Summing up...

I’ve always thought that films should represent life, and that if you live in a world of film, your films become increasingly out of touch.  Nobody in Hollywood wants films about Hollywood, but, in a sense, that’s all they get.  They hunger for writers who come in from outside: a New York cop, maybe, or an ex-con artist with a story from Florida.  But they usually fit it into their vision of the world.  I was at a meeting with a manager in LA and I told him about a story about this guy who wins the lottery.  Because of the circumstances, he can’t cash the ticket so he has someone he knows cash it for him.  The manager asked, why doesn’t this guy steal the ticket?  I didn’t have a good answer because it hadn’t occured to me.  The character doesn’t steal the ticket because that’s the way the character is.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was his own jilted Hollywood idea about life.  Most people I know wouldn’t steal the ticket for the simple reason that it’s a scummy thing to do.  In Hollywood, if you don’t steal the ticket, there’s something wrong with you.

 - Michael Walker

http://pangofilms.wordpress.com/

Michael Walker looks forward to growing up.

Filmmaker Michael Walker has a wonderful Blog you can view here: and I highly recommend you do. I browsed through most of his past posts and they're great reads. He spends a great deal of time pointing out our culture's pragmatism and media mania. I could go on for days about the points he makes. In one of his posts, "Death of grown up films" he asks a very interesting question: "The big non-news in Hollywood this week is that STATE OF PLAY did crappy at the box office. This means that, in case you’ve missed this message which they deliver over and over again, grown ups don’t go to the movies so why is anybody still making movies for them?"

I've brought up this topic with several peers and the consensus seems to be the same: "we're patient." Hollywood is a young man's game, and while I myself and quite young (being born in 1983) I'm often worn out by the Hollywood Hype Machine and although I enjoy the occasional popcorn flick, I can't keep up. Being a recent graduate of Childhood I found that, like my older peers, my tastes have changed. I haven't been to a film on opening weekend since Freshman year of college (with the exception of The Dark Knight) and for me, the term "movie event" has lost all meaning.

As Michael points out in his post, "Grown ups have lost the habit of going to the movies because for the last twenty-plus years they’ve had less and less reason to go. It’s not enough to make one film every once in a while and say, where’s the audience? Only years of grown up films playing in theaters could ever bring that audience back, which many hits and misses along the way." Clearly, Hollywood only cares about the dollar, and that's to be expected, they're a business, there's not fault in their model, just a lack of appreciation. What do you think?