Business, culture and shorts.

The history of Hollywood is a comic routine of bad guesses, unintended outcomes, and pure luck. Half of the failures were well-intentioned, and half of the successes were, by ordinary standards of fairness and decency, undeserved. People do get rich making movies; more often than not, they're the wrong people. That's why moviemaking is so much fun to read about. Unless, of course, it's your money.

The fun Menand's been having: David Thomson's The Whole Equation, whose "subject is not, strictly speaking, the history of the movies; its subject is the history of caring about the movies"; Tom Shone's Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, "an anti-valedictory for Thomson's Hollywood"; and Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing's Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession, not a "true inside look" (and Menand reminds us there indeed used to be such a thing).

Menand sorts through what he's learned - it takes him a while, but when you're reading Menand, you don't mind - and basically comes down on Thomson's side, which is hardly a surprise. Hollywood movies are not what they used to be, no. And yes, as he points out, millions still flock to see Hollywood movies anyway. But what's missing from the piece and, evidently, from Thomson's equation, is the awareness that people who do spend a good deal of time "caring about the movies" have long since turned their attention elsewhere.

Even so, a sober reminder from Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic: "If Kiarostami and Tavernier and Zhang Yimou were as widely available as The Lord of the Rings, they would not attract a sliver of the same attendance, which is obviously why they don't have the same distribution." It comes in a review of a book written in the same neighborhood of mourning Thomson and Menand have been hanging out in lately, Kenneth Turan's Never Coming to a Theater Near You: A Celebration of a Certain Kind of Movie. An interesting coincidence: both Kauffmann and Menand bring up the insights of Harold Rosenberg. But Kauffmann takes his piece further than Menand takes his; even as he keeps both feet planted firmly on real ground, Kauffmann dares to suggest a remedy: "As one who still gapes at the re-election on moral values of a man who led us into a war because of mass-destructive weapons that do not exist, I can't help feeling that at the root of the political thud is a blankness that culture could lighten."

Of course, the great line in the sand between caring and not caring, at least as Menand and Thomson see it, was drawn in 1977 by George Lucas. Thecinetrix has been reading about Star Wars lately, specifically, a collection of pieces by people who actually care a whole lot about it. She offers some of the best bits.

Meanwhile, Thomson himself writes on, of course, most recently paying tribute to the remarkable Hedy Lamarr and remembering Johnny Carson in the Independent.

Monday is media biz day for the New York Times; the roundup:

• The MPAA makes a big mournful noise about the $3.5 billion lost to piracy, "almost all of it overseas," as Ross Johnson reports, but they're mum when it comes to how much they're actually raking in in foreign sales, probably the fastest-growing segment of the biz and amounting to an estimated $11.4 billion. "What is more certain is that the windfall from overseas home video sales is affecting how the movie business is run," writes Johnson.

• Stuart Elliott presents his nominations for "best product in a leading role."

• Laura M Holson and Lorne Manly report on just the sort of brouhaha author James B Stewart could only have wished for in the run-up to publication of his book, DisneyWar: The Battle for the Magic Kingdom.

• Nat Ives investigates a sticky question: "How much credit does [Stan] Lee deserve for creating characters like Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four and how much was due to his collaborators?"

• Lia Miller looks briefly at "not exactly a case of life imitating art, but perhaps one of life reflected in art," the legal dispute between Kevin Connolly and Evolution Entertainment.

But there's more, too: "It was perhaps not remarkable that so many of the nonfiction films addressed social problems and political issues, including the Enron scandal, sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, abstinence-only education in public schools, the recent history of American foreign policy and the strange career of the Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori," writes AO Scott in what may be his last Sundance piece of the year. "What was striking was how few of the fictional films seemed to share this impulse, or, if they did, to give it persuasive form."

And Caryn James catches the Off Broadway production of David Rabe's Hurlyburly, which "may be one of the all-time bad movies made from an all-time good play." But the new version works as a period piece, she argues, since, in the 80s, "Hollywood seemed tackier and more alien to most of America than it does now."

Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside has swept the Goya Awards, Spain's rough equivalent of the Oscars. Reports from the BBC and the Guardian.

Tucker Malarkey talks to Werner Herzog for the San Francisco Chronicle. "'I love to rant.' What he is ranting about is what he calls the 'Disneyfication' of wild nature, an American cultural phenomenon of anthropomorphizing that encourages people to entertain the delightful notion that wild animals are, at some level, just like us." Via Movie City News, where David Poland wraps up his overall take on Sundance.

The BBC's Yvonne Murray talks to Robert Redford about the evolution of Sundance: "People started to say we had gone mainstream and Hollywood, but actually Hollywood came to us because suddenly there was good business in independent film." Via the indieWIRE Insider.

At Hollywood Bitchslap, Scott Weinberg's got three reviews of three docs screened at Sundance: The Aristocrats, After Innocence and Twist of Faith.

Interview of the day, hands down: Twitch and Neil Gaiman.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for Godard's Masculine Feminine, via Filmbrain's enthusiastic recommendation.

Posted by dwhudson at January 31, 2005 1:35 PM