When did you last get excited by a movie? When was the last
time a movie came out that made you want to see it - again and again and
again?
I remember in the 1990s when Pulp Fiction hit theaters - it was
so exciting, such daring filmmaking, such thrilling storytelling, that I
went to see it four times in the theaters. Back then, movies seem to
matter to people, personally, and they seemed to be important cultural
touchstones as well. Movies were, dare I say it, important. They
mattered. They lived.
Today? Movies suck - or mostly suck. These days, TV shows have the
cultural edge that movies once enjoyed. For the most part, movies now
are either one of two things: huge, cynical, money-hungry enterprises
(think of the proliferation of "franchises" and the unending number of
sequels) or calculated "Oscar-bait", movies designed to win awards and
make some money but are otherwise forgettable. Movies don't excite
anymore. They don't live inside us or the culture. The artistry of film
making isn't moving forward, taking strides. It's stuck. And that's sad.
So how did we get here? It took a long time. While movies were burning
up the culture in the 1970s through the 1990s, the seeds of their
downfall were being planting at the same time, namely the era of
blockbusters and sequels, along with the upwards spiral of production
costs. But most of all came the huge costs of failure. When movies fail,
they not only lose money but can destroy careers.
In 1978, a director named Michael Cimino made a movie called The Deer Hunter,
about working class men and women who's lives are shattered by the
Vietnam war. The movie was a huge success - it made lots of money and
won several Oscars, including Best Picture. Two years later, Cimino
produced his follow-up, Heaven's Gate, about 19th century land
wars in the American West. This movie failed catastrophically, so much
so that the studio that financed it went under.
It was the first time that a movie's failure actually did something so
devastating. Needless to say, the studios reacted accordingly. In the
decades that followed, movies became increasingly "safer" so as not to
offend audiences and critics. That's not to say, in the ensuing decades,
that there still haven't been other huge failures as well as other
exciting movies (like Pulp Fiction). But over time, safeness won over daring. The deary cinematic landscape we live in today is largely due to the failure of Heaven's Gate -- a movie that tried every bit to be as good as The Deer Hunter but wasn't.
Michael Cimino died last week, and his professional trajectory tells us a
lot about the culture we live in today. After his once promising career
was derailed, Cimino only directed a small number of movies, most of
which critics and audiences ignored. This was, and is, a shame. A daring
director was largely sidelined because of this (certainly huge) failure
and the art of film, I think, suffered as a result.
Movies matter less now because directors are increasingly not the
voices of their own films. When was the last time you saw a movie and
really felt like you saw art being created? Yes, such film "auteurs"
like Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas
Anderson, and the Coen Brothers are still making movies - but for how
much longer? And when they're gone, who will replace them? I have no
idea. There seem to be no young auteurs on the horizon.
When you watch both The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate,
putting aside both movies' virtues and flaws, what strikes you about
them is that these are stories being told by a great directorial voice;
that you are watching someone's singular vision spring to life; that
these are movies that do what only movies can do best: tell a story
through moving images, the director as storyteller. Like a painter using paints and brushes, like a
writer using words and a pen, like a sculptor using stones and chisel,
this is a director using camera and film to tell a story and imprint an
artistic style on your consciousness. Cimino didn't need special
effects, he didn't need clever dialogue, he didn't need fancy editing,
he didn't need any visual or storytelling tricks - he was amazingly
confident in the way that he simply pointed and moved the camera, coreographing his scenes with such skill, that his vision came across so strongly that
you were left with an impression that lasted long after these movies
were over.
Having seen both films, I remember them - the storytelling is
unconventional, the performances are bold, the camera work is thrilling and
confident, a master clearly at work. Ask yourself this: when was the
last time you saw movie where you felt like this? Probably a long time.
And as good as television is these days, it will never have the
cinematic visual power of the movies. Television is still mostly a
writer's medium with the director serving as the writer's handmaiden.
That's fine! But movies are first and last a director's medium, and they are at their most powerful when the director's voice rings loudly.
In many ways, Cimino both exemplified everything that used to be
great about movie making and was also indirectly responsible for its
decline. His ego, apparently, got in the way of his work. But now that he has passed on, it's important to remember that
filmmakers like him used to reign supreme in our culture and that
hopefully, one day, movies will live again.
PS. You must read Final Cut by Steven Bach, generally
considered the best book ever written about the movie business, which
chronicles the turbulent history of Heaven's Gate. It paints Cimino in a very unflattering light but, after reading it, you'll understand how movies are what they are today. You can find the documentary based on the book at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyeOmPMHRYg.
PPS. Cimino was a New Yorker, originally from Long Island, but he got his start working in advertising in NYC in the Mad Men era of the 1960s.