Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Hollywood Migraine: The Inside story of a Decade in Film by Ray Greene
The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age by Paolo Cherchi Usai
Despite its silly title, Jonathan Rosenbaum's new collection Movie Wars is a knockout. In it, the Chicago Reader's much-admired film critic names the guilty men, women and studios behind what he calls the "media-industrial complex" designed to limit the choices available to film audiences in the US. Rosenbaum believes that a combination of a spoon-fed mainstream press that has abnegated its responsibility to report film as anything other than a business, coupled with the cowardice and self-interest of studios who worship at the altar of test screenings, has resulted in a situation where bad movies thrive and good ones don't get seen.
He reserves particular venom for Miramax and its co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, who, with the eager co-operation of particular critics, has managed to propagate the perception that his company is somehow an underdog independent specialising in "alternative" film - this despite being owned by Disney (who paid the Weinstein brothers $60 million) and cornering the market in middlebrow fare such as Shakespeare in Love and Chocolat. Rosenbaum brings Miramax to book for refusing to make available prints of films it has bought the rights to, releasing only half the films it actually picks up, and keeping the others under wraps, either to reduce competition for their favoured releases or because the film-makers won't agree to the cuts and changes Weinstein wants.
Rosenbaum's seniority and refusal to run with the pack indemnify him to some degree, but it is still surprisingly refreshing to read him accuse the likes of The New York Times film critic Janet Maslin of wilful ignorance of non-US cinema and being a propagandist for the Miramax juggernaut. His cheerfully bitchy demolition of her dismissive report on the 1999 Cannes festival, where she devoted eight paragraphs to the views of the disgruntled Weinstein and only two to the major prize-winners, are worth the price of admission alone:
' ... she had little desire to hang out with critics more interested and knowledgeable about movies than she was, because this might make her at least faintly aware that she might be missing something. (I'm ruling out some of the titles that interest me the most ... because I couldn't imagine her sitting through them, but surely there were other, less demanding items she might have enjoyed.)'
This patrician disdain occasionally lapses into something like self regard (the final chapter, 'The Audience is Sometimes Right', takes the form of an imagined interview with himself), and the laser-like focus of the best parts of Movie Wars are diluted by chapters on Rosenbaum's recent experiences at film festivals and his championing of Orson Welles. But even these contribute to his overall argument, which is that given genuine choice and a level playing field, most audiences would probably rather not shell out for rubbish, despite what the studios' marketing departments persist in maintaining. A book to storm the barricades with for everybody who can't find anything worth watching at their local twenty-screen multiplex.
Ray Greene's Hollywood Migraine is a collection of precisely the sort of journalism that Rosenbaum would probably hate. Greene was Editor-in-Chief of Boxoffice Magazine in the mid-90s and a contributor to the LA Village View, which allowed him to write the sort of 'thinkpieces' (his word) that he could never get away with at the bottom-line fixated industry mag. This book collects pieces from both (although the emphasis is on the now defunct Village View material) and, while no particularly great shakes as journalism, it's instructive both as a companion to Movie Wars and as an account of the dominant norms of 90s Hollywood.
Rosenbaum would have a stroke reading the uncritical articles detailing the re-emergence of Disney, the dominance of Sundance and - yes - the pre-eminence of Miramax in the distribution of 'alternative' material. But surprisingly Greene and Rosenbaum are probably not so much of an odd couple on questions of aesthetics. One of the more thoughtful pieces here (which name-checks Rosenbaum) is on a "restoration" of Welles' Othello that Greene disapproves of, and there are other fairly interesting pieces about film archivism and Greene's (rather self-conscious) championing of "alternative voices" such as Spike Lee and John Singleton. And, amusingly, neither writer has a low opinion of himself (in short paragraphs that preface many of the pieces reprinted here, Greene time and again reminds himself and us of the effect such and such an article had (' ... this piece inspired a major story on "Entertainment Tonight" ... this piece got a lot of weird attention from people at Warner Bros. ... this essay provoked more response among my journalistic peers than any other I've written ... etc., etc.)).
As a snapshot of 90s Hollywood, all the major figures and stories are present and correct, with the Tarantino influence on indie cinema, the growth of the digital special effects industry, the predominance of science fiction hits and the impact of Chinese and Hong Kong cinema all covered. But the degree of real insight is perhaps best summed up by his description of interviewee Demi Moore as 'extremely intelligent and articulate'.
The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age doesn't have too much to say about Ms. Moore's assets, and I should know as I gave it a pretty close reading twice in order to be able to ascertain exactly what it is about. Paolo Cherchi Usai is Senior Curator of film at George Eastman House and has a long and distinguished record as both an archivist and a writer about the science and art of curation. The death of cinema (or the history of it) begins to occur, Usai argues, the moment a film is projected for the first time, and it doesn't behove us to get too hung up about preserving and restoring "classics" when there's thousands of films disappearing every year.
Well, that's my reading of it. Reading this collection of aphorisms and bon mots, I was reminded of the elaborate hoax perpetrated a couple of years ago by David Bowie and novelist William Boyd who invented 'Nat Tate' a 'forgotten' painter who briefly got the art community in all of a lather. The book is written in cod-scientific jargon that dares the reader to keep a straight face and may well be intended as ironic. But rather than amuse, it had the effect of making me fidget and want to find something else to do. It also suffers from its own version of the Imaginary Interview with the Author Syndrome, in the form of a fictional Reader's Report to the Publisher (not one to under egg(o) the pudding, Usai also offers a reply), and subscribes to the Long Now Foundation's style of writing dates (e.g. A Clockwork Orange was released in 01971), the net effect of which greatly undermines the intended (I suppose) seriousness of the enterprise.
Of course, it's easy to dismiss something that one can't quite understand (as Jonathan Rosenbaum might say about Janet Maslin). So let's instead applaud a number of well chosen archive illustrations that make the point rather more wittily than the text (an employee of Douglas Fairbanks Studio chopping up 'useless' film; stills from A Clockwork Orange, Metropolis, X-Men and others that almost fetishise seeing). This nicely produced book is printed on acid-free paper so that future generations can puzzle over it too.
On the other hand kamera.co.uk readers might find the sheer peculiarity of The Death of Cinema something to celebrate in itself. In which case, you might want to nominate it as one of the best film books of the last 21 years, in a new poll being organised by BFI Publishing to commemorate their very own 21st birthday. You can take part by visiting the BFI website at www.bfi.org.uk/books/21.
