Time to Weed Out Hollywood Idiots

Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly series of quick(ish) takes on the industry’s passing parade.

Introducing the Film Citizenship Exam

So after months of doom, film is saved by one hit movie.

More immediately, Mike and Pam are saved after a drumbeat demanding their scalps, before their work had even unspooled.

When did our trade coverage get so stupid? Is it a result of having it dominated by one monopoly? Sure seems like it, as the Penske Slop Factory gravitates towards whatever is the wildest charge at hand. Instead of bad takes being shot down or challenged, they’re echoed across the sister publications until they become The Narrative.

Then the knee-jerk non-trade publications swoop in looking for an easy frame for a story and echo Penske’s clickbait.

Anyway, the question was never Will there ever be another hit film? It was a matter of how many hits, how many doubles and singles do we need to keep a moviegoing public coming back and finding things they want to see year-round. This shouldn’t be a business that hangs everything on one hit every six weeks or three months.

Why is this so hard? The big fight of our time is to get the public excited about moviegoing again, as an ongoing thing, not just for one Minecraft here and there. As I wrote earlier this week in spotlighting four outsiders which could reinvigorate Hollywood, we need to put film back near the center of the cultural mindshare. That isn’t going to happen if we’re relying on anyone paying attention as often as you can see a supermoon.

It also occurred to me while at CinemaCon that if the mission is to get people excited about film again, it’s kind of de rigueur that the people making film be excited about the medium themselves.

When you talk about film with a lot of the people working in it — and with almost all of the people covering it — over and over again you bump into folks with the soul of an accountant. The accountant’s soul has a very narrow fixed obsession with cost without any larger context. Or any ability to grasp that intangibles like “getting the public excited again” isn’t some ridiculous pipe dream: It’s the entire fight and prior to 10 years ago, anyone working in the medium knew that on some level.

These people don’t hate film, but they have become our nightmare audience — content to see a Marvel movie or two a year or check out Barbenheimer but not really needing much more. They’re certainly not making much effort to experience movies outside of premieres or their couches.

The sneering tone of so much coverage and conversation of late reflects this perfectly.

The casual ambivalence about the beating heart of the industry explains why one of the great showplaces of our own city sits in mothballs year after year, and few in the business show any interest at all in reviving it:

In L.A., we are in the midst of an explosion of cinema appreciation — festivals, special screenings and events have broken out across town like never before. Just glance at this schedule of events if you don’t believe me.

But honestly, I never hear people who work in the industry talk about any of these events. I certainly never hear about them from my beloved peers who cover it.

Too much of this industry is in the hands of people who don’t love film — and certainly don’t know very much about it, either its history or even its basic functioning today.

If you don’t love film, you’re not likely going to be able to save it. We might go so far as to say, if you don’t love film and you’re working in it, you’re actually part of the problem.

Which is why I think it’s time for some credentialing in this business. You need to pass education requirements and secure a license to have a nail salon, yet anyone can be in the entertainment business without knowing a damn thing.

To that end, I’ve come up with a very basic film citizenship exam. This is not a hard test. If you know film just a little, you should be able to get 10 out 10 without breaking a sweat. For anyone who has even glanced out of the corner of their eye at the history of this medium — or shown the slightest curiosity about the medium they supposedly love — these questions should be an insult, the film equivalent of “Name the three branches of government.” (Although I suppose we can’t count on people knowing that either anymore, as Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville blew that one a few years ago and he remains a member in good standing of the world’s greatest deliberative body.)

Anyway, the quiz below should be administered by all managers of workplaces in film land, even streaming film, as well as all newsrooms covering the industry. Any employee who fails to get eight out of 10 answers right should be packed off to remedial film school — or at least taken aside for a serious talk about why exactly they want to be doing this job. Believe us, there are lots of easier places you could be working right now.