M. Night Shylamalan’s latest film, “The Happening,” is coming out soon [see the trailer].
“His career,” the Times writes in an article today, “illustrates one of the stubborn paradoxes of Hollywood: the film industry loves the myth of the auteur, the rugged individual filmmaker who plays by his own rules, until faced with the reality. Around the time that “The Sixth Sense” was released, this was a particularly potent idea, as studios tried to build brands around star directors like Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers (who made “The Matrix”), hoping their names would sell movies the way Hitchcock’s once did.”
The reporter follows that summation with a doozy: “But the studios also need to heed the brutal realities of the movie business.”
But aren’t the studios themselves “the brutal realities of the movie business”?
The article reminded me of Larry Mcurtry’s take on Hollywood from a few years ago in his review of “The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood” by Edward Jay Epstein.
Here’s an excerpt from “The Grand Acquisitors” in The New York Review of Books.
“Of more relevance to today’s Hollywood,” McMurtry writes, “are the legions who pursue what Mr. Epstein rather grandly calls “The Learning Imperative”:
Studios are finely tuned learning networks. Faced with a constant stream of reports on how relevant audiences in different markets are reacting to their films and other products, they analyze the various elements—including marketing, stars, and music—and, along this learning curve, adjust their subsequent decisions accordingly.
Which is to say that, like sorcerers of old, they read entrails, with mixed results of course. The cruel truth is that only the public knows what it loves, and then not until it sees it. Giant, hugely expensive flops continue to thud into the theaters season after season; why they were made no man can explain.”
