So, I’ve just discovered that Leonard Maltin has a Web site. (Of course he does, everyone has a Web site these days. Andy Warhol was wrong about the fifteen-minutes-of-fame thing; he should’ve said,”in the future, everyone will have a Web site.”) I’m not terribly confident in Maltin’s powers as a film critic — he strikes me as a bit too much of an enthusiast to be really objective, and a bit too nice a guy to be really harsh in his judgments when necessary — but he definitely knows his stuff when it comes to film history and the workings of the business, and I enjoy his frequent contributions to DVDs of classic movies and animation. I haven’t had the time to really explore his site yet, but I did spot an interesting comment right on the front page, which I’d like to share:

[2005 has] been an eventful year for Hollywood, to put it mildly. Audiences stayed away from some of the most vaunted would-be summer blockbusters, then seemed to get into the habit of staying away even when better movies came along this fall. Top studio executives have admitted that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.

 

How do you get people back into the habit of moviegoing when you’ve let them down again and again… when you charge an exorbitant ticket price in spite of the fact that people can see the same movie three or four months later for a fraction of that fee for a DVD rental or a video-on-demand download?

 

More importantly, how do you convince a younger generation that movies aren’t always about escape from reality… that you can have a memorable, meaningful experience watching a film that’s challenging or provocative?

 

I don’t pretend to have foolproof answers to these rhetorical questions. All I know is this: until Hollywood learns to respect its audience instead of insulting or pandering to it, the situation isn’t likely to change.

 

I know this, too: there’s an old saying, “There’s nothing wrong with the business that good movies can’t cure.” Technology and cultural shifts may have eroded some of the certainty in that maxim, but it’s still a good place to start.

The issues Maltin raises here, about how home-video and various digital technologies are changing the business and whether movies as we’ve known them are an endangered species, frequently come up in conversations with my fellow movie buffs. Naturally, a lot of griping also occurs about the overall quality of current movies and Hollywood’s obsession with the youth demographic — to which I and my friends, we are reluctantly starting to accept, no longer belong. Like Maltin, I don’t really have any solutions to these problems; even if I did, I doubt anyone reading this blog is likely in a position to implement them. But I do know that I don’t want to see the theater-going experience die out because, for the most part, I still enjoy it. (For the record, I don’t believe it is going to die out, not entirely anyway. The home-theater system may replace the cinema as the primary place of exhibition, but I just can’t believe the cinema is going to go away entirely. After all, live theater still endures long after other, more convenient forms of entertainment were created.)

Nevertheless, Hollywood needs a good swift kick in its collective behind. The gargantuan conglomerates that now own everything are far too focused on short-term profits, minimal risk-taking, and pre-packaged ideas. Those three factors are why we keep seeing all those lame remakes of old TV shows, because they’re relatively easy to do and they’ve already got what the marketing kids call “brand recognition.” They’re already familiar to the audience, which means safe investments for the businessmen and not much creativity required from the filmmakers. It didn’t used to be this way. Money has always been a concern in the industry, but it used to be a little more balanced against artistic purpose.

I doubt we’ll ever return to the glory days when movie studios were run by people who actually understood and liked movies (as opposed to people who understand and like accounting ledgers), but I do hope the pendulum eventually swings a little more toward the middle and we see at least some more movies made for grown-ups. That doesn’t mean serious and somber dramas, necessarily, but rather films that are intended for an audience whose sensibilities weren’t entirely shaped by video games.

I’ve been reading lately that certain maverick forces want to start releasing films to the theater and on DVD on the same day. The establishment worries that this will be a death-knell for traditional exhibition — why, they say, will anyone go to a theater if they can watch the same stuff in the comfort of their home? At the very least, these folks say, same-day releases will consign theaters (and what plays in them) to the teenagers for good, because they’re primarily the ones who want to go out on Saturday night and the market will cater to them. But I wonder if, perhaps, the exact opposite will happen. If going out to see a movie becomes more of a rare event for most people, then perhaps what they’re going to see will become more of an event, too, just like live theater. Perhaps what the industry fears will in fact bring about a renaissance of the days when, as Leonard Maltin suggests, watching a film was a “memorable, meaningful experience.”

Or perhaps I’m just babbling incoherently. That happens from time to time. In any event, if you like old movies, go check out Leonard Maltin’s Web site. It looks like it’s probably a pretty good resource. If nothing else, it’s a good conversation starter, as you can see from this entry…