Slow Players #12: "The Only Tonic for The Light" (Tolkin/Altman)

Hello!

Some years ago, I worked for a studio. This was in the days when movie studios didn’t put all their eggs into franchise baskets, when they were at least occasionally in the business of making movies that weren’t based on IP. I was running the New York office for one of the three feature divisions of 20th Century Fox, and thus found myself that fall at a corporate retreat with a gaggle of News Corp’s senior brass. The studio was having good year. Earlier that year The Full Monty, which one of the studio’s three divisions (Fox Searchlight) had made for $3.5 million, had grossed almost eighty times that, and it was soon to release Titanic, which would go on to the studio’s main division something in the neighborhood of $2 billion. A good year, but at that retreat, Bill Mechanic, then the CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, stood up at a lectern and gave the group of us who were tasked with development an instruction that has lodged in my head for decades.

“No more middle class movies.”

He said this exactly, these five words, punching each one for emphasis, repeating the phrase a few times so it took on a certain oracular force. No. More. Middle. Class. Movies. I liked Mechanic, who struck me as someone who understood and cared about cinema as an art form, but I couldn’t help but think of Ned Beattie in Network. The primal forces of nature were being invoked.

By “middle-class movies,” Mechanic meant middle-budget dramas and romantic comedies, films that might cost something in the neighborhood of $50 million, with actors who were not necessarily topline box office stars. Effective immediately, we were told to pursue movies for under $10 million, like The Full Monty, or ones that could be budgeted over $100 million, like Titanic, but. . . under no circumstances were we to mess around with budgets in-between. (Actually, he offered a single loophole, which was that there were five movie stars—Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, John Travolta, and one other whose name has slipped from memory—around whom it might still be possible to build a middle budget movie, whose participation was akin to an automatic green light, but otherwise, no.) This struck me off the bat as insane. After all, the division I worked for, Fox 2000, had recently produced a series of “middle-class movies,” ones that were budgeted in the $50 million range, all of them substantial cast but lacking much of a high-concept hook. We’d made One Fine Day, for example, a romantic comedy starring George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer; we’d made Inventing the Abbotts, a family drama with Billy Crudup, Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly, and Courage Under Fire, a story about the first Gulf War starring Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan. That two of these three were lousy didn’t seem like something you could index to their budgets. (After all, Speed 2, the studio’s other great white hope for the year, cost $110 million and sucked hardest of all.) Fox 2000 also had Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (budget: $52 million) and David Fincher’s Fight Club (budget: $63 million) under construction, so surely there was room to make movies in that range, and if Mechanic was serious about this edict I figured a bunch of us were soon going to lose our jobs. But most of all—

The disappearance of middle-class movies (and thereby of middle-class people, middle-class actors, writers and directors) from Hollywood seemed indicative even then of a much wider catastrophe. I felt it in the room and I’ve gone around telling that story to people for twenty-five years while being sure of its meaning (which seems to be finally erupting in the public consciousness now, at long last: welcome to Hot Labor Summer, baby!) and while being equally sure of its ramifications outside the movie business as well. After all, you could see the same stratification—between the highly-paid star on the one hand, and the non-star being paid guild minimum on the other—happening in sports, or in publishing. This gap, this sprawling gulf between the Jim Carreys (or the Alex Rodriguezes) of the world and the rank-and-file actors and athletes, seemed to be edging its way outside the worlds of art, media and entertainment, and also struck me as likely metastatic. I knew even then that those margins were going to move: that “under $10 million” would become “under $5 million,” and then “under three,” just as the high budget movies—and the profits harvested by the corporations who made them—were likewise going to skyrocket. I didn’t foresee the rise of streaming (Netflix, in fact, had just launched as a mail order DVD company), or of Amazon (which existed, but I, like most people, still bought my books in stores), but I did know Bertelsmann AG acquiring Random House and Viacom snapping up Simon & Schuster was bad news. For culture industries (and other industries) to exist inside a vertical corporate hierarchy is death, and while I was happy to have Rupert Murdoch’s American Express card in my pocket, and to charge everything to it that I could, it didn’t seem too great that my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss could own, say, a movie studio, a publishing house (Harper Collins), a multinational array of newspapers and broadcast concerns, and also the Los Angeles Dodgers. This seemed, in fact, very bad.

It still does. For all of my generation’s follies, we were right in knowing that corporate rock (and corporate cinema, and corporate publishing) sucked and still do. Often when I tell people I grew up in Hollywood, people assume this means a childhood surrounded by stars, which wasn’t particularly the case. My parents were middle-class people, and if my father the agent was to find greater success later in life, he made his bones representing middle-class talent: actors who weren’t stars, journeyman directors. Indeed, our affinity for 1970s cinema (“our” meaning almost everyone who subscribes to this newsletter, surely) can recognize there a cinematic landscape that was almost entirely “middle-class” in its output. Until, of course, it wasn’t. Until those leviathans erupted out of the depths to begin to swallow larger shares of the profit (and larger shares of the studios’ collective attention).

All of this—the story of my own upbringing and also of how we got here, the slow annihilation of Hollywood’s middle class over decades—is the one I relate in The Golden Hour, the book I have spent the past several months finishing. (Which is why, too, this newsletter has been on its brief hiatus: all work and no slow play has made me a productive boy.) But it’s also a story that seems to me in the process of giving way to something else. The absence of a viable middle class in Hollywood as it is presently configured, the thriving of locusts like David Zaslav (old news by now, but if you haven’t actually read Jason Bailey’s recent article for GQ—the one Zaslav’s camp successfully pressured the magazine into taking down—it’s here, and you should), the intolerable conditions that have working television writers also driving Ubers to pay rent, well . . . these things aren’t remotely sustainable. Bob Iger can gnash his teeth and claim the Guilds’ demands “aren’t realistic” all he wants, but they’re infinitely more realistic than eight-figure compensation packages for CEOs presiding over business models that don’t work, and infinitely preferable to other solutions that might not seem realistic to people like Iger either, but anyone who’s been alive for a few decades (or anyone with a sense of history, surely) should know that “unrealistic” things happen in the world all the time.

This newsletter usually devotes itself to particular books, movies, and artists moving a little outside the sphere of contemporary consideration: things that aren’t being chewed to death on Twitter (or Threads, or BlueSky, wherever it is folks do the chewing at the moment), hence this one’s a little different. But if one were looking for an indication of how these problems have been gnawing at Hollywood for decades (other than in The Golden Hour, about which—a bit more in the next newsletter), one could look to The Player, both Michael Tolkin’s excellent novel and Robert Altman’s 1992 adaptation of it, which if you haven’t watched lately, you should. Speaking of the antagonism between studio executive and writer, and of the studio executive Griffin Mill’s rather wretched excuse for a moral compass, Tolkin puts it this way:

Hot bright noons in Burbank were a kind of cosmic experience for him, because they were pointless, because the only tonic for the light, which was, in some sense, redemption’s gleam, was money, work, authority. In what sense? he asked himself. In the sense that if Judgment Day is the only reason for conscience, then the bad feeling stirred by the light is an echo of some ultimate regret.

Altman? Well, I’d say Altman’s assessment of Griffin Mill is much funnier, and alas more specifically predictive of our current situation, albeit not nearly as full of poetry and brimstone.

See you on the picket lines, and I’ll be back much, much sooner with more to come—

Matthew