descent or degeneration to a lower or worse state.
When VHS came on the scene, there was hand wringing and worry amongst the media prognosticators that this medium would spell the doom for the theatrical exhibition business. This did not happen, inn fact for some reason the rental of VHS tapes caused the theatrical business to see a boost in attendance in revenue and attendance. Maybe it was the fact that you had to go to the local video store to rent a VHS which saw an increase of people getting off their couches and braving the elements to go see what had just been released and what else looked interesting. On average a consumer rented three movies an evening. People were excited by the movies, curious about the movies and entertained by the movies.
Video and Sound was a video store which has located itself in an old car dealership. It was plain, ugly…no razzle dazzle whatsoever. What it literally did have was a copy of everything released on VHS …everything. Every evening you could spend up to an hour wandering its maze like aisles looking at the video art which hung in front of the stack of tapes. It was amazing. You went in looking for a specific new release, but there were many times when it had been out of stock so you rented some B movies with alluring and provocative covers. The hunt for alternative viewing choices introduced me to a plethora of cinema including my now beloved Troma (who is still on the vanguard of independent cinema), the films of Roger Corman, Charles Band and many more. The physical act of going out and choosing movies made them more substantive somehow, more important. It was free enterprise and it was truly a wonderful time for both consumers and people that made the movies. It in many ways was a paradise until someone had a not too bright idea, sell through video.
The studios in their wisdom decided to crush the rental business by lowering the price of new releases from $80 on average to $29.95. People became building video libraries and they began to abandon the video store model. When the studios further lowered the price to $19.95 the die was cast, the video store was doomed and the model for distribution moved away from a brick and mortar model into a model that was a direct link between the studio and the consumer. Movie studios hate middlemen and they hated an open market, plus it was the mid-80’s, Reagan and his culture of consumption ruled the land.
They can beg and they can plead
But they can’t see the light, that’s right
‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash
Is always Mr. Right
Cause we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl
Material Girl, Madonna
Something happened in the mid to late 80’s , movie began to herald an advancing cynicism, a profound shift in morality and change of direction for the American Dream, it signaled the demise of neighborhoods, the loss of a sense of community as the final nail in the coffin of the ideal that was the cinema of Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart. It also signaled the final loss of that wonderful American innocence that so entranced the world. A pallor of foggy self interest descended upon the land.
In 1987, Oliver Stone’s film “Wall Street” opened in theatres. The intent of the movie studios was becoming very apparent. The movie that was intended to satirize the free-market culture that dominated the 1980s but ended up, for many viewers, glorifying them instead. The movie’s most charismatic character is Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas), a hugely successful and often unscrupulous and immoral financier who makes hundreds of millions of dollars by acquiring up undervalued companies, gutting them them, and selling off parts of those companies for a deep profit. The intention of Stone was to make Gekko as a classic movie villain, but due to the brilliance of Michael Douglas who stole the movie by the depth of his performance managed to transform the character into a memorable movie hero.
In the key scene for character, Gekko appears at a shareholder’s meeting to justify his actions by , apologetically, preaching the moral principle of self-interest. “The new law of evolution in corporate America,” spouts Gekko, “seems to be the survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book, you either do it right or you get eliminated… I am not a destroyer of companies, I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed—you mark my words—will not only save this company, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA!” The monologue, which Oliver Stone intended as satire of what he saw as ruling-class selfishness in the Reagan Era, instead frequently won ovation and applause from movie audiences. Somewhere in the cinematic ether, Mr Smith .played by Jimmy Stewart began to weep.
Greed is good had become the defacto mantra of America. With the demise of the neighborhood video store and then the demise of Blockbuster, it became more and more apparent that the stratification of the movie business was taking shape. Studios had no interest in variety, no interest in competition and frankly no interest in free enterprise. They want to capture the consumer for themselves once and for all, after all greed is good.
Fast Forward to a cold day in Berlin at the Berlin Film Festival. During the Berlin Film Festival, the European Film Market (EFM), a film trade fair is held . It is a major industry meeting for the international film circuit. The trade fair serves distributors, film buyers, producers, financiers and co-production agents. It allows film distributors to buy the rights to movies for certain territories and make money on the movies exploitation. The problem is that this year, 2017 Amazon and Netflix went and swooped down and bought all the rights to all the marketable movies, pushing out the independent distributor and as well blocking access to movie theatres. It’s the monopolization of a business on a grand scale, and it used to be illegal.
This year the European Union just introduced streaming portability laws, which ensures some guy with a Netflix account in Barcelona can have access to his account in Rome. What this effectively does is erase traditional market borders and dooms the small distributor to a certain demise. It also of course further enhances the market position of both Amazon and Netflix. Amazon at least acknowledges the place in the market for the movie theatre, Netflix does not.
It is really time for theatres to start embracing independent content and variety of content. Walking down the path laid out by the studios will only lead to ruination.
Earlier in this article I mentioned Troma, the last truly independent studio in North America. This summer they are releasing movie “Return to Nukem High 2”. If you as a theatre want to do something to alter the path we are all on…..book this movie in your theatres. Email me at bill@dub3.tv and I will get it booked for you.
Think independently, think free enterprise…….an open market is a healthy market..
