Backing into the Future

By RICHARD CORLISS

Hollywood was born schizophrenic. For 75 years it has been both a town and a state of mind, an industry and an art form. But today, more than at any other moment since the beginning of the TV era, it is of two, three, many minds about its present and future. It sees rising costs and falling attendance at the box office, while at home Americans watch more movies than ever. It finds the gap between world-wide hits and big-budget belly flops wider than a Whoopi Goldberg smile. As the industry awaits next week's announcement of the Oscar nominations, it has to wonder if, after almost a decade of mostly good times, its sources of popular inspiration have evaporated. Hollywood's Golden Age died in the '40s. Is this the end of the Golden Egg era?

Some movie hype for the movie blues: it is the best of times and the worst of times. It is a time of turbulence and stagnation, of threat and promise from a competitor: the magic, omnivorous videocassette recorder (VCR). In other words, it is business as usual for the picture people. And if you think make-believe rules only in front of the camera, think again. Says Barry Diller, chairman of 20th Century-Fox: "This is a world in which reasons are made up because reality is too painful."

First the bad news. From an all-time high in 1984, box-office take in the U.S. and Canada dropped 7%, to $3.75 billion. The number of tickets sold fell 11%, to 1.06 billion. For the first year since 1979, no film returned as much as $100 million to its makers (though Back to the Future, the 1985 champ, should soon reach that goal). Variety Industry Analyst Art Murphy sees this slump as a cyclical phenomenon: the film economy booms, too many films are made to chase the extra dollars, the flurry of competition leads to hasty decisions, then the poor fare drives ticket buyers away. This summer, for example, young viewers tired of kidpix like Real Genius and Heavenly Kid, while adults boycotted big-budget dramas like Revolution ($22 million), A Chorus Line ($27 million) and Enemy Mine ($33 million).

And so the industry sits glumly waiting for the next big thing, too timid to try something new. For Hollywood, oldies are goodies. In 1985 five of the top ten moneymakers were sequels; the rest were a familiar blend of fantasy, comedy, spy and cop genres. Warns Guy McElwaine, who runs Columbia Pictures: "There's never any such thing as paying too much attention to the bottom line. If you don't make money, you aren't going to make movies." Right now, though, the sort of movie that makes money--perhaps as much as $1 billion over five years--lasts half an hour, has a laugh track and is called Cheers or The Cosby Show. "Syndicating TV series, that's where the cash register is rung in this business," notes Anthony Hoffman, media analyst for Union Bank. "For the major studios involved in TV sitcoms, producing motion pictures is like playing polo on weekends. It's fun, but not crucial to their livelihood."

Still, moviemakers have to consider moviemaking the big time--profit with honor. And in films, if not in TV, caution breeds entropy. Charges Terry Gilliam, whose Brazil is one of 1985's few demanding films to escape from the studios: "People in Hollywood are not showmen, they're maintenance men, pandering to what they think their audiences want. And so audience expectations become more simplistic. Movies have no surprises, no fizz." Right: new Hollywood is new Coke with the cap left off.

In a town close to artistic exhaustion, a go project is The Jewel of the Nile, a sequel to a ripoff (Romancing the Stone) of a canny remake (Raiders of the Lost Ark) of a '40s Saturday-matinee serial. And a winner is something as automatic as a Steven Spielberg special (last year he produced Back to the Future and The Goonies), a Sylvester Stallone sequel (Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rocky IV) or a comedy from Saturday Night Live alumni (this year's three Chevy Chase films, Fletch, National Lampoon's European Vacation and Spies Like Us, were among the dozen top grossers). As Screenwriter Robert Kaufman notes, "The studios know that one week of Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd walking into walls in Spies Like Us will gross as much as Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo during its entire run. And a film like Rambo taps the hidden rage of urban blacks and lower-class whites who feel cheated out of a future. They can't shoot Mommy and Daddy, so they watch Sly shoot up the world." With hits like these, who needs flops?

But wait. There is a much-maligned high-tech wizard waiting in the wings: the VCR. In 1980, studio revenue from domestic ticket sales and movie videocassettes totaled $1.3 billion (videocasssettes accounted for only 15%). By 1984 the cumulative take was $2.4 billion (33% from cassettes). Last year it rose to $3 billion, and cassette sales were virtually half the total (see chart), despite the "first sale" doctrine, which prohibits studios from earning revenues after cassettes are sold to video outlets. The industry is now pushing hard for a share of rental fees. Nonetheless, in five years, Hollywood has more than doubled its take in the two markets combined. Even "soft" 1985 combined revenue was up 20% over "hot" 1984. VCR hits may be recent theatrical hits (Rambo just set a record with a first-day order of 427,000 sales) or moldering musicals (last year the 1954 Bing Crosby film White Christmas sold more than 250,000 units). And surveys have found that many VCR owners are more avid moviegoers after their purchase than before. Renting cassettes opens them up to the universe of films, turns them into fans eager for the next new picture.

The prospect of composing films for the TV set instead of for the movie screen stirs mixed feelings among directors. John Sayles (Return of the Secaucus Seven) believes, "It's better to view a film in a theater; that's what it's shot for. But to reach people, it's good the VCR is out there. I see first-run theaters as becoming the 'loss leader' for the VCR, like hard-cover books for the paperback industry or a tuna special for the grocery store." Paul Schrader (American Gigolo, Mishima) is even more emphatic: "The times they are achangin'. We should ride the technical and social evolution and speak to the medium most preferred. If the dinosaurs don't like it, too bad for them."

The old argument for movie attendance is the strongest. Teenagers go to the movies to get out of the house. Observes Screenwriter Kaufman: "For young people, movies are just foreplay, a cheap date before the back seat of the car." Maybe. But people of every age go to the movies to get out of themselves, to share the intense, expansive communal experience of being in the dark, with the huge screen the only light. That experience was easier to achieve when movie theaters were huge, gaudy palaces with plush appointments and ushers dressed like Ruritanian footmen. Alas, those theaters have been razed or, worse, sliced into half-a-dozen small auditoriums that are about as attractive as the men's rooms in Chinatown restaurants. Why should anyone over 18, or not on a date, go to a noisy, rowdy theater with poor projection and get glop on his shoes when a few months later he can rent the same movie--or any other movie--and see it whenever he wants at home? Paramount Chairman Frank Mancuso puts the challenge more positively: "If owners are to survive, they must start building the video theaters of the future."

Hollywood must make movies that speak to the present, not concepts or carbon copies but reverberant stories and demanding images. Says Robert Benton, whose Kramer vs. Kramer was the top-grossing film of 1979: "The most interesting development of the past year was the success of the old-fashioned thriller: Witness, Prizzi's Honor, Jagged Edge. They didn't have a teenager among them. Maybe studios will begin to rethink their policies." Kaufman dares to predict "a return to movies about relationships. The mood has changed; the divorce rate is dropping. I see 40-year-old couples standing in movie lines again, for Out of Africa and The Color Purple. Remember, even studio bosses are human beings. They want to be able to tell their grandchildren 'I'm the one who got that made.' "

So as the industry backs into the future, some of its brightest minds want it to move forward into the past. The moguls' grandchildren may be watching some genteel drama on a wall-size screen in their living room. Or they may sneak out to catch Romancing the Nile LIV in a high-tech Movierama. Neither answer seems bold enough if this "art form of the 20th century" is to be a vital force in the 21st.

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/ New York and Michael Riley/ Los Angeles