Big word came down yesterday about a couple of eagerly anticipated releases—Sofia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring” has been acquired by the new distribution company A24 and will come out in June, and Amy Seimetz’s Southern road neo-noir, “Sun Don’t Shine,” will be brought out by Factory 25 on April 26th, simultaneously in theatres (I’d suspect only a handful) and on nationwide video on demand. The year’s-end best-films list is already getting crowded. I haven’t seen Coppola’s film yet, but I can attest to the great merit of “Sun Don’t Shine,” and there are a few other things coming very soon—including the Taviani brothers’ “Caesar Must Die,” Abbas Kiarostami’s “Like Someone in Love,” Raul Ruiz’s “Night Across the Street,” all arriving in February, and a few other films that I’ve seen, domestic and foreign, Hollywood and independent, that will be released a little later in the year and that are sure to be among the best films to come out this year. In short, 2013 is already a very good year; we’re living in a golden age of cinematic quality and quantity, and distributors are—not unfailingly, but nonetheless diligently and courageously—making a remarkable range of excellent films available (even if it’s the ones that remain unavailable that stick in the craw).
Chatting recently on Twitter about the bad old days—the late eighties and, above all, the nineties, when much of the best of world cinema failed to get U.S. distribution and many worthwhile independent films fell through the cracks, too—I heard from Steven Gaydos, the executive editor of Variety (and also a screenwriter, notably of Monte Hellman’s “Road to Nowhere”), who generously sent along a remarkable article that he wrote on this very subject, in 1992, for the Los Angeles Reader. The copiously reported piece carefully parses the reasons for the downturn in distribution. It makes for terrific reading, and it’s worth noting some of the more salient remarks from industry insiders that Gaydos passes along—and to contrast them with the current-day state of things.
The first question is whether demand for foreign films had decreased. The director, producer, and distributor Roger Corman told Gaydos, “the 1950s and 1960s were the time of the art film’s greatest influence. After that, the influence waned. Hollywood absorbed the lessons of the European films and incorporated those lessons into their films.” In other words, viewers could see something of the essence of the European art cinema in the Hollywood movies of the seventies. Corman is right about that, with several caveats: European cinema didn’t stand still, either, and its films of the seventies and eighties also built—in radically different ways—on the same heritage. And the so-called art film, which was never just a matter of European cinema, increasingly became an actual world cinema—albeit one that struggled to gain wide recognition.
Corman added that, “as the market for specialty films has either stagnated or actually declined,” the costs of distribution increased. He, seconded by the distributor Lloyd Cohn, blamed sales agents and producers overseas—as Cohn said, “foreign producers have a skewed view of what the U.S. theatrical market is worth. They ask for nonrefundable advances that are completely unrealistic.” I had some personal experience of this. During a trip to Paris in 1995, I was delegated by a distributor friend to contact sales agents and producers there about some noteworthy films they represented—including the films of Kiarostami, none of which had been distributed here yet. The distributor, impecunious but hard-working, couldn’t pay much in the way of an advance; the sales agent had high expectations. As a result, no deal was made, and Kiarostami remained, for quite a while, under-recognized here.
I suspect it’s still expensive to release a movie, but what exists now is streaming video. The exhibitor Robert Laemmle told Gaydos, “The repertory houses died because of video,” but a new generation of movie lovers who are accustomed to watching movies on their computers increasingly go out to watch movies on the big screen, and—at least in New York—the repertory scene is booming. Meanwhile, video makes it possible for movies that might otherwise remain unseen or hardly-seen to reach viewers across the country—if those viewers become aware of the works in question. And that’s where critics and editors come in. Even then, Jeff Lipsky, a leading art-house distributor (now a director), told Gaydos that arts sections increasingly bent coverage toward Hollywood celebrities—“It’s the newspapers that are shutting down the readership’s interest in obscure foreign films”—and added, “Who cares about the p & l [profit and loss] on films except the people who read MCA stockholder reports? … The more attention you pay to it, the more people follow it. I mean, it’s one thing if ‘Wayne’s World’ (1992) does a hundred million, but the last thing you want to do is talk about it.”
On the one hand, the Internet makes it possible to get a discussion going—in effect, to force the hand of publication’s editors by making news news from the ground up. On the other, I think that there’s a secret aesthetic in the overwhelming (and, I think, accurately diagnosed) increase in industry-centered movie coverage in the eighties and nineties. Exactly as art-house viewers and critics became accustomed to the convention-overturning of the European cinema of the sixties—with its virtual revelation of the ubiquitous director as “that man [or woman] behind the curtain” and the sense that the director was, in effect, on hand at the edge of the frame throughout the film, guiding the action and commenting on it—so general audiences, who had formerly been accustomed to experiencing the movies as a sort of mystery or miracle but had no actual sense of how these wondrous products were put together, now experienced movies as demystified spectacles.
Knowing what a rear-screen projection is, or knowing about how movies are edited and how stunts are done, is of a piece with understanding movies as a business: having an understanding of how producers put their projects together, how agents work to get their clients roles, how the box-office influences the decision-makers regarding stories and scripts and casting and choice of director, how publicity and advertising affects the reception of a film. Of course, the obsession with money and celebrity nourishes itself, but in the earlier age of art-house cinema, the only ones who obsessed about such things were those who wielded their levers. If the so-called art cinema has become increasingly important (and if Hollywood itself has expanded, radically, its aesthetic range—and it has), it is, in part, because the range of subjects at hand has expanded to include the very conditions of image-making, of movie production, of the new and prismatic media-mediated experience of modernity. (In fact, some of the very greatest art films of the sixties, such as those of Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard, more or less set the template for those considerations and their aesthetic implications.)
The sanguine forecasts delivered to Gaydos by Tom Bernard, of Sony Classics, have proven right: “The audiences has actually expanded. It’s bigger now, and the circuits have expanded…. There’s a new audience that has learned about art films at the video store.” Corman added that “there is currently the possibility of a rebirth…. We’re seeing more American films that qualify for that loose term, art film.” He also saw a rise in European cinema due to the influx of money from television. (As things turned out, European financing has also flowed into world cinema—many of the best recent Asian films have European co-producers.) In addition, the rise of American independent producers has accomplished what the studios haven’t and never could—to place the visions of filmmakers at the center of movie production. (Indeed, the increased pace of production for Terrence Malick and other directors is due to the presence of congenial financiers who don’t expect something other than what the filmmaker intends to deliver.) And while it would be familiarly silly to think that all is for the best in this best of all cinematic worlds, the range of styles and subjects, and of world views and experiences, that the cinema now offers is bewilderingly, dazzlingly vast—and the works in question are more readily available than ever.
