After last night’s showing of the documentary Apollo 11, shown to commemorate yesterday’s 50th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon, CNN showed a couple of episodes of their series The Movies. I had got entirely the wrong idea of this show from the promos of it: I had assumed it would be a series of hour-long segments each focused on the production of a particular classic film. Instead it was yet another vacuum cleaner-style documentary which lasted two hours per episode and focused on an entire decade — the one I saw last night was “The Nineties” and heralded an era of a few films I remember, a few others I’ve caught up with only recently (like GoodFellas[1] and Fargo), and others I’ve still not seen. As depicted here the 1990’s were a schizoid period in film in which the process of manufacturing and delivering blockbusters, which had begun in the 1970’s with films like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and George Lucas’s original Star Wars (now given the awkward name Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope to place it within the overall nanology of the Star Wars cycle), was being perfected. At the same time the 1990’s was also a flowering of independent film, thanks to Robert Redford’s formation of the Sundance film festival and the resulting development of major studios’ specialty branches that would release lower-budget and more “serious” films.
Today just about all the specialty branches have been either cut back or closed down altogether — and the big studios only seem interested in pre-sold properties from comic books or previous film cycles that can be produced for inflated budgets and give the theatrical film audience (what’s left of it) huge thrills from computer-generated special effects. The 1990’s were a period in which the big movies were just starting to be made digitally — Tim Burton, who produced the film The Nightmare Before Christmas (he didn’t take credit for formally directing it but he’s clearly the auteur), is one of the interviewees on this show and he speaks with pride about using the old technology of stop-motion animation on that film just before digital technology took over. The big harbinger of the transition to digital effects work was Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Jurassic Park (based on Michael Crichton’s novel about an attempt to build a theme park on a remote island off the coast of Costa Rica featuring living dinosaurs, genetically re-engineered from the left-behind fragments of dinosaur DNA), for which he’d originally intended to do some of the dinosaur effects with stop-motion and some digitally, but the digital effects worked so well that he abandoned stop-motion and did all the dinosaurs with CGI. Jurassic Park was an enormous hit and started a franchise for Universal that’s still going strong — and it also wowed filmmakers who realized that with digital effects they could now do stories that had previously been unfilmable because of the difficulty of doing the effects with costumed actors or stop-motion models.
The film also mentioned the other big movie that established CGI, the Disney-Pixar production Toy Story (which also launched a franchise that’s still going today), which established computer animation as the standard way to make films without on-screen live actors. I must say I really don’t like the blocky look of computer-animated films; they seem to inhabit a neither-fish-nor-fowl genre position and I’d much rather watch films made either with live actors or drawn animation. The 1990’s were also the decade that launched the careers of quirky auteurs like Quentin Tarantino (whose movies I avoided until some friends of mine were running Inglourious Basterds — I was put off him mostly by the reputation that his films featured wall-to-wall violence but I quite liked I.B. even though I resented Tarantino’s chutzpah in single-handedly rewriting the history of World War II for his story), Paul Thomas Anderson (I’ve seen Magnolia — featuring Tom Cruise in what’s probably the most unctuous performance of his career — and his early film Hard Eight, which I admire mainly because of his daring in casting an incredibly ugly middle-aged actor in the lead, but one whose very homeliness made him just right for the part!), and a run of highly competent Black and women filmmakers who in the relatively more liberal (business) climate of the 1990’s got opportunities they’re not getting today (though I still think Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, a superhero extravaganza with Black leads and a Black director at the top of his game, is one of the greatest films of recent times). The film showcases the multiple sides of Spielberg — it contains a long segment on Schindler’s List (including Spielberg’s revelation that he cast the relatively unknown Liam Neeson in the lead after seeing him on Broadway in a play) and then a long segment on Jurassic Park without mentioning the connection between the two movies: Universal stipulated he had to make the dinosaur blockbuster in order to get to do his personal film about the Holocaust. (As things turned out, both films were huge hits.)
And of course the film showcases James Cameron via Terminator 2: Judgment Day (a film I liked but not as well as the original Terminator simply because the first one seemed less bloated and more coherent — though I loved Robert Patrick’s shape-shifting in the villain role, and I remember when I saw the first two Terminators back-to-back that someone had finally found the right role for Arnold Schwarzenegger: as a robot!) and Titanic (for which he became the first director to fill out an ensemble cast with CGI instead of actually having to hire — and pay —enough extras to fill out “a cast of thousands”). My big problem with Cameron is he makes so few films — and I suspect that’s less for the “official” reason (the complexity and difficulty of realizing all the effects shots his scripts call for) than that he’s holding out for more deal points instead of actually making films. (Billy Wilder ruefully commented in the 1970’s, “In the 1940’s we spent 20 percent of our time making deals and 80 percent of our time making pictures. Today we spend 80 percent of our time making deals and 20 percent making pictures.”) Another movie showcased in this documentary is Thelma and Louise — or, as I jokingly called it when it was new, Bonnie and Claudette — including enough footage of the ending to make clear it was a deliberate suicide by two central characters who saw no other way out (sort of like James Cagney at the end of the 1934 film He Was Her Man) — so much for my joke, after seeing how many times the writers of the Republic serials had their heroes escape the cliffhangers by jumping out of the runaway car/train/plane/whatever by jumping, “Anyone who’d ever seen a Republic serial could have figured out how to do a sequel to Thelma and Louise — just before the car went off the cliff, they jumped out of it!”
[1] — Which I always thought was a silly title, both
because it’s meaningless and I hate that convention, derived from the names of
computer programs before they started to be called “apps,” of writing a
compound word with a capital letter in the middle but no space before it. I still wish director Martin Scorsese had called the film Wiseguy, which was the title of Nicholas Pileggi’s nonfiction
book on which it was based.)
