Ziggity Boomer Goes to the Movies

I'm newsblind on the younging of the 83rd Academy Awards: like snowblind only not dazzled. The hosts were young. Bob Hope and Billy Crystal showed up, just in case young didn't work. Bob Hope's dead. I'm not sure appealing to the dead demographic is going to add audience. Young is good. I was young once and liked it. Young people spend money on entertaining themselves, which is the whole point of everything, isn't it? Money? If it is, the Oscars are even farther off base than the silly host choice. Lest we forget: there are oodles of potential moviegoers over 50. We do not go to the show for popcorn (the big money in movies is made at the concession stand), we won't even rent movies with titles like The 40 Year Old Virgin, or Saw XVII, or any movie with Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughan, or the new babe with plastic boobs, or multiples thereof. We do not go to see guys dressed up like fat women. We do not watch car chases, people crawling on ceilings, explosions, multiple throat gougings, superheroes in tights, unless any of these features are included in a movie that is damn well written. Am I getting my point across? We want story. We have lots of money to spend at the local theater, we have nice cars to take us there. We have leisure time and we're hungry for more, better ways to entertain ourselves. I read more than one article today that quoted studio executives balloon-talking like a comic strip about needing to market to an older audience whose dollars will flow from their hands if only the executives could figure out what they want. AAARGHH! 50+ movie attendees are going to spend more money on movies than any age group in a hot second. We're close to it already in 2010 - this year our age group might surpass the 18-34 crowd, if there's anything coming out worth going to see. And the studio executives are wringing their hands. They will finish by wringing each other's necks because the movies in development are undoubtedly schlock. In 3D. Ignoring plot, good acting, and a story that engages us at the major studios is going to give independents who are more nimble and savvy opportunity to elevate some good screenplays into quick release. I love movies, and I'd like to see more movies than the ones I already love on Turner Classic Movies.

Women's Work in Movies

Movies today: tonight is the 83rd annual feast of praise and damnation, a celebration of the best & awfullest. I'm dusting off my tails. Francine LeFrak's article titled "The Mysterious Disappearance of Hollywood's Trailblazing Women" bemoans the lack of success for the movies about women this year. She points to Amelia, Conviction, Made in Dagenham, Secretariat and Fair Game. She writes in dollars: is box office the only criteria for 2010 being a "painful" year for women in movies? There are a thousand villains in a movie's supposed failure. The screenplay is the usual first suspect rounded up. Only two women writers: Pamela Gray (Conviction) and Anna Hamilton Phelan, second billed (Amelia). Maybe the director? Only one woman - Mira Nair directed Amelia. Nigel Cole has good woman movie creds (Calendar Girls, Saving Grace). Could be subject matter: Amelia Earhart again? Secretariat is a horse opera, I don't care who owns him. Conviction is a marginal story: sure there's a woman's struggle against possible injustice, but geez, did the brother do it or not? Is there anyone in this country who doesn't know the Valerie Plame story? How did these less than stellar story concepts get produced? This is no mysterious disappearance of women, trailblazing or other, in movies. It's a classic storyline. Moving pictures began in 1895. In 1896, Alice Guy-Blache directed her first narrative film. Frances Marion was scripting movies for Lois Weber, Mary Pickford, Marion Davies (as actors, directors, producers, studio executives) in the 1920s. Dorothy Arzner was admitted to the Directors Guild in 1937, after the money men had laid seige to Hollywood. Women have been, and continue to be, deliberately disappeared. Kathryn Bigelow won the first woman director's Oscar and DGA Award in 2010, a double first - 115 years after moving pictures began. In 2010 only 16% of directors, editors, producers, writers working on the 250 top films were women. I will wager a bunch that this year that percentage will be less by 2%. And we'll get still fewer movies about powerful women, brought to the screen by powerful women. 116 years of the movie business, with pioneering, trailblazing women working the majority of enterprising executive positions in the industry in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And here we are at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards. Now that's a screenplay to be written, a movie to be directed, edited, produced, distributed. Women's work.