The Times, They Are Earthquaking

All The World's A Stream

Am I seeing this right? Has movie stardom been sacrificed on the altar of Netflix? I recall $20 million paychecks, plus gross participation, for biggest names of the 80/90’s. How they must long for that now, at least those who remember back that far. It looks to me like the star system is all but kaput. And how do you define a Netflix movie? Some insist it isn’t a ‘real’ movie at all, owing to absence from theatres. An entrenched system prefers to deny the very existence of Scorsese’s The Irishman, even as viewers call it 2019’s Best Picture. Purists say film is meant to be projected onto a screen for delectation of a filled house, but look how often digital delivery fouls up, and how dim the picture looks when downloads work. I saw The Irishman at home, on a big screen, in a recliner, and am hanged if any theatre can match that. The “audience experience”? --- I’ll take vanilla.

We know how movies were convulsed by changes in the 50’s. Veterans on both sides of the camera felt lost as their system took sleds. Transition is toughest for those used to, dependent on, things as they were. What is happening now is beyond ordinary or expected change. Scorsese says it’s a biggest switch since talkies came. He also claims certain movies, very popular ones, “aren’t cinema.” That was taken as an insult to not just shows in question, but their viewership. He was dismissed by these as an old man out of touch. Never mind his just delivering a could-be career best, and doing so for Netflix. How much more “in touch” do you get? There are others who ride the tide and prosper. Clint Eastwood, approaching ninety, does fine work as a matter of routine, and reliably makes at least one out of any three a surprise hit (and none a loss). Tom Hanks seems to have unerring sense of what a modern audience wants, or at least what his mature fanbase prefers. I’ve enjoyed Robert Redford’s latter work and was sorry when he announced finis to acting. Despite these still bright lights that inspire us all to push on, I can’t help thinking they, and all of talent still at work, will do so under net that is streaming services, movie goers going no further than home seating or what they watch in the palm of hands. But hold … isn’t that just variation on nay-say going back to talkie transition, and endless points of perceived crisis since?

It is understood that The Irishman would not have been made had not Netflix kicked in. The necessary $159 million was theirs, plus consent to length and bleak epilogue a bygone industry would not have countenanced. Imagine if a Netflix had been around when Orson Welles or Erich von Stroheim needed them, The Magnificent Ambersons welcome in whatever mood Welles chose, EvS free to let breathe his ruined masterpieces (Hey folks, let’s order out pizza and binge-watch Greed tonight!). Appropriate then that Welles would benefit from policy change that looks to guide most all of filmmaking now, his The Other Side Of The Wind a rescue that would not have happened any other way than it did (look at decades of attempt under the old system). Forces, weakening ones, resist stream-product being nominated for awards, or being recognized in a mainstream sense. To tremors we’re seeing, add that of casting out of a Twilight Zone of trick effects, old actors young again, DeNiro, Pacino presumably able to rat-tat forever, though sharp, if pitiless, eyes, insist that while they look like forty, they move like eighty. But here’s the essence: Actors don’t have to age out anymore. They may not even have to stay alive (witness James Dean’s promised comeback). So has the trick been tried on women? Think of actresses from the 80’s, 90’s, earlier even, that could be back playing romance leads, maybe with partners twenty-thirty years younger, born long after their leading lady. I’d gladly drive out to see something like that, but again, are bells tolling for brick-mortar spots to see movies?

Streams, it seems, have become the Great Equalizer. No need for stars big enough to “open” a new film. Chances are we’ll sample whatever Netflix premieres sometime over a given week, or months (Julia Roberts has done a series … let’s sample five minutes). Last month was bow for a new Eddie Murphy, My Name Is Dolemite. It is the most enjoyable time I’ve had with one of his since 48 Hours and the first Beverly Hills Cop. Again we can figure no one would have supported this project pre-Netflix, let alone pay Murphy cash he used to get. But when did a lamestream industry last give him something good as this? Plenty beyond Netflix are making films for phones or whatever thimble we watch on, once super-names aboard for feature-length, limited series, half hour comedy, each supplying employ where an obsolescent system will not.

Old-timers need not sit home with scrapbooks … I liked Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin in The Kominsky Method, two seasons so far, and there’s Jennifer Aniston, age fifty, doing her thing on a stream galaxy I’ve not yet explored (idea: make her twenty-five again for a quarter-century more of rom-cons, or better yet, ten more Friends seasons with the principal six re-purposed to former selves). Who can say “No TV For Me” as Gable or Bogart once did (boy, do they seem more and more like ancient pharaohs), where television itself is so fluid as to frankly need a new name (for all of time, as in none, watching, I could wonder if the three “major” networks even broadcast anymore). We are heir to truly democratic times, the level field so many in Hollywood profess to want. Is there still big money in this game, other than the occasional supe-hero that strikes lightning? (Answer: Yes, and Netflix is earning it) Change makes content-delivery of even recent past seem like Sanskrit, but I suppose all of “old” media cries into a same bucket, and yet it’s an exhilarating thing to be witness to. In view of what’s happened in a short ten years, imagine where viewing will be after a next decade.