The name “Hollywood” was once an emblem of creativity, ingenuity, and originality. The film industry was, for decades, the home of the daring and devoted, those who were willing to risk their reputations and fortunes for the sake of their craft, for the sake of telling a good story in a way no one had ever told a story before. In the pioneering days of the film industry, motion pictures were still a novelty, allowing for much experimenting: filmmakers explored new ways to construct narratives, new techniques to make the impossible seem possible, new methods of framing and ordering images to elicit certain emotional responses — but all of this was done in the name of telling a good story.
However, after watching Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony, one has to ask if Hollywood has simply run out of good stories. Top contenders for the once-prestigious Oscar statuette included “Anora,” a nearly-two-and-a-half hour-long tale of strippers, Russian crime lords, and sexual assault; the French crime musical “Emilia Pérez,” centered on a South American cartel captain who decides he’s transgender; and “Conclave,” which depicts the leaders of the Catholic Church as scheming, Machiavellian arch-politicians and imagines that the next pope might be transgender. Eventually, the coveted “Best Picture” title went to “Anora,” the heartwarming one about a stripper marrying a Russian gangster and trying to avoid being raped. A tale as old as time, they say.
Hollywood used to tell good stories. Recent years have seen only a handful of good stories told well — the World War I epics “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “1917,” the World War II dramas “Dunkirk” and “Hacksaw Ridge,” the exciting “Ford v. Ferrari,” and the oddly-charming “Green Book” stand out to this writer as examples acknowledged by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over the past decade — but the film industry was, once upon a time, a behemoth of creativity, ingenuity, and originality, inspiring the imaginations of generations of boys and girls.
In the early days of Hollywood, studio heads and producers like Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers would partner with directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir to both perfect the technical art of filmmaking and tell riveting, intriguing, immersive stories. As the era of silent film faded, the Golden Age of Hollywood began. The half-century-long Golden Age produced numerous stars, of course — from Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Clark Gable to Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, and Gregory Peck to Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, and Marlon Brando — but was, more crucially, a time when screenwriters, cinematographers, and directors honed their art, establishing the rules which would govern filmmaking for decades.
For example, the style and format of a western differed from the style and format of a romantic drama, which itself differed in tone and technique from a romantic comedy. These rules, far from stifling creativity, were instead a means of guiding and even enhancing creativity and originality. Studio executives, of course, wanted a sizable return on the money they invested in a film, but were wise enough in those days to realize that a certain degree of novelty, daring, and even risk was necessary to make a film that would become a success. Hiring competent directors who knew when to adhere to general filmmaking guidelines and when to innovate, and casting stars with enough prestige and popularity to pack a theater allowed producers to spend a bit of their filmmaking capital splurging on original stories.
The Golden Age of Hollywood was a treasure trove of good stories: from taut thrillers like “Rear Window” and “North by Northwest” to sweeping romances like “Casablanca” and “Gone with the Wind” to moving dramas like “It’s A Wonderful Life” and “To Kill A Mockingbird” to grandiose epics like “Spartacus” and “Citizen Kane” to lighthearted musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “High Society.” Over the course of decades, thousands of stories were told, captivating the hearts and minds of generations.
In the 1960s, a new cadre of filmmakers arose, shaped by the classical moviemaking of the Golden Age but eager to take new risks and further develop the technical and narrative aspects of their chosen craft. The New Hollywood movement, spearheaded by the likes of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, took the tried-and-true rules established by their predecessors and applied them in novel ways, benefitting from and in many cases pioneering technological advances, which were coupled with ever-more-original approaches to storytelling.
The era produced numerous hits and spawned the phenomenon of the blockbuster. While some films, like 1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” pushed the envelope in regard to onscreen depictions of violence and discussions of sexuality, others, such as “Jaws,” the first “Star Wars” trilogy, the “Indiana Jones” movies, “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Chinatown,” and others dazzled audiences with immersive, realistic, and relatable storytelling techniques, breathtaking special effects, and a novel application of the filmmaking style developed in the previous decades.
Action films exploded onto the scene in the 1980s, with movies like “Rambo: First Blood” and “Die Hard” depicting heroes who fight hard to do the right thing. Films like “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” used innovative special effects to tell heartwarming, family-oriented stories. “Risky Business,” “The Breakfast Club,” and others immortalized the style of teenage comedy unique to the 1980s. “Blade Runner” and “The Terminator” joined the “Star Wars” films as science-fiction classics. Many of the stars and filmmakers of the 1980s went on to continued success in the 1990s, with action stars like Mel Gibson proving themselves skilled and adept directors and household names like Spielberg yielding instant classics like “Jurassic Park” and hard-hitting epics like “Saving Private Ryan.”
Even the modern era of filmmaking has yielded some good stories, passionately and skillfully told by masters of the art of filmmaking. But those good stories have become fewer and farther between since the dawn of the 21st century. Why? There are two chief causes: corporate greed and woke ideology.
Film studios and producers have long been fixated on making money, but, as noted above, many recognized in the past that audiences enjoy and appreciate at least a modicum of creativity, ingenuity, and originality, whether in the story itself or in how it’s told. But the advent of the blockbuster in the 1970s showed studios that they could not only make some money on successful films but profit immensely from blockbusters. Thus, studios began pouring more and more money into films, in the hopes of creating that rare beast: the blockbuster. If a film needed $10 million more for its budget to afford star power, popular tunes, more engaging special effects, it could be a worthwhile investment, netting hundreds of millions of dollars for the studios and producers responsible.
Of course, studios learned that disaster could also ensue. Sinking money into a film wouldn’t necessarily make it good, even if that money was spent on stars, script rewrites, and stunning special effects. A prime example is 1995’s “Cutthroat Island,” a $98 million attempt at a swashbuckling pirate adventure. After the film lost the studio over $100 million, pirate movies were barred from production for nearly a decade, until Walt Disney Pictures and producer Jerry Bruckheimer took a risk on “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.” Major studio losses on films over the past two decades have gone as high as $200 million (wasted on the science-fiction-meets-mythology film “John Carter”) and even $237 million (lost on 2023’s “The Marvels”).
The combined desire to generate a sure-fire blockbuster and the dread of losing and never recouping hundreds of millions of dollars has led to the asphyxiation of creativity, ingenuity, and originality in the film industry. A handful of directors — almost all of whom made a name as a New Hollywood director in the 70s, an action auteur in the 80s, or a breakout genius of independent cinema in the late 90s and early 2000s — have enough cachet behind their own names to be handed almost unbridled creative control over cinematic endeavors, but the majority of big-budget, studio-funded films tend to be either reboots or franchises. A movie will be made, on a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, so long as that movie has a built-in, pre-existing fan base and, thus, a better-than-average chance of making money.
The endless stream of “Star Wars” sequels, prequels, and television shows; the ever-increasing adaptations of the “Harry Potter” books; the nonstop production of “Fast and Furious” flicks; and the almost-incestuous, incessantly-expanding Marvel superhero “multiverse” are all symptomatic of the corporate cancer that is eating the film industry away from the inside. The simple fact is that studios and producers simply are not willing to take risks on new, daring, and original ideas — with one exception.
Hollywood has become a hotbed of woke ideology over the last 15 years for certain, but the malady has arguably been around far longer. The only “risks” that studios and producers are willing to take are in pushing and promoting the LGBT agenda, demonizing white men, and mocking or belittling Christianity. Woke ideology is anathema to good storytelling; it is predicated on the concept that victimhood is a virtue. “Anora” and “Emilia Pérez” are ideal fare for the Academy Awards: a stripper who is not appreciated by her Russian mobster husband and a drug lord who wants to transition genders are perfect victims and, thus, perfectly virtuous according to the tenets of woke ideology.
Good storytelling, however, is predicated on the cultivation of virtue and its triumph over vice. This principle has been the bedrock of literature for centuries, one to which practically every great story has adhered. Victimhood is deserving, in some cases, of pity, but it is not the equivalent, in good storytelling, of either virtue or heroism. William Wallace is not the hero of “Braveheart” because he is a victim; he is the hero because he fights against tyranny, devotes his life not to revenge but to the good of his country, and finally gives his life for the sake of his country’s liberty. Dr. Alan Grant is not the hero of “Jurassic Park” because he gets attacked by dinosaurs, but because he risks life and limb to save two children and learns by the story’s end to like children.
Corporate greed has choked the creativity, ingenuity, and originality out of filmmaking — and what little there is left has been inverted and neutered by woke ideology. It has been years since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been relevant, but Sunday’s awards ceremony was nothing more than a soulless pageant, rewarding the woke with little statuettes, since the unoriginal franchise reboots have already been rewarded with millions of dollars.
AUTHOR
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
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