Here's one constant in Hollywood – even more so than gluten free frozen yoghurt stores, buses unloading small town beauty queens and rehab – everything is always getting worse.
No matter when you started working here, you missed the glory days by a decade or so. Today old timers will tell you how much better things were in the 80s. The studio dished out lavish treatment, platters of coke were delivered to your office (and your assistants didn't sue you for sexual harassment when you asked if you could snort it off their breasts) and movies didn't cost so goddamn much you had to partner with private equity firms or the Chinese Ministry of Culture.
Now go back in time and listen to a producer in the 80s whine about their own lot. The studios were only bankrolling big sequels full of special effects and stars who – thanks to all the power the goddamned agents were getting – were demanding tens of millions a picture. Not like in the 70s, when the corporations hadn't taken over and the movies were full of real stories, goddammit!
Now go back a bit further and look around Hollywood in the 60s and 70s, where the panels are sloughing off the fading Hollywood sign overlooking an unkempt, broken city. The few creative (and commercial) triumphs like The Godfather and The French Connection will go down in history, but all the town can talk about is the financial carnage giving the corporations the leverage to swoop in and buy the studios while cinemas sit empty and everyone stays home enjoying the new TV boom thanks to cable. If only things were like the 1940s, goddammit, when stars were mere employees and knew their place and you could shoot everything on a soundstage in Burbank, the weather and traffic be dammned!
You get the idea.
Every time there's a few high profile flops like there was in 2013 there's talk of 'paradigm change' and 'the broken system' and this year they were hard to ignore. Soderbergh's state of independent cinema address, in which he asserted that movies were 'under assault' by studios, and Lucas and Spielberg's use of the word 'implosion' became the default narrative thanks to the profile and legitimacy of the speakers and spread the appropriate amount of authoritative panic.
So it was not only very nice but kind of a relief to read recent comments by John Kilik, a producer with credits as varied as The Hunger Games, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, W and This Must Be The Place to his name.
Standing against almost the entire industry, Kilik did the keynote presentation at the Independent Filmmaker Project's IFP Market, and he reminded us all of some arresting truths.
'It hasn't happened,' Kilik said about the chorus line of pronouncements about the death of the industry this year, 'what has happened is that we now have more ways to make movies and more ways to get people to see them than ever before.'
Kilik's right, and the proof is in the pudding. If you're a casual moviegoer who lines up on at the multiplex on a Friday night to decide what to see, you're probably going to be swayed by Attack of the Man Of Steel in the After Earth Pacific Rim in 5D thanks to the four hundred and eleventy squillion dollar marketing campaign complete with the themed soft drink cup.
If you watch movies for a living, you're going to see a lot of gems in amongst the CGI dross, and you should come away a lot less jaded about the pap movie audiences are fed than the casual moviegoer above.
As Kilik put it; 'Yes it's true that movies have become a crass commercial commodity at times and studios have crowded these spectacles into theaters at a disproportional rate. But it's also true that sensitive, brave, personal, and courageous work is being done everyday. For every tent pole being built pixel by pixel in a Hollywood Laboratory, there is a young filmmaker like Benh Zeitlin going into the bathtub of New Orleans with a small cast and crew and a 16mm camera to create a uniquely personal vision. Beasts of the Southern Wild found its way all the way to the White House and to the Oscars. For every sequel that's being churned out, there is something new and original fighting to be born. It's never been harder and it's never been easier.'
Then came Kilik's kicker – 'I guess it's been like that all along.'
It's as tempting as it is lazy to fall back on the same tired stereotypes about the industry as every other producer, film writer and wannabe director – that movie executives are backstabbing idiots who care more about the finish on their Maserati than making movies, that a $300m 3D sci-fi action movie only making $200m means there's something fundamentally wrong with the movie industry, etc etc etc.
As everyone searches for the next Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Benh Zeitlin or Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station) – just like they once did the next Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino or Steven Soderbegh himself – the only certainty is just like the scribe once said; in Hollywood, nobody knows anything.
Read Kilik's speech in its entirety here.
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