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[Jaelle]

http://www.nytimes.c...ies/09WWLN.html

Tagline: Studios think it's good for awards and profits to release all the serious films at year's end. But what about audiences?


THE NEW YORK TIMES
November 9, 2003
Lost Weekends
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

I try to go out to the movies -- popcorn, previews, a Manhattan crowd -- at least once a week. Usually I fail. I pick up the movie listings with the vague feeling that there's something I thought I wanted to see -- something that opened over the weekend -- and it turns out to be ''Old School'' or ''Tears of the Sun.'' So I catch an early train home to the country instead, where I can have supper with my wife and the dogs and listen to crickets singing in the moonlight.

Then comes autumn. And suddenly it's as if the spaceship of my personal entertainment were passing through an asteroid field of ambitious movies before re-entering the cinematic void sometime in January. For as it happens, the only meaningful season in Hollywood -- the only cinematic one, that is -- is the so-called Christmas season, a 12-week stretch beginning in October when the studios put forward what they consider to be their most important films. It almost feels like a natural phenomenon, the clustering of serious movies at the end of the year -- like the migration of geese or the beaching of whales. But since it's Hollywood we're talking about, nature has nothing to do with it, unless you think of nature as a realm of life-or-death marketing.

There must have been a time long ago when movies with artistic ambitions (or pretensions) didn't clump up this way -- a time when there was a generic, not a calendrical, distinction between A and B movies and when studios scattered their best films across the year. But that was before television, and before television turned the Academy Awards into the national extravaganza it has become.

Every major cultural prize -- a National Book Award, a Pulitzer, a Grammy, an Emmy, a Tony or a Golden Globe -- has an impact on the bottom line of the product it honors. But no prize comes close to rivaling an Academy Award, especially the Best Picture Oscar, for sheer marketing wallop. Think of all the ways a movie can be sold -- in theaters, over pay-per-view television, in international release, through sales of DVD's and videos -- and you can begin to imagine the financial incentive an Oscar represents.

As the marketing power of the Academy Awards has grown over the years, so has the gravity they exert. Studios vie for release dates in the final quarter of the year in order to place their ''prestige'' movies closer to Oscar -- to make sure the academy remembers them and to profit from the awards themselves. And Oscar, this year, has moved ahead in the calendar -- to Feb. 29, three weeks earlier than last year and closer to the tight platoon of prestige movies.

This year's logjam of ''serious'' movies in the Christmas season is the flip side of the rest of the year, when, except for documentaries and foreign films, scarcely a single meritorious movie opened. It's as if all the Oscar-worthy films had moved to the end of the line, causing an extraordinary pileup, beginning with ''Mystic River,'' which opened in early October, and ending with ''Cold Mountain,'' which opens on Christmas Day. Nearly every weekend in between sees the release of one or two signature films -- ''Veronica Guerin,'' ''Sylvia,'' ''21 Grams,'' ''Big Fish,'' ''Mona Lisa Smile,'' not to mention the final installments, awaited with very different expectations, of ''The Matrix'' and ''Lord of the Rings.'' What the season amounts to is a 12-week national film festival. Instead of a single venue -- Cannes or Sundance -- this festival plays all across the country, and with barely enough screens to open on. And instead of a festival prize bestowed by a jury, the award is a gold-plated statuette and big box office.

The cinematic Christmas season is now a fundamental fact of moviegoing, one that moviegoers have been forced to get used to in recent years. The trend began, some film historians argue, with ''The Deer Hunter,'' which opened in Los Angeles and New York in December 25 years ago, well ahead of its wide-release date in February 1979. The plan was to make ''The Deer Hunter'' eligible for the Academy Awards and to slingshot the momentum of those awards directly into the movie's nationwide opening. As one executive said at the time: ''The picture would die if we opened it cold in February. It must have awards to give it the stature it needs to be successful.'' The plan worked, but only because ''The Deer Hunter'' -- a tough movie to sell to a general audience -- won Oscars for best picture, best director and best supporting actor.

Hollywood is a very conservative place when it comes to taking risks. Everyone feels better if everyone takes the same risks together, and most studios are happy to keep placing the same bet over and over and over if it has been shown to win once. A marketing ploy as simple as the one that turned ''The Deer Hunter'' into a box-office success -- never mind the film's artistic value -- has led over time to an end-of-year stampede.

But it's also arguable that Hollywood increasingly needs the impact of a seasonal focus to get people into theaters, especially for films that may not have the first-weekend clout of ''Spider-Man'' or the word of mouth that ''My Big Fat Greek Wedding'' turned out to have. Every movie in general release has to compete with TiVo and NetFlix, not to mention sports, live music, legitimate theater, world literature, video games and the social commitments of a real life. Going out to the movies was a bigger occasion, strangely, when people did it more often and more regularly than they do now. Sitting in front of the big screen these days is just one of hundreds of entertainments, including sitting in front of the big-screen TV at home.

It's tempting to pretend that the seasonal impact of this 12-week festival synchronizes somehow with something in our blood, some autumnal hormone that makes us crave a concentration of the new just as the old year is on its way out. In every art that has such seasons, whether it's literature or classical music, the fall season is usually the most significant. But behind the idea of the Christmas movie season -- apart from outright Oscar-hunting -- there lurks Hollywood's cut-rate audience psychology. Somehow, it's assumed, audiences are more serious in the fall. If so, is it only because all the big-screen summer fluff we've been offered has made us hungry for something more substantial? The trouble is that the studio summer fluff now starts showing up in theaters sometime in January and runs right through to October. The rhythm the Christmas movie season really evokes is the nostalgic and no less market-driven rhythm of old-fashioned television, back in the days when all the new shows were rolled out just as school was beginning, for our long winter's nap in front of the tube.

The tactical logic of crowding the release dates of prestige films into the fall may be obvious. Quality loves company. But it's hard to argue that that crowding is good for moviegoers -- or even for moviemakers. For one thing, it creates an artificial dearth of serious, artful Hollywood movies in the first 40 weeks of the year -- though some people would argue that the dearth isn't artificial at all, just a natural state of vacuity. It also implies a limit to the number of serious films that can ever make it to the screen, since for those kinds of movies the year has effectively been compressed from 52 weeks into 12.

The growing emphasis on the Christmas season resembles the way election primaries have shifted earlier and earlier -- and closer and closer together -- in the electoral cycle. That pattern isn't about getting a more democratic result. It's about state versus state, campaign versus campaign -- the internal machinations of managing party politics.

Same with the movies. The Christmas season is essentially pitched at the industry. It leads not to greater diversity in filmmaking but to the ubiquity of a few heavily endorsed films. An Oscar is less and less the final payoff for a movie's success and more and more the kick-start of a second campaign. The hope that the audience itself can sustain a serious film -- based on its merits, whenever it opens -- has largely been abandoned.

[to be continued]

[Jaelle]

[continued]

This is a cycle -- a feedback loop, in fact -- that has become all too familiar in our cultural lives: the breathlessness of a self-reinforcing pattern. A National Book Award turns a novel into a best seller. That validates the National Book Awards as a marketing tool. And that, in turn, increases the potential sales of the next winner, making it all the more imperative to win. As the Academy Awards pack more and more marketing clout, it becomes more and more important to aim right at them. In turn, the public comes to rely increasingly on the results of competitions and awards ceremonies to guide its viewing and buying and reading. Not because the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to single out one such judging body, have especially good taste or do an objective job of picking best pictures, but because the awards themselves do so much to drive the marketing. What's being sold is the Academy Awards themselves as much as the movies they honor.

Would ''Mystic River'' have been as good a movie if it had been released in March instead of October? It's a ridiculous question on the face of it. Would Sean Penn's or Clint Eastwood's Oscar chances have been as good? That's not such a ridiculous question -- at least not given the status quo. To open a movie in the Christmas season these days is to announce what kind of movie it is and what kind of attention the studio thinks it deserves. And yet it's easy to forget that opening a movie in the Christmas season is only an angle, after all, only an advertising claim. The weird thing is that we now take a film's release date as a sober sign of seriousness in itself. If it's December, it must be portentous.

After all, just look at the words I've had to use to write about this phenomenon: ''ambitious,'' ''prestigious,'' ''serious,'' ''artful.'' Each word deserves its quotation marks. And yet each word takes it for granted that this fall's movies are exactly what the studios say they are by virtue of when they've scheduled them to open. In the premise lies the conclusion, and vice versa.

But what if Hollywood scrambled the lineup, releasing summer-feeling movies in the summer and holiday-feeling ones at the holidays but scattering all the rest evenly throughout the year as production schedules allowed? What would it prove? Well, it might prove that the Hollywood calendar has no coherent principle of organization besides the Academy Awards. It might also prove -- or perhaps disprove once and for all -- that you can open a ''serious'' movie almost any week of the year and that the value of the Christmas season is just a time-honored myth of the kind that Bill James set about disproving in baseball. After all, the audience accepts the fact of the Christmas season only because it has no choice. We love the movies, despite ourselves. And apparently we'll put up with 40 weeks of ''The Life of David Gale'' in order to get to ''Mystic River.'' Or maybe not.

So far there's no Bill James of the movies, someone to look at the common wisdoms and find them not so wise. The reason is simple. Unlike baseball, movies have nothing that is quantifiable except the cost of production and the box office. Hits and flops, yes, but no errors or on-base percentages or earned-run averages. No way to measure, precisely, the aesthetics of a movie or what makes it stick in the minds of viewers. The studios have tried to calibrate these things with endless research and focus groups, but that only has the effect of making their products look as cynical as they often are. The studios are left with essentially simple notions, like the assumption that releasing Oscar-worthy movies as close as possible to the Oscars makes those movies more Oscar-likely.

But there's a danger in these assumptions. Starve the people long enough, and they find it easier and easier to go hungry. Coming upon the prestige-film season after the cinematic drought of late winter, spring and summer is like coming upon a Christmas feast after a long, long fast. The table groans under the weight of the food, and a crowd gathers round with hungry looks. It looks like plenty. But everyone knows that the real plenty would be to have enough to eat all year long.
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Verlyn Klinkenborg is a member of The New York Times editorial board.

[Tarl_Cabot]

Because the Academy has ADD and short memory...Gladiator won with a May release though.