Smash hit

And, in their greed to pull in the DVD money as soon as possible, the conglomerate film companies are cutting the throat of conventional theatrical moviegoing. Ever since DVD total income began to top total theatre grosses, the time lapse between theatre distribution of a movie and its appearance on DVD is shrinking dramatically. It used to be six months, then three months — and now it may be as little as 30 days.

In wringing their hands, crying “What has happened to our beautiful business?” and blaming it all on the technological revolution, today’s Masters of the Hollywood Universe seem to be very slow to realise that they have met the enemy — and it is them.

No longer are the studios individually owned or operated, as they were in my father’s day. The old name brands — Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, Universal — have been gobbled up by corporate goliaths, Sony, Vivendi, News Corporation (parent company of The Times), Time Warner, Zivaldi, Seagram and Matushita. Their CEOs aren’t moguls in the old sense. Their asses don’t itch when their own movie bores them. It itches when their investment begins to go sour.

Instead of having their own true sense of what will be moving and appealing and meaningful to their audience, the corporate minds that have taken over Hollywood employ all the old, cold techniques of big business marketing. They test their projects on all the different demographics in different parts of the country, just as they would test a new product in any other market. When they think they have a winning formula they pour big bucks into it.

Now comes the roll of the corporate dice. They pour multimillions more into high-powered advertising campaigns and then wait to see how that make-or-break first weekend does. Most of the time it doesn’t. For every Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire there are ten misses. And when that first weekend tells them that they have another seven-figure disaster on their hands, they cut and run. Remember Ali, with Will Smith, a big star playing the most famous athlete in the world, the iconic Muhammad Ali? Roared in like a lion on Friday, and by Sunday night it goes out like a lamb.

In the old days, if you loved your picture, you fought for it. But now the mogul is Mr Bottom Line. The corporate wisdom is cut your losses. So Ali disappears. The second week you literally can’t find it. Same thing happened to Cinderella Man. And The Legend of Zorro, with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Antonio Banderas. Big names. Cost a bundle. Bomb.

Here’s how the great minds of Corporate Hollywood think: the Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez romance is hot hot hot. Let’s cash in on all the gossip. So they make Gigli, a movie so bad and empty it’s literally unwatchable. And these two young people aren’t bad actors. But they need a real story to tell, real characters to play. They need good writing. Which Gigli don’t got. Another bomb.

Or Shanghai Sunrise. How could they miss in a movie starring the just-married Madonna and Sean Penn with all that free and lubricious publicity about their steamy relationship? Again, another floppola because all the energy was put into the selling and not into the storytelling.

Almost without fail, the only serious films come from Europe, where they are still making them the old way, or from dedicated, truly independent film-makers such as Jim Jarmusch or Gus Van Sant. And I see the Weinstein brothers, Harvey and Bob, as a welcome throwback to the days of the moguls who cared about the movies and every so often were willing to take chances.

“The trouble today is that the studios are so bureaucratised,” Time magazine’s film critic Richard Schickel said to me the other day. “It takes a year to make a contract. You don’t pitch a story to one producer, you pitch to 20. They’re not thinking about film, they’re thinking about ancillary rights.”

The best movie I saw last year was Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby. Even though it was a low-budget film, at $25 million, Warners wouldn’t underwrite it, afraid of a downbeat story about a woman boxer with a tragically downbeat ending. Eastwood had to cast far afield, to an independent Chicago company, to get the job done. It ran away with the Oscars, but even that didn’t seem to dent the corporate mindset. Remember, it’s no longer Warner Brothers, run in the old days by the happy-go-lucky Jack Warner. Now it’s Time Warner AOLSports Illustrated CNN. Their corporate committee surely can’t relate to a tough little movie like Million Dollar Baby.

Be grateful that we still have a star like Eastwood making the kind of movie a discerning audience will treasure. The conglomerate mentality, though, will always fear its anti-formula quality, and thumb it down.

So we may be seeing the Decline and Fall of Hollywood as We Knew It. As America stops going to the movies, a new generation seems to be telling us in their own sweet, suburb-to-ghetto way: “Movies suck.”

Picture this: the life and times of Budd Schulberg

Born in New York on March 27, 1914

Publishes his groundbreaking satire on Hollywood greed and corruption, What Makes Sammy Run? in 1941

Publishes an equally damning portrayal of corruption in boxing, The Harder They Fall, in 1947

Testifies as a “friendly witness” to the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee inquiry into communist activity in Hollywood

Adapts his own novel for the Oscar-winning screenplay to On The Waterfront in 1954

Schulberg is collaborating with the director Spike Lee on a biopic of the boxer Joe Louis. Actor Ben Stiller plans to film What Makes Sammy Run?

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