From the New Yorker, nearly two years ago.
And there never was a golden age in which art or great entertainment poured unremittingly from the studio gates. The majority of movies at any time are junk. From 1953, we remember “From Here to Eternity” and “The Band Wagon” and maybe “The Big Heat,” but not “The Redhead from Wyoming” or “Guerrilla Girl.” For most people, memory itself is a kind of revival house in which only the most vivid things survive. But if there was never a golden age there were a few structures that encouraged superior work—or at least didn’t actively defeat it. One was the contract model of the nineteen-thirties and forties in which, to cite the most obvious miracle, the producer Hal B. Wallis, at Warner Bros., was able to put together “Casablanca” with actors, screenwriters, set designers, and a director who could all be found eating lunch at the commissary on the Warner lot. The contract model, which many actors hated but which often made good use of their talents, fed a system in which most of the stable genres—women’s films, Westerns, sophisticated comedies, period literary adaptations, crime films, psychological dramas, and all the varieties of noir—were aimed at the grownup audience. Another productive structure arose in the fifties, during a period of loosened studio control when directors like Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, and Douglas Sirk did highly idiosyncratic work. Still another was the director-controlled model of the early and mid-seventies, when the studio executives, baffled by the tastes of the new young audience, turned to such recent film-school graduates as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg, as well as Robert Altman (who was a generation older). Operating freely, these directors turned out a series of remarkable movies with complexly motivated characters and startlingly original forms and moods.
Put businessmen in charge of producing art and they will usually yield crappy results, because it becomes about money, not art. This is true of any discipline, intellectual, athletic or artistic. But let businessmen distributee the money to artists who produce the art, and then you might create something that is actual art.
