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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
In a year when Mel Gibson and Michael Moore exploited our deep divisions, we needed more Incredible films to bring us together.
Dec 9, 2004 | On one of the documentaries included in the handsome new DVD edition of "Gone With the Wind," there's a story about the movie's first super-secret sneak preview at the Fox Theater in Riverside, Calif., two hours outside of Los Angeles. It was a blisteringly hot late summer night and the theater -- "air cooled," remembers William Ericson, a boy at the time and there with his mother -- was packed. The audience had just sat through the B-feature "Hawaiian Nights" and was settling in for Gary Cooper in "Beau Geste" when a man took the stage to tell them that, instead, they had been chosen to see a major Hollywood preview. He wouldn't reveal what they were seeing but did say it was a rather long picture and if anyone wanted to call home they should because the doors of the auditorium were going to be locked.
The titles of the movies weren't finished yet so it began with one of those trailers where someone's hand turns the pages of a lavish, leather-bound book. Hal Kern, the picture's editor, who was present at the preview, remembers that when the audience saw Margaret Mitchell's name, "you never heard such a sound in your life." And that roar was surpassed when the next credit confirmed that the audience was in fact seeing "Gone With the Wind." Kern remembers that he had ordered the soundtrack turned up full blast and still the audience was drowning it out. The faces in the photos from that night tell the story. They're the faces of people beside themselves with happiness. Everyone in the country was waiting to see "Gone With the Wind," and these folks couldn't believe their luck at getting to see it before anybody.
And at the end of 2004, it hurts like hell to see them. The images of the ecstatic faces in that 1939 preview audience sting because they show us how far away their experience was from the present state of moviegoing. This year, when the two biggest success stories (if not, by the numbers, the biggest successes) catered to niche political and religious audiences, the very idea of movies as a communal experience feels like something from the irretrievable past.
The movies that have been great communal experiences -- as opposed to merely big moneymakers -- are the ones that try to reach a wide audience through a combination of instinct, smarts, showmanship and luck, the opposite of the market-researched, test-driven, focus-grouped process by which most movies are now made and sold. Today, most of the big hits feel like a triumph of marketing rather than moviemaking. It's the difference between entering into a partnership with an audience and pulling it by the ring in its collective nose.
The best popular movies, the ones that become legitimate phenomenons -- pictures like "Gone With the Wind," "From Here to Eternity," "On the Waterfront," the first two "Godfather" films, "Jaws," "E.T." and perhaps "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy -- cut across audience barriers. That may be why, in contrast to the cut-and-dried approach that leaves no meaning, no potential audience reaction to chance, the meanings of good popular movies are often contradictory, maybe even ambiguous. "The Incredibles," an example of a big popular hit that trusts in the brains of its audience, is one such paradox. A cartoon that may hold more appeal for adults than for kids, the picture was No. 1 at the box office the weekend following President Bush's reelection, even though its message -- championing the nonconformists who make the "normal" world uncomfortable -- was just what we were told the election, and especially the success of gay marriage bans, repudiated.
There's no ambiguity in the message of "Ray," an even better recent movie, though not nearly as big a success. And its existence is proof of a faith that well-done, classical mainstream moviemaking will draw a wide audience. (There's also implicit belief that there are critics who'll have the brains to see how familiar bio-film conventions are brought to life by the picture's democratizing spirit. We can dream, can't we?)
