{"id":766,"date":"2007-09-20T17:09:55","date_gmt":"2007-09-20T21:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/09\/20\/a-lesson-in-old-fogeyism\/"},"modified":"2007-12-06T14:57:55","modified_gmt":"2007-12-06T18:57:55","slug":"a-lesson-in-old-fogeyism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/09\/20\/a-lesson-in-old-fogeyism\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lesson in Old Fogeyism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nostalgia is a pleasant sensation. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t be searching for all my old college mates on Facebook. Nostalgia is the illusion that things were once better than they are now or, perversely, that things we find ridiculous today have some sort of kitsch value.<\/p>\n

It’s worth keeping in mind that it was ever thus. Andrew Sullivan<\/a> linked to this Atlantic article by Budd Schulberg from 1947<\/a> that complains about how Hollywood’s economic structure has forced it to move away from excellent movie making to more crowd-pleasing mass spectacle. <\/p>\n

The push to fill movie theaters with a steady diet of new releases led to ballooning budgets (“In our inflationary market a film that costs less than a million dollars is tagged as a “B” and a two-hour feature that draws on the best talents in all departments can hardly be brought in, as they say, for less than three million”<\/em>) and the celebrity system (“Today, if a star can act\u00e2\u20ac\u201dor create a living character on the screen\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit is only an incidental embellishment of his stature as a member of our contemporary mythology”<\/em>) have led to star vehicles churned out to make a quick buck. Moviegoers begin to prefer fantasy and “reverie” over seriously artful pictures, condemning them to a schizoid disorder of some kind.<\/p>\n

Schulberg even has a top ten list of conditions<\/a> that could force the industry to move in a more artful direction. To summarize, changes in the distribution system (1 and 2), changes in disposable income (3), the unsustainability of high production costs (4), a generational and ideological change in who makes films (5, 6 and 7), internationalization of the industry (8), and better educated and more critical filmmakers and audiences (9 and 10). <\/p>\n

By changing just a few words here and there, I could write a convincing plagiaristic treatise on today’s gaming industry. Replace block booking and double-features with MMOs and digital delivery. Change the disposable income to variable pricing and micropayments. High production costs speak for themselves, as do the issues of independent development, global reach and better insight into the medium. I’m sure I could a dozen essays on each of these points arguing how they would change the gaming world and deliver us better, more sophisticated games instead of the steady diet of franchises, me-toos and juvenalia.<\/p>\n

But did any of this stuff change the movie industry? For a while. The high cost of American development in the 1960s led to the more intimate movies of the 70s. Then advances in technology made epic blockbusters viable again, and back came the spectacle movie. The collapse of the studio system led to independent auteur cinema, but eventually created a system of superstar free agency where movies became “Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson in …”. <\/p>\n

And it’s not like mediocrity ever went away. We only remember the Chinatowns<\/em>, not The Midnight Man<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nostalgia is a pleasant sensation. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t be searching for all my old college mates on Facebook. Nostalgia is the illusion that things were once better than they are now or, perversely, that things we find ridiculous today have some sort of kitsch value. It’s worth keeping in mind that it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-cm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}