chances.' "
I referred to the CPAs sinking our culture to reap the profits, and that seems testimony for my side. I began thinking about this not just because TV profiteers do about everything possible to annoy us. Programming dwindles for more and more ad breaks of more and more commercials, the leading cause for our shorter and shorter attention spans. Obnoxiously mocking an extremely obnoxious Head-On ad carries their actual message about as acidly as possible. Advertising at the end of programs and movies is more important than running the credits, so that I squint at the tiny fast roll now to one side, unable to decipher who was who in the cast. Most recently, distracting coming-attraction pop-ups jump into the lower screen corners, large enough to cover part of the picture. I can mute what I don't want to listen to and have a pop-up blocker for my computer but not one for the TV, alas. And I'm still aware that over here, as opposed to, say, Europe, those invisible radio and TV waves freely circulating around us were given to corporations to make millions and billions from, and, gee whiz, do they! A Super Bowl ad costs $2.4 million for 30 seconds.
It is silly to carp about the cultural corruption of business, even as the debacle of Enron and its cronies cost me somewhere between $35,000 and $45,000 in pension funds (others lost everything and much more). I have other cause for complaint, and I've been on the trail since I began worrying about the state of classical music, fan of detection that I am. Coincidentally, a newspaper editorial recently considered that classical music lost its audience when composers went too modern in 12-tone experiments and atonal dissonance and jazz lost its audience for the same reason in bop and fusion experiments in the mid 20th century, all too wild for the general public. True, but not even close to the real reason.
Of all places to make me realize the magnitude of what had happened in my beloved Fifties, it was Tab Hunter's gossipy autobiography, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star. Most people would be interested in the gay gossip of those years when Rock Hudson, Farley Granger, Montgomery Clift, Rory Calhoun, Anthony Perkins, and Tab himself led double lives, but I found myself confounded by the rapid cultural expansions, like the waves from a boulder dropped into a frog pond, of the unexpected huge recording success of Hunter with 1957's "Young Love," #1 for six weeks, a popular culture phenomenon which success launched Warner Brothers Records and six more record hits in the top 100 over the next few years. That huge success was based solidly (and, of course, ironically) on teenage girls, as Hunter was the first teen idol packaged and sold by sex appeal specifically to teenagers, leading the way to special teen magazines, teen programs, special appearances, that huge musical niche of adolescent music, anything for the shrieking teenagers, a magic new market tsunami that has since simply swept aside everything. I was there, I should've known. (Yes, I know, generalizations, simplistic stereotyping, but....) Teenagers have the most disposable income to spend freely, hugely controlling in commercial marketing, and the most desirable demographics are for the 18-34 crowd, though most movies now are allegedly made for teenage boys, Fast and Furious-ly. And so it is that we end up with their radio, their TV, their movies, their music, which tastes they carry with them into their middle ages. What a juggernaut to flatten out all the old standards I grew up with! The economics of the adolescent, inexperienced, undisciplined, emotional pubescent. (Brain studies have controversially suggested adult responsibility does not develop until around 26.) Swell, Isabel, swell.
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