Recently I was interviewed by Super-ficcion on a wide range of movie related issues, under the headline of “Is Hollywood in Crisis?” I thought they did a great job in putting together a very spiffy piece, which can be accessed here. Some Mid Century Cinema followers have read the interview on other platforms, but we’re reproducing it here, partly for our own archives, and also because I answered the questions in English (let’s not dwell on my high school Spanish imbroglio). Super-ficcion did an excellent job translating my comments into Spanish, but getting back to English via google translate – quite impressively, and as my Grandma would say, “in my day, we didn’t have such things” – nevertheless left a few rough edges that are smoothed out here. [Note: I have also slightly rephrased some of the questions for clarity and continuity]
SF: Today in Super Fiction we bring you an interview with Jonathan Kirshner. Our first question is to invite you to tell our readers about your writing on cinema.
JK: I am the author of Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society and the Seventies Film in America, and the co-editor (with Jon Lewis) of the recent edited volume When the Movies Mattered The New Hollywood Revisited. I am also the author of the novel Urban Flight which takes place in New York City in 1975 – so I am quite committed to the period! But on Mid Century Cinema, and in my wider range of publications and film studies teaching more generally, I range much more broadly, including film noir, postwar French cinema, and the films of Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Claude Chabrol and Jean Pierre Melville, among others. But my principal area of specialization is the “New Hollywood,” a sub-culture of American films that thrived from (approximately) 1967 – 1976 (essentially from the end of the censorship code to the birth of the blockbuster).
SF: What do you consider to be special about the New Hollywood?
JK: I am among those who consider this period to have been a “golden age” in American cinema, due to a variety of social-political-cultural trends, and a confluence of factors that allowed a certain type of film to thrive – as well as, importantly, a certain type of film culture (what audiences wanted and expected from the movies). I discuss in both books (and on my website) these factors that permitted the New Hollywood to thrive, and about a decade later those had changed. Essentially, 1977 was very much not 1967 in the US—socially, culturally, politically, and in terms of the industry itself. (To take one random and unfair but illustrative example, the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s were important, cutting edge, and revolutionary; the Rolling Stones of the 1980s were a safe, mainstream, large commercial enterprise.)
SF: For many specialists, Chinatown, starring the great Jack Nicholson, marks the end of a cycle. The end of cinema’s golden age. Why is that perspective so common?
JK: I do want to emphasize that although golden ages come and go (and this is true for all art forms), it is important to remember that great films are always being made, and that lots of bad films were made during golden ages. The larger difference, I think, as I said, is in the film culture. So what audiences want is also a very important factor here. And it is true that the most ambitious films being produced today are unlikely to emerge from the Hollywood Studios. But there are great artists working right now, behind and in front of the camera, in the U.S. and around the world. These should not be overlooked. For example, the mega-star Kristen Stewart has made a slew of blockbusters, but she has also made a number of great and important and ambitious films, and she is an enormously talented actor. (She seems to be following the later Clint Eastwood model: “one for the suits, one for me.” That is one way that serious and ambitious artists can thrive within the system.)
SF: A movie that shares this notion of a lost golden age has recently been announced, to be directed by Ben Affleck and based on the book ‘The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood’ by Sam Wasson. What do you think about the project?
JK: Well, the production of Chinatown is a heck of a story. I guess we’ll find out if it can make a good movie. I am skeptical, but curious.
SF: What do you think of the science fiction genre? Since its inception it has always been well received, but today it seems especially common.
JK: Unfortunately, I don’t have much to say about the science fiction genre, other than to note that filmmakers use genres to explore certain themes, and science fiction is especially attractive for taking on huge issues about the basic nature of humanity. They also commonly provide a good backdrop for “frontier” stories and mysteries, which work well in cinema. It is not surprising that it is such an enduring genre.
SF: What about television? Streaming services are increasingly being bought and many movies that would have been great on the big screen a while ago have been brought to these platforms on the small screen.
JK: There is a tremendous amount of high quality television being produced these days. My own view is that the reason for this is economic: because the costs of production are so much lower, the need for a mass audience is reduced, so creative artists can take chances and/or seek out niche markets. (This was one reason why the New Hollywood thrived. In many cases – the production company BBS, which I have written about, is the best example of this – New Hollywood filmmakers traded low budgets in exchange for no studio interference. That’s why, for example, The Last Picture Show could be in black and white – because studio objections, and they were raised, were irrelevant.)
SF: In the new era of cinema, there are many prequels, sequels, spin-offs, reboots … of classics of yesteryear. We have clear examples such as the Star Wars saga or others such as Star Trek, etc. . . . Has contemporary cinema lost its spirit?
JK: Regarding sequels and reboots: Roger Ebert offered the definitive statement here. His little movie definition book has this entry – Sequel: A Filmed Deal. It is hard to get enthusiastic about such things. (The exemplar here is a movie I love: Ghostbusters. Brilliant, innovative, hilarious, a strike of lightning. Ghostbusters II? A bunch of suits saw that Ghostbusters made a ton of money and thought they could squeeze more money out of doing it again. I think the results speak for themselves.)
SF: What do you think of the evolution of the superhero films? These days the MCU fill movie theaters. These films are enjoyable but are they a piece of art?
JK: Personally I am not a big fan of the current crop of superhero films. I thought Scorsese’s op-ed in the New York Times was brilliant on this point, and it is worth quoting: “For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.” I think most cinephiles are with Marty on this. BUT – and this is a big but – is it important to remember that commercial movies (movies made with the idea that they will recover their costs and ideally turn a profit – that is, the overwhelming majority of movies we see) are works of art, but they are also forms of entertainment (to use a word that John Cassavetes hated). There is nothing wrong with that. So people should watch what they want to watch. It would be nice if more people wanted to watch more ambitious films, because then it would be easier for more ambitious films to get financing. But other than for that factor, as a movie viewer (as opposed to an investor, which I am not), I don’t think that much about “box office”—and have always found it strange that so many movie viewers seem to care, as if they have some stake in the money being made. (I mean, I root for a baseball team, but I want them to win games – I have no idea about, and don’t care if, “my” owner made more money than the opponent’s owner.)
SF: To conclude, we would like to ask your point of view about Hollywood today. Where are we going? Is on crisis? Is it possible to return to that Golden Age?
JK: Is Hollywood in crisis? I don’t know. I think a great danger about Hollywood movies today – though this has been brewing for years – is that the international market is so important to Hollywood. Don’t misunderstand this comment as hinting at nativism or xenophobia – something that, sadly, must be made very clear in this distressing moment in American history. (Probably most of the films I watch these days are made outside the US.) But rather, in that search for the mass, blockbuster audience – especially a global audience – wild action, special effects, and broad comedy are more likely to be successful than subtle, dramatic, character-driven films. So that does not bode well for Hollywood emphasizing the type of content I prefer. And there is also the issue of foreign censorship. This is a very big issue. Especially given the importance of the China market. Studios and some filmmakers are changing their films so they can be screened there. This is of course a desecration and a mutilation—and the studios will do it willingly. Indeed, studios may even pre-censor their films with this in mind. (Personally I had mixed feelings about Quintin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – you can read my review in Cineaste magazine – but his unwillingness to change the film so that it would be allowed in China deserves a standing ovation.) On the other hand, regarding the future, let me end on a more positive note. As I said, great movies will always be made. And nowadays, the means of production (especially with the availability of lightweight, sophisticated cameras) have become so much less costly, it is now easier to make a movie than it used to be, when financing was so daunting (obviously there are still many barriers to entry, including distribution). So that is a reason for real hope, even though one negative aspect of low production costs is that there is now so much content available on so many platforms—much of it quite dismal.