Cheering For The 1% (Or Perhaps The Top 25%): Part Two

The following is an essay I wrote a year ago for a class on celebrity culture. Over the next five Fridays, I will upload another part of the essay. I find it to be pretty relevant today for a number of reasons (the NBA lockout, the Occupy Wall Street protests, this recent article from Forbes ,etc.) and hope you find it to be an enjoyable read.    

It's not much of a stretch to assume that movie stars were for a long time the reason people went to the cinema. In her poignant essay, “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers”, well respected critic Pauline Kael wrote of the Hollywood system, “how else could you entice buyers? Certainly not with something unfamilar, original. They feel safe with big star packages, with chase thrillers, with known ingredients. For a big overseas sale, you must have 'international' stars, – performers who are known all over.....for a big advance sale to worldwide television, a movie should also be innocuous: it shouldn't raise any hackles, either by strong language or a controversial theme. And there must be stars, though not necessarily movie stars. It has recently been discovered that many Americans are actually more interested in TV personalities than in movie ones, and may be roused from their TV-viewing to go see a film with John Denver or John Ritter.” (Kael 11). 

      Ms. Kael uses a key word in the above quote that producers consistently bank on: familiarity. Consumers want to see familiar faces, familiar plots, familiar beginnings, and familiar endings, with a tiny bit of harmless variation thrown in for good measure. When you (the moviegoer) invest money (the purchasing of a ticket) into an evening of entertainment (the viewing of a motion picture), you hope to get your money's worth. This is why movie trailers now give away everything about a film in the course of two minutes – they want to reassure the public that they are serving up a similar concept that everyone loved or mildly enjoyed the last time. Hollywood aims the bar low and always hits it. They are using familiarity in replacement for quality, for one is easier to identify than the other. Even if moviegoers didn't like the last film starring Tom Cruise as a secret agent, they go because it is familiar. Their frame of reference may be negative, of course, but they are willing to be burned two or three times before giving up hope on the now not-always-comforting familiar. 

      Kael, later in the same essay, notes, “there is an even grimmer side to all this: because the studios have discovered how to take the risk out of moviemaking, they don't want to make any movies that they can't protect themselves on. Production and advertising costs have gone so high that there is genuine nervous panic about risky projects. If an executive finances what looks like a perfectly safe, stale piece of material and packs it with stars, and the production costs skyrocket way beyond the guarantees, and the picture loses many millions, he won't be blamed for it – he was playing the game by the same rules as everybody else.” (Kael 12).

      If originality in the world of profitable cinema was something to be scoffed at in 1980 (when the article was first published), things have only gotten worse, but in a different way. Now movie stars take a backseat to recognizable franchises, spin-offs, and pre-conceived creative properties. Children and young adult book franchise such as the Harry Potter and Twilight series have become two of the highest grossing properties of modern day. Millions of fanatic book readers eagerly anticipate the next film installment year after year and wait on line for hours (sometimes dressed up as characters from the series) to be the first ones to see the highly anticipated cinematic equivalent. It feels like almost everyone, young and old, have developed an interest in one of these two series, both involving teenage characters with mystical powers and romantic pursuits. People now read the books just so that they can complain about what the film adaptations left out; perhaps there has never been a more dedicated and detail-specific group of fans than the ones for these two franchises. Harry Potter, the first two words in every book and movie title, sells itself. The book generates a large amount of interest in the films and the films provoke long time fans (and convert new followers) to go back and read the written stories one more time. These two series are famous for their content and their ability to peak the interest of an extremely diverse global audience. Their awareness is quite high because the works are seemingly everywhere. They have four-walled the entire media-consuming planet.