Richard Linklater, the director of Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, and Slacker, recently shared that the ‘90s was the last great era of studio movies.This Substack is reader-supported.
A movie like The Blair Witch Project could probably never get made today. And that was 1999. All of the low budget independent classics that came before it would never get a second look in Gen Z America where the average attention span is about .005 seconds.
No chance of turning this around. The audience is gone. More like their attention span. I offer in evidence a certain piano my grandmother bought CHEAP because everyone was getting hi-fis and didn't need to make their own music anymore. How many people you know out there now buying private pianos to make their own music? Creativity died to make way for content.
I have to disagree with Linklater. The 90s was not the last of great films from Hollywood but it was probably the last decade of when risky ventures, like some of his films, could get greenlit; that is until NetFlix came along. The 2000's had some great stuff and even the first half of the 2010's had some great films. The small screen from network to cable saw some amazing content between the mid 2000's and mid 2010's. The expansion of new networks like AMC brought us possibilities not previously possible on network TV due to regulations and advertising.
It was really the mid 2010's when things turned to crap and that's b/c Hollywood stopped hiring based on talent and merit; opting instead fora DEI like hiring philosophy. Due to the turn around time for movies, it would take around 5 years before we would start to see the end results of this epically bad decision by Hollywood.
Rarely is there any singular point in time or even year when such large scale societal level changes take place. DEI didn't happen over night and so purging it from the system will take some time and even if we can eventually get rid of it ( as well as other discriminatory hiring practices like Affirmative Action) it will take years, decades even, to see the damages these bad ideas will have caused. If a DEI hire(s) was involved in the design/implementation of a newer bridge or an overpass, it will be several years, possibly even a decade, before we the public experience the negative effects of an incompetent hire being involved in the things creation.
The 90's may have been when the seeds of the coming destruction were planted but the 90's was not when things changed IMHO.
I grew up in Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s. That was an error of many 1000+ seat cinemas, in Westwood (Hollywood, which I was less familiar with, was probably similar). Screens big enough to benefit from 70mm prints. Century City had a massive screen that I think approached 2000 seats, that was nearly always underutilized. In between blockbusters like Jaws and Grease, it would exhibit art cinema like Koyanisquatsi for long stretches. Like a nascent IMAX.
They're all gone. It was quite an era. There was a shared cultural experience, sometimes including long waits in lines to see big releases. Personally, I saw several Star Trek movies in Westwood on opening night, including the first one. I also worked at a movie theater one summer in 1986, a common summer job for college students. The Avco Center Cinema, where all the Star Wars movies played (then 3 screens, today 6 or more). Aliens was there, and we saw bits of it many times, along with other less memorable movies.
To the extent the structures still exist, the have been divided up into multiple postage stamp-sized screens. It's not the same as seeing movies back then. I remember seeing Dazed and Confused. I loved the movie when I saw it. The audience was great too.
A movie like The Blair Witch Project could probably never get made today. And that was 1999. All of the low budget independent classics that came before it would never get a second look in Gen Z America where the average attention span is about .005 seconds.
Yep. Unless a NetFlix or similar were to greenlight it, something like that would not likely get made today.
No chance of turning this around. The audience is gone. More like their attention span. I offer in evidence a certain piano my grandmother bought CHEAP because everyone was getting hi-fis and didn't need to make their own music anymore. How many people you know out there now buying private pianos to make their own music? Creativity died to make way for content.
I have to disagree with Linklater. The 90s was not the last of great films from Hollywood but it was probably the last decade of when risky ventures, like some of his films, could get greenlit; that is until NetFlix came along. The 2000's had some great stuff and even the first half of the 2010's had some great films. The small screen from network to cable saw some amazing content between the mid 2000's and mid 2010's. The expansion of new networks like AMC brought us possibilities not previously possible on network TV due to regulations and advertising.
It was really the mid 2010's when things turned to crap and that's b/c Hollywood stopped hiring based on talent and merit; opting instead fora DEI like hiring philosophy. Due to the turn around time for movies, it would take around 5 years before we would start to see the end results of this epically bad decision by Hollywood.
Rarely is there any singular point in time or even year when such large scale societal level changes take place. DEI didn't happen over night and so purging it from the system will take some time and even if we can eventually get rid of it ( as well as other discriminatory hiring practices like Affirmative Action) it will take years, decades even, to see the damages these bad ideas will have caused. If a DEI hire(s) was involved in the design/implementation of a newer bridge or an overpass, it will be several years, possibly even a decade, before we the public experience the negative effects of an incompetent hire being involved in the things creation.
The 90's may have been when the seeds of the coming destruction were planted but the 90's was not when things changed IMHO.
I grew up in Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s. That was an error of many 1000+ seat cinemas, in Westwood (Hollywood, which I was less familiar with, was probably similar). Screens big enough to benefit from 70mm prints. Century City had a massive screen that I think approached 2000 seats, that was nearly always underutilized. In between blockbusters like Jaws and Grease, it would exhibit art cinema like Koyanisquatsi for long stretches. Like a nascent IMAX.
They're all gone. It was quite an era. There was a shared cultural experience, sometimes including long waits in lines to see big releases. Personally, I saw several Star Trek movies in Westwood on opening night, including the first one. I also worked at a movie theater one summer in 1986, a common summer job for college students. The Avco Center Cinema, where all the Star Wars movies played (then 3 screens, today 6 or more). Aliens was there, and we saw bits of it many times, along with other less memorable movies.
To the extent the structures still exist, the have been divided up into multiple postage stamp-sized screens. It's not the same as seeing movies back then. I remember seeing Dazed and Confused. I loved the movie when I saw it. The audience was great too.