How has the Evolution of the Silver Screen affected the theater and movie going experience in the...

[LizzieMaine]

None of the milliennials I know -- and I'm surrounded by them -- would have any use for a "pretty, low-conflict" movie. These are kids who grew up on violent, hard-boiled TV shows and superhero pictures, and those who went to college don't seem any different in this respect from those who didn't.

However, I can tell you that there most definitely is an audience for pictures like that. For us, it's a certain type of middle-class WASP women in their late sixties who absolutely fetishize Western Europe. Any picture we get with any kind of a scenic European setting will get these people in droves. Woody Allen's recent series of Euro-comedies did a bangup business with this crowd, and not because they particularly like his style of humor -- they wanted to see Barcelona, Paris, Rome, etc.

The most hilarious example of this type of audience's Pavlovian response to European settings was when we showed "In Bruges." As soon as they saw the title go up on the marquee they were lining up for tickets -- they had no idea what the picture was, or what was going to happen in it, but they were all set for a lovely tour of Bruges. The look of shell-shocked astonishment they displayed as they exited the picture was quite amusing.

 

[Fading Fast]

...I can tell you that there most definitely is an audience for pictures like that. For us, it's a certain type of middle-class WASP women in their late sixties who absolutely fetishize Western Europe. Any picture we get with any kind of a scenic European setting will get these people in droves. ...

Why do you think this is?

 

[MikeKardec]

None of the milliennials I know -- and I'm surrounded by them -- would have any use for a "pretty, low-conflict" movie. These are kids who grew up on violent, hard-boiled TV shows and superhero pictures, and those who went to college don't seem any different in this respect from those who didn't.

However, I can tell you that there most definitely is an audience for pictures like that. For us, it's a certain type of middle-class WASP women in their late sixties who absolutely fetishize Western Europe. Any picture we get with any kind of a scenic European setting will get these people in droves. Woody Allen's recent series of Euro-comedies did a bangup business with this crowd, and not because they particularly like his style of humor -- they wanted to see Barcelona, Paris, Rome, etc.

The most hilarious example of this type of audience's Pavlovian response to European settings was when we showed "In Bruges." As soon as they saw the title go up on the marquee they were lining up for tickets -- they had no idea what the picture was, or what was going to happen in it, but they were all set for a lovely tour of Bruges. The look of shell-shocked astonishment they displayed as they exited the picture was quite amusing.

Heck, I'm only guessing, and if you say I'm wrong then I probably am. You are at the tip of the sword, or box office or whatever. But from the slight experience that I've had around college campuses there does seem to be a very stressed out, touchy sense to a lot of kids. It's as if they don't want to be challenged about anything and the idea that there is a world out there that is different than they want it to be is treated as if it is intolerable. It is also the case that I hear a lot about the studios complaining that millennials are not showing up at the box office like previous generations. I find it hard to not be surprised about that, these days film and TV executives are a very insular group and have trouble learning from the audience because they really don't respect it or listen very well.

Now it's possible that all the attitudes surrounding campus unrest are just about students cynically exploring their power, rather than acting out about how they feel. I tend, however, to take people's word for what they want until I am convinced otherwise.

I think the notion about the idealized Western Europe fetish is correct and similar and spreads even further into our culture. I find myself fantasizing about Europe between the 1950s and the '70s, a time it's easy to view through rose colored glasses in hind sight. More recently I was involved with a college theater program that involved some visiting artists. A Columbian couple who had been living in Italy for a decade and our host theater professor were talking about art and culture and the theater and the prof was going on and on about how wonderful it must be living in Italy where "they" truly appreciate art and support the arts through a socialist system and the Columbians were saying Europe is just DEAD artistically (meaning when it comes to doing new things, as opposed to worshiping the classical and even modernist past) ... the two of them were completely talking past one another. The prof was saying you have to go to Europe to do art (no idea if there was any reality based logic to this) and they were saying that the US was really where an artist could flourish (and they had lived and worked in both places). Personally, I think it's all what you make of it and I'd love to go live in Italy but I'm not making the case it's an (imaginary) paradise. I just think we always dream of going home to an idealized past and Europe may not have much of what we fetishize much longer.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think they're mostly people who went to Europe once, a long time ago, and have been romanticizing the experience ever since. People who travel to Europe frequently have no need to romanticize it -- but those who went there only that one time, long ago, when they were young and lively, will look back on it with rosy nostalgia for the rest of their lives.

There's likely also a bit of class aspiration involved -- the desire to be seen as a cosmopolitan, globe-trotting type of person familiar with the cultural highlights of the Old World is pretty common among middle-class WASPS of the postwar generation. The old money isn't like this at all -- they don't talk about such things because they don't need to: in their circles, familiarity with Europe is taken for granted. But their wanna-bees often feel the need to drop "Europe" this and "Europe" that into every conversation.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Heck, I'm only guessing, and if you say I'm wrong then I probably am. You are at the tip of the sword, or box office or whatever. But from the slight experience that I've had around college campuses there does seem to be a very stressed out, touchy sense to a lot of kids. It's as if they don't want to be challenged about anything and the idea that there is a world out there that is different than they want it to be is treated as if it is intolerable. It is also the case that I hear a lot about the studios complaining that millennials are not showing up at the box office like previous generations. I find it hard to not be surprised about that, these days film and TV executives are a very insular group and have trouble learning from the audience because they really don't respect it or listen very well.

I think the difference is that I'm not experiencing millenials on a campus, and the kids I do experience are either kids who never went to college at all, who went only for a year or two and then had to drop out because they couldn't afford it, or if they did go, they went to a state school, not a "name" college. The only exception to this is one of my now-grown-up theatre kids who went to Smith, but she was from a decidedly working-class background, and was not raised in any kind of a middle-class environment.

But none of the millennials I know personally -- and I have more millennial friends than I do friends of my own age -- are anything like the modern stereotype of the intellectually lazy, emotionally spleeny college kid. I don't know where the kids who fit that stereotype come from, but they certainly don't come from around here.

What Hollywood needs to do, from this exhibitor's point of view, is to get out of its gated-community/film-school mindset and get some people in positions of power who actually know what it's like to stand in line to buy a ticket. I get awful sick of movies, myself, about pretty bourgeois white people and their pretty bourgeois problems -- I'd like to see some pictures with the same kind of proletarian edge that Warner Bros. was known for in the thirties. Every time I do see a movie about working-class folk it's more than likely that they're involved in drugs, are hopeless alcoholics, or are involved in some form of violence or sexual abuse. Or we're portrayed as "the help," living to make life better for the Right Kind of People.

The kind of people who are making these pictures have absolutely no idea whatsoever what they're talking about, and while I'm not going to jump up and down and stamp my feet and hold my breath because I'm "offended," I'm also not going to spend any money to see them. I would, however, go out of my way to see a picture that portrayed people like me with honesty and dignity -- there have been a few that really stand out in recent years, including "City Island," "Two Family House, "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio," and most recently "Brooklyn," -- but there needs to be a lot more.

 

[Fading Fast]

... I would, however, go out of my way to see a picture that portrayed people like me with honesty and dignity -- there have been a few that really stand out in recent years, including "City Island," "Two Family House, "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio," and most recently "Brooklyn," -- but there needs to be a lot more.

I saw "City Island" and "Brooklyn" (book was similar to, but better than, the movie) and enjoyed both, but seem to remember "City Island" having a bit of the too-weird-but-wonderful people that Hollywood likes, but that in the real world tend to be disabled by their weirdness. It's been a long time since I've seen it, but "Mystic Pizza," seemed to have some of these characteristics of these movies as well.

How did these movies do from a revenue / profit perspective because as you know better than I do, if they made really good money, I'd bet Hollywood would make more of them as they love money even more than art or ideology? Maybe not everyone in Hollywood, but enough decisions makers / investors just want to make money, that I bet they'd make more if they were good bets.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"City Island" was a huge hit for us -- one of the top-grossing films of that summer, if I remember right, and "Defiance Ohio" and "Brooklyn" both did very well also. I can't say how they did nationally, but they were big hits around here, and not just with our "regular" audience. I can't speak for the multiplexes, but we'd take as many pictures like those as Hollywood is willing to dish out.

There was certainly a bit of studied quirkiness in "City Island," especially about the son with the fat-girl fetish, but the overall treatment was authentic -- nobody was exoticized, and the motivations played out as honest. I thought "Juno," which was another gigantic hit for us -- our third-highest-grossing film *ever* -- although a bit more suburban in its setting, and in spite of its highly-stylized dialogue style, had that same sort of down-to-earth honesty about it. It was about everyday people facing a real situation, not yet-another-whiny-white-college-grad-in-the-city Noah Baumbach-style thing.

"Mystic Pizza" is another good example of the kind of picture we'd like to see more of. I've often toyed with the idea of writing a screenplay myself, based on our lives at the theatre and the various little dramas that come up with the kids, and if I did it would be very much in that vein. But I won't write it unless I can play myself.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

This could also go in the "Terms which have disappeared" thread. The phrase is, "This is where we came in." When I was a boy in the '50s we paid little attention to starting times. We just went to a movie and sat down, no matter how long the feature had been running. They didn't clear the theater at the end of the film in those days. We just sat through the end, then the cartoon, previews, travelogue, maybe another feature and when we got to the part where we came in, we got up and left. As long as we saw the whole movie, the continuity meant nothing. It would drive me crazy to do that now, but children have no need of narrative continuity. They just need to experience the whole story.

 

[Fading Fast]

This could also go in the "Terms which have disappeared" thread. The phrase is, "This is where we came in." When I was a boy in the '50s we paid little attention to starting times. We just went to a movie and sat down, no matter how long the feature had been running. They didn't clear the theater at the end of the film in those days. We just sat through the end, then the cartoon, previews, travelogue, maybe another feature and when we got to the part where we came in, we got up and left. As long as we saw the whole movie, the continuity meant nothing. It would drive me crazy to do that now, but children have no need of narrative continuity. They just need to experience the whole story.

Somewhere on FL, I recently mentioned that my grandmother went to movies this way right up until she passed away in the '70s. Not all the time, but she definitely did and thought absolute nothing of seeing the last third of a movie first, sitting in the theater for twenty or so minutes for it to clear out and re-fill, then, watching the first two thirds and, then, leaving. I did this with her several times. Seems crazy, but it just shows how much cultural memes change over time.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Continuous-show policies were common from the 1910s to the early 1960s -- thruout the Era our theatre opened its doors at 11 am every day and ran continuous shows, with the last one ending around midnight. The idea actually pre-dates movies -- the Keith vaudeville circuit introduced it in its New England theatres in the 1890s, and it quickly caught on nationwide. Vaudeville actors hated it, because it meant four shows a day in some cases, which was an absolutely grueling schedule -- but movies came in cans and didn't complain.

 

[MikeKardec]

What Hollywood needs to do, from this exhibitor's point of view, is to get out of its gated-community/film-school mindset and get some people in positions of power who actually know what it's like to stand in line to buy a ticket. I get awful sick of movies, myself, about pretty bourgeois white people and their pretty bourgeois problems -- I'd like to see some pictures with the same kind of proletarian edge that Warner Bros. was known for in the thirties. Every time I do see a movie about working-class folk it's more than likely that they're involved in drugs, are hopeless alcoholics, or are involved in some form of violence or sexual abuse. Or we're portrayed as "the help," living to make life better for the Right Kind of People.

The kind of people who are making these pictures have absolutely no idea whatsoever what they're talking about, and while I'm not going to jump up and down and stamp my feet and hold my breath because I'm "offended," I'm also not going to spend any money to see them. I would, however, go out of my way to see a picture that portrayed people like me with honesty and dignity -- there have been a few that really stand out in recent years, including "City Island," "Two Family House, "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio," and most recently "Brooklyn," -- but there needs to be a lot more.

A lot of the greats of the "people's studio" years were sportswriters, they brought some of the qualities of 1920s sports journalism to 1930s-'50s Hollywood.

Many of the whiniest kids I run into have not been obviously pampered by the generic background of their home. In other words they might be spoiled rotten but it's not because their parents were rich. There is a kind of expectation that the world will be handed to them on a silver platter, however. Some of the older ones (this type has been obvious in the touristy/hippy towns of southwest Colorado for a decade, and only rearing it's head more slowly elsewhere) often have a pretty good education, meaning good grades from decent schools (no ivy league), they work service jobs so they can play on and off all year and they just want everyone else to you-know deliver a world that's environmentally perfect without their having to become engineers or physicists and doing it themselves. So they are not really 'upper" class, they could do better jobs but they don't yet they DO work hard in the part time service work that they have chosen. They seem to be preparing for terminal adolescence and expecting a parent or an autocrat to hand them the world they think they deserve. They are too good for the world they've been given and very assured of their own intelligence. I am VERY pleased to hear this is not something that is found everywhere! Maybe I'll move to your neck of the woods. I love the company of people younger than I am ... just not this particular sort!

The community of Studio Executives, Producers, Agents, Managers and now Writers and Directors is on it's several-ith generation of being walled of from the world. Few come in from the outside having done something truly different and many have parents who were born in the shark tank. Plenty of managerial types still arrive direct from those film-schools but more are MBAs and the like. If you try to talk about how something is done they get irritated really fast. That's what those ... worker people do, whoever they are, the ones in t-shirts and ball caps. The social scene is so extreme it's like the outside world isn't even there and there is so much infighting that it's hard for them to learn from failures in the marketplace. Basically, the lack of performance of a particular film can't be "punished" because very often the person responsible has either killed his way to a higher position or been killed off himself. If you move up quickly enough your mistakes might not catch up with you ... and if you're never on record with an actual opinion it's hard for it to be used against you. What a world!

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

"City Island" was a huge hit for us -- one of the top-grossing films of that summer, if I remember right, and "Defiance Ohio" and "Brooklyn" both did very well also. I can't say how they did nationally, but they were big hits around here, and not just with our "regular" audience. I can't speak for the multiplexes, but we'd take as many pictures like those as Hollywood is willing to dish out.

There was certainly a bit of studied quirkiness in "City Island," especially about the son with the fat-girl fetish, but the overall treatment was authentic -- nobody was exoticized, and the motivations played out as honest. I thought "Juno," which was another gigantic hit for us -- our third-highest-grossing film *ever* -- although a bit more suburban in its setting, and in spite of its highly-stylized dialogue style, had that same sort of down-to-earth honesty about it. It was about everyday people facing a real situation, not yet-another-whiny-white-college-grad-in-the-city Noah Baumbach-style thing.

"Mystic Pizza" is another good example of the kind of picture we'd like to see more of. I've often toyed with the idea of writing a screenplay myself, based on our lives at the theatre and the various little dramas that come up with the kids, and if I did it would be very much in that vein. But I won't write it unless I can play myself.

Let's say your schedule won't permit you playing yourself in the film. Who should be called upon to fill in?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Unfortunately, Patsy Kelly is no longer living, but she'd have been my first choice. Are there any loud-mouth, sarcastic middle-aged actresses out there now who know how to take a pratfall?

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Christine Baranski, but I'm not sure about the pratfall part.

 

[Fading Fast]

Unfortunately, Patsy Kelly is no longer living, but she'd have been my first choice. Are there any loud-mouth, sarcastic middle-aged actresses out there now who know how to take a pratfall?

Frances McDormand?

 

[EngProf]

Somewhere on FL, I recently mentioned that my grandmother went to movies this way right up until she passed away in the '70s. Not all the time, but she definitely did and thought absolute nothing of seeing the last third of a movie first, sitting in the theater for twenty or so minutes for it to clear out and re-fill, then, watching the first two thirds and, then, leaving. I did this with her several times. Seems crazy, but it just shows how much cultural memes change over time.

I remember doing that - coming in at any old time to a movie as a kid with my parents and waiting for the, "This is where we came in..." (1950's), but it seems so odd to me now that I almost don't trust my memories of doing so.

 

[Fading Fast]

I remember doing that - coming in at any old time to a movie as a kid with my parents and waiting for the, "This is where we came in..." (1950's), but it seems so odd to me now that I almost don't trust my memories of doing so.

I think part of the cultural change is that movies back in the Golden Era were entertainment to the vast majority of the public and the studios thought of their movies as products to entertain (sell seats) - so, in that environment, who cares when you come in as long as you paid for your ticket and enjoyed the show (wherever you happened to start watching from).

But now some segment of the public and some (most) movie makers (independent producers / directors / writers) who sell their talents / ideas to studios but many who don't work in a studio factory view their movies as art and both groups want the viewer to experience the movie (art) as intended by the creator - to be seen in full from the beginning.

 

[BlueTrain]

Gosh! I mean, GOSH! I don't agree with very much of this.

To be sure, there have been changes in the entertainment industry (or industries) since, say, 1945. And not many have been mentioned in this thread. To be sure, however, it was the advent of television, or more correctly, wide ownership of television that had the biggest impact, bar none. Television had been introduced before WWII but only after the war did it become common. Commercial radio was barely 25 years old by then. Motion picture theaters began appearing probably just after the turn of the century.

The main change, I think, is that people quit going out as much. They still went to the movies, though. I, for one, showed up and stood in line so I could be inside when it started. I tried to wait until the movie began before I started eating my popcorn, too. Mostly they were B-movies, too, meaning only an hour long, but there were newsreels, cartoons, previews of coming attractions and sometimes a double-feature. I went for all that, not because it was some kind of shared experience. That certainly wouldn't have been true at a drive-in theater. My father and adult relatives rarely went to the movies, if at all.

Note here that I'm relating to all this through small-town experiences. Even a small town might have more than one motion picture theater. We had two (across the street from one another), plus two drive-in theaters, one on either side of town. None of them are there now. And you could always go to another town for more theaters. But we had no regular stage where there could be a stage show of any sort, except in the schools.

I think most of us missed the era when you could go out to a nice place for an evening of dining and dancing--to live music. If there was a pretentious hotel in town, and there was where I lived, that's where you could go to celebrate New Years, if you did that sort of thing. Or for a pleasant Saturday evening. The operator of said hotel also ran a sort of amusement part about five or ten miles outside of town that had a pool, live entertainment, a few carnival type rides and even cabins. I remember all that, even the live entertainment, but by then it had seen it's better days. That's all gone now and I left, too. I also missed the vaudeville days, too, and the travelling entertainers. Many of the earlier TV shows, like Ed Sullivan, were pure vaudeville.

Although television changed things, I don't think it changed the movies all that much. They were still thriving while I lived there. The first motion picture theater in my hometown opened in about 1907, according to one source, in the neighborhood near the train station. It was called the Lyric. Another theater opened five years later called the Dixie. Yet another theater opened in 1924 but it only lasted one year. But one of the movie theaters I patronized was named the Royal and opened in 1917. In was in a building owned by the Von Court family and Mr. Von Court changed the name to the La Von. The other theater in town opened in 1937 (on October 15th) and was still going strong when I moved away. As soon as I left town, everything started to fall apart.

So whatever happened to B-movies? Turn on your television. Motion picture studios that had been turning out B-movies at the rate of one a week were perfectly organized for producing television shows.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Television came slower to most of the country than a lot of people realize. There was a Federal Communications Commission freeze on the granting of new television licenses in 1948, intended to slow down the spread of TV until issues relating to channel allocations and the development of color and UHF could be sorted out. No town or city that didn't have TV by 1948 would get it until the end of 1952 -- and most of the communities that had television by 1948 were urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest, and parts of the West Coast. For most of the rest of the country the "TV explosion" of the early fifties was something you read about in two-page spreads in Look magazine.

When the freeze was lifted there was a flurry of construction -- Maine got its first TV station in 1953 -- but it wasn't until 1955 that over half of all American homes had television, and by the end of the 1950s TV penetration was just over 83 percent. It was the latter half of the fifties, not the first half, that saw television really take over the country as opposed to just taking over New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The 1953-54 radio season was the last in which the nighttime listening audience exceeded the viewing audience.

How Hollywood reacted to television didn't have a lot of connection to viewing figures, though, and the early fifties saw a lot of experimentation and gimmickry as a way of distracting attention from the new medium. The 3-D craze of 1950-53 was the most ridiculous example of this, but a more lasting change was the adoption of wide-screen processes. The 1.85 x 1 aspect ratio was introduced in the spring of 1953, and would become the industry standard by the 1960s, replacing the old 1.37 x 1 "Academy Ratio" that had dominated since the early talkie era. Experiments with more radical wide-screen processes like Cinemascope, Vistavision and Cinerama also came out of this era, with the 2.35 x 1 "Scope" ratio surviving to the present day as a legacy of the period. The idea of the big splashy "roadshow" film at high-ticket admission prices was a dominant thing in this period, and remained so into the 1960s.

B-picture units at MGM and Warners were converted for television in the mid-1950s, but B's remained a going thing into the early sixties at lower budget studios like Columbia and Universal, both of which continued to produce B films alongside their television departments. It was the production of shorts that really fell off -- in 1958, the Three Stooges shorts at Columbia came to an end as the last surviving live-action two-reel comedy series. Cartoon production ended at MGM in 1958, but Warners, Famous Studios (Paramount), Terrytoons (Fox), and Walter Lantz (Universal) continued to produce cartoon shorts into the 1960s, with Lantz continuing to turn out new releases until 1972. Newsreels also lasted a lot longer than most people realize -- only Pathe and Paramount shut down their newsreel operations in the 1950s. Fox Movietone lasted until 1963, Universal News until 1967, and Hearst-MGM News Of The Day until 1968. The advertised single-admission double-feature was dead at "hardtop" theatres by the end of the 1960s, but it lingered at drive-ins until the 1980s.

 

[BlueTrain]

That's interesting. We were probably the last house on our block to get a television set when I was little. It was a portable and longer than it was wide. Much of the programming was recycled movies-B-movies, that is. (I'm using the term B-movie to mean an hour long film). My early television viewing (Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers!) was at a neighbor's house. When we did get a TV, sometime in the late 1950s, we still only got one station. You needed a really high aerial to pick up the more distant stations. The up-to-the-minute technology at the time was an aerial that could be rotated in the direction needed to pick up the signal from a given station. We never had one. My childhood was somewhat disadvantaged because we didn't get CBS.

I can only barely remember newsreels but I'm surprised they lasted as long as some of them did, longer than I realized. The interesting thing about them is the way news that you see on Yahoo or MSN almost exactly parallels what you saw in a newsreel. In fact, some of the events are the same; only the dates have changed. There would be something about the saber-rattling in Europe or the Far East, something about new hats in New York, something about the floods on the Mississippi (it's always flooded, you know), bathing suits in Miami or Atlantic City, something about the economy perhaps or politics. I always wondered who did the voice-over. It was good, just like the narration on Walt Disney nature films.

When the major studios shut down their cartoon departments, it sort of created opportunities for other up and coming artists like Hanna and Barbera. If people want to see something, someone will produce it, if possible.

Television keeps changing, of course. There is never any reason to think nothing will change, although newlywed husbands think their wife won't change (The wife thinks her husband will--but he doesn't). The biggest change was probably the explosion of channels, but which has not been matched by an explosion of talent. I think movies are better than ever, though, some of them, anyway, not that I go often. I'm not so sure about television but I scarcely watch it. I do miss the variety shows that used to be on years ago but for all I know, there may be musical variety shows on now. The best musical variety show I've seen recently has been Viva Volksmusik, a Swiss production.