Hasta la vista, Tinsel Town!
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul ClarkeTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
FUELLED by the growth of multiplexes, British cinema attendances were up to 115 million last year. The years when TV and VCRs knocked the bottom out of the film industry are gone, in Britain and the USA. But what exactly are people watching? PAUL CLARKE takes a look.
Some recent British films, for example Mike Leigh's Naked and Ken Loach's Raining Stones, have enjoyed enormous success in France, a country which takes its cinema rather seriously.
But people in that country are amazed when they hear that although these films will do well in Britain, but have no chance of a widespread showing.
Such films will not get a general release because of the stranglehold of a few key distributors and the criteria they have established for what makes a 'commercial' film.
The predominantly young film-going audience responds to films which conform to the 'formulas' which Hollywood and the distribution networks in its thrall have established.
Hollywood today is a shining example of cultural decay imposed by the 'free' market. Key aspects of that market are the corrupt 'star' system and the huge outlay needed to make a Hollywood movie, and hence the huge audiences needed to roll in substantial profits.
Juggernaut
The quest for profits creates a juggernaut which crushes creativity and anything controversial or challenging in its path.
The Hollywood/distributors stranglehold is neatly demonstrated by the fate of the independent British film company Palace Pictures. After a series of commercially unsuccessful films Palace set out to make the enormously successful Crying Game.
Because of financial difficulties, to complete the film Palace sold the royalties to the US distributors in advance. The net result was that when the film was a smash hit in the US, the distributors scooped $50m in profits, and Palace Pictures went bust.
Subversive
According to Dan Quayle and the US new right, Hollywood is the centre of dangerous and subversive liberalism (and this accusation is often overlaid with implicit anti-semitism). But with notable exceptions this doesn't work its way into the movies.
The stock-in-trade is a sign of the times: escapism, militarism, disasters, fantasy, horror, sexism, unbridled and infantile sentimentality. Oh yes, and a world in which everyone is a thirtysomtheing yuppy (generally a lawyer) who lives in one of those huge apartments in a former warehouse (Fatal Attraction, Ghosts, Wall Street).
Well what's wrong with fantasy and escapism? What's wrong with horror movies? Of course there's nothing wrong with Jurassic Park. But there's something morbid about a film industry which provides merely a means of escape.
The star system has reached obscene proportions. Bruce Willis was paid $18 million for Die Hard 3. $5m plus is common nowadays for big stars.
The huge cost of stars and hi-tech mega-special effects movies creates a vicious circle. To be a big hit, a movie is expected to gross $12m on its first release week-end.
But to guarantee that you have to have a sure-fire big name star: Kevin Costner, Michael Douglas, Arnold Swcharzenegger, Clint Eastwood, Tom Cruise or maybe Stallone (yes, all men). And you have to have a lowest common denominator story.
The 'big bucks movie' and star syndrome creates a spiral of a tiny mega-rich elite inside the system, with thousands of aspirant actors, writers, directors outside it or trying to get in.
In every field - acting, directing, producing - the movie industry is one of the most male-dominated. And women are paid less at every level.
So can the Hollywood stranglehold be broken? Small independent film and video distributors are prey to takeovers by the big fish - Palace started out distributing videos, and then sold out to Virgin.
Challenging Hollywood, or at least creating independent centres of film production, has to tackle the central issue of financing.
Channel 4
In Britain some support comes from Channel 4 and the BBC for independent films. But the issue of state subsidies is the key one for maintaining film production almost anywhere outside the US.
To do that means breaking with 'free market' logic. America's final showdown with France in the last stages of the GATT negotiations hinged in part on France's box-office subsidies for French-made films - which is the sole reason why France retains a vibrant and creative film industry.
The global media market - the giant communications corporations like Warner and Sony which control film studios, the popular music business, TV, Cable, video, satellite, newspapers and magazines - want to smash any state subsidies which challenge their monopolies.
This monopoly borders on a semi-totalitarian control of all kinds of recorded information and popular artistic production. It is moreover a monopoly which produces a stifling homogenisation of cultural production internationally, with everyone from Buenos Aries to Bangkok watching Robocop at the same time.
Which is why the left should have no qualms at all about supporting the demand for substantial subsidies to the British film industry.
Of course the same Hollywood which produces Top Gun, Wayne's World and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids produced Thelma and Louise and the succession of radical Oliver Stone movies like Salvador and Born on the Fourth Of July.
Abject
It even produced Warren Beatty's Reds, a great movie notwithstanding Beatty's abject apologies at the Oscars and the grotesque caricature of poor Zinoviev.
Hollywood liberalism is not dead, but it is liberalism. Hollywood has a way of taming its radicals and subversives in the end, and their productions are a tiny minority.
While independent producers struggle on, there is no long-term solution other than the democratisation of the means of information and artistic production.
Access always poses the question of control, and in our society that means ownership. Cultural diversity will continue to be crushed so long as artistic production is first and foremost a business.
Hollywood makes films, but its most powerful figures are accountants, and they have the final say.
Which is why there is another mediocre thriller, starring Clint Eastwood and Kevin Coster at a cinema near you (wherever you are in the world) soon.