About Last Night

I belong to the last generation to have grown up without VCRs. Born in 1956, I was raised in a small town that had one movie theater. The only “arty” films I saw in high school were 2001: A Space Odyssey and Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. The nearest public TV station was in St. Louis, just beyond the range of our rooftop antenna–this was before the invention of cable TV–so it wasn’t until I left home to go to college that I saw any old movies other than an occasional Saturday-afternoon John Wayne.

I went to a small school near Kansas City, and lived near there for several years after graduating. As a student, I had a tiny TV set in my room but was too busy to watch it more than occasionally, though I did catch three or four foreign films (among them M and Grand Illusion). My campus had no film series. At that time, Kansas City was home to a grand total of two “art houses,” one of which showed first-run foreign films and the other domestic revivals. All told, I probably saw no more than a couple of dozen old movies in Kansas City, including Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, Duck Soup, and Casablanca, none of them more than once.

If you grew up in New York or Chicago, my experience will doubtless sound alien to you, but I suspect that most Americans of my generation could tell similar stories. For us, seeing a classic film was an occasion–one not likely to be repeated anytime soon–and for that reason, we never quite absorbed the abstract notion of Film as Art. To be sure, I “knew” that film was an art form, but this “knowledge” had little or no basis in experience, and so it had no real meaning.

In 1983, I moved to a big-campus college town, Urbana, Illinois, where I got my first VCR, hooked up to a decent cable system, and started haunting the local art house and the various campus film series. That was when I started taking movies seriously. Prior to that time, they’d been little more than casual entertainment, made to be experienced once and then put aside. Thereafter, I started thinking of great films as art objects that could be revisited and restudied as often as I wanted. They soon became as important to me as books or music, and stayed that way.

Nowadays, of course, pretty much everybody takes movies seriously. It’s taken for granted, for instance, that an educated person will have seen Citizen Kane at least once. (If you doubt it, ask yourself this: how many people of your acquaintance would know what you were talking about if you mentioned “Rosebud” in a casual conversation?) Film is now a central part of the middle-class cultural landscape–but that wouldn’t have happened without the invention of cable TV and the VCR.

This is why I have no trouble imagining life without movie theaters. Having spent nearly two decades living in New York City, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to watch classic films in a theater, but there are still any number of important films I’ve only seen on TV. I know it’s not the same thing–I well remember how stunned I was the first time I saw Kane on a large screen–but the fact remains that most people see most movies at home, which is infinitely better than not seeing them at all.

Nor do I expect this situation to change much. For better and worse, film has become a species of home entertainment. Of all the seismic shifts in American art and culture that have taken place since my childhood, that one may ultimately come to be seen as the most fateful of all.

“Schiller distinguishes the naive–and the sentimentalisch: sentimentalisch doesn’t mean sentimental. He distinguished between artists who create naturally, who are not troubled by the burden of the tragic disorder of life, who do not seek salvation in art as some people seek personal salvation in religion or Socialism or nationalism. Verdi in that sense is simply a craftsman of genius with the simple strong moral ideas of his time and place–no tragic self-torment. He was a marvellous composer, a divine genius who created in a natural way as Homer and Shakespeare and perhaps Goethe did.”

Sir Isaiah Berlin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin

What Dale Peck has to say in this interview–which is as engaging and compulsively readable as all of Robert Birnbaum’s author chats–reminded me of a book that I have been obsessed with off and on the last ten years, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood: Mary McCarthy’s classic, heartbreaking account of her embattled childhood. Peck’s latest book, What We Lost, is a memoir of his father’s childhood, an essentially uncategorizable work that its publisher calls a work of fiction “based on a true story”:

I always got confused in English classes and such where you would be reading Colette and then they would tell you it was based on such-and-such love affair and they would tell you the name of the real person and all this kind of thing. And I’d think,

Another one of those days: I’m writing a piece for money this morning (tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal theater column, to be exact), then standing in for Doug McLennan, the genius behind artsjournal.com, at the ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards ceremony here in New York. Doug is getting a special award for having invented artsjournal.com, but he’s stuck in Seattle and can’t collect it himself, so I’m doing the honors.

Anyway, I won’t be posting again until much later in the day, if then, but OGIC promises that she has something in the works. One way or another, we’ll be back.

Fellow blogger Felix Salmon writes, apropos of Monday’s posting claiming that the failure of Master and Commander to achive full-fledged hit status represents “the sound of doom for big-budget adult movies, which were already sick unto death and have now officially straight-lined”:

You say they’re officially dead, but I wonder when, exactly, they were alive. I’ve just been looking down the list of the top-grossing films of all time, after adjusting for inflation, and I really can’t find anything you might call a big-budget adult movie from the past 20 years. The Sixth Sense probably comes closest, as you surely don’t have stuff like Forrest Gump or Lord of the Rings in mind. Oh, here we go: at the bottom of the list they start appearing. At #92 there’s Saving Private Ryan, and at #106 is Dances With Wolves.

I guess my point is that if you’re bemoaning the death of adult-oriented movies with nine-figure budgets, I’d simply say that they never existed in the first place. Even Saving Private Ryan cost “only” $70 million: pretty much half of Master & Commander’s budget.

In other words, the Hollywood Blockbuster with the nine-figure budget is, and always has been, a mass-market affair. Let’s look at Oscar winners: Chicago had a $45m budget, A Beautiful Mind was $60m, American Beauty and Shakespeare in Love were tiny, English Patient was $27m, Braveheart was $72m, and so on.

So what does that leave us with? Titanic, of course, which I’m sure is not what you consider an adult movie, and the one exception — Gladiator, with a $103m budget, and which was clearly the success that Master & Commander was trying to replicate.

What’s expensive is big special effects, bangs and crashes, all the sort of things which you really don’t need in an adult film. So do I mind that directors making adult films can’t get nine-figure budgets? Not really, since I don’t think there’s any need for a nine-figure budget when making an adult film. And if we adults want bangs and crashes, we’re more than capable of enjoying Pirates of the Caribbean, which is a wonderful movie for people of all ages.

The lesson which I draw from Master & Commander’s box-office (which, as you say, is perfectly respectable, and much more in three weeks than, say, Mystic River or Lost In Translation can hope to gross in their entire runs, assuming they don’t win Best Picture) is basically that water-based films (Titanic, Waterworld) are always incredibly expensive, and in this case clearly the budget got out of hand. Criticise the producers for spending too much, don’t write off ambitious adult films.

Cute, and interesting, too. But while I take Felix’s point about actual numbers (facts do have a way of messing up a terrific generalization!), I think maybe it’s just to the side of the point. Of the other movies he mentions, The Sixth Sense is an adult film, in the same sense that Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers were at the same time popular and serious. So, in their different ways, were Chicago (which I thought quite good) and American Beauty (about which I had sharply mixed feelings). The others are for the most part pseudo-adult movies, a genre at which Hollywood excels. Conversely, Master and Commander is an adventure film, but its premises and methods seem to me genuinely adult, which is why it isn’t working with the mass audience so expensive a film must command in order to succeed.

The real point of my original post, of course, was the claim with which it ended: “Movies as novels, bought on the Web and consumed at home: that’s the future of grownup filmmaking in America.” About this I feel absolutely certain. What was hitherto missing was the technology necessary to make such a transformation feasible, and now it is rapidly falling into place. I don’t say that I necessarily look forward to the contraction of cinematic possibilities that will come from the loss of the theatrical experience (as several other readers wrote to point out, the cinematography of films like Lost in Translation really does benefit from being seen on a large screen), but it will have its reciprocal advantages, too, mostly having to do with convenience. In any case, under-50 filmgoers are universally habituated to the experience of watching movies, even well-known ones, on TV, and in a death match between the enveloping aesthetic experience of a large-screen theatrical film and the comfort and intimacy of home viewing, comfort will win every time.

I just got back from the 36th annual ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards, presented at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for excellence in writing about music. No, I didn’t win one, but I accepted a citation for special recognition on behalf of Doug McLennan, the creator of artsjournal.com, the invaluable Web site that hosts this blog. Here’s what I said:

Sometimes the greatest ideas are simple ideas that no one else has thought of. Doug McLennan had one: start a Web site that carries daily digests of, and links to, news stories and commentaries about the arts, drawn from newspapers and magazines all across the English-speaking world. Not only did he have that idea, he made it happen–and now artsjournal.com is an indispensable part of the morning routine of artists, administrators, and journalists everywhere.

This summer, Doug had another idea: invite arts writers, myself among them, to keep daily Web logs on Artsjournal. And that, too, has been a smashing success. Last week, my Artsjournal blog, “About Last Night,” received its one hundred thousandth page view.

I believe the future of arts journalism is on the Web. If I’m right, then Doug McLennan was present at the creation. I’m proud to be a part of his creation, and on his behalf I accept this award with gratitude–and hope.

We were in fast company. Other prizewinners included the authors of several books about which I have written enthusiastically here and elsewhere, among them Alfred Appel, Jr.’s Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce, Charles M. Joseph’s Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention,
Allen Shawn’s Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey, and Richard Sudhalter’s Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael.

At a time when serious writing about music is getting harder and harder to find in the major media, it’s heartening that ASCAP should pay tribute to books and writers like these–and, of course, to artsjournal.com, without which there would be no “About Last Night.” Bless them, and Doug, too.

The Grammy nominations were just announced, and I rejoice to inform you that Luciana Souza, the subject of “About Last Night”‘s very first posting, received her second nomination in a row for Best Jazz Vocal Album, this time for North and South.

If you haven’t bought North and South, get on the stick!

UPDATE: For a complete list of Grammy nominations, go here.

I spent yesterday afternoon hanging out in a recording studio in midtown Manhattan, watching a friend of mine, a jazz singer from Brazil, record her next album. She was in the vocal booth when I arrived, so I slipped discreetly into the control room and took a seat in front of the board. As soon as she was finished, she burst out of the booth, ran into the control room, gave me a hug and said, “Guess what? I took my citizenship test this morning. I passed!“

A little background: my friend is as Brazilian as it’s possible to be, but she’s lived here for many years and decided some time ago to become an American citizen. It touched me to the heart when she told me of her plans. Not only do I have a special love for American art (the pieces collected in A Terry Teachout Reader are all about American art and artists, and except for a lone Bonnard, my collection of works on paper is all-American), but jazz has always seemed to me uniquely emblematic of the American national character. Somehow this made my friend’s decision all the more moving.

I knew she was taking the test that day, and I had every reason to assume she’d pass it with flying colors, so I was ready for her news. I opened my shoulder bag and took out a neatly wrapped present (neatly wrapped by somebody else, needless to say!). The card was a reproduction of a John Marin watercolor, and the gift was three albums of music by Aaron Copland: Quiet City, the Third Symphony, Old American Songs, Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, and a two-CD set of the complete piano music. I couldn’t think of a better way to welcome my beloved friend to my beloved country. Neither could she.