Put less confusingly: People sometimes complain that there’s nothing “good” coming out of Hollywood these days. Many of the “iconic” actors are old or dead. It’s all flash and sizzle but no steak.
My question is, have people always had these complaints? Or was there ever really a Golden Age of movies?
I would say that the golden age of movies ended with the popularization of Television, and then took another critical hit when home playable media came out (VCRs/DVDs).
Before then, Motion picture arts had but one focus, to get butts in seats in theatres. After that, it split into movie making and television making.
In the pre television days, a trip to the movie theatre would include a few cartoons, a news reel or two, the main feature, perhaps a short. And THEN the trailers (that’s why they are called trailers - they trailed AFTER the movie). Advertising would be limited to a “Let’s all go to the lobby” Jingle.
Theatres tended to opulent, with velvet ropes, uniformed ushers, and a snack bar that didn’t require a transfer of funds from the Caymen Islands to make a purchase.
Ticket prices were more reasonable, even if “then vs now” dollar values are considered.
Audiences tended to be politer, and more considerate of the fact that they were sharing the experience, and not the only ones there.
Television’s ubiquity presented to many challenges to that “Golden Age”, and so the medium changed, becoming more main stream, profit driven, and less likely to underwrite artistic or experimental films. Theatres became less opulent and more mundane.
Additionally, in the days of B&W film making, “Hayes” Laws, and without CGI and 79 channel Dolby sound, or even sound at all, the story and its portrayal were more important than simple whiz bang explosions, boobs, and 1 dimensional characters.
FML
The vast quantity of crap produced by Hollywood 1930-1970 has been forgotten; hence it all looks good.
Except the acting in those old movies, IMHO, sucked. A couple of B&W stiffs smoking and making small talk. And when Bogart shoots someone, they hardly bleed, let alone have their head explode!
Also, back in the day, the studios rules the movie industry with an iron fist. Make of that what you will.
Spielberg pretty much invented the summer blockbuster in 1975 with Jaws and then Lucus perfected it in 1977 with Star Wars.
Look, every year there are a couple really great movies and a shitload of bad or mediocre ones. And as every year goes by, people remember the good ones and forget the bad ones.
Also, as you get older, new movies tend to look a lot like old movies.
Sunshine = Event Horizon = Alien = 2001 A Space Odyssey
And that’s not even counting the terrible Sci-Fi Channel copies or plot variations (Alien underwater = Sphere = Deepstar Six = Leviatian = The Abyss)
After awhile it’s like “I’ve seen 6 people trapped with something dangerous already.”
Sturgeon’s Law in action.
I bought for $5 a DVD set that had just about all of John Wayne’s Lone Star westerns, produced from 1933 to 1935 plus, for some reason McLintock! While not as bad as I’d feared, they still were mainly of interest in seeing the Duke learn his craft, and were nowhere near Stagecoach, just five years later. The dross is forgotten except for a few students of the art; the few gems are what are remembered.
Yes, people have always had these complaints. The only people who think otherwise are those who have no contact with actual history. This is about 99.9% of the population, so don’t worry too much about being one of them.
Pick a decade, any decade. You’ll find critics and reviewers and columnists and intellectuals and just plain joe’s denouncing the current output as inferior to that of some previous era. The words and terminology used varies only slightly according to the linguistic standards of the era. Some of it could be reprinted today with the names changed without anyone finding it the least odd.
The reverse is equally true. Movies and stars were considered to be exceptional in their day that we find inept, clichéd, objectionable, or boring today. (Who remembers that Sonya Heine was a top box office draw for a decade? When’s the last time you saw *any * of her pictures?)
What others have said about our remembering the great movies and forgetting all the dross that people of their times had to sit through, not realizing that something great was a few months down the line, is completely true. Golden Ages are never ages in which everything was good, merely times when more of the great stuff is remembered later.
There are periods which seem to have more lasting creativity than others. For movies the 1930’s and 1970’s are the usual examples, but people make cases for other eras (especially for non-American films).
A good case can be made that the 1930s were a Golden Age because of, not despite, the studio machinery. It’s made most recently in The Star Machine, by Jeanine Basinger. The book is long, contentious, and warps the evidence to prove her thesis so spectacularly that she should be named an honorary black hole. But she’s seen every movie made in the Golden Age, and remembers every line, camera placement, and lightning direction. And she uses those technical details not to provide exposition about a movie (the way a Leonard Maltin does) but to give a feel for what it was like to be in the audience watching the film when it first appeared on screen. That’s such a rare gift that it deserves special notice. (About the only other book that rises to these heights is Gerard Nachman’s Raised on Radio, the sole book on old-time radio that let me experience the magic that radio programs once had.)
Basinger argues that the studios were experts in building careers and building stars by controlling every aspect of their existence, from their names to their hairstyles to the way they talked to what the public would be told of their lives and, oh yes, to the roles and pictures and types that the public saw them in. (She makes all the exceptions part of this thesis, which takes some sleight of hand that you’d have to be another writer to truly appreciate). She’s also good on why many of these movies don’t hold up today and make some people describe them as “A couple of B&W stiffs smoking and making small talk.”
Were the 30’s any better than the 70’s? Or the 60’s or the 90’s? That’s up to you. There is a reason why that decade is put at the top, though.
And people complained their way through every week of it.
People who think this way never go to movies, hence they miss the ones that they complain “aren’t being made anymore.” Yeah, they’re being made, you’re just not going to see them so shut the fuck up (not you Love Rhombus).
Exactly. I catch excellent films all the time in the theater, and I’m one of a half-dozen people in the house. Meanwhile, the most heavily promoted crap is packed (Step Brothers anyone?) It really irritates me when people complain that they “don’t make good family movies anymore”. Yes, they do. But people don’t go see them! The 2003 Peter Pan was a great family film, and tanked in the US.
I’d say that the quality of acting now is as good as it has ever been. I can’t imagine any actor of any period doing a better job than Heath Leger in Batman: The Dark Knight…or John Wayne having the guts to play a cowboy in love with another cowboy as Leger did in Brokeback Mountain.
There are great years and average years…but, as far as I’m concerned, no bad years for movies. Every single year, I see brilliant, groundbreaking films. Yeah, I see a lot of crap as well - some of it entertaining crap, some just crap. But the great films more than make up for the crap. And I’ll put the best films of the last few decades up against the best films of any decade. As great as Lawrence of Arabia is, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is (IMO) far more powerful. I literally could not get out of my seat for a while after the film ended.
I think I have to disagree with the notion that things are the same now as they have ever been - far fewer Hollywood movies are made today than in the 30’s through to the '50s. Film production slumped in the 60s with the advent of tv and this, plus the huge success of the movie “Easy Rider” led to what was (for me, anyway - these things are inevitably subjective) Hollywood’s true Golden Age, the 1970s. Simplifying hugely, the former studio sytem had lost all confidence in itself and so turned over unprecented control to the young, maverick directors. Hence we got Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, Cimino, Polanski and many others making amazing movies. Sure, there was a lot of dross around too but things really were better for me in the 1970s for films.
Most old movies were printed on nitrate stock, and there was no thought to keeping them available for more than a couple of years, much less posterity. Transferring them to celluloid stock was an unnecessary expense and well over 90% of Hollywood’s output clearly wasn’t worth the effort. Remember, for every Orson Welles or Charlie Chaplin film, there were hundreds of Dead End Kids and Ma and Pa Kettle-level efforts, and hundreds more that weren’t even on that level!
Nitrate stock crumbled and burned easily, so an ocean of lesser movies are irretrievably gone. Sad, in a Library at Alexandria kind of way, but look at the old horror, Western and comedy $5 DVD bins at Costco and the like, consider that this is the 2-3% considered worth saving, and you realize our culture will solder on somehow.
There are fewer big studios and they focus on about 8 movies apiece per year. But USC turns out a glut of filmmakers, digital technology makes indy filmmaking affordable to a greater number of auteurs than ever before, and while their share of the multiplex box office is negligible, non-studio movies account for a growing share of DVD and cable revenue (Porn, religious movies starring Kirk Cameron and Orlando Jones, action movies with former stars like Lorenzo Lamas and Steven Seagal, etc). The percentage of unwatchably crappy films made holds steady at 90%.
I bear in mind that even when most movies were factory-produced LCD fare, Graham Greene, George Orwell and Jorge Luis Borges all found it worthwhile to make movie reviewing a sideline.
It’s much higher than 8 a year for the majors.
Paramount/Dreamworks, Fox, Universal, Sony (Columbia), Warner Bros, Disney all crank out at least a dozen to 14 a year, some twice that ammount.
Sound RUINED movies! Before that an actor had to EMOTE but now all he has to do is jabber with another actor and you get stuck with pretty boys and girls with nice voices instead of ACTORS! Sound is a crutch that wrecked good story telling and the extra cost means Hollywood can never again afford to make a movie with the size and dramatic sweep of a “Birth of a Nation.”
There’s a great bit in The Seven Storey Mountain where Thomas Merton complains about how many terrible, terrible movies he and his brother went to during a particular summer. I think it was just pre-WWII.
So, yeah. Terrible movies then, too.
Nitrate stock was celluloid. Nitrocellulose, to be precise. Safety stock is cellulose triacetate.
Exaggerate much?
U.S. all-talking features, 1928–1939:
5,176 features produced
321 are totally lost (6%) and
112 are incomplete (e.g., only b&w survives of a color film, or major
chunks missing, etc.),
leaving 4,743 (91%) surviving more or less intact.
U.S. features 1940–1949:
4,248 features produced
56 are totally lost (1%)
Okay, I’m busted.
Those are small, curiously specific numbers. Would you, as a courtesy, post a link to the names of those 168 lost titles?
Also, I am told (by our good friend Mr. FOAF) that many old television shows (including pre-1970 Tonight Show segments, including all that featured the Beatles) were erased and irretrievably lost so the videotape could be used for other purposes. Would you happen to have statistics for those as well?
I don’t have the lost 1928-1939 titles at hand, but here are the lost 1940-1949 titles:
Allergic to Love (1944)
Am I Guilty? (1940)
Betrayal, The (1948)
Citizen Saint (1947)
Come On, Cowboy! (1949)
Country Fair (1941)
Curse of the Ubangi (1946)
Fight Never Ends, The (1948)
Fight That Ghost (1946)
Fighting Back (1948)
For You I Die (1947)
Four Shall Die (1941)
Gentle Gangster, A (1943)
Going to Glory, Come to Jesus (1947)
Golden Gate Girl (1941)
Golden Trail, The (1940)
Harlem on Parade (1946)
I Married a Savage (1949)
Jewels of Brandenberg (1947)
Joe Palooka in Winner Take All (1948)
Jungle Terror (1946)
Land of the Six Guns (1940)
Larceny With Music (1943)
Little Iodine (1946)
Mantan Messes Up (1946)
Mantan Runs for Mayor (1947)
Meadville Patriot, The (1944)
Messenger of Peace (1947)
Mr. District Attorney in the Carter Case (1941)
Night Wind (1948)
Peanut Man, The (1947)
Power of God, The (1942)
Professor Creeps (1942)
Project X (1949)
Public Enemies (1941)
Rendezvous 24 (1946)
Return of Mandy’s Husband (1947)
S.O.S. Submarine (1948)
Shark Woman, The (1941)
Sickle or the Cross, The (1949)
Singin’ Spurs (1948)
Sofia (1948)
So’s Your Uncle (1943)
Souls in Pawn (1940)
Stolen Paradise (1941)
Story of Kenneth W. Randall, M.D., The (1946)
Strange Journey (1946)
Swanee Showboat (1947)
Trigger Law (1944)
Trouble Preferred (1948)
Tucson (1949)
What a Guy (1947)
While Thousands Cheer (1940)
Youth for the Kingdom (1945)
Yukon Patrol, The (1942)
This is a great list, but not a comprehensive one. Wikipedia lists these major studio releases on its “Lost Films” entry for the 40s, absent from your list:
1941 Kukan Rey Scott, dir. (Winner of an Honorary Academy Award)
1942 Brother Martin: Servant of Jesus Spencer Williams, dir.
1944 Escape Episode Kenneth Anger, dir.
B-movies, not included, are by definition films that the studio didn’t give a crap about after their initial release. They comprise the bulk of your list. I don’t believe anyone at the studios had a reason to keep an accurate tally of how many of these were lost. I may have overestimated the number of lost films, but I believe you are underestimating that number.
