..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

The Eleventeenth Commandment

This is a time of year when people make resolutions they generally are incapable of keeping, or are impelled to promise to maintain order and civility in the home or workplace. They are by and large self-serving pledges to do better that while laudatory in principle list toward the narrow of focus. Not many take the oath to cure cancer but scores resolve to make more money or be nicer to friends and neighbors.

The on set of a new year has obvious psychological spurs for starting afresh. It's also something that's engrained in the tenants of most religions. So I will neither decry nor endorse the practice but simply state that one should avoid entering into such a pact without full knowledge of the consequences of steering the course or going radically off track.

The few times I've been sufficiently blithe to indulge in this sport, I've managed to either be vigorous in purpose or quickly adapt to the reality of the rigors involved. In the spirit of sobriety it makes more sense to lay down the gauntlet for others to pick up the challenge rather than be that tiny voice in the desert.

What's been raising my hackles (wherever they may be biologically located) of late is (and this also tends to intensify as the days dwindle in December) what's sometimes referred to as box office analysis. The kindest thing that can be said of the majority that passes this vague definition is that it opts to look at the small picture or takes the short- term view.

The quintessence of the problem can be aptly described as Monday morning quarterbacking. It's invariably written on Sunday but appears in print the following day. In publications catering to all manner of reader, it offers up the equivalent of a weekend scoreboard of the movies playing in multiplexes and proclaims the winners and losers in a season that has no obvious or natural kick off or a final referee's whistle. It measures with an indefinite yardstick on a playing field where goal posts are constantly being re-positioned.

The critiques tend to equate negative or positive traits to literal size. And sometimes this is in fact correct just as the old observation that a monkey put in front of a typewriter will eventually type a real word. It's a sort of stunt journalism with a lot of gibberish thrown into the bargain.

As with resolutions, one need not look to the end of the year to realize the need for change. While the intensity is at its height, the situation persists annually for 52 weeks. One can randomly select any weekend and appreciate both the tendency for a rush to judgment and the difficulty of providing a broader perspective.

I plunged my hand into a folder and pulled the weekend of April 16 - 18, 2004 out in hopes that any three day span would provide fuel for my fire. That particular weekend the debut of Kill Bill, Vol. 2 was the top grossing film in the marketplace with a gross of $25.1 million. Other new films in theaters including The Punisher, ranked second with $13.8 million and Connie and Carla further down the list at 13th with $3.3 million. The British drama Young Adam also bowed in nine locations and generated $50,000 and other popular films in multiplexes included Johnson Family Vacation, Hellboy, Scooby-Doo 2 and Walking Tall. The overall banality of marquee offerings at that time of year tends to underscore an industry wrung dry by the receding memory of a frantic award season and about to ramp up for the hyperbole of summer blockbusters.

The snap conclusions eight months ago were thumbs up for the Kill Bill finale and The Punisher, sudden death for Connie and Carla and total indifference to Young Adam and virtually any other film on screen. The Passion of the Christ was still in the top 10 but writers had long run out of superlatives for the movie and the second weekend of The Alamo fell by 55% after an inauspicious start.

The general consensus at the time was neither particularly wrong nor was it instructive. On any given weekend the American moviegoer has at least the semblance of several dozen options when it comes to a night or matinee at the cinema. Back on April 16 the two national debuts were action dramas with the theme of revenge with a third movie - Walking Tall - also fitting into that niche. Very young audiences had such options as the animated Home on the Range or Scooby-Doo 2 and Johnson Family Vacation was targeted at African Americans. At least in the mainstream, there were few titles that would appeal to anyone more than 25 years old.

The question barely addressed at the time was: why open two films with similar plots and pedigrees simultaneously? And following from that initial question one has to wonder why the viewing public turned out with unexpected force to see these films.

Does the limited number of choices in the types of movies at the multiplex eat away at the core movie audience? Does the skewering of films toward older teens and early 20s come with a heavy toll to thirty to eightysomethings?

What can't be repeated too often is the fact that the majors no longer produce and distribute a wide variety of moving pictures. They do not make many dramas and the comedies on their release slates tend to be broad and vulgar. They will make films for Latinos or African Americans if they can be produced on a low budget and that also applies to any film that has social or political content. But primarily they make a lot of "boy" movies with stunts and special effects and the surprise is that the instances where two very similar movies open on the same day don't occur more often.

The fact that one can open a newspaper and see ads for 20 movies provides the illusion that one has options but they are to see perhaps only five different types of movies. If one reverses the process and says: "I want to see a romantic comedy with star performances" or "an epic adventure based upon an historic event," the odds of finding something that fulfills your desire is only slightly better than winning the lottery.

Now at the end of the day, Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and Johnson Family Vacation were modestly successful movies, The Punisher and Walking Tall lost money and The Alamo and Home on the Range lost a lot of money. And at this point one has to ask why any of these films were green lit.

It's not solely the media analysts that see the small picture but the executives producing those small pictures that create a situation where a significant part of the audience is migrating to alternative and niche movies if they haven't already given up on the process altogether. Movie options this time of year tend to be better because in addition to cynically driven commercial fare there are films being promoted based on adult content and artistic craft. There are differences between Meet the Fockers and The Life Aquatic or The Phantom of the Opera, Ocean's Twelve and The Aviator. If you live in a major city there's also Hotel Rwanda, The House of Flying Daggers and The Sea Inside in addition to Darkness and Flight of the Phoenix.

The point is that for a small window of time one actually has a slew of options if one is so inclined to savor a spectrum of movies. By the time April rolls around it will be a distant memory.

Anyone with a sense of history can readily point out that regardless of the time of year, movie going is more buoyant when there's a diversity of choices. Just this past year The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 set box office records during periods that are either viewed as lulls or times when adults can't be coaxed into theaters. It should come as no surprise that the former film was made outside the studio system and the latter was forcefully abandoned by its major parent.

A number of years back I was asked by a student whether I paid to go to the movies and replied, "only emotionally."

The thing of it is that if you do the trend analysis there are safer choices and there are riskier ones. If one makes a comedy or a thriller or a sequel and casts it with a certain level of star and promotes it with $30 million in national advertising, it should deliver a box office factor of X based on research culled from 20 years of data. It isn't a guarantee of quality; it isn't a license to print money, it's simply the average or mien based upon all that has occurred prior to a production green light. It's a security blanket one can brandish and when the dust settles after opening day say, "see, the research holds up," or "gosh, this flies in the face of what happened in the past."

The quantifiable aspects of making movies are killing the creative elements that make great movies. You cannot factor in what a good script contributes to a successful film or an accomplished director, a brilliant cameraman or a gifted and appropriately cast actor. Studios used to produce an array of films based on the talents of their talent. They may hits and they made flops but primarily made a lot of money and more movies.

I'm not certain what the incentive is to make good movies for the contemporary movie executive. We all know what the prod is to make successful pictures beside the obvious perk of keeping a well-paid job. But if being involved in quality filmmaking is supposed to create a sense of pride and purpose, that dialogue has been conspicuously absent in the speeches and statements of production chiefs at the so-called majors. For close to a decade they've gone to the Oscars often with little or no rooting interests just to be seen.

So, I won't make a New Year's resolution.

Rather, I'll suggest a few for the industry beginning with: I will make fewer films that fit snuggly into cookie cutter business models. I will allow passion (my own and those of others) to be a factor in several decisions annually. Finally, I will be as attentive to the creative elements as I have been to the business elements of making a movie.

The gauntlet has been thrown and one must wait to see whether anyone is willing to pick it up.

- by Leonard Klady