Posted 5:21 PM by Gene

Another excuse from the mooVEE extruders and their press agents: too many moVEES. "600 pics a year -- no WAY can we handle that much product." Somehow the biz handled it in its golden age, a cutthroat-competitive age where numerous genres battled one another: westerns, war movies, women's pictures, comedies, costume epics, musicals, horror movies, crime dramas -- not to mention the attractions before the picture: two-reel comedies, shorts animated and unanimated, newsreels; and let us not forget the moVEE biz was stratified into A and B levels, which surely had their blood feuds. (That ended long ago; now we have B movies with A budgets.) But today there's television, right? I submit radio had at least as much original programming as television today -- more so as the boob screen's so abandoned itself to reality and sports. That doesn't explain where the audience went. And it won't come back when the moVEE biz has stratified again into tentpoles and other lures for stupid teenagers and easily led parents, and moVEES for cri-TICS. 400 moVEES for how many ad-blurbists? Just as the public knows the infomercials by heart, so it knows AHThouse pictures by heart: "hard-R" "adult" slogs with lots of sex 'n' violence 'n' pretentious brooding. And under the guidance of ad-blurbists the moVEE extruders are strait-jacketing the strait jacket. When PEOPLE WARNER shut down its two AHThouse units (which we submit have never been so called before by a news hack -- a rare brain spasm from Lauren, no doubt) it only affirmed the biz was making too many CRI-TIC-ALLY ACCLAIMED bowel movements for nobody. And these oafs can't blame marketing; somehow the 500 pictures a year in the golden age got seen without TV ads. Moreover that we're now stuck with tentpoles until hell freezes over is partly a consequence of the biz' pleasing so many cri-TICS: ten money-losing AHThouse pics lose as much money as one tentpole, so why make ten AHThouse pics? No, this biz increasingly can't excrete product to save its hide, as witness the five-percent attendance decline so far this year -- a decline that might have been much worse if KURT COBAIN hadn't died. The only saving grace for the FILLUM biz is that so long as lawyers would be moguls, and see immortality in burning money, we'll have moVEES -- even if they empty out the popcorn restaurants, as well they might.

(Via the usual AHTSJournal)