Word: hollywood
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...Movies mean less than they did. In the '40s, movies occupied a central place in the national consciousness. With no TV, no video games, no Internet, Americans - almost all Americans - went to the movies a lot. In 1946, the year after the war, Hollywood sold an all-time high 4 billion tickets in the domestic market; that's 30 visits to the Bijou for every American. Moviegoing was a habit, not an event. At the theater they saw not only their favorite stars but newsreels and documentaries of the war - the only moving pictures of the battles involving their sons...
...severe, with the young accounting for a lopsided percentage of the audience. As for moving pictures of current events, TV and the Internet offer as many as anyone could want, but the newsreel is as dead as Free Dishes Night. Thus movies are now more escapist than the old Hollywood product ever was, more reticent to turn the nation's central anxieties into screen drama...
...fears of a smaller, more intimate kind: the serial killer with a knife, the snakes on a plane. They're reluctant to think about the Big Fear, because that fear is too close to the headlines, and about the current Big Villains, because that means Islamic extremists. In Hollywood today, greed is the handmaiden of timidity. I envision a studio V.P. for marketing standing before a wall map, putting his hand over the wide swatch of Arab countries and saying, You want to lose all these markets...
...WHAT CAN HOLLYWOOD...
...Maybe it's unfair to criticize a decently made, honorably intentioned movie for not being a different one. World Trade Center is what it is. Yet it strikes me as odd that the only two major 9/11 movies financed by Hollywood have been about the day itself - two old-fashioned hymns of tribute, to the heroes of Flight 93 in one film and the survivors of the Twin Towers' collapse in the other...