01 June 2007

About This Issue — Beyond Blockbusters

Scarlett Johansson at the 2005 Academy Awards

The late film director Richard Brooks once said, “The images come first, and with images, like music, the primary reaction is emotional.” The extraordinary popularity of movies made through the Hollywood system among audiences the world over for more than 100 years testifies to this core truth. In an age of globalization the emotional power of pictures translates easily across cultures and makes Hollywood films one of America’s major exports to other countries.

Movies are not simply entertainment, a vicarious roller-coaster ride of thrills for audiences in the dark. As our title, “The Movie Business Today,” indicates, one way to see American films is as a kind of industry. An obvious but often overlooked truth is that a film succeeds or fails first in the white heat of the marketplace. Will people pay to see it? That’s the bottom-line question industry moguls ask themselves when considering a potential film project, and it’s the key to understanding American movies.

At the same time, filmmaking is more than a business. It’s also a highly collaborative art form that employs hundreds on a single film—from the high-priced “talent” who act, direct, and write to the skilled craftspeople who build the sets, light the scenes, and apply make-up to the stars.

Finally, like all forms of popular culture, a film contains certain larger values its creators inevitably embed as a result of the hundreds of choices required to make a movie. Rarely do these values take the form of explicit themes or messages; they are more often a subconscious result of what all filmmakers try to do—hold the audience’s attention.

What then is American about American movies these days? There is a well-known and somewhat stereotypical answer: the blockbuster, a smash hit that sells tickets around the world and turns a large profit. This term usually suggests an action movie or a thriller, with a $100-millon-plus budget and a star with a track record of delivering at the box office. The star plays an athletic, clever, and resolute hero who against long odds must overcome some extremely evil villains who have a plan that threatens much of civilization. Viewers can count on a blockbuster to deliver sudden plot reversals, elaborate chase scenes, and big, big explosions. On the other hand, the blockbuster is not likely to provide much depth of character or social background or realistic depiction of the lives of ordinary people.

At the 2007 Academy Awards, actor Will Smith offered a different view: “The common thread that you will find in American movies, that make them distinct as American, is that there is none. Each is as different as America itself, some stand up and cheer for us, some make fun of us, some sing for us, some cry for us, but each tells the world who we are as a people: a country that evolves through our social and political and religious differences.”

Here Smith emphasizes several values commonly associated with the United States: first, the idea that this nation is a work-in-progress, one whose political system allows it to move in the direction of its ideals, and second, diversity, the celebration of the multiplicity of the American people. Looking at the Hollywood film industry it is easy to spot some other values that Americans treasure: innovation, entrepreneurship, optimism, creativity, and an openness to other cultures that often takes the form of immigration.

One of our purposes in presenting this issue of eJournal USA is to make our readers aware that American movies are far richer and more varied than the blockbuster stereotype would suggest. The articles in this issue capture an industry in flux. Our authors analyze the increasing internationalization of the film industry, both in terms of audiences and filmmaking talent; the rise of a more personal style of independent filmmaking in recent years; the market for foreign-produced films in the United States; and the effects of the Internet and the digital revolution on how movies get made and distributed. Shorter pieces focus on film festivals like Sundance that seed young talent and some film studios’ efforts to go green in making movies. A photo gallery spotlights a few in the multinational cadre of youthful writers, directors, producers, and actors who are creating a buzz in the competitive cauldron of Hollywood.

So yes, as Richard Brooks would have it, Hollywood movies still supply the world with a rich trove of iconography and emotion as we enter the 21st century. In the words of Richard Schickel, dean of American film critics, “The American movie tradition has always operated above and below the intellect.”

The Editors

From the June 2007 edition of eJournal USA.