I forgot to tell my Hitler joke this morning, and I can't let it pass.
I once wrote an essay that began, Adolf Hitler is no laughing matter, but I'll violate that principle today.
In his office in Munich, Hitler had a painting called The Four Elements by Adolf Ziegler, one of his famous arts, and it's basically four nude women.
The French ambassador said not to have liked it, and he always referred to it as the four senses.
And someone said to him, now wait a minute, Mr. Ambassador, there are four elements, but there are five senses.
And he said, not in Hitler's office, taste is missing.
Ah, that was French.
So, anyway, we're now turning to the emotion picture.
My epigraph for this lecture comes from a nameless screenwriter who said of Hollywood,
They ruin your stories. They massacre your ideas. They prostitute your art. They trample your pride.
And what do you get for it? A fortune.
so we're at a point now where I don't have to explain to you that there's
something commercial about movies I mean you know I have to explain to you that
the elegant French, Flemish tapestry industry was actually commercialized or
that Bach and Mozart were making money off the sheet music of their music we
tend to idealize the art of the past and think it had nothing to do with commerce
But motion pictures are right in front of us. We know they're commercial.
So really I should need to argue with you that it's art.
But I really don't have to do that anymore because anybody recognizes that there have been many great artworks
produced in the history of the motion picture and even out of Hollywood.
So this really is a prime example of the intersection of commerce and culture.
No one can deny that motion pictures are a commercial art form, and no one can deny that much great art has been produced in the form.
Again, most movies are pretty bad as art, but an amazing number of them are very, very good.
And so this is very important to any large-scale understanding of the relation of commerce and culture.
In fact, what's really nice about movies is we can virtually recapture their birth.
You know, it's really just over a century ago. I mean, the whole history of the motion picture can be encompassed in a little over a century.
I can't talk to you about Renaissance Flemish movies. And for most of the art forms, their birth is shrouded in mystery and in antiquity.
We really don't know the origins of epic. We really don't know the origins of drama.
We have some theories about it and some evidence and so on, but you know, the history of the movie is right there for us to see, and there are some important lessons in that.
For one thing, we can see that the motion picture was fully commercial in its birth.
Edison was not sitting around thinking, how can I create a new art form?
And he was not thinking, how can I help out Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut?
How can I give birth to the Godfather?
He was just tinkering as usual.
He came up with this gimmick that seemed pretty clever to him and a great novelty item.
The motion picture was essentially a novelty item at its birth and its early years.
You would not call it art.
There were these things called Nickelodeons, where you put in a nickel, and you saw some,
at most, five-minute film, and typically, it was a lady taking off her clothes, again,
new medium pornography.
And all sorts of, you got to see a train crash, and all sorts of stuff like that.
So there seemed nothing artistic about this form, it was just a new sort of novelty item,
and they showed it at state fairs and at arcades and no one was predicting in 1900, 1910 that this was going to be the great new art form of the 20th century.
As far as I can tell, it's not until the mid-20s that anyone goes on record as saying, hey, this is going to be the new art form of the 20th century.
The bandage should have been obvious, but of course it wasn't, especially to most scholars.
The interesting thing is how quickly movies became artistic.
You can't put a date on it, but certainly by D.W. Griffith and the great train robbery, you got something there.
And by the time he's doing Birth of a Nation and Intolerance,
Within roughly two decades, film had become something we can recognize as an art form and in the 20s it just blossoms.
It's very interesting. This is far more typical of artistic development than we think.
The way scholars' minds work, they try to think of slow evolution and it must take years and years.
You can actually see that art forms develop very quickly, especially when there's money involved, to attract people to it.
And by the 20s, especially in Germany, there's one great director after another, F.W. Mornau, Fritz Lang, the silent era.
and so it's really quite remarkable. If it's evolution it's more Stephen Jay Gould's punctuated equilibrium than Darwin's slow step-by-step evolution.
You get a new form comes along and quite quickly a lot of people realize its potentiality and it draws in lots of talent and it grew by leaps and bounds
And then, of course, you get sound, and by the 30s, film was completely established, and great, great works of art are being turned out in the media.
The only people who didn't realize this was professors. I can't quite date it, but I do remember, I went to Harvard as an undergraduate in 1962 to 1966,
and I remember when some visiting professor offered a course in Alfred Hitchcock, and we thought it was the weirdest thing we'd ever heard of.
and you know fortunately was a visiting professor and he taught it over in the
Carpenter Center for Visual Arts and it was only at night and you know we we
didn't have to feel that our undergraduate education was being
sullied by this course about Alfred Hitchcock. I mean that seems utterly
laughable to realize that at this time but it really took quite a while now of
course there are whole departments of film and film programs and I give the
the academic world credited for finally having discovered that movies are out for them.
But it is interesting, there's a kind of a lag here where the public discovers it first.
Really the market discovered how good movies are, and typically professors were saying,
oh, well, it's a passing fad, you know, go to a play, save your money.
So we actually, it's a cautionary tale that we should try to overcome our contempt for
commercial culture, but it's really the reason academics resisted movies for so long is their
prejudice against commerce in general and commercial culture in particular.
So in discussing the motion picture industry today, I basically want to look at two major
academic ways of viewing the motion picture industry which are basically anti-commercial
in their orientation.
One is the French school of criticism of the so-called auteur theory of movies and the
other is German, the Frankfurt School critique of movies as culture industry.
I think they'll help me highlight what I believe is true about motion pictures and about commercial
culture.
allow me to define my position better.
So let me begin with perhaps the more famous of the two, the auteur school, and raise this
whole issue of authorship of films.
That is, when you're talking about a film, it's very difficult to assign authorship and
And to say who made it. In fact, for most movies, and especially for the history of
Hollywood and especially during the so-called studio era of the 30s and the 40s, movies
were corporate products, collaborative products. That's in fact what a lot of scholars held
against Motion Pictures. They couldn't be art precisely because they didn't have authors
in the classic or traditional sense of authorship. Here's a perfect example of how this romantic
and then modernist ideal of the solitary creative genius worked against the appreciation of
of Motion Pictures as an art form.
As I've said, from roughly 1800 on,
this theory developed first with the Romantic poets
that a solitary creative genius has to produce a work of art.
And if anything interferes with it,
that introduces elements of inauthenticity and corruption
into the resulting work.
And again, I can't stress enough how much
We instinctively and unthinkingly buy into that myth today, and one reflection of that is the development in the 1950s in France of the so-called auteur theory.
Auteur is just the French word for author.
And in reaction to the Hollywood studio system where movies were manufactured, a group of French theorists came up with the idea that the only true movies are movies that have a single author and that single author is a director and preferably a writer-director.
Now, Francois Truffaut, the French writer-director, was very instrumental in developing this theory.
It's associated with the French journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, and it was adapted very early among US critics.
For one thing, it finally gave academics a way to talk about movies in the way they like to talk about things.
I found this myself, and we'll find it today and a bit tomorrow.
It's very awkward to say, the group of people who produce decisions had this in mind.
You want to be able to attach a name.
And so what these French theorists looked for is a single name they could attach to a creative achievement.
And they were thinking of people above all of Orson Welles, people like Alfred Hitchcock, people like John Ford.
That is, what these French theorists of the 50s tried to identify was a subgroup of movies which they were claiming these were authentic art, unlike these inauthentic Hollywood productions, they were just corporate collaborative products, but if you could find a movie that had been made by one man, that and only that could be authentic art.
So, their chief example was always Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, and you know, if you could see written and directed by on the screen, that was an auteur film, and you know, Charlie Chaplin was one of the great examples, so if you wanted to see written and directed and produced by Charlie Chaplin, with music by Charlie Chaplin, you know, Gaffer, Charlie Chaplin, electrician, Charlie Chaplin, best boy, Charlie Chaplin.
And they were trying to imagine some way in which the whole movie could be the product
of a single genius.
Again, Citizen Kane was their example.
They began to notice, this is how they began to speak of bodies of film, that you could
take John Ford's films together.
You could look at stagecoach and she wore a yellow ribbon and, you know, later the searchers
and see a comprehensive vision of the West in his films.
Now, there's a lot of truth to this.
These people were pioneering and remade the way people talked about films
and really discovered a great deal of creativity in filmmaking
and began to understand that there are people in the field who have artistic things to say.
Among them were Jerry Lewis, that's always the problem with French film criticism, that he was one of their great examples of auteurs, Jerry.
So theory, like all theories, had its ups and downs.
And again, I don't want to dismiss it, because a lot of the best film criticism ever written came out of this approach,
approach, and they needed a way to talk about films as artistic unities.
But notice the notion here was you couldn't have a unified work of art unless a single
artistic consciousness had produced it.
There's a kind of mythology at work here that Hayek identifies more broadly in thinking
The thing about economy is that people really have a hard time of understanding how an economy
worked if a single mind didn't plan it.
I mean, Hayek sees it as almost tribal, that our human minds are conditioned to think that
if something works, it's because a single person designed it, built it, and keeps it
running.
I think his point is the great advantage of the market is that it allows meaningful, coherent, rational results to come about even though no single mind is in charge of it, and that's the great advantage of the market, that it can produce results without a single consciousness being in control of it, it can in fact produce better results, and again through a process of feedback, trial and error, correction.
Please take that Austrian model of spontaneous order and apply it to culture and to suggest
that if a work of art looks planned, it doesn't mean it was perfectly pre-planned by a single
consciousness.
What Austrian economics tells us is you can get a result that looks perfectly planned,
that actually was the product of trial and error, continuous revision, and although I'm
I'm not dismissing the model of perfect planning in art because, again, when Yates sat down to write one of his modernist lyrics,
yeah, that was probably a process of perfect planning by a single consciousness that is possible.
Many great works of art have been produced by that.
But I think we have many alternate cases and that, as I was suggesting yesterday,
Victorian novels were produced by a kind of helter-skelter, knock-em-sock-em social process
in which the works got better and better and looked more and more planned.
Not because someone was in charge all the time, but because you had to give and take
a social system, this system of serial publication that brought it about.
Hollywood is similar.
These so-called corporate productions from Hollywood are similar, but it took a long
It's a long time for people to realize that, and it's, you know, the story about a sausage.
You don't want to look and see how a sausage was made.
And frankly, you don't really want to see how most movies are made.
If you simply describe the process, as I'll show in some cases, you'd think the movie
would be a complete chaos.
In a way what I'm attacking here is the so-called genetic fallacy in criticism that looking
at the way something comes into being tells you in some ways very little about the final
result aesthetically.
A work can be beautifully composed even though the process that produced it was incredibly
messy and chaotic.
But again, that's what these auteur theorists could not accept.
They wanted this single genius to stand behind the film.
And the notion was that when Orson Welles made Citizen Kane, he was fully in charge,
and that's why that's so great.
And the thing that ruined all his other films was studio interference, and there were all
these stories of Magnificent Amberson and how the studio rejected his cut of the film
of Money, Human Re-Cutted, and that story's probably true in some sense, but you see there's
this kind of idealization of the single creator here that, and again, Chaplin was one of their
examples, Ford another one, the sense that to make these films aesthetically meaningful
you had to posit and indeed locate a single genius behind them.
Now, in fact, again, I'm a great admirer of all these directors, and some of them, like
Wells and Chaplin, often did complain about studios.
Chaplin, of course, went off and founded his own studio, United Artists, with Mary Pickford
and Douglas Fairbanks, because he didn't like dealing with the existing studios.
There's no question that, again, that many movie makers were frustrated by the studio system.
On the other hand, there's also no question that the studio system, in many cases, worked.
And these horrible commercial pressures that people always complain about, in fact, had beneficial results.
And I'm going to choose as my chief example of a studio product of work the motion picture Casablanca
Partly because I've written about it and I have the facts at my hands, but in part because it is an ideal example
Casablanca is generally on anybody's list of the 10 greatest movies ever made
were made on the American Film Institute list that came out a few years ago.
It came in second right after Citizen Kane.
So we're talking about a work here that is regarded as one of the peaks of cinematic
history and people often speak about it in awe and talk about its perfection.
I'm just going to read you a quote from one description of it.
Every gesture, every turn of the head is important.
Casablanca is that rare movie miracle.
A film with not one inconsequential frame,
not one insignificant line of dialogue.
Don't even consider blinking during this film
in which every moment is inextricable from the whole.
Remove one note and there is diminishment.
It's the same thing Salieri says about Mozart's music in the Schaffer-Forman film.
There it is, the great ideal of artistic perfection.
Every part of the whole is a part of the whole. It's there for some reason.
You can't remove anything and not hurt the film. This film is artistic perfection.
That may or may not be true, but at least a lot of people claim it. Certainly it's a well-made movie, certainly it's a very good movie.
It bears re-watching and you do see something new in it each time you see it.
But the inference from that for many people would be if it looks perfectly planned, it must have been perfectly planned.
And if it has this perfect artistic unity, only a single mind could have produced it.
Well, unfortunately, nobody could possibly identify that single mind.
If it's a question of writers, there were nine different writers on the film.
The director, Michael Curtiz, is a fine director, but, you know, name a great other work of art by him.
Yankee Doodle Dandy, for example, Captain Blood, I mean, he made a good solid series of Hollywood films.
This film was a completely collaborative enterprise.
Moreover, its history of production is a complete mess and of a tale of utter chaos.
Basically, they just lucked out in the end.
I'll just give you a brief description of the writers involved in it.
First of all, it's an adaptation from another medium.
It's based on a stage play called Everybody Comes to Ricks.
Just imagine if the film was called Everybody Comes to Ricks.
It never was going to go anywhere.
And someone in Hollywood, I think it was the producer, Hal Wallis, came up with the idea of calling it Casablanca.
But anyway, Warner Brothers bought the rights to the play, and they gave the job of adapting it to the screen to two brothers named Julius and Philip Epstein.
They started working on a script, but unfortunately, with middle World War II, they were called away to work on Frank Capper's Why We Fight, a documentary that the government wanted made.
and so how Warner Brothers was left without writers so they called in a guy
named Howard Koch to write on the screen and as things ended up the Epstein
brothers are roughly responsible for what we know is the first half of the
film and Koch for the second half but the studio was not satisfied what they
were coming up with so they brought in a guy named Casey Robinson to integrate
the two halves. And he's the one who thought up the idea of the Paris flashback. And moreover, he's
mostly responsible for the romantic scenes, the love scenes between Bergman and Bogart. But then
the Epstein brothers finished their work for Capra and they came back and they started to work on the
end of the movie. There were several other writers involved. The official count is somewhere between
between eight and nine writers, of whom I think only three got screen credit.
But meanwhile, Michael Curtiz, the director, was constantly fumbling with the script and
Hal Wallace, the producer, was always getting involved.
So you feel like saying, too many cooks, more of the broth.
I mean, this film should be a complete hodgepodge with all these people working on it.
Remember this is always the criticism of Hollywood, that they get a script and they work it and
they rework it and rewrite it and redo it and everyone's got to change things so the results
should have no artistic unity.
But somehow it worked in this case.
Now in particular, the most amazing thing about the film is they never knew how it was
The End of Casablanca is the greatest thing about the movie. It's what makes the movie. It's what everyone remembers from the movie.
You almost automatically assume that this is what they had in mind from the beginning, that they always knew it was going to end with that airport scene.
If you know Woody Allen's play against Sam, which pays the ultimate tribute to the ending by recycling it, in that film the way you come back to it, you just know it's the heart of that film that's going to recreate that scene.
Again, it's one of the most parodied and recycled films in Hollywood's history.
But they were just clueless and the actors were panicking because they didn't know how to play their roles.
Ingrid Bergman's daughter reports that her mother kept complaining that the filmmakers didn't seem to know what they had in mind.
And finally Ingrid Bergman confronted the Epstein brothers and said,
said, who do I go off with in the end? Heinried or Bogart? And Julius Epstein said, as soon
as we know, we'll let you know. And you see, everything hinges on that, and I don't know
how to play the scenes with Paul Heinried if I'm going to leave him in the end. I don't
know how to play the scenes with Bogart if I'm going to leave him in the end. The actors
We're getting desperate about it. So, how did they finally get the end, the great sequence?
Now, this is very disputed. Everybody claims he wrote the end of Casablanca now. There's
a cameraman, I think, who claims he wrote it. I'm going by the account you get on the
DVD. And the special edition DVD of Casablanca's grades got all this archival material. And
and his interview with Julius Epstein, and I'm just going to read from his, my transcription of his account because it's so revealing how he tells his story.
I mean they are under huge pressure. Every day the studio says, what's the ending going to be?
And finally he and his brother are driving to work and he remembers the corner in Hollywood where they threw it up.
They just turn to each other in the car and say, round up the usual suspects.
and everything followed from that line is again if you were trying to think logically here you'd say they thought through they plotted the ending and then came up with a line but no somehow spontaneously they came up with this line round up the usual subject suspects and they they followed from that they decided that the scene would have to feature a murder then if that was going to be the big line and this is how Epstein reconstructs their thought process they asked themselves who does
Who do the audience want to see murdered?
Their answer was Major Strasser.
The next question was, who do they want to see kill Major Strasser?
And their answer was Humphrey Bogart.
It's great to hear that these great Hollywood figures confuse actors with characters.
Illusion reality, no difference to that.
So Humphrey Bogart's got to kill him.
And then their final question, and who do they want to see round out the whole thing?
The brothers concluded, Claude Rains will end the film with round up the usual suspects.
So here's the genesis of perhaps the most famous ending of a film in Hollywood history.
And what I love about it is if that really was the logic, and this is the way Julius Epstein reports it,
then they came up with this great ending by simply imagining what the audience wanted.
The worst form of submitting to commercial pressure you can imagine.
And again, according to the auteur theory, according to romantic theories, the autonomy
of art, if you give the audience what they want, you're prostituting yourself and you're
going to debase the quality of your art.
And here we see this great scene was formed precisely by following out the logic in their
account.
Let's give the audience what they want.
How do we do it?
And it's interesting when you think it through, and I did, that in relying on their audience,
they were essentially relying on the generic expectations of their audience.
That is, when they ask, what does the audience want, they're saying, what does an audience
want as a successful conclusion to a kind of romantic thriller?
And as if they understood, audiences understand genre.
They've seen hundreds of films, and in a certain sense, they know how a film should end.
And it is interesting that, you know, when movies are made, they do testing, they show
them to audiences, and one of the key things they do is test the ending. And they often
have alternate endings and see which ones play best with the audience. Filmmakers know
that one of the key things to a film is the ending. It can ruin your whole day if the
ending is lousy. And so it's interesting the degree to which they allow audience expectations
to govern that here.
And again, if the ending was really lousy, we would say, oh, those Epstein brothers,
they sold out.
They went Hollywood.
But since it's this work, genius, you know, we want to say, oh, they must have thought
this up themselves, in a certain sense they did, but they thought it up by asking what
the audience wants.
But of course, that wasn't the end.
Curtiz and Wallace shot the script and confronted the Epstein brothers and said, your ending
does not work. And in fact, when the Epstein brothers saw how it had been cut, they thought
it had been cut too quickly. And they explained to Curtiz, you've got to have a few more shots
here. And indeed, they worked together the ending from that. But we're still missing
something, right? This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, right? The really
clincher at the end, that wasn't from the Epstein brothers, it wasn't from Curtiz,
It was from Hal Wallis, the producer, at least according to his account, and again everyone
claims they wrote the line, but Wallis decided this is too abrupt, this scene, shooting Strasser
and so on, and just letting Bogart and Rains walk off into the distance.
So he wrote a little scene, about six or seven lines of dialogue, interchange between Bogart
and Reigns, Beginning with Louis, This is a Beautiful Friendship, they have his memo
and it's wonderful, he misspells Louis, so you know how all of us must have been writing
it.
But he wrote, This is the Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship was just going to be the beginning
of a dialogue, they were talking about going to Algiers or something like that, and when
In post-production, Wallace has to get back Bogart, get back Raines, and shoot the scene.
Raines is unavailable, making another film. They can't get Raines back.
So poor Hal Wallace has to cut six of the seven lines, and the film now just has to end with Louis.
I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Next time you watch the film, you'll see you never see Bogart's lips move.
He's, his, the back of his head is to the camera when you hear Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, because it was dubbed in weeks after they shut down a production. It's actually very easy to do.
So look at that. When you, when you see this sequence, again, it is considered the classic Hollywood ending. Everything is perfect about it. In fact, different people wrote different things.
And that doesn't sound right to us. It doesn't feel right. We really would like to think that some single artistic genius wrote that whole ending from the beginning and designed the whole film to lead up to the ending.
And that doesn't sound right to us. It doesn't feel right.
We really would like to think that some single artistic genius wrote that whole ending from the beginning
and designed the whole film to lead up to the ending.
Unfortunately, the facts disprove that view.
And, you know, when in doubt, we have to go with the facts.
And just accept the fact that sometimes you just luck out.
Again, if you read an account of the production of Casablanca and didn't know what this movie was like, you would say, boy, it must have been a bad film.
They didn't know what they were doing. A couple of guys driving a car just trying to spin out the ending there.
The producer intervening at the last minute. Imagine that. That's the ultimate sin to a tour theory.
The producer ruined the film. The Epstein's had written the ending. Kurtis had filmed the ending.
and who is Hal Wallace, this cheesy Hollywood producer, to decide this isn't good enough, I need to add a line here.
Again, even to me, it just doesn't feel right. It's taken me a long time to come around to understanding that art is often a matter of luck.
It isn't always a matter of perfect planning. But as an economist, I should have known that.
that a lot of things that happen in the economic world, which are the right outcome, are still a product of luck and certainly not of perfect advanced planning.
And as I've studied film and television more and more, I've seen more and more examples.
This Casablanca situation is more the model than the model of auteur theory.
And a classic example of that is Citizen Kane. It's on the initial bibliography, but I really recommend this book by Jack Stillinger, a great romantic poetry editor and scholar, multiple authorship and the myth of solitary genius.
I read this book 15 years ago and refused to accept its thesis then. I was a big solitary genius fan. Well, we solitary geniuses have to stick together, basically.
So, I just, I resisted and resisted this book, but the more I've thought about it, you know, he's right, and it has an excellent chapter,
chapter plays and films, authors and auteurs, and it's a good way to get a very quick overview of the subject.
And one thing he does is just take on Citizen Kane. This again, exhibit A for the auteur theory, and he's drawing upon a book here by Robert Carringer
Citizen Kane
Credit for the Citizen Kane screenplay, which won an Academy Award, were shared with Herman J. Mankiewicz and Wells, in that order.
And there were other writers as well.
is not certain of first thought of doing a film about William Randolph Hearst, Wells said
that it was his own idea, while others have claimed priority for Mankiewicz, who died
in 1953. Mankiewicz, with the help of John Hausman, wrote a 268-page first draft titled
American, between the beginning of March and the middle of April 1940, some 40 pages of
revisions shortly afterward, and a complete second draft by May 9.
At this point, 308 pages into the script, Wells took over the script, and the individual
responsibility for writing became more difficult to sort out.
Amelia Kent reworked the second draft into a continuity version that added visual and
mechanical details necessary for budget and production planning, and drafted a breakdown
script containing scene designations with physical descriptions.
After approval from the RKO executives and department heads, the script was further heavily
was revised during June and July mostly by Wells but also by Mankiewicz in four further drafts the last of which was the shooting script from his painstaking analyses of cuts and other changes from one version to the next Carringer concludes concerning the shares of Mankiewicz and Wells that Mankiewicz's main contributions were the story frame including the rosebud gimmick Mankiewicz not Wells so Mankiewicz's contribution with the story frame
characters, many of the individual scenes, and much of the final dialogue.
While Wells, as he said, added narrative brilliance, the visual and verbal wit, the stylistic fluidity,
and such stunningly original strokes as the newspaper montages and the breakfast table
sequence.
Carringer comments, this is really interesting, that Citizen Kane is the only major Wells
film on which the writing credit is shared.
Not coincidentally, it is also the Wells film that has the strongest story, the most fully
realized characters, and the most carefully sculpted dialogue.
Mankiewicz made the difference.
Now he goes on and on and shows, in the making of the film, all sorts of people gave Wells's
suggestions, including the actors, and he concludes that even Citizen Kane was a collaborative
effort.
and that the primary exhibit for the auteur theory was not the single product of Orson's Welles Ma.
You know, you couldn't say that in the presence of Orson Welles, he would sit on you.
He said that.
And notice the other implication that this was the film in which Welles had the most collaboration
And it's his best film that the more artistic control he got over his later films, I won't say the worse they got, the less good they got.
That's really interesting and well, maybe if I have time I'll trace that in some other careers, including Chaplin's and Coppola's.
But Stillinger goes on to discuss a couple of other examples. It turns out, even now with Hitchcock,
I mean, Hitchcock was a maniacally controlled freak in this film, but even with Hitchcock it's turning out that, well, for example, that a number of his screenplays he was collaborating with Ben Hecht, and, you know, I try to show even with Shakespeare, he sometimes accepted some help on his plays and collaborated with others.
In other words, we are so captive of this idea of the single author that it's hard for us to face the facts, but they're staring us in the face.
And I will say this, you know, as Austrian economists, we love individualism.
We really do like to think of the great entrepreneurial geniuses, and we do want to focus on the individual, and we hate collectivist thinking.
But let's be careful about this, because what we're talking about here, when we talk about the making of films, is a social process which is collaborative.
And that's our view of the economy, in general. That's the whole point about the economy, is it allows people to collaborate and produce something better by working together than they could ever produce by working alone.
It's Marxism that talks about social interaction as purely exploitative.
It's Marxism for which social interaction is a zero-sum game.
And one person can profit only if another person loses.
For Austrian economics, just the opposite.
The market is not a zero-sum game.
When there's a trade, a transaction, both sides gain.
We think of social interaction as a collaborative, cooperative process, so it really should be okay for us to talk about even artistic production in those terms.
And you can see, I've been repeating this, whenever Marxists look at these kind of processes I've been describing, they balk at it and they say someone's exploiting someone else.
Welles exploited Mankiewicz, he took too much credit and so on.
Well, maybe there's a bit of element of truth to that.
But what you see when you look at this is examples of division of labor.
People work together and they produce something better by working together.
When you read accounts of Casablanca, you see how Wallace and the studio were aware of what writers could do what things.
The Epstein Brothers were known for snappy dialogue, and a lot of the humor in Casablanca comes from them.
This guy, Koch, I guess, was known for writing romantic scenes or whatever.
I talked about this earlier, that in Hollywood they have writing specialists, people who are just good at writing endings,
people who are good at punching up the dialogue with humor and so on.
and you know that's an old established economic principle the division of labor
and so the you know the idea that one single artist could produce everything
you need to produce a great film that really is questionable so again I I'm
more impressed with the results of the auteur theory in the criticism of
individual films and explaining them that I am with it as a theory of how
great movies are produced these critics are able to see the aesthetic pattern
in movies very well they are reading them as unified and it sort of helps them
to have it in their heads that one single unified mind created them but
those are two entirely separable questions if you understand the
principle of the genetic fallacy whether the movie is a unified work of art or
not has nothing to do with how it was produced in a way for Casablanca
Everything just fell into place, but there was no way of telling that until they put it together, test screened it, finally made the plunge, released the final cut and put it on the screen.
Banking. I put on your supplementary bibliography a wonderful book called Fiasco, which I've
mentioned already, which traces film disasters from Cleopatra on down to the present films
like Waterworld and The Postman. Kevin Costner is the great distinction of being the only
one with two films in that book. And, you know, it's a very good book. It's very good
to learn, to read, to counter these Marxist theories that Hollywood studios are in charge
of their audience and can shape their audience and create demand.
But the conclusions of the author, whose name escapes me at the moment, draws from it, are
wrong because, you know, he describes all the things that can go wrong on a film.
For example, he says, this shows never to start filming a film without a finished script.
and then at the end in his grand paration he says, so if you see a movie that went into shooting without a finished shooting script and if there's a lot of hype about it and you're being told it's the next blockbuster, you really know the next Hollywood bomb is coming
and the joke is he's just mentioned the fact that Titanic reflected all these same conditions that these big blockbusters that failed were
If you know, the advanced publicity on Titanic was disastrous.
They were saying, you know, there was over budget, over schedule, they didn't have a script,
they didn't know if the special effects were going to work.
Titanic was being predicted to be the biggest flop ever, and at the time it was the biggest success ever.
What I'm getting at is Hollywood's unpredictable, and of course artistic creation is unpredictable.
What I see here is this desire on the part of critics, the same desire you see on the part of mathematical economists.
They want to be able to predict things. For obvious reasons, they can make a lot of money if they can predict things.
This human desire to predict things is what subverts so much understanding, and I'm saying it's the same in the cultural realm as well.
People think I can figure out ahead of time what makes a great movie or a great television show.
Believe me, if you could, you could make a lot of money, and it wouldn't be as an economist or a literary critic.
It would be as a film producer.
But what any study of Hollywood will tell you is it's simply unpredictable.
The same things that produce disaster, in one case, produce triumph in another.
And I'm talking about financial success and artistic success.
for example, Titanic or Casablanca or even The Godfather, the advance word on The Godfather
was awful, there was quarreling between the director and the producer and they didn't
have a script and Brando was acting up and all that.
So it's very hard for people to face the fact that life is unpredictable and that therefore
Your art is unpredictable, but I think that's the conclusion we have to draw here.
So in terms of your thought theory, again, I don't want to denigrate these abilities
to read a movie, give an interpretation of it, but their idea that you have to have this
single author behind it, and you see the anti-commercial bias behind it, the notion that to the extent
If anyone or anything interferes with a solitary artistic genius of some great creator like Wells or Hitchcock, it's a problem.
Now in fact, the history of Hollywood suggests the opposite, the history of television.
It's something I've sensed for a long time and only have begun to formulate recently.
Many directors did their best work under the greatest commercial pressures.
You can go back to Chaplin.
You know, I do love the full-length movies, Gold Rush, Modern Times,
but in some ways people will, you know, his absolute genius as a comic filmmaker is in the shorts,
in part because they're so brilliantly compressed.
And let's face it, the movies, they are in some ways a string on which he hangs a number of brilliant routines.
That's a little cruel to say, but when you think about it, what stands out, you know, with the gold rush, you probably don't remember the plot.
You do remember the scene where Charlie has to eat his boots and, you know, in a way,
his movies were stringed together, some of the shorts.
The shorts were his great commercial work, where he was working for Hal Roach, I guess
it was, and then gradually went off on his own.
And the more independence Chaplin got, the worse his films got.
You know, The Great Dictator, wonderful film, brilliant, funny, again, what you remember
are bits, Hinkle dancing with the globe, the barber, Charlie is the barber shaving the
man's...
I mean, and someone should have told him, Charlie, lose the final speech.
I don't know if you know The Great Dictator, but the moment when it's about a man impersonating
Hitler and getting to give this big speech at a rally, and he gives a great speech in
favor of international peace.
At the very least, the speech needed to be cut.
Forty-seven minutes was a little long for this.
Well, it's about five minutes, but it's interminable when you see the film, and it's actually a
bit embarrassing now.
And you know, Charlie Chaplin could do anything he wanted at that point. Again, that's one
of those films written, directed, produced, music by Charlie Chaplin. He was a genius
and it's amazing to think he could do all these things and do the gaffing on his own.
I don't even know what gaffing is. And then you get to Monsieur Verdoux and then the really
and so on.
I mean, there are probably other reasons for his decline, but a bad case of autourism was
one of them.
And I mean, this is a story that goes on and on.
Coppola, I've already mentioned.
I mean, to me, the greatest films ever made are Godfather I and II, and they're arguably
therefore the greatest artistic achievement of the 20th century.
Samuel Beckett, the greatest artist of the 20th century.
The Greatest Artistic Achievement of the 20th Century, Samuel Beckett, eat your heart out.
They are commercial art, a big money-making film, the product of as close to a studio
environment as you can find now.
Those two films are perfect.
They are the only films I know that are completely perfect, and they're just magnificent in every
The turning point of this career is Apocalypse Now, which has about one and a half hours
of the most brilliant filmmaking ever, and then an hour that's completely incoherent,
otherwise known as Marlon Brando's part in the film.
But there's the point, there's the point.
Coppola had to get his independence as a director, and Marlon Brando now had to have his independence
This is an actor. No script that Marlin's going to follow. He's just going to ramble on and on for 40 minutes.
And, you know, the independence Coppola and Brando had in making that film ruined it.
I mean, again, whenever Robert DeValle is on the screen, for whatever reason, that's a great movie.
Robert DeValle, the consummate professional actor. And I just say to myself, you know, somebody needed to kick Coppola's butt.
And now, of course, we have, now I can turn to the issue of director's cut, we have the director's cut of Apocalypse Now, and who in the world needs that French plantation owner for another hour?
And so we start talking about this with Amadeus, because thanks to my misplaning, I brought the director's cut of the movie, and it's a really fascinating...
I mean, here's how the auteur theory is infecting DVD sales, you know, we're all like sheep, we run out and buy the director's cut, wow, the director's cut, well, more than half the time the director's cut's inferior to the theatrical release, I want to get the thing where you get both on the one DVD,
D. I mean, even with Lord of the Rings, I love seeing the extra scenes, but I wouldn't
have in the theater. And again, it's a perfect...Director's Cut is auteur theory brought to life. It's
romantic autonomy of art. It's this whole theory that somehow the director knew right
and the studio didn't. But, you know, half the time...You know, we were watching Amadeus
grandfather is in the film playing the flute around the gangsters and you know
they're marvelous scenes but when you see where it's placed it really
interrupted the powerful cutting continuity of the film so you know it's
nice that technologically we have the choice and I think eventually soon we're
gonna be cutting the films ourselves we're given these scenes and we get to
The Triumphs of Capitalist Technology
But what I'm pointing to is this issue that, you know, the director doesn't always know best
and having someone else look at what you do with a more objective eye
and telling you, you know, lose that scene
in studying the Casablanca, I was amazed that at the end of the DV
They have all these surviving correspondents on the film, and it's quite amazing the notes,
read some of these too, that Hal Wallace wrote.
This in a way is the auteur theorist's nightmare.
Hal Wallace watched dailies of the film, commented them on detail to Curtis, and it was things
like this, 1942, June 4th, Wallace wrote to Curtis, I don't like your choice of the bartender,
I don't think he sees it all funny, and I want to give him as little to do with the picture as possible.
On August 21st, he writes some detailed notes on the cutting of the film that goes on for several pages,
and it's at this level of detail.
In the opening shot of the café, lose the silent cut of the woman crying, cut before the pan.
Occasionally, even Jack Warner himself got involved.
The boss of all bosses went over Hal Wallace's head, Director Curtiz, and he writes,
Dear Mike, I can't understand why a 54 second take must be started 7 times. You must cut down on the amount of negative and positive film.
Signed Jack. And everybody knew who Jack was on the set.
And you see again, according to the author theory, this was the worst thing possible.
Jack Warner was getting involved, Hal Wallace was getting involved. They were interfering with the authorial vision of Michael Cortese.
I was amazed at how carefully these studio people supervised what was going on.
And I'm not at all convinced that they made the film worse with their suggestions.
So see it one way or another.
I mean, the great auteur was Orson Welles, but you know who else was an auteur?
The greatest film in the history of Hollywood, according to most people, Citizen Kane, and the worst film in the history of Hollywood, according to everybody, Plan 9 from Outer Space, were both produced by auteurs, Orson Welles.
Ed Wood, who thought he was Orson Welles, and wrote and directed, you know, Glender, Glenda, and all those terrible films
And Tim Burton made that wonderful movie about Ed Wood, which culminates in the scene of Ed Wood meeting Orson Welles in a bar
And what are they talking about? Orson Welles has just learned that the studio has insisted on casting Charlton Heston as a Mexican in Touch of Evil
Orson Welles, the studio, they're ruining my film, and Edward has said, oh yeah, they've ruined a couple of my films too.
And, you know, again, the auteur theory, it just doesn't work if auteurship can produce both Citizen Kane and Plan 9.
Complete autonomy as part of the director does not necessarily produce good results.
So, again, I really wish that directors could have autonomy and have their freedom and not be too pressured.
But many times, that pressure turns out to produce better results.
And then time and time again, one can see that a person has one big hit as a filmmaker, and then gets too big for his britches,
so much for the auteur theory, let me turn briefly to the Frankfurt School and another Marxist anti-market way of viewing Hollywood
Now, if you read nothing else of Marxist culture criticism, read the culture industry chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Teodor Adorno.
I can't begin to say how influential this essay has been. It's probably the single most influential essay in cultural studies.
studies, I disagree with it, it's at times unreadable although that may be
because it's a bad translation for the German but but still it's actually
brilliant in certain areas and you could learn a lot from it but this is the it's
the full title of the chapter is the culture industry enlightenment as as mass
deception. This is a product of a kind of historical accident called World War II
That is, Horkheimer was Jewish and Adorno was half Jewish. In any case, they were Marxists and had to flee Nazi Germany.
And by some grotesque quirk of fate, they ended up in the only place that seemed worse to them than Nazi Germany, namely Los Angeles.
And you have to appreciate the fact that they couldn't drive.
so it really I mean I can't sympathize with their circumstances so there was a
huge colony of German emigres in Los Angeles centered around Hollywood a
number of these directors had come there and in conjunction with that a number of
musicians Arnold Schoenberg ended up in Hollywood and Louis B. Mayer felt sorry
and ask them to write a film score.
One of the most bizarre ideas of Arnold Schoenberg writing film music.
But anyway, Horkheim and Adorno ended up, actually Adorno was good friends with Schoenberg.
And in a way, the whole modern field of cultural studies was born out of the alienation and dissatisfaction
of these German emigres stuck in Los Angeles.
and watching Hollywood movies with, I think, a minimal concept of comprehension, as I'll try to show in a minute.
But they were weirdly driven in a sense. I mean, they were German to the core, very cultured, especially Adorno.
Adorno was a composer himself and a decent pianist, very learned in musicology, wrote excellent books on musicology.
And here they are listening to Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians on the radio and all this slick Hollywood music and it's driving them crazy and they're watching these films and it really led them to conclude that this, there was a conspiracy going on here and part of it was they were, one thing that could be said for them is they were profoundly anti-fascist
They were trying to understand what had gone wrong in Germany and it is interesting they
were among the first to try to see Germany as not an exceptional case but that what had
happened in Germany was the logical outcome of, they felt, capitalism and in general of
enlightened rationale in the West.
The thesis of this book is that fascism goes back to the Odyssey, to put it in a nutshell,
that the Greek rationality of Odysseus, which led him to blind that cyclops, eventually
leads through the Marquis de Sade to Hitler.
I'm compressing this book very quickly for you, but that's essentially its thesis.
And in a way, I mean, some of the insights, the reading of the Odyssey, for example, is
completely brilliant.
But they wanted to spread the blame and not locate it in Germany.
And so they found it in Hollywood.
And one of the great claims of this chapter is Hitler's speeches, Hollywood films, propaganda.
It's the same thing.
It's mind control, it's thought control.
And Adorno had it in for Arturo Toscanini, the conductor, and so at one point it's Hitler
dictator, Toscanini dictator.
There's some really bizarre things in the book, and you have to wonder how much of a
Fort Fangler fan do you have to be to equate Toscanini with Hitler.
And they equate the Budapest string quartet with Montevani in the strings and Guy Lombardo
in the Strings, because they feel the Budapest String Quartet has been corrupted by coming
to Hollywood and they play too sweetly now instead of this very odd thing going on in
this essay.
And I do, I think it is a feature of their feeling so out of it in the Hollywood community
and frankly watching films in a language that they didn't really understand.
And so what they saw was this completely manipulative system.
and I'll just read you a few things from the essay to give you a little flavor of it.
They're reacting to defenses of Hollywood as mass culture.
It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary
that inevitably require identical deeds in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods.
They see Hollywood films as mass production, being turned out on a mass production line,
Standardized Product for Standardized Audience
The technical contrast between the few production centers
and the large number of widely dispersed conception points
is said to demand organization and planning by management
Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based
in the first place on consumers' needs
I mean, they have complete scorn for the idea
that Hollywood could be responding to any kind of genuine demand
And for that reason, we're accepted with so little resistance
The result is the circle of manipulation and the retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.
A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself.
It is the coercive nature of society alienated from self.
Automobiles, bombs and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength.
automobiles, bombs and movies. It's all this technological structure of capitalism, which in Germany produced fascism, in Hollywood, as you will see, produced Donald Duck.
And they're equally sinister in their effects. They were struck by market surveys by the studios, because they were doing them even as now.
and mark differentiations such as those of A and B films or of stories and magazines in different price ranges
depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing and labeling consumers.
Now their idea here is Hollywood doesn't follow a market and accordingly label the consumers.
No, it labels the consumers and invents the markets.
Something is provided for all so that none may escape.
The distinctions are emphasized and extended.
The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification.
Everybody must behave as if spontaneously, in accordance with his previously determined and index level.
They can't believe in any spontaneous human action. If people decide which movies to go to, it just looks as if it's spontaneous.
But no, Hollywood has planned it all ahead of time.
They've decided who will see which movies, rich people will like this movie, poor people will like that movie, and it just looks spontaneous.
Everybody must behave as if spontaneously in accordance with his previously determined and index level and choose the category of mass products turned out for his type.
Consumers appear as statistics on research organization charts and are divided by income groups into red, green and blue areas.
The technique is that used for any type of propaganda.
You know, talk about getting the cart before the horse here.
They see these charts in Hollywood that are the result of market surveys, and they think
Hollywood producers create the charts and then create the demand from them.
Now again, this is this fallacy, it's a kind of Monday morning quarterbacking, the fact
that a movie is a hit, they think Hollywood knew how to do it, that they could produce
a hit any time they wanted to, obviously untrue from the history of Hollywood as that book
Fiasco Shows.
Well, this goes on and on.
For one thing, their notion of Hollywood is that it was designed to, the movies are designed
to reconcile Americans to the capitalist system so that they won't rebel against it.
And so this is actually rather clever.
They analyze quiz shows as giving everybody the false hope that they can strike it rich.
And you know, if you just let one guy in a million strike it rich, everyone else will
put up with their poverty because they still have the hope of striking rich.
That actually is a rather insightful idea of why game shows are so popular.
But then comes Donald Duck.
Cartoons are there, we would say itchy and scratchy, so we can watch people get beaten up worse than we get beaten up by capitalism.
Let me read you this, my favorite passage.
And this is also great. This is the nostalgia of culture critics.
This is like, he's now saying, Steamboat Willie, that was great cartooning.
But Donald Duck, now, cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism.
They ensured that justice was done to the creatures and objects they electrified by
giving the main specimens a second life.
All they do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over truth.
Feel that way about cartoons?
A few years ago, they had a consistent plot, which only broke up in the final moments in
the crazy chase, and thus resembled the old slapstick comedy.
Now, however, time relations have shifted.
In the very first sequence, a motive is stated so that in the course of the action, destruction
can get to work on it.
With the audience in pursuit, the protagonists become the worthless object of general violence.
He would have died if he'd seen an itchy and scratchy cartoon.
Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into
every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual
resistance is the condition of life in this society.
Donald Duck and the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the
audience can learn to take their own punishment.
The Character of an Artita Enta, Degenerate Duck, as it would be in German, Donald.
I mean, that's where I thought, you know, maybe they didn't understand the Donald Duck cartoons.
Maybe, you know, and I just, I'm thinking of my, I went and saw Macbeth in German in Frankfurt,
and I understood about 60% of it. My German's okay and I knew the play, but I still got about 60% of it.
and I'd be hesitant to write an analysis of Macbeth based on seeing it only in German that I didn't understand very well, or as in Vienna, they were performing Grillparte's Königsautiker's Glück.
I figured I'd skip that because I didn't know the play and I had no prayer of following it.
But I sympathized with Jorge Amador, they're stuck in Hollywood, what are you going to do on a Friday night?
Go see a Donald Duck cartoon, but I don't think they really get the Donald Duckness of the film there.
And again, this is one, it's extraordinary that so much of cultural studies flows from this essay of two emigrate Germans confronting a culture they barely understood.
They were almost like anthropologists, you know, going to a South Seas island and relying on native informants to explain American popular culture to them.
I think a lot of the errors of modern cultural studies grow out of the fact that these original Frankfurt School analyses basically miss the point.
They just don't understand the degree of feedback that goes on in Hollywood production.
And again, they see everything, typically Marxists, that they focus on the production and they
think that the people who produce the product can then foist it on the audience by clever
marketing.
Now, all films are marketed.
You may know that half the budget of films is sometimes on the marketing and indeed it's
one of the tough discussions, decisions any film producer has.
You've made a film, it's a turkey.
You know it, the audience surveys show it, what do you do?
You then sit down and say, well, we've dumped $12 million into this.
We could put $12 million into marketing, do saturating marketing, operate it in 1,500 theaters
in one weekend, get the ads on Thursday night TV, and get as many people into the theater
that weekend.
Maybe we can recoup the $24 million.
or you can send it straight to DVD hell and save the 12 million dollars on advertising or something in between.
But nobody in Hollywood thinks you can market anything.
Now sometimes they obviously think they can market something, which it turns out they can't.
And you know, you do know this saturation strategy, open the film in as many theaters as you want.
Maybe don't release it for reviewers so there will be no bad reviews, you hope that word-of-mouth won't kill it between Friday and Saturday, but sometimes even that happens.
And that fiasco book is extraordinary to see how unbelievable, you know, films made for $82 million grossing a total of $3 million with a $17 million advertising budget.
So, you know, what strikes me about these Marxist theorists, these cultural theorists in general, they seem to have no idea how the industry actually operates.
You just wish one of them could intern in a studio office for a change.
And then maybe they'd have some idea how markets operate.
So in general in films, yes, a lot of planning goes into a film, but the final film rarely resembles the thing that was originally planned.
A lot of planning even goes into a studio strategy.
But again, if you're not adaptable in this industry, you're not going to be in it very long.
It is a case of feedback, revision in the process of producing the play.
You'll see that movies are sometimes changed even after they're released.
They will do another ending for it and rush to get it out.
Ad campaigns, you can see, get refined in the process.
Again, we are so obsessed with this idea of pre-planning, getting it all right ahead of time.
I mean, it's sort of the way academics tend to write their books.
They do write them, you know, sort of in a kind of isolation, and they project that then on the rest of the world, how they operate.
But in fact, again, the whole world of the motion picture, as we look at its history, is a world of, it should be studied with chaos theory.
It's a world of unpredictability, of all sorts of elements of contingency.
And that's why we need thousands of movies to produce one good one.
Again, the way you see some aesthetic critics write about films, the way you see some cultural studies write about films,
you'd think that you could figure out ahead of time how to make the perfect movie.
That just neglects how complex it is to make a movie.
There are so many elements involved, so much chemistry involved, the chemistry among members of the cast, the chemistry between the cast and the directors.
Many of the actors in Casablanca, for example, had worked together in other Warner Brothers movies, and that helps very much.
You can actually see that on the screen, that these people are comfortable together.
On the other hand, Bogart and Bergman had never worked together, and yet they hit it off, and that's obvious on the screen.
on the screen.
Kurtis was a very professional director and easygoing and worked well with everybody.
So that helped.
But all these things are unpredictable.
Warner didn't know they had a hit when they were making Casablanca.
They certainly didn't know they had a film classic going when they made Casablanca.
If people waited for everything to be in place to make the perfect movie, no movies would
ever be made.
So the structure of the movie industry and its cultural product is basically just what
we saw in the serial novel and also I'm claiming we saw in the Elizabethan Theater and I think
you'd find in Greek tragedy if you look back.
Again it is not a case of a few single geniuses turning out a few single perfect products.
It's a mess.
It's everybody working against everybody else and I think the formula is the more people
working the better, the more competition the better, you know, the larger the movie industry,
the more likely it is to turn out hits and so when you look at the record of the motion
picture of the 20th century, just an unspeakable number of bad movies and many of them have
have mercifully been lost. You look at some of the genres like the Hollywood Western in the 30s, just what were called B-movies then.
One that Horkheimer referred to that back in those days, studios did decide, typically movies were shown in a double bill in those days,
and you had an A-movie and a B-movie, and that they decided ahead of time, they put their famous actors and actresses and directors
the big budget of the A-movies and the script on the B-movies
often made more money on the B-movies in terms of profits because the costs were lower
but in any case, you look at those things, I mean, no one looks at them now
except maybe on TCM very late, 3 a.m. in the morning
but all those movies, again, they're like the base of the pyramid
it's the one thing I'm trying to get across, culture is like a pyramid
It needs a broad base to reach those peaks in the view of many analysts as if we could jump to the peaks immediately.
Who made Boxtop Bertha? Was it Scorsese or Coppola? One of the two.
Boxcar Bertha, Scorsese. In order to make Raging Bull, Scorsese had to make Boxcar Bertha
early in his career. That's the typical pattern. You take the greatest directors, they don't
consistently turn. The people closest to auteurs, like Ingmar Bergman or Fellini, they don't
They don't turn out consistently great films. Any place you look in culture, there's inconsistency.
Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Crescent and Titus Antroticus, for that matter.
We know this from the economy in general, that entrepreneurship is a gamble, that nobody knows ahead of time what works.
you can only guess at it and culture it's almost even more extreme becomes a matter of taste
there's more more uncalculable elements so that's why commercial culture can be successful it throws
so much money so much resources here at the making of movies that you make enough movies you'll make
make a great one. And again, you'll see that for the sort of movie economy as a whole.
But even in a director's career, I was really struck, for example, with Tim Burton, how
strong his first movies were. I couldn't remember anyone who was that good from the beginning,
starting off with Pee Wee's Big Adventure, then doing Beetlejuice, and then doing the
The Batman film and the second Batman film. As I recall, Edward Scissorhead, I think his
first six films were all successful and all extraordinarily good. And then things have
actually started to drop off lately. M. Night Shyamalan, I think his first three films were
extraordinarily good and now he's kind of falling off. But, you know, Hitchcock made
some bonds, John Ford made some pretty bad movies. I mean, he made so many movies. Of
Of course that happened, but that's what you should expect.
Again, if you read critics, they always look at things in retrospect.
When a movie works out, when everything is perfectly in place, then they can go back
and a critic can explain to you the pattern, I'm very good at doing stuff like that, it's
my profession.
But the mistake is to think it has a perfect pattern because it was perfectly planned from
from the beginning. Scholars are very uncomfortable with contingency and messiness and with the
sheer element of contingency and luck in artistic achievement. And they tend to write it out.
They tend to write out everything that makes a culture unpredictable in a way, everything
that makes it fun. But if you really see how the pattern of the Victorian novel is the
The same as the pattern of movies, a whole series of really bad novels and novelists,
about 20 who were really good, some who were real peaks and one powering genius like Dickens.
You see the same thing when you look around at movies.
Again, as I started to say, I'll say it again, that if you took the 100 best movies of the
in the 20th century, around the globe, but even just out of Hollywood, it really would be an extraordinary body of work.
I sat down to compile the list of the 100 best movies and came up with 200.
I really couldn't whittle it down to 100 because it's quite extraordinary when you start thinking about it.
Now, I don't know how many billions upon billions of dollars went into the movie industry in the 20th century,
But it's one of the reasons why it resulted in such an extraordinary production
And that's the point I would make and we'll be making about television as well
We have great contempt for commercial culture
But one thing it does is throw money at culture and it attracts talent
American drama has not been so great in the 20th century
There's O'Neill, and maybe you can talk about Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and come down to David Mamet, but you know the reason why American drama has not been so good is there's been so much more money and opportunity in making films.
Why should Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese be writing drama when they could be making these films, which are not, it's not just that they make more money, it's not just they get more fame,
It's even not just that they reach a larger audience, but the final product is in fact more exciting than just the stage play, and it allows them to do things that they couldn't do on the stage.
And so it's obvious that the movies have siphoned off talent from the area of drama, but that's what happens in the history of culture.
New media come along when theater was introduced and ancient Greek drama drew talent away from people who otherwise might have been writing old style epic poems.
And so that's what we see here. To sum up then, the motion picture is a perfect example of a new medium that comes along without any particular artistic thinking behind it.
and the medium itself is initially attractive. People were fascinated just by the fact that
something is on film and that they've got a moving picture now. And similarly when they
introduce sound to it, there was an absolute fascination just now with talking pictures.
What happened very quickly though is people with artistic talent were attracted to this
area. In some cases we always see this migration from Broadway to Hollywood. W.C. Fields would
The New Medium draws out people who never would have even thought of being artists in
the old medium.
Someone like John Ford was just a Hollywood roustabout.
I think he starred out as a stuntman in silent films and one day he said, hey, let me use
the camera.
I can do that.
He's a man who didn't grow up with any artistic ambitions, ended up one of the great artists of the 20th century with films like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to his credit.
So a new medium gives new opportunities to people who worked in the old medium. Above all, it opens up new opportunities to people who never worked in any artistic medium.
And the result, as we say, is aesthetic and cultural history.
Okay, I'll stop here. Yes?
Sir, there's a couple of things that ought to be said here.
Fried is one of the greatest sims, and these critics, and the Germans, especially the German people.
I mean, I was in the service when the Germans were restoring their own military system.
Could you ask me a question? Could you just ask a question?
Well, the question is, well, the thing about it is, all of this commotion about these things has to take in people with pride, for instance, critic, and then, but the point of the thing is that the human nature is operating here,
And movies and their fate is just like comparing it to a golf and holds in one. You have to play a lot of golf to get a hold of a golf.
I agree with that, yeah.
In other words, it should be asked, the question should be asked if it's going toward the highest form, the highest desire in mankind, it's good.
If it's going to the lower attitude that mankind has, it's bad.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. It's a problem. We can't tell ahead of time whether a movie is going to hit the heights and depths.
Other questions? Yes?
I'm afraid that the epic first will be seen quite hard, as we have deliberately planned these movies to turn on it under the makeup of recent films a lot.
You did do some streaks in this role of film in the vehicle of radiology, and it's not but a way to be pre-capitalist in the sense that you have parodic wisdom, but you also be very pro-communist in a way.
You used to think about multi-stopped and photobiological films, which are novels written by communists, and they're certainly contained in the novel.
Films are ideological and they often express the ideology of the people who make them and
sometimes more generally the ideology of the filmmaking community.
Ben Stein wrote a wonderful book called The View from Sunset Boulevard, which shows how
the way people live in Los Angeles gets reflected in the films they make.
And for example, the fact that films generally portray businessmen as sleazy reflects the
The Greatest Center of Sleazy Businessmen is Hollywood.
If you look, he used Dallas on television as an example, JR would sit down and sign
a $6 million oil deal on a handshake.
And Stein pointed out, there's no way Shell Oil or Mobil is going to do business that
way.
There'd be 52 lawyers and 112 accountants there going over things.
But he said, in Hollywood, that kind of crazy thing actually does happen, that you sign
and a big deal on the basis of just a handshake.
So that's an example where they have a certain view of business
which really is a projection of their own situation outward.
What I will say that I do like about Horkheimer and Adorno
is they point to ideological aspects of Hollywood
that don't seem to be consciously ideological
and that are really clever to observe that, for example,
a quiz show has a kind of built-in ideology to it
Didn't Adorno write a great deal on modern Schoenbrenner?
and be a positive composer. Yes?
Early on, you said that the market is showing how the news are that the academics are really slow to come along.
I guess my question is do you really think that the academics were slow to come along because they didn't know how to embrace movies.
Or do you think academics are slow to come along because they're usually typically supposed to come along in terms of technology?
I think it's a combination of things. Generally, academics are slow to get the message.
I think, you know, so many times when I talk about Gilligan Unbound or my other writers on television,
you know, what I hear from them, oh, well, I don't own a TV, you know, like, oh, you, so, but, you know,
I think academics tend to be invested in whatever the last big thing was.
They have been studying it in some cases for centuries.
They know the vocabulary.
It's very interesting that, for example, the first commentary on films tended to apply
the standards of drama to it and say this film lacks some characteristic that a stage
drama should have.
academics get very good at talking about what's been in front of their eyes for a long time
and in some ways they balk at a new medium because it requires them to retool.
I'm not really, you know, I was trained to discuss literature.
I know that my talk about film and television suffers.
I don't have the right vocabulary.
I've been told this by people in film studies and so on and I just have to live with that.
But it's typical that academics get invested in a certain mode and they really don't want new modes to come along.
Hegel's the great example of this. Hegel, these great lectures on aesthetics, you know, Hegel takes you brilliantly from the origins of art down to his present day.
And, you know, Hegel creates the idea of the end of history. He just wishes art could end there so there'd never be anything else to say about it and he'd said it all.
at all. So there's nothing on motion pictures in Hegel's Aesthetics. He barely acknowledges
the novel, although he's writing already in the 19th century, because, you know, what
you want is to be able to tell the whole story. And academics take that view. Other questions?
I know being a member of the Hollywood Society out in Los Angeles, across the Los Angeles area, one of the things that you were really struggling with is the tax structure within the business industry and actually leaving the country more and more.
I'm interested to almost shift more of our transfer approach to if the government is becoming more involved in it, then why are we changing and they don't seem to really have much of an impact on it?
in Hollywood. I mean, for example, the single, in some ways the single most important event
in the 20th century was when the federal government decided to break up the studio system. The
movie industry used to be vertically integrated and the movie studios owned movie theaters
and they could see their product all the way through the screen. The federal government
decided this was a matter for antitrust action, that they had to break the power of the studios.
They spent years in court and millions of dollars to do what television was about to accomplish on its own in breaking up the power of the studios.
Many people have said that movies have never recovered from the breaking up of the vertical integration of the industry.
I don't know enough about the economics of this to comment on that, but it does seem to me the government had no business breaking down a system that the free market had developed.
If I were sure this was purely the result of free market developments, I'd say that more confidently, but I don't know if any sort of government regulations helped keep the integrity of the studio system.
But I mean, just abstractly, what business of it was the federal government to decide whether studios could own theaters or not?
And the consequence of that has been monumental. It basically destroyed the classic studio system.
Many people have said that at least the average quality of movies has never been as good as it was in the 30s and 40s.
So yes, that's a whole other question that libertarians would want to talk about.
To what extent is the structure of the movie industry determined by government intervention?
And tax laws chiefly involving issues like depreciation and all the accounting practices that are basically dictated by the federal government
have a huge impact on how films are financed and therefore on their qualities.
I'm not enough an expert to discuss that stuff, but you're absolutely right.
Talking about the economics of the film industry, you cannot ignore federal regulation and intervention in so many areas.
But fundamentally, the outsourcing of Hollywood production is a consequence of labor unions.
and the fact that so many American television shows are produced in Canada now, follow from that.
Is that all? I think we'll bring it to a close now. Yeah. Okay. That's all.
Thanks.