Back-to-School Edition: Why Won't Johnny Watch B&W?

Okay, so I had to take the summer off.  Even activists need a little inactivity.

Came back to find the "China" thing had mercifully cooled a bit, now that Wolf Warrior 2 had suddenly scared the crap out of every studio in town over August ("Uh-oh, they, uh, like their own movies now?"), and more and more brave souls were coming forward, like Bill W., and forcing themselves to admit that, okay, maybe Tom Cruise in "The Mummy"'s new Dark Universe did actually ffff.....f-f-f-f-fffffffff.....flop. 

And picking on Sony taking their big one-two summer punch with "The Emoji Movie" and "Valerian", leading to an analysis of why Sony now seems to be beating Fox as the new failed-franchise Sad-Sack studio still running to keep up with the Big Five's joneses (the one hit they had last summer didn't even belong to them anymore!), just seemed like kicking it while it was down.  At some point, the discussion would have led to mentioning Ghostbusters again, and, well.  Bury the dead, or at least wait till after the Jumanji movie.

But, to quote the elder Michael Corleone, just when I thought I was out, they drag me back in again--A new headline hit the movie discussion forums over August.  And just in time for the kids going back to school.

If you're wondering about the title, it's taking its play from Rudolph Flesch's 1955 book Why Johnny Can't Read, a bold manifesto that showed teachers and educators that kids weren't learning to read because they weren't being shown any reason why reading was interesting--The use of recognize-and-repeat in "See Spot run. Run, Spot, run" (rather than learning the basic "C-at" phonics that the Electric Company taught us) made learning to read a droning chore, and kids were falling behind in their verbal scores.  Among Flesch's new ideas, what if we had more intuitive beginning-level easy-readers that were fun reads for kids to show more enthusiasm learning on?...Say, maybe that funny Dr. Seuss fella from the Bartholomew Cubbins books could try writing a few "cat" and "hat" books for first-graders!

And new literacy in the last half of the 20th century was born.  But now the 21st century is facing a new kind of illiteracy:  Kids who didn't read books in the 50's were never half as openly, combatively, or stubbornly martyr-complexed or smug as 18-24 yo.'s--the dreaded "Millennial generation"--who claim they've never watched an old classic film in their lives.

According to an unscientific survey conducted by FYE media-store chains last August--maybe not Nielsen, perhaps, but it got the discussions started across the net--conducted between 1000 over-50 movie fans and Millennial 18-24 fans, the results weren't promising:
"Millennials Don't Really Care About Classic Movies", NY Post, 8/16/17

- 30% of the young audience polled had never seen a movie from the Black & white era.
- 20% said they feared one would be "boring"
- Only 28% said they had ever seen Casablanca, 16% said they had ever seen Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West", and only 12% had seen Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window".
-The most classic movies the young audience had claimed to have seen were those their own theater/DVD experience personally remembered from the 90's and 00's, including The Matrix, The Dark Knight and Return of the King, with, of course, Disney's "The Lion King" for most-seen "classic" film.
(C'mon, you're going to worship Quentin Tarantino, and you've never seen an actual real-life Leone film?  And no Rear Window?...Seriously??  I knew the plot at ten years old, from a Flintstones cartoon!)

The discussion so far, on most news and film forums, has gone in the usual directions:
The older folk shake their head, the younger folk protest "Don't stereotype us!", and then fall back on asking what's so great about the movies they "should" watch, anyway.
This seems to be the main stumbling block that's been the hardest to overcome:  How do you sell an audience, of whom less than half has ever actually seen "The Sound of Music", on the idea that maybe Terminator 2: Judgment Day might not be one of the Ten Greatest American Movies Ever Made?  (Although I'll grant that Back to the Future may be high on the list.)
The issue is the same as putting a book in the hand of a grudging fourth-grader who won't read anything else after Harry Potter:  Don't lecture them that they're not reading.  Find out why they're not reading...And put something within reach just different enough to show them why they were wrong.  And then, of course, gloat later.

To this end, it would first probably help to take on the Millennial's main arguments against having their parents' classic movies forced upon them--or "Pre-1970 movies", as the term has now come to call them (because pop-culture didn't exist before the 70's, of course), point by point:

1.  "But I don't WANNA watch Citizen Kane!"  Well...you don't have to, y'know.  No one's forcing you to--And that seems to be the main perception at the very top of Millennial's fear-list:  That embarking on a self-help kick for watching Old Movies(tm) will become the same punishing highbrow foreign/classic syllabus as the Film majors.  Engage in any film-stubborn debate with the right age, and wait for the K-word to appear as the big demonic straw-elephant in the room.

Keep in mind, if you're at the age where you're in college, just come out of college, or either way just made it through high school, you've been actually forced, at various points in the recent last years of your life, to read Julius Caesar, 1984, Pride & Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, A Tale of Two Cities, and at least one Franz Kafka or James Joyce novel, without the clarity or courtesy of being told WHY you should.  Beyond a make-or-break term paper where you're presumed to suddenly have the same enlightened analysis of the book on first read that hundreds of literary critics before you have expounded upon.

And then, when those same Grown-Ups tell you you haven't watched very many "great films" made before your birthday, what's the first one they tell you to respect, watch and analyze?--Or at least the first one you're afraid they will?  Like your high school Lit class, your first worry is "Does this Famous Book have a plot, so I'll have something to take my mind off my assignment while I'm reading it?"

Here, don't worry, you're clear:  This one passes the "Things actually happen in it" test, and, one might add, with flying colors B&W.

Y'know...there's nothing WRONG with Citizen Kane.  Do a lot of pundits commanding you from on high to be amazed by the first use of "bold cinematography and editing" in the 40's just somehow, in some way, not excite you?  Try Orson Welles' character instead.  In telling a non-linear fictional story of William Randolph Hearst--of whom to say was "the Rupert Murdoch of his day" would be putting it mildly--Herman Mankiewicz's script, mixed with Welles' own smooth, literate sardonic-velvet from his post-radio bad-boy days, fairly drips with acidic irony:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzhb3U2cONs  There's a very good, and very deserved reason the real Hearst took the movie so personally.

If the idea of watching a 40's film avengingly analyzing the rise and big ironic fall of an egotistic but ultimately insecure self-styled tycoon, who believed he could personally manipulate the world around him "like a modern feudal baron" for its own good, sounds a little, um, familiar right now, well, it should.  A lot familiar.  Even if you've never heard of Patty Hearst's Granddad, but you've heard of Ivanka's Dad.

And, yes, it's got a lot of those neat cinematography shots, editing, and set ceilings that all the fancy people talk about, if you're into that.  What you may instead be surprised by is just how darn good it is by the last reel...An experience you may or may not have probably already had in Lit class with Dickens or Orwell.

And as for going on to "snooty" critics' "overpraised" great-film-syllabus recommendations of Vertigo or The Seven Samurai...heheh.  Why is this expert smiling nastily?

(But don't worry, even I won't make you watch Death playing chess in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal", if that's what your imagination's also afraid of.  This isn't college and you don't have to agree with anyone older than you, but you're still not going to get anything over a C- if you didn't do a little homework before the lecture.)

2.  "They made movies in B&W because they didn't HAVE color back then!" - Well, that's certainly a profound observation.  But when Millennials use it as a reason not to watch B&W, it's more of a social criticism.  It's a weapon used by the belief that only people of a certain age were able to master the technology of the late 90's and 21st century, and those who didn't just couldn't get into the big Pirate Treehouse Club.  Apparently, B&W films existed simply because older people's eyes were different way back then, and couldn't see color like we can today...Sort of like dogs.

It's a reason used to say that the movies that are readily available at hand--the overexposed studio-marketed 80's classics and current blockbusters--are easier to watch than those that take effort and film knowledge to track down, so watch in amazement as I download last summer's hit on my smartphone!  Wow, you've got Disney's live-action Beauty & the Beast, right there in your hand!...It's magic OUR generation never had!

The problem, however, is one that's frequently brought up with remakes--Particularly the remakes of old films the same audience actually is sentimental for.  Movies that had genre coolness, but were "handicapped" by the fact that they couldn't use CGI, or faster editing, or that Sean Connery's 007 couldn't do the same wild stunts that Jason Bourne could.

There's a love/hate relationship, in that admitting that old films had great appeal, and how wonderful it must have been for an earlier generation to see 80's films, or even 30's films, in theaters, as good...But not as good as WE could make them today if we tried!  And then when they do, they discover it was a lot harder for somebody else, who was good enough to make it look too easy.

This brings up the old observation that anything you can do is not always what you should, and what you should do is that much more of a challenge if you can't.  It takes a bit of life experience to know the difference, and maybe someone before you who had, did.

Pursue Millennial Fear #2 into a corner, and the cornered animal will in the end strike back with "Eh, Grandpa can't handle what the new kids on your lawn are into, didn't get your Metamucil today?"...Tribalist trash-talk?  Oh, now that's just being childish.

3.  "The only good B&W films were Psycho and Young Frankenstein!" - Ah.  So, there are good old B&W films you don't mind watching, and bad ones you'd never touch with toxic gloves.  It's not a double standard, we actually have some dividing line between one and the other.

Pursue this argument into a corner, and most Millennials are happy to explain why:  The movies were newer, and CHOSE to use B&W, you see, to show off...They could do that, if they wanted to.  It's not like one of those old musty-dusty films from Reason #2, that hobbled along in technical obsolescence.

The one argument you don't tend to hear is that there was some culty-reputation preceding the movie that made them sit down and watch it as part of American mass pop-culture, and lo and behold, the movie turned out to be good.  Stuff actually happened in them; one was a horror movie where things turned out to be scary, and the other was a comedy where things turned out to be funny.  And once the Millennial had watched it, it became his film to adopt, one that rebelled against the system and did things its own way, unlike all those others that had to do what they did back then.  It may not have been in color, but like the 10-yo. says after falling off his skateboard, the movie MEANT to do that.

So, no chance that you might find the same personal "adopting" discovery in a movie that didn't "mean to" use B&W, and made the most genius use of what they had?  Or was making movies with a little hip informed experience just an idea that somehow sprung into human consciousness after 1955?

4.  "What do old movies have to teach us today, anyway?  They put all the women in housewife aprons back then!" - And here is where the argument finally starts dropping its big, loud, ugly penny.
The basic foundation of the Millennial is one that's been raised on thirty years of Historical Revisionism since the 80's--in which we were told how many slaves George Washington owned, and every "shocking" bad thing our forefathers ever did to women, minorities, natives, and other countries--and not very much actual history of causes those people stood up for, or things smart people occasionally did right.  When you hear one story over the other long enough and not both, you tend to believe the one you hear...And if you're at the age where college independence makes you want to Change the World personally, the first thing you're going to want to change are the crimes committed by the fact that Americans in the 20th Century Were Evidently A Bunch of Major Racist/Chauvinist/Imperialistic Jerks.  
And if you can't make actual guilty heads roll because they're, um, already dead, the other weapon is dismissive historical-revision laughter at the naivety or un-PC of any idea that YOU weren't enlightened enough to live to figure out.  And maybe if hip people laugh at it long enough, Bad History will eventually slink away into the shadows and disappear.

Persuade a Millennial to watch Gone With the Wind, if ("if"?) he hasn't yet seen it in its epic-roadshow entirety.  Take a guess why he hasn't watched it, and then take bets on what's the first thing he'll say when you ask him why he hasn't watched it.  The reason he'll likely give you is that he believes it's a movie he shouldn't watch, followed by progressive and self-righteously historical arguments why it's a movie that now, in 2017, NOBODY should watch, so don't go around faulting him if he hasn't.  Well, that's taking a bold stand against dogmatic thinking, isn't it?
I confess it's not my own personal favorite either, but certainly not for any reasons regarding racial stereotypes or defenses of racist American history...Let's face it, either you like spending four hours cataloguing the dysfunctional relationships of a spoiled brat, or you don't.  But one thing I will grant in the movie's favor--Those amazing sunsets.  (Yes, in Technicolor!)  And why Clark Gable was the Coolest Male Human Alive in the 30's.
I'm not watching History.  I'm not watching a Confederate-Sentimental Defense Of Segregation.  I'm not watching the Relics of Destructive 20th Century Thought.  I'm watching a movie, featuring amazing sunsets, amazing Max Steiner music, and starring the 30's coolest man alive.  To be a movie fan is to know how to do such things, and you can learn from the masters, or you can learn from your local hobbyist who got the knack on his own.

There is one bit of sunlight on the horizon:  Millennials don't like being called "Millennials".  They say old people "unfairly stereotype" them too much, in thinking that they have smug persecution complexes, hate old people, and wave smartphones in their faces.

And when Millennials want to combat the stereotype that they "Don't watch old films", they immediately rush out to go see one, so they can be Cool and Different from other nasty old Millennials, so there.  Where we now run into the problem that they don't know WHAT to watch, or WHERE to go see one.

The instinct is to look up where a classic film is streaming, but the new 21st-century reality is that you don't find very many of the essential-list AFI 100 Classic Films on streaming:  They're certainly not on Netflix, and studios don't make money on them--They'd much rather you buy the new hit blockbusters they're still trying to pay the bills on, and have the live-action Beauty & the Beast playing on your very own smartphone.
The next instinct is to wait for them to show up at a theater, and TCM and Fathom screenings have started to make those trendy again in the shopping-mall cineplexes, especially during a lull seasons for the new hit movies.  But the hard business truth is that seats have to be filled, and there's usually more tickets sold to The Princess Bride and Fast Times at Ridgemont High--great "Old films from the 80's", as the age group calls them--than for Double Indemnity or Gunga Din.  Only a 30th, 40th, 50th or 75th Anniversary, to help sell the disk release, will usually get any "unmarketable" old classic movie back into the plexes for a night or two only.  (Although, ironically, take a guess WHO'S the reason most old films aren't showing at random for free on local TV stations anymore, where anyone can see them.)
But if it's cool to be curious again, curiosity won't kill you.  It's still a night at the movies, after all, and yes, Things Happen In Them.  You might even find a few at the library, for free, on those old disk things, if nothing's playing on Fathom this week.

As a wise saying once taught me at the same age, "Never proudly show off in public what you DON'T KNOW. It's darned hard to try and impress someone that way."

The March Madness of Geek-Week

Ask studios what are the most greedily sought-after release dates of the year, and you get several answers:

The first week in May, of course, for the first big summer-blockbuster.  July 4 weekend, going back to those old 90's days of the Transformers and ID4.  The first week in November is the coveted spot to seek the Christmas family films, and Avatar, Tolkien and Star Wars have since turned the week before Christmas into a billion-dollar sci-fi fan convention.  

And last but not least, of course...the second and third weeks in March.

Cue the audience saying "Huh?  Sure you're not talking about the basketball thing?"  No, I'm not talking about the basketball thing.

For the past ten years--celebrating the anniversary this year--middle-March has become a strategic and necessary staked tentpole for studios to court specific high-school and college-aged fanboy and fangirl audiences with the week off for Easter vacation or Spring Break, to provide them with their own fan-niche targeted blockbusters that might not otherwise have universal appeal during May or June.  They're only out of their cages for a week or two, so grab your nets and catch them, before they go back in again!

And thus the tradition of "March Geek-Week" was born.  So what is Geek-Week?  Well, right now, as the detergent-selling manicurist used to say, you're soaking in it.

Up to about ten years ago, March, like February, was not particularly in high demand.

January, with snowbound audiences, and theaters looking for any excuse to clean out their empty December-movie screens, was the time for studios to clean out their wastebaskets and unload their trash--Usually either minor horror movies, or misfired studio projects that had already had their release dates delayed twice already out of panic, and that the studios hoped would disappear under the radar and under the rug.

February was considered an extension of the winter-cleaning, with the exception of a few movies that tried playing the "Valentine's Day" programming (which explains why nobody went to see the Fifty Shades movies on the second week)--Until Disney discovered that February also had Presidents'-holiday school vacations, and was a good excuse to float a family-movie that wasn't meant to last very long.  Which it usually didn't, once vacations were over, and the key audience was back in school again.

March and April were considered a time to grab some audiences out on Easter vacation, and maybe give them a big-budget movie that was meant to be disposable (if Disney delayed "The Alamo" till April, you could write your reviews from there), and maybe tide desperate two-months-starved audiences over with a little quick snack until the "real" summer movies hit on Memorial Day.

But that release ethic was suddenly changed in 2007...BY SPARTA!!

Nothing creates an instant overnight phenomenon than a movie that nobody can figure out why it becomes a hit, and creates fear, awe and superstition--That, in a nutshell, is the founding idea that all the "core" Geek-Week classics share.  

Warner, in particular, didn't have much faith in "300", a bizarrely over-stylized tribute to a pretentious Frank Miller comic graphic-novel story, by a young promising comic-fanboy director named Zack Snyder.  (Who had previously shown such promise with an "unwanted" Dawn of the Dead remake with core-fan audiences in March '04, and was therefore a "lucky charm")--Particularly after "Sin City" hadn't exactly brought out the core Frank Miller fans in droves.  But the fans had heard of it, and those who hadn't were curious to look at it anyway, and came out quoting all the cool cult lines.  With little or no competition in theaters to stop them, except for studios' spring disposal bins of cheap horror and Will Ferrell comedies, the 300 Spartans of Thermopylae became...unstoppable.  
And in Hollywood, the rule is, "If you can't beat 'em, pledge eternal loyalty and obedience."

Now, to understand Geek Week, here's where we need to get back to the fable of the Blind Men and the Elephant:

Like the six blind men feeling the ear and saying "It's a fan!", or feeling the trunk and saying "It's a snake!", studios tried to feel around 300's success without standing back and looking at the whole beast.  One blind studio exec felt the plot and said "This 300-phant is a new generation sword-and-sandals epic!" and proceeded to remake "Clash of the Titans" for spring.  Another blind studio exec (ahemwarner) felt the comic-core audience, said, "It's clear to anyone, this 300-phant is the success of Zack Snyder graphic-novel movies!", and immediately gave Snyder the keys to fanboy-faithful adaptations of "Watchmen" and "Sucker Punch".

But then, in 2010, an even bigger, more titanic elephant stampeded trumpeting into the room:  Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland".  Here was an elephant with a dozen different parts to feel, and months to spend feeling them:  A Tim Burton core-fan targeted movie (back before Alice, Burton fans were still devoted zombies hoping his next "weird" movie would bring back "The Nightmare Before Christmas"), with fangirl fave Johnny Depp front and center on the poster (no, he wasn't playing Alice), and the glorious lure-promise of Dark Burton-esque Weirdness with the fairytale.  Any one of the reasons would have made it a fan-cult juggernaut for HS/college vacation week, and here we had three, to start with.  If you needed a clue, you could have spent some time at the Disneyland parks, watching fangirls Instagramming themselves in the mock-Depp Mad Hatter cosplay hats they'd simply had to pick up.
And the more money it made, on into April, the more the blind men started feeling until their hands were sore:  This Alice-phant is clearly a big-budget, candy-colored CGI epic, with all the money Disney can pour into it!  It's a "re-examination" of classic stories, with CGI coming out of its ears!  Nonsense!--It's a DARK version of fairytales, and just look at all those girls swoon dreamy sighs...Quick, get those Snow White adaptations ready, and polish up those glass coffins!

And The Hunger Games?  Well, let's not get into that.  We'll assume everyone knows by now there's a reason why Lionsgate or Summit tries forcing YA-novel franchises on us every March, even after 2014's "The Fault in Our Stars" turned out to be the bigger summer YA-cult reader hit gone to the screen.  (Self-martyring YA-reader teens now dream about terminal illness; crossbows, tournaments and government dystopias have Had It.)

Okay, so the name's cheating a bit--It's not really a week.  It actually lasts the whole month long, and sometimes into the first weekend of April, since studios have the two problems of:

A) Seven studios each trying to cram ONE lovingly groomed niche-targeted blockbuster into the same two or three-week period, and 

B) Nobody really knows for certain which week high-schools and colleges have off for break, as it can often vary from one state or school to another.  At least, y'know, it's sometime in that general ballpark.

And, of course, competing with the non-Disney family studios, like Dreamworks, that want to grab elementary and middle-school Easter-weekend audiences with their big animated/family tentpoles that staked out their release territory.  Which starts to get a little crowded in the room.
Together or separately, the studios feel that to crack the Mystery of Geek Week, superstition dictates that they must provide:

1. A CGI-heavy action blockbuster
2. A CGI-heavy period-fantasy blockbuster,
3. A long-awaited cult-comic or videogame adaptation that mainstream audiences haven't heard of
4. A dark fangirl fairytale, heavy on the romance, and
5. The latest core chapter in a YA cult-novel series.  (Which, after Allegiant, the studios have since wisely decided to cut back on, and move to streaming-miniseries to cut their losses instead.)

That's five movies, minimum, each year, in the space of one month, that studios believe they're obligated to release, regardless of audience demand.  The competition is fierce, the budgets are high stakes, and the dogs that lose the fights lose a lot more than their tails.

A brief lineup of the targeted March Geek-Week movies, their release dates, and final domestic US box-office grosses, from 2007-2016:

• 300 - 3/9/07 - $210M
• 10,000 BC - 3/7/08 - $94M
• Watchmen - 3/6/09 - $107M
• Alice in Wonderland 3/5/10 - $334M
• Battle: Los Angeles- 3/11/11 - $83M
• Red Riding Hood - 3/11/11 - $37M
• Sucker Punch - 3/25/11 - $36M
• John Carter - 3/9/12 -  $73M*
• The Hunger Games 3/23/12 - $408M
• Wrath of the Titans - 3/30/12 - $83M
• Mirror, Mirror - 3/30/12 - $64M
• Jack the Giant Slayer - 3/1/13 - $65M
• Oz the Great & Powerful - 3/10/13 $234M
• Olympus Has Fallen - 3/24/13 - $98M
• GI Joe: Retaliation - 3/29/13 - $122M
• The Host - 3/29/13 - $26M
• 300: Rise of an Empire - 3/7/14 - $106M
• Need For Speed - 3/14/14 - $43M
• Noah - 3/28/14 - $101M
• Cinderella (live-action) - 3/13/15 - $201M
• Divergent: Insurgent - 3/20/15 - $130M
• London Has Fallen - 3/4/16 - $62M
• 10 Cloverfield Lane - 3/11/16 - $72M
• Divergent - Allegiant - 3/18/16 - $66M
• Batman v. Superman - 3/25/16 - $330M*

As you can see, it's not exactly the Yellow Brick Road to riches, even for Oz, the Great & Powerful.  

(Although it was necessary to put a baseball-asterisk on two of the statistics, as  "John Carter" was considered to have been sabotaged by a marketing campaign so disastrous it helped cost the chief Disney studio exec his job, and "Batman v. Superman" was idealistically and artificially boosted by a small, angry Trump-like core of downtrodden DC Comics fans that wanted to prove their numbers and identity to the world, in the hopes they'd get that cool Wonder Woman movie next year.)

It's a myth that studios continue to bet the farm pursuing, and often losing, possibly for the simple reason why studios DO put such blind faith in an over-marketed movie:  They were so caught up in "properties" and release dates, they simply didn't know their audiences.

Leaving aside the quality, or lack of, the movies (and in "Noah"'s case, that's saying a lot), there are more problems with releasing a movie in March than there are rewards to it:
1) It's not summer.  Theaters don't have as many afternoon screenings when the kids aren't out of school for long terms, and less chances to do business in a day.  And if you're recouping a movie with almost three times the gross of its $150M budget, you're going to want as MANY screenings available as you can get.

2) It's not forever, and it's not on the calendar.  Since nobody's quite sure which week schools have off, as it's not a national holiday, it becomes like Spring Break tourism in Ft. Lauderdale and Cancun in that weeks can differ from one college to the next.  You'll get some movie business the entire month, but not the all of May orJuly.  And if the majority of common vacation time is one week, that ain't much.
3) You're targeting a movie to only a select front-loaded group of people who care and will be in line the first week only, fully knowing few normal mainstream civilians will be there on the second.  Again, a big-budget movie can't afford to be choosy, even when that was pretty much the purpose of the movie going in.
It's going All-In on a high-stakes poker match with two pairs, and you'd better be able to afford to lose.  Because someone's going to.

Which brings us to March Geek-Week Madness, 2017:  

In this bracket, Fox's critically well-received but prohibitively R-rated "Logan" for the comic readers, Disney's much hyped "Beauty & the Beast" for the dreamy fairytale-fangirls, "Kong:Skull Island", for Warner to blitz us with CGI Action 'N Stuff, and launch their new "Monster-verse" (their name, not mine), Lionsgate's "Power Rangers" reboot, for the cult-fan love, and Paramount's American live-action remake of "Ghost in the Shell", which every cult Japanese-anime fan will be demanding that civilians go see, and if not, well, Hollywood always ruins 'em anyway.
Five films courting for those TWO slots of #1 and 2 at the running box office, with the #3 and 4 films out of the running overnight, never mind what happens to #5.

Who's got game?  Place your bets, folks, we're still in the quarter-finals.  
And as you can see from the list, don't feel sorry for the losers.

80's Throwback (Now with real cane sugar!)

Normally, the opening of "Monster Trucks" these past weeks would not particularly seem like the stuff of blog fodder.  (And as it turns out, it wasn't.)
But piggybacking onto one of the other current fan-crazes--the Netflix binge-following for Season 1 of "Stranger Things"--it's brought a certain phenomenon to the front of the stage.
It's been around for years; it was the reason fans became artificially excited for JJ Abrams'  2011 "Super 8", and became a rallying cry against last summer's "Ghostbusters" remake, but now it officially has a name:  A lost public is searching for "80's Throwback!"  
(Or, occasionally, "90's Throwback" if you find childhood-sentimental fans of Jumanji, Jurassic Park, or the Goosebumps books, and even that decade didn't last long...But that's another post.)

It's become the centerpiece of Stranger Things' marketing, to conjure up a genre of kids up against unworldly forces, evil psychic tots and sinister plots "reminiscent of Stephen King".  (Who was also a cottage-industry of mid-80's movies, as ten bestsellers were dumped on the decade between "Cujo" and "Pet Semetary" alone.)
Fan sites now use Stranger Things as a "gateway" for leading on new-generation fans, offering reading-list syllabi of other core 80's escapist scifi/horror classics, like a library's children's-book section recommending other books to their readers besides Harry Potter:
"10 Films You Need to Watch If You Love Stranger Things", Daily Dot, 7/25/16

"Monster Trucks", and its kid-friendly Nickelodeon Pictures story of lovable CGI octopi and the teens racing them to safety, seemed a little TOO familiar for its audience, and was dumped into January by Paramount with the understandable hopes of being ignored.  But trying to rescue their dignity for an empty early-'17 weekend, the producers thought their CGI critters had tapped into an 80's/90's "retro" ethic--the kind that conjured up the cheaper Amblin' productions of the late 80's like "Batteries Not Included" and "Harry and the Hendersons", and the post-Jurassic CGI fests of the Jumanji 90's--and that the movie was actually a labor of Retro love.  
Trucks even tried an alternate movie poster deliberately homaging the style of Richard Amsel, the iconic 80's movie-poster artist who gave us Indiana Jones, Willow, and every big-budget Lucasfilm of the decade.  A generation knew, if Amsel painted the poster, you knew what to expect.
And just like our Stranger Things kids on the run from evil firestarters, some loyal diehard Monster Trucks defenders also tried to rally around the Retro Childhood flag, for a generation that was never there and needed to learn the Old Days...Or at least other overlooked 80's movies besides Princess Bride quotes:
"Ten Awesome Movies to Show Your Kids If They Dig Monster Trucks", CinemaBlend, 1/13/17
(Yes, "Batteries" is on the list, as is '99's "The Iron Giant".)

The craze even attracted B-video company Mill Creek, which had the licenses to a number of discarded Columbia catalog titles, to sell many of their 80's fantasy/scifi Columbia classics in a bulk box under a Stranger-knockoff banner.
And while it's a stretch to think that 1983's gorgeous old-school fantasy "Krull" or cheesy low-rent space-opera "Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone" would be the first things to watch after a grim 10's-streaming series of nasty genetic experiments, it's clearly tapping into the audience's reawakened search for the same question:  "Where did they GO?"

If you today hear anyone talking about "Great movies of the 80's", it's a safe bet they're NOT talking about "Amadeus", "Out of Africa" or "Terms of Endearment".  
What they're most likely talking about is summer movies of the mid-80's, usually involving neighborhood kids taking their bicycles and flashlights out to investigate the monster or friendly alien in the woods nearby their whitebread California suburban neighborhood...And in general, going on an adventure, as the MST3K-ism has it, "just like The Goonies".  (Which, btw, we hated in 1985--There's a difference between a movie for 10-yo.'s, and one that reads like it was written by 10-yo's.)
In other words, they're talking about Elliott and E.T., or any of his many imitators, back in the days When Steven Spielberg Roamed The Earth.

So, what footprints are we tracking when we go in search of the rare and elusive 80's Movie?  What historical factors caused the generational break to stick out in our mind when we turned "80's" from a box-office-statistic year-date or childhood memory into an artistic Film Genre?  Whadda they got back then that WE ain't got?  
Appropriately enough, part of the answer would seem to be "...Courage."   (Buh-huh, you said it.)

1. It was easier to go to movies - In fact, we had to:  VCR saturation in the home didn't really catch on at popular prices until the mid-80's, and even then not all of your favorite movies came out for retail sale.  More theaters were locally mom-and-pop owned, and might be charging upwards of $3.50 by the mid-80's, although the big chains had already ballooned up to $5 for an adult ticket.  (Assuming you were over twelve, the year WarGames or Superman III came out.)  If you couldn't wait to see it again, hey, you had an afternoon or a weekday night, and three or five bucks in your pocket, why not?
Today, we have what you might call a trade-off:  Now you can see EVERY movie in your own hometown area the week it opens...but you can probably only afford to see it once, before waiting for the disk.  And heaven help you if you want popcorn with it.

2.  Theaters weren't so big - Chain cineplexes, huge 7-8 screen ones, were beginning to appear, but most towns still had a 1-3 screen left over on Main Street from the old days.  If you had an older town, you probably had two or three of them scattered about the downtown back streets, or some new ones built into an unused office building.  You found where your movie was playing, that was part of the fun of going to see it, and if it wasn't in town, you ventured forth to the town where you could get your experience...Otherwise, you might never get it at all!
And if your theater was playing in town, you didn't need Mom to take you, or at the very worst, all you needed was for her to drop you off with your friends, and pick you up after her 2-hour vacation from you.  On a Friday night, the local theater was the gathering place for your school friends; if there wasn't anything you wanted to see, you saw it anyway, and if you did want to, so much the better.

3.  TV still mattered - It doesn't now, you know, we pride ourselves on being able to stuff our face with an entire season on Hulu over a weekend, and flip a bird to the cable companies with our mouths full.  But while watching TV was looked down on in the 70's, and movies gave you spectacle and bestsellers, TV became popular again in the 80's; you counted your weekdays by show title, and when you went out of your house on the weekend, you went out for fun.
Movies weren't designed to be more than one, they were movies because they only had one wild story to tell you, and if you liked it, then they might reward your love with a sequel, if they could figure out one to tell.  That's why they'd decided not to be TV, because they'd put everything into whatever little isolated bit of imagination they had.

4. Movies were made for YOU, not anybody else - There was one good thing about having little cheap-priced theaters nearby in your local area, within walking or bus distance, and not five miles out of town by the highway strip malls:  You could go to your own movies.
And because tickets didn't have to be sold to parents, they could be sold to the people who DID want to see the neat stuff--Kids' movies could be sold to kids, escapist tween-boy adventures could be sold to 9-12 yo. boys, and teens could get rock musicals, rebel dramas and--you know it--teen-babysitter horror films pitched all to themselves on Friday night and nobody else had to care.  But then, everyone knew grownups didn't understand anyway.
We don't see that nowadays:  Studios have too much at stake pitching a megadeal, they can't put themselves in the position of letting just some people buy a ticket at the risk that other people might not.  As a result, most mainstream movies calculate themselves to be all things to all audiences, male, female, ethnic and overseas alike, and are carefully assembled not to leave anything out..."Your" movie just isn't YOUR movie anymore, unless you happen to have $200M to pay a studio personally to make back their net.
Some niche movies, like female-audience or frat/weed-pack comedies, might still target "their" audiences without a hope of finding any other, but they tend to be the product of producers who don't know how to make any other kind of movie.  It's harder to make one that's supposed to be what the audience wants.

But there's a deeper answer here, and just why it DID end with the mid-90's may have to be the stuff of another column:
5.  Studios still bought SCRIPTS - Yes, we've all heard the whine:  "It's all comic books, sequels, remakes and teen novels nowadays...There's nothing original in Hollywood anymore!"  And the minute you say that, everyone immediately rolls their eyes and groans, because by "original", they think you're being a pretentious jackass talking about La La Land, or whatever just came out of the indie Sundance fests.  But back in the 80's, studios did EXACTLY what Hollywood studios had been doing for the past fifty years, since the days of Louis B. Mayer:  They let a poor, struggling screenwriter pitch his neat original idea, to see if it sounded like a surefire winner.  And it might be an idea he made up all by himself!--Which meant the audience would be taken by surprise, and seeing it for the first time!

Like the old songwriter musicals of the 40's, call it the "Tin Pan Alley" days--"Chief, got a boffo idea for ya:  An 80's kid goes back to the 50's and meets his parents!  A romance-novel author finds herself on a real adventure, straight out of one of her books!  Or, wait, I got it--Bill Murray, Paranormal Exterminator!"
Of course, you know the risk of that:  For every Back to the Future or Ghostbusters, there could be a My Stepmother Is an Alien.  And studios don't want that.  ("But it had Dan Aykroyd in it!")  
Studios can't do that anymore.  After a bad experience with getting big-name writers to write original action blockbusters in the 90's [more on that later], and negotiation salaries ballooned after actors stopped asking for profits and became smart enough to ask for cash up front, studios decided that a $150-200M movie just wasn't worth the risk of an audience seeing a movie they didn't know.  If you could audition an "accepted" property ahead of time, like a TV show, long-awaited live-action form of a cartoon or comic, or a "franchise" sequel that one need only show the logo symbol to promote, well, that was half the battle won right there.

The answer's not a complicated idea:  We don't miss aliens, and kids with bicycles and flashlights.  It's not that we miss old-school mechanical creature effects, soundstage-sets or 80's fashions.  (Although we do.)  We miss IMAGINATION.
We look for a "throwback" to someone telling us a story we've never heard before, and letting our neato tapped-into emotions go along for the ride.

Are Disney, Pixar and Marvel becoming the new dominant forces at the box office?--Think what they give us:  Dory and Cars 3 aside, Pixar and WDFA gave us new stories of island girls, spunky rabbit cops and personified emotions, while Marvel Studios, for their group initiative, were forced to bring us a few solo heroes who were once forgotten B-stringers in print--Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther.  Did you ever read their print books growing up?...Er, didn't think so.  Well, guess you're hearing their stories for the first time, then.  Not so bad, aren't they?

With a few exceptions--who are in the accidental good luck of being exceptions--studios in the 10's are ruled by fear, and like most people who let their lives be ruled by fear, don't like to take chances.
Not like the characters in really good movies, who have to take chances all the time, and sometimes discover that really neat things happen to them in the end if they do.

Theater Roots, Star Wars Edition: Notes From the O.G.

With Rogue One opening in theaters this week, it's an excuse for my favorite symbolic Star Wars-fan story:
In 2005, as the days led up to the big May 18 opening for "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith", the news covered the traditionally symbolic straw-man images of devoted core-cosplay Star Wars fans, with Jedi robes, Stormtrooper armor and plastic lightsabers, camped out six weeks ahead in front of Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese Theater (to even dare properly call it the current "TCL Chinese" is an insult to movies and theaters) to be first in line for tickets.

There was just one problem:  Episode III WASN'T opening at the Grauman's Chinese.  In a break with tradition, it was opening at the newer Hollywood Arclight theater, some distance across town.
"At a movie theater not so far, far away", LA Times, 4/8/05

"Yes, we know it's not opening yet, and yes, we know it's across town," one representative fan wearily explained.  The issue, they claimed, was not so much that the Arclight had more modern cineplex ticketing and different sound from the Grauman's, but that, well, opening at the Grauman's should be traditional!  They hoped that their camping out in front of the theater would be a statement that would inspire distributors to change theaters at the last minute.
When it, um, didn't, the fans in costume tried to portray their doomed vigil as a Fans For Charity stunt, getting sponsors to fund their marathon campout to raise funds for Starlight Children's Foundation...It wasn't about tickets, they explained, it was about celebrating the unity of a worldwide fandom!  Finally, on the big day of the premiere, the event concluded with legions of fan Stormtroopers rounding up the "Rebel scum" and leading them on a big charity parade across town to the Arclight opening.  Which was meant to be a big display of fan unity, but to the non-fans, came off as "Well, after all that, maybe you might like to go see it where it's actually playing, doyyy..."
The mainstream public's reaction in 2005 wasn't quite what it was in the glory days of 1977 and '78--Most '05 teen moviegoers looked at the diehard fans putting their spare time aside for the Glorious Cause and stared, "Dude...who stands in line anymore?  Why didn't you just buy your tickets online six weeks ahead at Fandango, like everyone else?"
It was thirty years too late to try and win back their hearts and minds for the days of Stunt Fandom to get the word out.

---
I have to admit, I love that story.  I may spend a lot of time saying what damage the Rise of the Multi and Mega-plex may have done to moviegoing in the 21st century, but I side with the "That's so 90's!" kids. Whatever else the plexes have corrupted the audience mentality with--now that every movie opens in every town, and your local shopping-mall 15-screen can serve all your one-stop needs, all day--worrying about getting tickets for a movie is one thing I do not miss anymore.

But y'see, I have a reason for that.  I'm a grizzled survivor of that sometimes revered, sometimes mocked, remaining audience of what the Star Wars fans call the "O.G."--Original Generation.
I DIDN'T grow up watching the Original Trilogy on VHS in my jammies, or first see Jar-Jar Binks on a Phantom Menace DVD.  I was thirteen when Star Wars opened at the big-city theater in the summer of '77 (in those days, it wouldn't hit the suburbs until a few weeks later), and I was IN those lines that the New Kids like to decade-mythologize about.  Ohh, was I ever.
And if I don't sound happy about it--proud, yes, wistful, maybe, but not happy--it's because it wasn't the myth that everyone thinks it is.   But it was something you don't see anymore.

Actually, I didn't line up in May, and I didn't go to the Hollywood Grauman's or NYC Ziegfeld, like all the iconic photos show. 

See that, over there?  That's the Boston Sack Charles, just down near the Charles River and Longfellow Bridge, just across big Cambridge St. from the old red-brick townhouses that led to the Public Gardens.  It was Boston's most cavernously elegant Cinerama theater back before the day, but now a strip-mall/office complex, still with the big wide-widescreen main theater, but split into cineplex mini-screens on the lower floor.  All the downtown commercial-chain theaters were owned by the Sack company, later bought out by Loew's, and with 1-3 screens each, which movie would be playing where was a matter of neighborhood real-estate reputation:  The movies that got the big audience would probably playing the Charles, or the Cheri next to the convention hotels, the snooty Oscar-bait would always play the Paris, across from the Prudential building, and the not-so-fortunate might be playing underground at the Beacon Hill across from New City Hall, or in a parking garage at the Pi Alley on Washington St.  
Suffice to say, the entire Original Trilogy played one by one at the Charles.  The location became such a local tradition (especially once the '77 movie played there for a year), it somehow didn't seem right to stand in line there for anything else.

Our family didn't move to the Boston area till June, after school let out, but Dad had already moved there in May for work, and wanted to take us in on the MBTA train to show us all the Boston-insider sights.  That meant a big movie night, and by that point, three or four weeks later, the little movie that Fox wanted to "bury" had become a hot ticket for the feel-good sleeper discovery of the summer, at least until the next 007 movie would come along in August.  (According to legend, theater-distributor demand had originally been so low, Fox resorted to illegally "block-booking", ie. blackmailing, theaters into booking Star Wars in late May, if they wanted to book the surefire best-seller adaptation of "The Other Side of Midnight" two weeks later.)  The press articles, quick to jump on stories about Francis Ford Coppola's discovery, the new young breakout American Graffiti director, homaging a sci-fi movie, played up all the "Tribute to old 30's cinema" angles, to make the movie look as if it was some Hollywood-genre labor of love to Flash Gordon...So even regular city-folk who hadn't bought the "secret" posters at sci-fi conventions were standing in line.  I'd never seen a three-screen cineplex before, and hoped that we wouldn't hear anything from "Exorcist II: the Heretic" playing downstairs.
And we stood in line for a very important reason--We were trying to get tickets.  It was playing on ONE SCREEN out of three, and if you weren't in line early enough, the movie would be Sold Out.  In fact, you weren't even realistically trying to get tickets for the next show, you knew that you were standing in line at 3pm trying to get tickets for the 9:45 show.  People about ten yards ahead of you would be the last to get 7pm.  Nobody was in costume, for one rather logical reason:  We didn't know who was in it, or what the heck it was about, apart from the fact that it was "old-fashioned" sci-fi.  I had some familiarity with the characters after a readup in a Scholastic children's magazine trying to target some underground hype, while every other upscale movie fan was looking for cineaste comparisons to John Ford westerns or The Wizard of Oz.  (Because Luke Skywalker came from a farm just like Dorothy, y'see, so that made C-3PO the Tin Man and Chewie the Cowardly Lion...)

Right up there, in that second-floor glass hallway over the CVS Pharmacy, was the line (which extended all the way down to the bottom of the escalator, or down the chair-ramp to the street out back).  With twenty minutes before the next seating, and trying to keep the midnight-show ticket lines from getting too long, the theater let the next-show audience into the lobby to keep down the crowds.  All we could see of the earlier show, still going on behind little glass panels in reasonably soundproofed wood and aluminum doors, was the climactic Death Star trench battle--Or rather, just isolated peephole bits and pieces of explosion sparks and cockpit closeups, at least, that's what they looked like.  A jam-packed crowded lobby of puzzled, impatient, stand-weary folk heard one Dolby-booming explosion after another coming from the inside theater with the sparks, and with some of the explosions...audiences cheering.  Okay, that was just strange.  We hadn't heard audiences mass-cheer anything for a long time, especially not during the gritty 70's Golden Age (okay, maybe Rocky Balboa after the fight), but whatever those lucky folks ahead of us had gotten to see, something had gotten them pumped.  

And in the Carter malaise of 1977, anything that could pump you to feel optimistic and happy enough to say that good things had happened to movie characters that deserved them was something that had come in from some magical Elsewhere.  This was NEW.

Oh, and as one of the ultimate Elite O.G.'s himself, James Earl Jones, points out, when we O.G. folk first saw Darth Vader give Luke the big news about Anakin Skywalker in 1980's "The Empire Strikes Back"...we knew exactly what we thought, and so did Jones when he first got the script.  And oh, how we LOVE to frustrate N.G.'s that the "Big moment" wasn't quite what their fantasized nostalgia likes to dream it was:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ1mmkKb_BQ
(As you can see, like most New Generations, the fanboy YouTube argument has since devolved into a nitpicking argument over whether the line was "No..." or "Luke..."--Even though we're clearly justified in remembering "No, Luke,..." muffled by '97 re-edits.)

And yes, Han Solo DID Shoot First.  That was because Han always shot first, it was his answer to everything.  No one appreciates that better than an O.G. who first discovered Harrison Ford in the seventies, when the future granite-face of "The Fugitive" and "Air Force One" still had a working sense of humor.

You may notice, in the YouTube clip, that most in the 2005 Sith-fan Parade are, it is safe to hazard a guess, under the age of 28, and most with a ticket for Rogue One are under the age of 39.  Star Wars had always been around as a Thing since literally before they were born, like the rocks and trees, and jumping onto the phenomenon was just something everybody geeky-cool did, sooner or later, like your first sip of Coca-Cola.  

The current generation's fan-love is an attempt to wish for something they were born too late to do.  It's a wish to see their favorite childhood DVD on the bigscreen, and try to capture Something Their Parents Did, just like 50's Grease-themed parties, or Civil War re-enactment societies.  If you dress up well enough, maybe, through some wishful miracle of time-travel, you'll have been Born Back Then too, even if you weren't.  
Even the attempt to bring "Star Wars: the Force Awakens" back to the "spiritual feel of the original", and bury the goofy George Lucas atrocities of the Prequel Trilogy, is essentially a story of a teen heroine too young to have seen the battles, against a teen villain who hero-worships a Vader-helmet relic, and snotty young new Death Star trainees trying to be Peter Cushing...A reverent New Generation dress-up movie for a reverent New Generation dress-up audience, until gray-haired old Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill show up for real.
Speaking for all us mad old grizzled O.G. hermits in the desert, it's not about Dressing Up.  It never was.  For Star Wars to be mentioned at all in the media in the fall of '77 (look, network TV's going to do a Holiday Special!) was validation that our little secret, which we called "A new hope", was finally starting to take hold with a grownup moviegoing society who were paying more attention to Vietnam-vet movies and Woody Allen comedies.  Hope for saving the Alliance went hand-in-glove with hope for discovering that Movies Were Fun Again, and our going to Star Wars was our trying to celebrate how much fun our grandparents must have had going to the Flash Gordon serial every Saturday.

The Boston Sack Charles?...Oh, that.  It isn't around anymore.  The downtown theaters all closed one by one in the 90's, to be replaced by the Loews' Boston Common 20-screen on Tremont St. (and some highway cineplexes in the Cambridge suburbs), and nearby Massachusetts General Hospital added six more floors to the future Richard B. Simches Research Center. When I went to MGH for a specialist appointment a few years ago, nobody I talked to could remember that Charles River Plaza North had ever been anything else.  You'll notice the CVS Pharmacy is still there, though.
Me, I can still remember a couple of Boston books I bought at the plaza bookstore nearby (not there anymore either), because to my Old Geezer memory, Star Wars was never a "franchise", a "phenomenon", a "Jedi religion" or a "fan lifestyle".  It was a movie night out with my folks in the big city, and even standing in the stupid line turned out to be worth it.