Pauline Kael’s Cri du Coeur to Filmmakers

From Dogville Vs. Hollywood, © by Jake Horsley

“The big change in the system is that everybody got really rich in the ’80s. . . . It used to be, executives worked for the company. Now, you’re dealing with executives who are worth $20 million. That changes how they deal with you. The big hurdle now is getting them interested in what you’re doing. They’re not very interested in movies out here anymore.”

—Brian De Palma, 1992

In 1981, Warren Beatty, the star and producer of Bonnie and Clyde and Shampoo and the director-to-be of Reds, whose finger tips Woody Allen dreamed of being, successfully seduced arch-critic Pauline Kael to leave her hunting ground of New York for a sojourn in Hollywood. Beatty’s idea was that Kael apply her remarkable acumen for film, her special gift for spying the weakness in script construction, casting, etc, to the process of preproduction, and act as an executive consultant at Paramount.[1] Kael did not greatly enjoy her time in Hollywood, nor did she feel that there was much she could do to check the rapidly increasing momentum of corporate Hollywood, as it moved towards the complete debasement of an art form. (One film she helped to greenlight was David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.) But she did get to see just how far her reputation extended. By her own accounts, and much to her surprise and dismay, she was regarded with awe bordering on terror by the Hollywood community. As Derek Malcolm wrote of her after her death, in The Guardian:

Pauline Kael could make or break reputations at will. And she was not averse to doing just that. A brilliant writer, she slammed and praised with equal ability, coining memorable phrases to castigate those she thought fundamentally untalented and to boost the reputations of her favorites. . . One of her chief sources of power was a network of lesser critics who she caused to be hired, and sometimes fired, across the United States. The Kaelites were a group who thought like her, even if they couldn't write like her, and she often kept tabs on them, like a slightly malicious mother hen. Hollywood took note of what she wrote, even if it did not prevent them pursuing their own course of commercial mediocrity. If a director was praised by Kael, he or she was generally allowed to work, since the money-men knew there would be similar approbation across a wide field of publications. Even after she retired, editors would seek her advice on whom to appoint—even if they didn’t always take it. Kael, who was wrong almost as often as she was right, was not a balanced writer. She got stuck in as if the cinema were politics. She had a profound effect, most of all on the acolytes she supported. The rest of us tagged along behind. At the height of her career, it was difficult to raise one’s voice sufficiently to mask hers. But, particularly on non-American films, it was sometimes worth trying. When she was off beam, she was very off beam indeed. When she was right, you felt you had, in some way, been blessed.

While in Hollywood, Kael was afforded a rare, inside view of the process of filmmaking that greatly enhanced her understanding of movies, and forever changed her view of Hollywood. She wrote about it extensively for the New Yorker on her return, in a piece called “Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers.” Yet whatever she had seen can hardly have come as any great surprise, considering that, ten years previously, Kael had written extensively on the corruption of the movie business, and the all-but hopeless plight of the artist within it, in a historical little piece called “On the Future of Movies.” In this article, written in 1974, Kael wrote on the growing need for filmmakers to “break out of this humiliating, suicidal struggle with the entrepreneurs. There’s only one way: They’ve got to help each other. It’s a matter not of the lunatics taking over the asylum . . . but of the artists’ abandoning the asylum to the lunatics who are the keepers.”[2] With characteristic audacity, Kael wrote of the need for filmmakers to start their own distribution company, noting that “they might have to spend time on business problems, but, with any luck, much less time on dealmaking sessions.” She commented on the time and energy wasted by these artists “preparing projects that they never get to shoot. . . . The directors spend their lives not in learning their craft and not in doing anything useful to them as human beings but in fighting a battle they keep losing.” The amount of work and the inconvenience of controlling the funding and distribution of their own films might be a headache, she argued, but it would be relatively painless compared to the creeping, insidious contamination of studio interference, “the self-pitying bosses, the indignity, the paralysis.”[3]

Kael made a strong case for the banding together of the major filmmakers and cited those she was hoping to rally, a list which today consists of many of the same lights (albeit dimmed), plus dozens more. Admittedly, back in 1974, there was a powerful new sense of creative potential in Hollywood which certainly isn’t there today; but even so, Kael’s argument may be more valid (and urgent) than ever. Instead of filmmakers endlessly compromising their vision and their talent and spending a year or more of their lives making empty dross like Mission Impossible—on the off-chance it will be a big hit and fund more personal projects—might it not be smarter, in the long run, if they scaled down their ambitions (as Woody Allen does) and channeled their energies (and resources) into a collective enterprise? Needless to say, moviemaking is a medium that requires large numbers of people to work together, so logically, a major part of the creative process is in selecting just who those people are. Yet a director rarely gets to do this to any significant degree. This is the advantage of a repertory company of stock members who mesh together well, as Coppola was aware. Repertory companies can produce and stage their own works for the theater, but rarely if ever can filmmakers fund and distribute their own movies. Yet potentially, there is no reason why they shouldn’t do exactly that. The idea is not new, obviously, and anything but simple, as Coppola can amply testify.

The truth is that similar collaborative endeavors have been attempted in Hollywood, on several occasions, but have never got very far. Recently for example (October 4, 2001), Variety announced a collaborative enterprise identical in spirit to the one proposed by Kael, in which some of the most gifted and innovative directors would band together at USA Films (owned by Barry Diller and Paramount) to create their own mini-production company, or “shingle.” With names such as Steve Soderbergh, Spike Jonze, David Fincher, Alexander Payne, and Sam Mendes, Variety announced a “major film venture” in which the directors would have “complete creative control, along with the opportunity to own the titles in five to seven years.” (Each of the filmmaker partners was committed to making three films over a five-year period.) Shades of the Directors’ Company, Diller’s project never went any further than its announcement. As Sharon Waxman put it, “Ultimately the rebels could not muster a united front”;[4] the directors argued over whether or not to include David O. Russell in the group, while the fact that Sofia Coppola (Jonze’s wife at the time) had not been invited caused still further friction, most of which was presumably less than creative. Artists’ egos make mayhem of their best intentions, might have been the headline, underlining a factor that Kael’s essay failed to take into account, one that may well be the determining one, alas, and the primary reason the collaborative dream never seems to be realized.

There are only two true auteur/movie moguls in history, and they are Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. But Lucas and Spielberg seem content to create their own cinematic Disneyland, and the two men who could conceivably beat the studios at their own game have opted to join them instead. On the other hand, if all (or even some) of the more rebellious filmmakers joined together to distribute their own films, they could wield proportionally greater power than alone. Certainly, they would attract other artists into the fold, above all the people with the real pull: the stars, and once a few of the “name” actors were on board, the bigger studios would be forced to string along. All that would be wanting, once the artists and the dollars were organized, would be the audience. And as any marketing expert knows, the public goes where it is told to go. Not only can you lead a horse to water, but you can be sure it’ll drink it once it gets there.[5]

Whatever was true 30 years ago is true today. Directors, writers, and actors need to band together and apart from the studios, to develop their own personal projects. With the new technology, it’s possible to fund, organize, shoot, sell, advertise and maybe even distribute movies, without either the assistance or the interference of studios. It is an unprecedented time of possibility: when standards of moviemaking are at an all-time low, independent cinema has never been stronger, and the opportunities have never been better. With home computers and internet and ever cheaper, better technology for filmmaking (and digital video’s improving standards), it is now perfectly feasible for filmmakers to make movies independently of corporate, committee-based funding, with a select group of like minds, getting the work to the public in the form it deserves. Those artists who achieve a firm grasp of the new, ever more accessible technology, and who join together with fellow artists on a shared enterprise with common goals (i.e., making good movies), will find—provided they stick to their vision and have the courage of their convictions—that Hollywood is their oyster. Like old Brazil, it will become a thing of the past. The old mill has peaked, and is beginning to run out of steam. Perhaps it’s not a renaissance that is needed, then, but an out-and-out revolution? A coup in which heads will roll and bodies will burn. Like a steam-roller or a runaway train that can only keep on the track for so long, Hollywood’s accelerating momentum will eventually topple it over.

*

“The net effect was that the studios began to resemble large corporations. They became bloated bureaucracies, with a proliferation of so-called creative executives. The days when production at Paramount was run by two men, Evans and Bart, were long gone. The comeback of the studios would be accompanied by the reemergence of the producers through whose hearts Calley had driven a stake in the early ’70s. They would crack the coffin lids, shrug off their shrouds, and rise again.”

—Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed, Hollywood is not so much a dream factory as a stealer of dreams.[6] Hollywood is a business, a corporation, and like any business that pretends to uphold the arts, it is a company of middlemen, a corporate parasite that drains and devours its host while pretending to serve it. Movies have been infected and contaminated by this parasite, and for the most part they are little more than two-hour, $100-million commercials for the vapid “wonders” of America, propaganda fostering a dead dream on a sleeping mass. Over time, the artists who once made real movies (movies now made by corporate lawyers and agents and executives) have become infected by this parasite, as it filters down to them through the movies they are forced to make. Being in close proximity to this “system” and working within it, they have become a part of it, and finally succumbed to it. In the end, the erstwhile auteur-filmmaker, now mere “director,” has become a middleman too, one more company executive peddling the corporate product. He’s the public face, his name is on the product, and he gets to call it his own. But he’s still peddling somebody else’s goods.[7]

Kael described how in the ’60s and ’70s, from merely controlling the selection and production of films, studios moved steadily into the realm of public responses via the (then little-understood) psychological tool of advertising. Studio executives devote their energies to a twin-pronged goal: on the one hand, shaping public taste/appetites until they conform to the product (so that a monstrosity like Titanic passes for greatness); on the other hand, manipulating and steadily corrupting the artists working within the Industry, recruiting them to the commercial agenda and turning them into fully-functioning “trash merchants.” If he is unable to quash or subvert the artist’s vision, studio execs can always take consolation in their power to destroy the film itself. As Kael put it,

The right of “final cut”—one of the great symbolic terms in moviemaking—gives them the chance to chop up the film of a director who has angered them by doing it his own way; they’ll mutilate the picture trying to remove the complexities he battled to put in. They love to play God with other people’s creations . . . When they’ve finished, they frequently can’t do anything with the pictures but throw them away. That’s their final godlike act—an easy act for them to live with because they always have the director to blame.[8]

Kael cited studio men’s unassailable conceit and their self-fulfilling prophecy, as salesmen who simply “gives the public what they want.” By a standard bit of doublethink, he convinces his detractors—perhaps even himself—that it is not the supply which is shaping the demand but the demand which dictates the supply.

The public has nothing to gain from believing this (and everything to lose), and yet the public swallows it. . . . When they tell a director, “Listen, what you call crap is what the public wants,” it’s not just an objective comment; they want the public to want this crap, and they’ve made stark sure it will. Since they’ve cold-decked public opinion, since they promote and sell only what they like, when they say, “That’s what the public wants,” it’s the truth. [9]

In her 1974 essay, Kael prophetically pointed out how the steady derangement of American culture—and of society itself—was a direct result of the conglomerization of the arts, the rapid and irreversible shift from a diverse variety of competing creative forms to a total centralization of media. What this means is that a once creative industry such as the movies (as well as all the other media) becomes chained to a corporate agenda and serves the function of propaganda instead of art. Creations become commodities, and what were once individual forms of expression become corporate means of social indoctrination. It may be that profit is the primary motive behind this agenda, but profit is not the only result. The “unification” of the arts is the worst form of democracy and amounts to a kind of cultural totalitarianism directly (though not solely) responsible for the lowering of audience standards, and for subtly sabotaging its capacity to think for itself. As producer Michael Phillips (Taxi Driver) put it:

In the ’70s, the US domestic market accounted for 85 percent of the business. If an executive had a hunch, he would take a shot. It was a seat-of-the-pants business. There was no more than two, three million dollars on the line, and virtually nothing in releasing costs, because it was a pay-as-you-go process. You opened in one or two theaters in each of the major cities, saw how it went. Nurse it along. When the economics started to drive film distribution the direction of thousand- to two-thousand-print releases and big national buys of media and launch costs of ten, thirteen million dollars, the stakes were so high that each decision was fraught with sheer terror. Instead of a seat-of-the-pants process, people were grasping for a rational framework to make decisions, and the only rational process available was precedent and analogy. So the mentality of the sequel or the look-alike emerged in the ’80s.[10]

The paradox is that, at some level, there has never been more opportunity in the movie industry for up-and-coming talents, provided they can get with this agenda and suppress any of the troublesome creative tendencies that drew them to the medium in the first place. Studios love first-time talents, for obvious reasons: they are fresh meat to mold. As Kael wrote,

The packagers offer themselves as the stars, and in many cases their pictures fail because they insist on employing nonentity directors who don’t assert any authority. . . . Movies have gone to hell and amateurism. A third of the pictures being made by Hollywood this year [1980] are in the hands of first-time directors, who will receive almost no guidance or help. . . . It’s not just that the decisions made by the executives might have been made by anyone off the street—it’s that the pictures themselves seem to have been made by anyone off the street. [11]

It’s a lot easier for the entrepreneurs to push around a first-time amateur than a veteran filmmaker; the fact that the films these puppet-directors make fail to make the grade, artistically speaking—are often in fact, incoherent messes—is of little consequence to the studio-heads. What matters is that they conform to the studio demands and remain on schedule/budget, etc, and that they make money when released, even if no one actually likes them.

As Kael lamented later in her life, “It’s reached a point where it’s just about lethally impossible for somebody to do good work in the system. They’re fought every step of the way.” [12] Perhaps her most poignant observation was how all the time, effort, money, sweat, blood and tears that went into making an endless stream of lousy movies could just as easily be directed into the making of real movies. This is a fact that doesn’t seem to have occurred to the public, or to the artists caught up in this hideous process: the amount of work is the same, and probably costs would be lower and profits not much diminished (once the public adapted to a new supply). What would be different is that Hollywood might finally be able to claim to be serving its true function, and entertaining the public. One final Kael quote:

In the past ten years, filmmaking has attracted some of the most inspired college students—the aces and prodigies who in previous eras would have headed into poetry or architecture or painting or playwriting. There they are, poised and ready to take off, and there is no place for them to take off to except the same old Hollywood vice—tighter now, perfected. And there are the high-fliers who have been locked out all along—the dozens of artist-filmmakers who work in film not as a collaborative storytelling medium but as a highly individual art-from, more closely related to the graphic arts than to Hollywood . . . . Right now, there is no way for their work to reach movie theatres and no way for them to heat up and fertilize feature filmmaking, which needs renewal. Everything is ready for an age of great movies, except the entrepreneurs and the public.[13]

The obvious question is, why not give the public what it wants? Why persist on churning out lifeless product when it would be just as viable for real movies to be made? Cui Bono? As Rushing and Frentz write in Projecting the Shadow, movies are “the instruments of domination as well as visionary art, they both reaffirm and subvert the status quo. Films can reveal that which is odious to consciousness, but they can also repress it.”[14] If Marx were alive today, would he admit that movies, as much as religion, are the opium of the masses?

Back to Kael

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[1] Paul Schrader has a different theory regarding Beatty’s motives: “Because of her power, executives used to be terrified of her. There was a feeling in the industry that Warren was the only one who could bring Pauline down. The ultimate smooth move was to flatter her to death, give her a little power, and put her in an office until she was gradually exposed as being one of us and therefore not dangerous. I really believe he brought her out there to humiliate her, maybe not consciously, but some part of him did. He gathered a lot of respect from the industry for that.” Schrader quoted in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, pg. 366.

[2] “On the Future of Movies,” Reeling.

[3] “The artist can grow making his own mistakes; he decays carrying out the businessmen’s decisions—working on large, custom-made versions of the soulless entertainment on TV. Privately, almost every one of the directors whose work I admire tells the same ugly, bitter story, yet they live in such fear of those spiteful, spying bosses that they don’t dare even talk to each other. Hollywood is a small, ingrown community where people live in terror that ‘word will get back.’ They inhabit a paranoia-inducing company town, and within it they imagine these bosses to have more power in the outside world than they actually do.” Reeling, pg. 330-31

[4] Rebels on the Backlot, pg. xix; also Variety quotes courtesy of Waxman, pg.ix. After the project collapsed, Soderbergh set up Section Eight at Warners; Payne went with New Line; Jonze with Sony Classics; Mendes with DreamWorks SKG; and David Fincher made The Panic Room.

[5] Kael writes, “[I]t’s a matter of picking up the pieces, and it may be too late. But if the directors started talking to each other, they’d realize that they’re all in the same rapidly sinking boat, and there’d be a chance for them to reach out and try to connect with a new audience. If they don’t, they’ll never test themselves as artists and they’ll never know whether an audience could have been found for the work they want to do. The artists have to break out of their own fearful, star-struck heads; the system that’s destroying them is able to destroy them only as long as they believe in it and want to win within it—only as long as they’re psychologically dependent on it. . . . The system works for those who don’t have the needs or aspirations that are in conflict with it; but for the others—and they’re the ones who are making movies—the system doesn’t work anymore, and it’s not going to.” Reeling, pg. 330-31.

[6] “The movies have taken away our dreams. Of all betrayals, this is the worst.”

[7] Pauline Kael wrote of this middleman extensively, of how he “functions as a book publisher, as a theatrical producer, as a concert manager, as a rock promoter,” but above all as a foil for the artist: “the middleman in the movie world is probably more filled with hatred for the artists he traffics in than the middleman in any other area. . . The war of the businessmen against the artists is the war of the powerful against the powerless, based on the hatred of those who can’t for those who can, and in return the hatred of those who can for those who won’t let them. The producers’ complaint about the hotheaded director who puts up a fight to try something different is ‘He’s self-destructive. He’s irresponsible. You can’t do business with him.’ And they make him suffer for it.” Reeling, pg. 316-18.

[8] Reeling, pg. 319

[9] Reeling, pg. 322-5

[10] Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, pg. 404. As mentioned, Don Simpson helped pave the road to high concept hell. As Craig Baumgarten says, “Don redesigned the way studios related to the material they produced. … The ’80s would become a period in which studios took charge of their movies. It wasn’t like, Gee, we like it, or we don’t like it, or why don’t you try that? We began to issue blueprints. We came up with our own ideas.” Rob Cohen describes how, “Don would dictate easily, twenty- to thirty-page memos, single-spaced, that would go through the script from the beginning to the end, every scene.” Quotes from Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, pg. 402.

[11] “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers,” in Taking It all In, pg. 15, 16., and Reeling, pg. 316.

[12] From an interview with Evelyn Renold, see Conversations with Pauline Kael, pg. 178.

[13] Taken from “On the Future of Movies,” Reeling.

[14] Rushing and Frenz, pg 47.