Wow, some great responses, anticipating what I was thinking as I read the OP. The Hollywood pattern has always been to release a vast amount of material, which our memories have filtered out to leave us only the good ones. Look at Clark Gable’s filmography sometime; for every memorable film, like Gone with the Wind or It Happened One Night, he made a couple of decent-but-forgotten flicks (e.g. Boom Town or Idiot’s Delight) and half a dozen by-the-numbers duds (Lone Star, Adventure, Sporting Blood, Never Let Me Go, ad nauseum). Even his notorious work (Red Dust, for one) is long forgotten. We remember Run Silent Run Deep, Mutiny on the Bounty, and a handful of others, and that’s about it.
One small point to address that nobody else has commented on:
India, France, Spain, Hong Kong, Canada, etc. make hundreds and hundreds of movies each year. Of these, only a tiny fraction receive exhibition in the United States (or, indeed, anywhere but their home country), because only the very best films are picked for export. If you saw every single British or Italian flick, I guarantee your opinion of “foreign films” would be radically revised. Doesn’t change the basic tenet that the very best foreign films tend to be somewhat better, on average, than the very best Hollywood films, but it does put it into perspective.
Another point:
There’s a lot to this, I think, and it shouldn’t be glossed over. There’s a very natural psychological phenomenon, a basic element of human nature, in which each individual believes, at least subconsciously, that the universe revolves around him or her. I’m not suggesting that we think we’re literally the most important person on the planet, and we have all the answers, but I’m pointing to a far more subtle effect. Notice how, at any given time in history, you can always find lots of people prophesying important developments, usually tragic (up to and including the end of the world), always “within our lifetimes.” These disasters hardly ever come to pass, but because we humans are so self-involved, we subconsciously believe and expect that because we’re here now, it’s time for something important to happen. I’m not explaining it very well, but I hope that my description of what I call, with tongue partly in cheek, the “strong anthropic predictive principle” triggers some recognition in people.
At any rate, a highly self-absorbed person like Ben Stein, who has an exaggerated sense of his own self-importance, will naturally be more strongly affected by this phenomenon, and will raise a hue and cry over something or other. And upon careful examination, it usually turns out that the prediction has no real rational basis, and is more closely related to the individual’s need to subtly bolster his opinion of himself by inventing a mantle of social-upheaval expert which he can throw about himself.
For example: If you assert that the star system is more powerful now than ever, and point back to the mid-70’s as a high point of American filmmaking (Taxi Driver, The Sting, The Godfather, Network, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, Marathon Man, etc etc etc) in which the film in totality was more important than casting Jim Carrey or whomever, you must also remember that very few of what we remember as “the great movies of the era” were particularly successful at the box office. Instead, you had fluffy romantic comedies, The Computer In Tennis Shoes, Sheriff Buford Pusser, and all sorts of other crap paying the bills. When up-and-coming auteur David Cronenberg was casting Rabid in 1975, he wanted then-unknown Sissy Spacek in the lead, but the producers, citing box-office considerations, twisted his arm to cast porn superstar Marilyn Chambers. This stuff isn’t new, folks.
Hollywood has been here for a while, and is very, very good at what it does. Although individual failures like Waterworld or Pay It Forward or Blair Witch 2 or Bonfire of the Vanities or Heaven’s Gate or Godzilla or Three to Tango may be invoked as evidence that Hollywood doesn’t know what it’s doing, there will always be a larger number of bloop singles like 10 Things I Hate About You or Final Destination (and, yes, the very profitable Road Trip) that keep the paychecks stable and allow Hollywood to give us The Iron Giant, Being John Malkovich, The Insider, and any number of quality flicks. Read Dunne’s The Studio, and McDougal’s The Last Mogul, to see that Hollywood’s historical practices, taken in aggregate, aren’t a whole heck of a lot different from the modern reality.
On this topic, I say Ben Stein is a bag of hot air.
