Coast to coast.

"Why Does NY Media Suddenly Think They Know Their Ass From A Gaffer?" scoffs Movie City News. At her Risky Biz Blog, Anne Thompson is a bit more diplomatic: "Every so often a film critic flies to Hollywood, interviews a few studio heads about what's happening and writes up a good solid term paper." And they're talking about David Denby's piece in the New Yorker, "Big Pictures: Hollywood Looks for a Future," at Hollywood Elsewhere, too. Still, the soberest response is Anne Thompson's: "The thing about the folks in Hollywood is that while they're hanging on to their lucrative jobs while they last - they will do what they have to do to survive. They may not move fast - but when push comes to shove, they will change. More easily than some folks, like Denby, who have both feet firmly planted in the past."

But Denby's piece is not all Angelenos might get worked up about. Choire Sicha and Sara Vilkomerson turn a New York Observer cover story into an open letter:

Updated through 1/5.

Dear Hollywood,

It's time to renew the memorandum of understanding between your town and ours. You remember us - New York, whence the books and plays come? The city with the whole bad-plane-incident thing? (You let Oliver Stone make a heinous movie about it.) The place where you keep Scott Rudin?

The holidays are over, and with them, any vestiges of holiday spirit. Among the tidbits of advice the NYO sends westward: "Your feel-good flicks insult our souls." Well, they have a point there... and actually... some of these are pretty funny.

Anyway, it doesn't stop there. Also in the NYO, Rebecca Dana chides Hollywood for spiffing up Ricky Gervais, which of course, is completely missing the point, while the Hollywood Elsewhere commentators are picking apart David M Halbfinger's New York Times piece in which he tallies Hollywood's box office winnings: "While Al Gore's prophecies in An Inconvenient Truth produced a respectable $24 million for Paramount, it was the message-movie exception that proved the rule. The big money was to be made making people laugh, cry and squeeze their dates' arms - not think."

The World Socialist Web Site is most likely not based in LA, but David Walsh's fury is worth a look:

Of course, audience members can attempt to flee the Iraq war and increasing economic hardships by seeking out 'escapist' entertainment. Such things have been known to happen. In the first place, however, why should 'laughing' and 'crying' and 'squeezing a date's arm' be counterposed to thinking? Again, there was a time when popular film entertainers, like Chaplin and Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, could produce all those responses.

Update: Chuck Tryon (currently living and working on the east coast, but way south of New York) not only has some thoughtful bullet-points of his own in reaction to Denby's piece, but he's been gathering links to other responses as well.

Update, 1/4: David Carr chimes in: "Of course, Hollywood journalists always say that everyone else from everywhere else does not get it, if only to keep dissonance at bay.... Los Angeles and New York are often mentioned in the same sentence, but the civic-culture doppelg�nger of Los Angeles is Washington, not New York. A single industry town with a fear-based culture, where hierarchy is maniacally observed and the conversation obsessively pivots around whoever has the juice on any given day." That said, Denby's piece is "a clip job with lots of A-List interviews and lunchies that yield about two-and-a-half reels of conventional wisdom."

Update, 1/5: "The reason you, Bagger, are loved in LA circles is that your personal style is not about pretending to know what you do not," writes David Poland in reply to David Carr. That said: "The NYT is still the paper of record, just as the trades are still boot lickers. But the arrogance of the NYT often leads to stories being wrong and in spite of the suction of the trades, some of their writers do find challenging notes where even the NYT is afraid to tread."

Posted by dwhudson at January 3, 2007 8:23 AM