MattBrady
06-03-2003, 01:08 PM
<center><a href="http://www.newsarama.com/Thousand_Flowers_index.htm"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/flowers_banner.jpg" width="475" height="75" border="0"></a></center>
<center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center><center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center><center>Installment 19</center><center>by Stuart Moore</center>
The Kids in All of Us
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/SWars.jpg" width="250" height="383" align="right" border="0">If you didn’t like Star Wars in 1977, you might as well have just marched yourself off a cliff and saved yourself some pain. I’m serious -- you couldn’t get away from the thing. Toys, games, comics, mall openings: All were suddenly filled with droids, spaceships, women with funny bun-hair, wise fighters in Kung-Fu bathrobes, and asthmatics in menacing black armor. Entertainment journalism hadn’t yet developed into the all-pervasive force it is today, but the Force was with all of us, like it or not.
I was more of a Star Trek fan myself -- enough so that I defended the turgid Star Trek: The Motion Picture when it came out, a couple years later. But this column isn’t about my embarrassing mistakes. It’s about Hollywood’s.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=00005 0" target="_blank"> Last time</a>, we discussed the shift in Hollywood, in the early ‘70s, from the big blockbuster movies that had tanked so badly in the ‘60s to cheaper, independent-style films. Star Wars, which itself was made for a modest $9.5 million, proved a catalyst that turned the wheel back in the other direction. In The Devil’s Candy, a fascinating account of the making of the horrific film version of Bonfire of the Vanities, author Julie Salomon discusses the rise of MBAs and money--craziness through the ‘80s:
“Though no one could pinpoint exactly when the insanity had begun, everyone agreed that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were somehow responsible. When Star Wars and E.T. broke the $100 million mark at the box office, studios became obsessed with the big score. A string of modest successes would no longer be satisfactory -- not with the lure of the jackpot.”
Along with this came a return to “pure entertainment” as a goal in films, turning away from socially-conscious, thematically ambitious works. Some of this was a matter of sanitizing the product to fit new business models, as film critic Pauline Kael pointed out in 1980:
“I think a lot of what’s happened is simply that the movie companies have been able to take the risk factor out of financing movies, by selling them in advance to TV, international TV, cable, Home Box Office, as well as selling them in advance to theaters. They will not take a risk on projects that are not desirable for TV…They are terrified of anything that will not readily satisfy the networks.”
But there were other reasons why the movies shifted toward pure entertainment -- chief among them being that, arguably, they’d gone too far in the other direction. Film historian Peter Biskind put it this way: “[A]fter half a decade of character- or theme-driven movies, unhappy endings, fractured narratives riven by flashbacks and psychedelic dream sequences, Lucas reasserted the pleasures of straightforward, unironic storytelling, along with accessible two-dimensional characters whose adventures ended happily.”
Science fiction writer Tom Reamy was even more direct: “The way to read Star Wars’ success is fairly simple: It’s an overreaction to twenty years of the movies telling us everything is shit and there’s nothing we can do about it…If [Hollywood] starts entertaining again and stops doomsaying the people will be there again.”
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/Lucas.jpg" width="250" height="383" align="left" border="0">George Lucas himself stated very directly in promotional interviews for the film: “Young people today don’t have a fantasy life any more, not the way we did. All they’ve got is Kojak and Dirty Harry. There are all these kids running around wanting to be killer cops. The films they see are movies of disasters, insecurity and realistic violence…I wanted to give young people some sort of faraway, exotic environment for their imagination to run free.”
That sounds like a worthy goal -- and, applied to a single film, it was. But, as always, Hollywood tends to overreact to success, and Star Wars’ success proved chilling to ambitious, socially conscious filmmakers. Peter Biskind describes both sides of the debate in equally blistering terms:
“Lucas said he wanted to make a film for ‘the kids in all of us.’…To infantilize the audience of the sixties and empower the audience of the seventies, to reconstitute the spectator as child, Lucas and Spielberg had to obliterate years of sophisticated, adult moviegoing habits. Star Wars came on the heels of nearly a decade of wise-ass, cynical, self-conscious moviemaking.”
Socially conscious art and thrill-ride entertainment don’t have to be mutually exclusive, of course. Personally, I’m most drawn to genre works that transcend their boundaries, providing the excitement of a spaceship battle, a six-gun fight, or a mafia showdown, while using those tropes to shed light on contemporary issues -- and, hopefully, to reach people who’d never read Finnegan’s Wake, or Infinite Jests, for that matter. In films, that might mean Chinatown, Repo Man, or The Maltese Falcon. In books: Philip K. Dick, Charles Willeford, Stephen King. On television, The Sopranos, Hill Street Blues, or Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And in comics, Preacher, Sandman, Watchmen, X-Statix, American Flagg!, and countless others.
Speaking of comics…
The late ‘70s were dire times at both major comics companies. Bright spots included X-Men, Howard the Duck, and the Englehart/Rogers Detective Comics, but they were pretty thin on the ground. The newsstand market had deteriorated badly, and by most reports, the publishers assumed comics would die out completely soon. Even the printing quality was shot to hell, when plastic printing plates replaced the traditional metal. Nobody seemed to care too much.
By the ‘80s, an entirely new economic factor -- the Direct Market -- pulled comics onto a very different path than the movies were taking. (See installments <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=00003 4" target="_blank"> 13</a>, <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=00003 6" target="_blank"> 14</a>, and <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=00004 6" target="_blank"> 17</a>.) While movies became blander, comics began to blossom, freed from the necessity to provide acceptable content for newsstands.
Like -- well, like almost every decade -- the ‘80s is remembered by comics fans as better than it was. Yes, new publishers provided a haven for quality work, and pushed the majors into new business models. But there was a lot of crap published, too. Pull out any old Amazing Heroes Preview Special and see how much of it is Watchmen and how much is…everything else.
But the Direct Market did make possible a lot of good work. These things come around, of course; the early ‘90s provided a lot of shocks to that system. Changes in the distribution network, in particular, have made it a lot harder for a small publisher to compete on level ground with DC and Marvel.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/8mm_poster.jpg" width="200" height="300" align="right" border="0">Films cycled back around, too -- in the other direction. Sex, Lies and Videotape and Slacker ushered in a new era of indy filmmaking, jumpstarted by Reservoir Dogs and the new affordability of digital video as a filmmaking medium. The new technologies, including DV and CGI storyboarding, have not only provided a cheaper entry point for new directors, but also a playground for veterans to experiment with smaller films such as Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal, David Fincher’s Panic Room, and various films by Joel Schumacher and Richard Linklater.
Oddly, the first Star Wars sequel -- The Empire Strikes Back, released in 1980 -- was a significantly more serious, dark film than its predecessor. Empire wasn’t exactly a ground-breaking analysis of social issues; it maintained the thrill-ride look and pace set by the first film. But Empire placed its protagonists in a generally grimmer world and played with some weighty metaphors for the hard choices adulthood thrusts upon us. In most ways, it was more of a ‘70s film than Star Wars.
The trend didn’t last. With Return of the Jedi (1983), the Star Wars series embraced the empty ‘80s moviemaking ethos full-bore. The original film may have had pure thrills as its main goal, but it had its core a resonant coming-of-age story -- a large part of the reason it appealed so universally. Jedi, on the other hand, squandered every possible dramatic or metaphoric opportunity in favor of selling teddy bears.
Fortunately, things do come around. There’s an old saying: “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a while.” It’s every bit as true of films and comics. And hey -- if we let every little disappointment put us off our entertainment of choice, most of us would never have stuck with comics this long. Right?
**
Very special thanks to my wife, writer Liz Sonneborn, for advice and access to her library of film-criticism books this time around. Speaking of which, here’s the
Bibliography:
Pat Aufderheide, “Pauline Kael on the New Hollywood” (1980), from CONVERSATIONS WITH PAULINE KAEL, edited by Will Brantley (University Press of Mississippi, 1996)
Peter Biskind, EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS (Simon & Schuster, 1998)
Peter Biskind, “The Last Crusade,” from SEEING THROUGH MOVIES, edited by Mark Crispin Miller (Pantheon, 1990)
Tom Reamy, “Everything Is Shit and There’s Nothing We Can Do About It!: Thoughts on the Star Wars Phenomenon” (1977) from TRUMPET #12, Summer 1981
Julie Salamon, THE DEVIL’S CANDY: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES GOES TO HOLLYWOOD (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)
“George Lucas on STAR WARS,” SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW #24, February 1978
Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999.
My current comics work: JUSTICE LEAGUE ADVENTURES #22, coming in August, features a nice stand-alone story spotlighting Green Lantern and Hawkgirl; details and a great cover image at <a href="http://www.dccomics.com/comics/dc_display.html?cm_dc_itemCode=jladv22&month=August" target="_blank">http://www.dccomics.com/comics/dc_display.html?cm_dc_itemCode=jladv22&month=August</a> . Next up is LONE, a new future-western series from Dark Horse/Rocket Comics in September. More details on these and other new projects, including GIANT ROBOT WARRIORS, VAMPIRELLA, and PARA, at: <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=00026 1" target="_blank">http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=00026 1</a> . See you in two weeks…
<center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center><center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center><center>Installment 19</center><center>by Stuart Moore</center>
The Kids in All of Us
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/SWars.jpg" width="250" height="383" align="right" border="0">If you didn’t like Star Wars in 1977, you might as well have just marched yourself off a cliff and saved yourself some pain. I’m serious -- you couldn’t get away from the thing. Toys, games, comics, mall openings: All were suddenly filled with droids, spaceships, women with funny bun-hair, wise fighters in Kung-Fu bathrobes, and asthmatics in menacing black armor. Entertainment journalism hadn’t yet developed into the all-pervasive force it is today, but the Force was with all of us, like it or not.
I was more of a Star Trek fan myself -- enough so that I defended the turgid Star Trek: The Motion Picture when it came out, a couple years later. But this column isn’t about my embarrassing mistakes. It’s about Hollywood’s.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=00005 0" target="_blank"> Last time</a>, we discussed the shift in Hollywood, in the early ‘70s, from the big blockbuster movies that had tanked so badly in the ‘60s to cheaper, independent-style films. Star Wars, which itself was made for a modest $9.5 million, proved a catalyst that turned the wheel back in the other direction. In The Devil’s Candy, a fascinating account of the making of the horrific film version of Bonfire of the Vanities, author Julie Salomon discusses the rise of MBAs and money--craziness through the ‘80s:
“Though no one could pinpoint exactly when the insanity had begun, everyone agreed that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were somehow responsible. When Star Wars and E.T. broke the $100 million mark at the box office, studios became obsessed with the big score. A string of modest successes would no longer be satisfactory -- not with the lure of the jackpot.”
Along with this came a return to “pure entertainment” as a goal in films, turning away from socially-conscious, thematically ambitious works. Some of this was a matter of sanitizing the product to fit new business models, as film critic Pauline Kael pointed out in 1980:
“I think a lot of what’s happened is simply that the movie companies have been able to take the risk factor out of financing movies, by selling them in advance to TV, international TV, cable, Home Box Office, as well as selling them in advance to theaters. They will not take a risk on projects that are not desirable for TV…They are terrified of anything that will not readily satisfy the networks.”
But there were other reasons why the movies shifted toward pure entertainment -- chief among them being that, arguably, they’d gone too far in the other direction. Film historian Peter Biskind put it this way: “[A]fter half a decade of character- or theme-driven movies, unhappy endings, fractured narratives riven by flashbacks and psychedelic dream sequences, Lucas reasserted the pleasures of straightforward, unironic storytelling, along with accessible two-dimensional characters whose adventures ended happily.”
Science fiction writer Tom Reamy was even more direct: “The way to read Star Wars’ success is fairly simple: It’s an overreaction to twenty years of the movies telling us everything is shit and there’s nothing we can do about it…If [Hollywood] starts entertaining again and stops doomsaying the people will be there again.”
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/Lucas.jpg" width="250" height="383" align="left" border="0">George Lucas himself stated very directly in promotional interviews for the film: “Young people today don’t have a fantasy life any more, not the way we did. All they’ve got is Kojak and Dirty Harry. There are all these kids running around wanting to be killer cops. The films they see are movies of disasters, insecurity and realistic violence…I wanted to give young people some sort of faraway, exotic environment for their imagination to run free.”
That sounds like a worthy goal -- and, applied to a single film, it was. But, as always, Hollywood tends to overreact to success, and Star Wars’ success proved chilling to ambitious, socially conscious filmmakers. Peter Biskind describes both sides of the debate in equally blistering terms:
“Lucas said he wanted to make a film for ‘the kids in all of us.’…To infantilize the audience of the sixties and empower the audience of the seventies, to reconstitute the spectator as child, Lucas and Spielberg had to obliterate years of sophisticated, adult moviegoing habits. Star Wars came on the heels of nearly a decade of wise-ass, cynical, self-conscious moviemaking.”
Socially conscious art and thrill-ride entertainment don’t have to be mutually exclusive, of course. Personally, I’m most drawn to genre works that transcend their boundaries, providing the excitement of a spaceship battle, a six-gun fight, or a mafia showdown, while using those tropes to shed light on contemporary issues -- and, hopefully, to reach people who’d never read Finnegan’s Wake, or Infinite Jests, for that matter. In films, that might mean Chinatown, Repo Man, or The Maltese Falcon. In books: Philip K. Dick, Charles Willeford, Stephen King. On television, The Sopranos, Hill Street Blues, or Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And in comics, Preacher, Sandman, Watchmen, X-Statix, American Flagg!, and countless others.
Speaking of comics…
The late ‘70s were dire times at both major comics companies. Bright spots included X-Men, Howard the Duck, and the Englehart/Rogers Detective Comics, but they were pretty thin on the ground. The newsstand market had deteriorated badly, and by most reports, the publishers assumed comics would die out completely soon. Even the printing quality was shot to hell, when plastic printing plates replaced the traditional metal. Nobody seemed to care too much.
By the ‘80s, an entirely new economic factor -- the Direct Market -- pulled comics onto a very different path than the movies were taking. (See installments <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=00003 4" target="_blank"> 13</a>, <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=00003 6" target="_blank"> 14</a>, and <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=00004 6" target="_blank"> 17</a>.) While movies became blander, comics began to blossom, freed from the necessity to provide acceptable content for newsstands.
Like -- well, like almost every decade -- the ‘80s is remembered by comics fans as better than it was. Yes, new publishers provided a haven for quality work, and pushed the majors into new business models. But there was a lot of crap published, too. Pull out any old Amazing Heroes Preview Special and see how much of it is Watchmen and how much is…everything else.
But the Direct Market did make possible a lot of good work. These things come around, of course; the early ‘90s provided a lot of shocks to that system. Changes in the distribution network, in particular, have made it a lot harder for a small publisher to compete on level ground with DC and Marvel.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/8mm_poster.jpg" width="200" height="300" align="right" border="0">Films cycled back around, too -- in the other direction. Sex, Lies and Videotape and Slacker ushered in a new era of indy filmmaking, jumpstarted by Reservoir Dogs and the new affordability of digital video as a filmmaking medium. The new technologies, including DV and CGI storyboarding, have not only provided a cheaper entry point for new directors, but also a playground for veterans to experiment with smaller films such as Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal, David Fincher’s Panic Room, and various films by Joel Schumacher and Richard Linklater.
Oddly, the first Star Wars sequel -- The Empire Strikes Back, released in 1980 -- was a significantly more serious, dark film than its predecessor. Empire wasn’t exactly a ground-breaking analysis of social issues; it maintained the thrill-ride look and pace set by the first film. But Empire placed its protagonists in a generally grimmer world and played with some weighty metaphors for the hard choices adulthood thrusts upon us. In most ways, it was more of a ‘70s film than Star Wars.
The trend didn’t last. With Return of the Jedi (1983), the Star Wars series embraced the empty ‘80s moviemaking ethos full-bore. The original film may have had pure thrills as its main goal, but it had its core a resonant coming-of-age story -- a large part of the reason it appealed so universally. Jedi, on the other hand, squandered every possible dramatic or metaphoric opportunity in favor of selling teddy bears.
Fortunately, things do come around. There’s an old saying: “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a while.” It’s every bit as true of films and comics. And hey -- if we let every little disappointment put us off our entertainment of choice, most of us would never have stuck with comics this long. Right?
**
Very special thanks to my wife, writer Liz Sonneborn, for advice and access to her library of film-criticism books this time around. Speaking of which, here’s the
Bibliography:
Pat Aufderheide, “Pauline Kael on the New Hollywood” (1980), from CONVERSATIONS WITH PAULINE KAEL, edited by Will Brantley (University Press of Mississippi, 1996)
Peter Biskind, EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS (Simon & Schuster, 1998)
Peter Biskind, “The Last Crusade,” from SEEING THROUGH MOVIES, edited by Mark Crispin Miller (Pantheon, 1990)
Tom Reamy, “Everything Is Shit and There’s Nothing We Can Do About It!: Thoughts on the Star Wars Phenomenon” (1977) from TRUMPET #12, Summer 1981
Julie Salamon, THE DEVIL’S CANDY: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES GOES TO HOLLYWOOD (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)
“George Lucas on STAR WARS,” SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW #24, February 1978
Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999.
My current comics work: JUSTICE LEAGUE ADVENTURES #22, coming in August, features a nice stand-alone story spotlighting Green Lantern and Hawkgirl; details and a great cover image at <a href="http://www.dccomics.com/comics/dc_display.html?cm_dc_itemCode=jladv22&month=August" target="_blank">http://www.dccomics.com/comics/dc_display.html?cm_dc_itemCode=jladv22&month=August</a> . Next up is LONE, a new future-western series from Dark Horse/Rocket Comics in September. More details on these and other new projects, including GIANT ROBOT WARRIORS, VAMPIRELLA, and PARA, at: <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=00026 1" target="_blank">http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=00026 1</a> . See you in two weeks…