Art is all but dead in the Sony, MGM/UA, and 20th Century Fox boardrooms. Its slide downhill began back in the '70s, when Barry Diller, then a TV programming exec at ABC, began insisting TV movies be pitched to him in a single sentence. By the time the film Flashdance turned into a cross-merchandising phenom with millions sporting torn T-shirts and buying up the soundtrack, art's fate was sealed.
In the book High Concept, Justin Wyatt takes a look at how filmmaking has been reduced to an economic science. Big studios now commonly green light projects based in large part on their potential for offshoot media: CD-ROMs, videogames, novelizations, soundtracks, T-shirts, and other merchandise.
Wyatt, a former market research analyst, says conglomerate buyouts of Hollywood are to blame. After studios were acquired, high-concept moviemaking became a priority for parent companies accustomed to marketing a product based on its salability. Though this tactic has proven phenomenally successful on the business end of things, the quality of films has sunk to regrettable lows.
While this part of industry history is compelling, Wyatt's documentation of it isn't always so riveting. High Concept is too thick with details and extremely academic. Fortunately, the author cites enough historical tidbits to keep your interest. For instance, Jon Peters, former hairstylist and Barbara Streisand ex-boyfriend, is credited with promoting movies through music. For his 1976 remake of A Star Is Born, he had radio stations play a key song from the soundtrack weeks before the picture's première. Commonplace as this idea sounds today, it was unheard of before the age of high-concept moviemaking.
Wyatt is strongest doing what he knows best: looking at the market research that goes on before (and after) a movie is made. His charts and models of how studios predict a high-concept movie's gross potential will capture even casual readers' attention.
Hollywood economics already play an integral role in Wired entertainment media. You can't find a big film today that's not being hastily shoveled onto CD-ROM, cartridges, and diskettes. And if the big media giants become purveyors of content for the digital world as they have in the analog world, brace yourselves for more schlock spillover onto your computer.
High Concept, by Justin Wyatt: US$35 hardcover, $17.95 softcover. University of Texas Press: +1 (512) 471 7233, fax +1 (512) 320 0668.
STREET CRED
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They Do Make 'Em Like They Used To
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