With festivals beckoning and box office wobbling, this obnoxious question looms ever larger: Whats next?
Where will they come from?
A quick survey of past groundbreakers poses some answers, all of them disturbing.
Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate and The French ConnectionEverett
The Beverly Hills Cops bumped away the Nashvilles.
Spurred by the ongoing strikes, theres a growing paranoia about the intentions of the New Gatekeepers.
Are Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros Discovery and Amazon exercising stifling multi-platformed dominance both psychically and commercially?
Mia Farrow in 1968’s ‘Rosemary’s Baby’
Has the brave new world of streamers become a dark cloud over creative output?
Which takes us back to that stubborn question: Where do great films come from?
Filmmakers like to point to the early 70s as a springboard of innovation.
Major studios had run out of money.
Top stars had lost their cushy deals and indie producers their funding.
The upshot: Both studios and filmmakers had to think outside the box because the box was broken.
The studio was shuttering.
The mood in the filmmaking community of that period was one of angst.
Hollywood is failing both its employees and its audiences.
A look at history suggests that that prognosis may kick off the way for a new moment of innovation.
Or at least a novel form of failure.
