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William Katz has had a long and varied career, as an assistant to a U.S. senator; an officer in the CIA; an assistant to Herman Kahn, the nuclear w

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I think that it would be impossible to satirize what Hollywood has become.

William Katz remembers: Hollywood, hooray for?

Thanks for the interesting posts.  Mr. Katz is a treasure trove of nostalgia.

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I think that Hollywood has always had the wackos, weirdos and misfits that it does today. I think that the difference is that a Louis Mayer well understood what he had to work with and cracked the whip hard enough to instill the fear necessary to keep the loonies from straying too far.

How very sad! What insight. H’wood will never figure out because it has become another leftist echo chamber. No wonder some movie producers/makers head to Australia and England. Would “The Lord of the Rings” ever have been produced in the US? What about the “Harry Potter” series? Ok, the authors of the original stories were British but that never stopped H’wood from making terrific movies.

We just saw a “B” (or C, D?) movie last night, “Nancy Drew”. This movie, under the old H’wood system, would have been the first in a series cranked out by a studio that knew its business. Instead H’wood made a movie of a prissy cutie and a wussy Ned. Pathetic. The script just stank!

Movie critic, Michael Medved (http://www.michaelmedved.com), has commented numerous times about the H’wood mentality. A review of the top grossing films (http://www.boxofficemojo.com) of all times show most of them to have: heroes; great plots; great writing; most rated PG-13 or better. They are not the juvenile bathroom humor, feminization of boys and x/r rated garbage that comes out of H’wood today.

The irony of all of this is that if we lose to Islamic terrorists, H’wood will be one of the first institutions to go. And they still don’t get it.

Thank you Mr. Katz!

vladimir estragon - 09 July 2007 01:02 PM

Hollywood is, and always has been, about making money. If you have any problems with what Hollywood is doing, you are critiquing the market.

how profound

It DOES however inspire artists to produce qualitiy projects without the H’Wood’s imprimatur.  When something is good, it gets made.

Just think of all the great films made by independents.

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The main reason for audiences to attend movies remains the same: they want to be entertained!  I think it was Selznik who said, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union!”

Hollywood, like the mainstream broadcast and print media, has forgotten this wisdom.  They force upon their public a worldview that is ugly, pessimistic and self-loathing.  They do this even though they know that such product will not be well-received.

When an entire industry goes against its own self-interest rather than change the political message it is intent upon sending, you know you are dealing with a type of insanity.

Watching newspapers cut back and go out of business, broadcast TV lose huge percentages of their ratings, and movie audiences declining (in every sense of the word), I am amazed.  Really, I did not think they would take it this far.  Now I wonder just how far they will go in their zeal to destroy the Old America - against the wishes of at least half of those Americans they are supposed to be selling their product to!

Force it on them, huh? Where do you live that there are guys with guns marching people into theaters?

I’m just amused because when there’s a large government program, the right tells us in all seriousness that the market can always do it better. But when the market produces crap, or (worse!) something with a progressive point of view, suddenly the people running private industry are following a political agenda

the market is working. Movie attendance ain’t what it used to be. Some former stars have played out their hands and many of us on the right won’t spend a nickel on thier movies. I cannot imagine the next blockbuster with susan sarandon and Tim what’s his face. Why would I pay to see that?

You are trying to combine two seperate issues vlad. The market is working, clearly and hollywood does have an agenda, clearly.

As others have noted their are far more interested in their agenda than they are in their profits. Some of them are making money, and so what do they care? For every ten movies like “jarhead” or “syriana” they produce they just need one Transformer or Pirates and they are fine.

When will we see a movie extolling the day to day virtues of the grunts in Iraq? We’ve gone from Jimmy Stewart enlisting to Sean Penn visiting the enemy on the eve of an invasion. Ghastly, dreadful and not to be funded.

Hollywood is, and always has been, about making money. If you have any problems with what Hollywood is doing, you are critiquing the market.

Of course. To think otherwise is double-plus ungood.

We need a Fairness Doctrine for the print media, to prevent old liars like William Katz from spreading their lying lies.

If anything, Hollywood is biased to the right. Everybody knows that. All the studios are run by Big Corporations who are in bed with Bu$hCo.

vladimir estragon - 09 July 2007 05:37 PM

Movie attendance ain’t what it used to be.

You’re right. It’s much, much bigger.

Attendance has dropped significantly. And you have to correct ticket prices for inflation. Box office mojo does this, but only for paid subscribers. And the first drop which frightened those making movies for theatrical release came in the 1950s. And they blamed TV. I Love Lucy was a ‘must see’ program in that day.

But that ‘depression’ in the film business, and even the slow demise of the studio system, would be seen as a golden age when compared to the 21st century. Good films still tend to be about people, and conflicts, and victories. But they tend to be small films, from those you never hear from again, or who subsequently produce uninspired work. The floor is gone missing. The worst a film can be is as bad as it has ever been.

One can’t even complain that tv is stealing away the business. There’s is NOTHING on tv during the summer months. It’s now summertime. And one can’t complain that there are no great movies in the theaters. Because if Hollywood complained of that, and they might given what’s now playing, then who is to blame?

Tom W. - 09 July 2007 06:15 PM

If anything, Hollywood is biased to the right. Everybody knows that.

Certainly everyone just to the ‘right’ of Daily Kos and Michael Moore might believe that. Everyone that is. Everybody. All. Every.

Are you serious?

postBot - 09 July 2007 09:01 AM

William Katz has had a long and varied career, as an assistant to a U.S. senator; an officer in the CIA; an assistant to Herman Kahn, the nuclear w

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Hollywood remains the devil’s playground, however. Even the remake of Ben-Hur, with Heston, and one of my favorite films, went easy, they say, on the ‘religious aspect’. And there was no reason for that.

It’s difficult to imagine the truly miraculous being portrayed on a theater stage. The stage is - false. It’s smoke. It’s mirrors. It’s pure imagination. So the true reality that often seems so unbelievable - doesn’t play well on stage, or in film.

To me, this is the value of the printed page, of the biography, of the novel. You can’t translate some of these to the stage, or the screen.

As for the studio system, I appreciate what Katz says about the meetings, about the schools. But couldn’t these be had without a tyrant at the helm? Because the tyrant might put his ‘stamp’ on everything, and miss some great scripts and great actors in doing so.

Could not those with money, and appreciation of the old schools, simply not put together their own new schools, on their own - today?

It’s not as if the contractors don’t have standard agreements, or don’t have huge warehouses of props just as the studios once had. Because of the free market system, these various independent contractors might be BETTER equipped than the old studios.

I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the problem is that the independent producers/directors, executives or private syndication gamblers are simply imbued with the unthinking cultural leftism of today. So they simply wouldn’t fund something like the Sound of Music. They might look for another Jurassic Park. But they’d want even LESS of a ‘religious aspect’ to the next Ben-Hur. I think it might even be their principal concern.

That’s the problem - political correctness. You can produce greatly diabolical films about the underside of life. That ‘plays’ with those given over to the ideas of the leftist establishment. But you can’t talk about reality, about surprising behavior, about even something like, self-sacrifice, or love, or bravery. Because these are not politically correct, particularly if there is that ‘religious aspect’.

vladimir estragon - 09 July 2007 07:02 PM

And the first drop which frightened those making movies for theatrical release came in the 1950s. And they blamed TV. I Love Lucy was a ‘must see’ program in that day.

Actually, it was precisely the opposite. When televisions moved into homes in large numbers, the end of the movies was widely predicted. In fact, attendance spiked upwards. Almost the same thing happened when VCRs arrived in the early 80s: it’s the end of movies. Movie attendance has ballooned since then.

Ticket prices only reflect that percentage of the curve that pay top evening or Sunday rates in the cities. And these figures will rise and fall per year. But you could find a moving average shows that movie attendance has dropped significantly from its peak in the 1930s and 1940s.

That is, if you find even a peak with the new Century theaters being built in various cities, if that’s partly a reason (like people going to a ballgame more for the park, than the team), then you might conservatively DOUBLE that attendance, today, and probably still not approach the movie audience of the 1930s and 1940s.

This is why the ticket grosses are so prominently touted, and on box office mojo. But again, that doesn’t reflect attendance. It reflects the high end of ticket sales. These ought to be adjusted for inflation, and not just some figures put out by the government, but the specific rate of inflation in the price of tickets for theatrical releases.

sorry vlad, neither page six nor page seven supports your contention. Movie attendance has declined steadily and rebounded slightly in the last year.

Further, this is data from the mpaa. One must consider the source.

vladimir estragon - 09 July 2007 07:02 PM

Movie attendance has ballooned since then.

Nope. If it’s not on TCM or a DVD of a classic movie from the ‘40’s, 50’s or 60’s, I’m pretty much not interested.
And I think that goes for a big chunk of my Baby Boomer Generation.
Hollywood is in crisis and they are being boycotted by large segments of the American public.
They’re totally dependent on their young audiences and the foreign market now and coasting on the image everyone had of Hollywood in its Golden Years, which is wearing thinner and thinner with every film.
I hear they’re remaking “Barbella...”
Surely the Apocalypse is near.

The MPAA lies about the box office? Why? To try to look better than, um, those other people representing the entire industry?

And look at the numbers, silly. We’re talking about a billion-plus tickets a year and you and sevry think a few million up and down in the past five years is a “significant decline.”

Yes, I question the numbers. Its a trade group vlad. Its really that simple.

Do I think that a few million make a difference? Why yes Vlad, I do.

Any thing else?

My goodness there are few people in the world I truly despise and I ask God for forgiveness but you sir are truly detestable.