Last fall I wrote that the next great Hollywood expose or tell-all could or should be called “Super-Vomit: How Hollywood Infantiles (i.e., Devotees of Comic Books and Video Games) Degraded Theatrical and All But Ruined The Greatest Modern Art Form.”
Not filmed dramas per se but the stand-alone, non-sequelized, franchise-resistant form of dramatic endeavor that used to be Hollywood’s bread-and-butter when theatres showed movies of substance (1920 to 2015). This kind of thing hasn’t completely disappeared from theatres, but it nearly has. Streaming and cable are where the goods are now, and half the time you’re talking long-form serials.
Otherwise a form of dramatic story-telling that has existed since the time of the Greeks — a tale told in one sitting, three acts delivered within 100 to 160 minutes and that’s all she wrote — is showing signs of serious theatrical erosion and may even be extinguished down the road. What does Kenneth Lonergan have to say about all this? Oh, Manchester By The Sea, how we loved ya, how we loved ya…your brevity, discipline, dramatic choices, shape.
Ben Fritz‘s “The Big Picture” is said to be the best intelligent summary of this evolutionary process, but I also understand it’s more of a historical analysis thing. I’d like to read a you-are-there, episode-by-episode, movie-by-movie, beat-for-beat saga of how it actually happened over the last 15 years or less. As I wrote yesterday, how the apes (“suits” and ticket buyers alike) decided that theatres are CG funhouses and that smarthouse, soul-stirring flicks are for streaming, and how the twain would never again meet.
What I’m imagining is something written in the tradition of David McClintick‘s “Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street,” Stephen Bach‘s “Final Cut: Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven’s Gate,” or Mark Harris‘s “Pictures at a Revolution.”