Authors: Hadley Freeman
20 ‘I’m too old for this shit.’ (
Lethal Weapon
)
19 ‘You are evil, and you must be destroyed.’ (
Steel Magnolias
)
17 ‘Any girl that did that to me I would not be too JAZZED to hold on to.’ (
Pretty in Pink
)
18 ‘You think what you want about me – I’m not changing. I like me.’ (
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
)
16 ‘You have chosen … wisely.’ (
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
)
15 ‘I love you.’
slap
‘Snap out of it!’ (
Moonstruck
)
fn23
14 ‘Fuck me gently with a chainsaw, do I look like Mother Teresa?’ (
Heathers
)
13 ‘Looking good, Billy Ray!’ ‘Feeling good, Louis!’ (
Trading Places
)
12 ‘You know what I am? I’m your worst fuckin’ nightmare – I’m a nigger with a badge.’ (
48 Hours
)
11 ‘Shame on you, you macho shithead!’ (
Tootsie
)
fn24
10 ‘The royal penis is clean, your highness.’ (
Coming to America
)
9 ‘If you build it, he will come.’ (
Field of Dreams
)
8 ‘Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.’ (
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
)
7 ‘If Jesus came back and saw what’s going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.’ (
Hannah and Her Sisters
)
6 ‘When you grow up, your heart dies.’ (
The Breakfast Club
)
5 ‘Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.’ (
Back to the Future
)
4 ‘Your ego is writing cheques that your body can’t cash.’ (
Top Gun
)
3 ‘I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen.’ (
Say Anything
)
2 ‘Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!’ (
Ghostbusters
)
1 ‘Nobody puts Baby in the corner.’ (
Dirty Dancing
)
TOP
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF
QUOTES
5 ‘You heartless wench!’
4 ‘The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads – they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.’
3 ‘I weep for the future.’
2 ‘Bueller … Bueller … Bueller …’
1 ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’
TOP
THE PRINCESS BRIDE
QUOTES
5 ‘Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Hahahahahaha!’
dies
4 ‘No more rhymes now, I mean it!’ ‘Anybody want a peanut?’
3 ‘Inconceivable!’ ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’
2 = ‘As you wish.’
1 = ‘Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.’
TOP
WHEN HARRY MET SALLY
QUOTES
(no, I did not include ‘I’ll have what she’s having.’ It is the most famous but there are too many better quotes)
5 ‘Someone is staring at you in Personal Growth.’
4 ‘I’m going to be forty!’ ‘When?’ ‘Some day!’
3 ‘It’s amazing. You look like a normal person but you are actually the Angel of Death.’
2 ‘Thin. Pretty. Big tits. Your basic nightmare.’
1 ‘You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right.’
On 27 April 2013 director Steven Soderbergh walked up on stage and gave a speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival about what he saw as the state of cinema. Now, as he was the leading force behind the rise of independent filmmaking in the late eighties with the release of
Sex, Lies and Videotape
, Soderbergh focused largely on the crushing of the independent film sector. But as he is also the man who has proven studios can make stylish and interesting commercial films, such as
Out of Sight
and
Ocean’s Eleven
, he also had some thoughts about how studios are crushing the movie business as a whole:
‘Speaking of meetings [at Hollywood studios], the meetings have gotten pretty weird. There are fewer and fewer executives who are in the business because they love movies. There are fewer and fewer executives that know movies. So it can become a very strange situation. I mean, I know how to drive a car, but I wouldn’t presume to sit in a meeting with an engineer and tell him how to build one, and that’s kind of what you feel like when you’re in these meetings. You’ve got people who don’t know movies and don’t watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you’re going to be allowed to make. That’s one reason studio movies aren’t better than they are …
Well, how does a studio decide what movies get made? One thing they take into consideration is the foreign market, obviously. It’s become very big. So that means, you know, things that travel best are going to be action-adventure, science-fiction, fantasy, spectacle, some animation thrown in there. Obviously the bigger the budget, the more people this thing is going to have to appeal to, the more homogenised it’s got to be, the more simplified it’s got to be. So things like cultural specificity and narrative complexity, and, God forbid, ambiguity, those become real obstacles to the success of the film here and abroad …
If you’ve ever wondered why every poster and every trailer and every TV spot looks exactly the same, it’s because of testing. It’s because anything interesting scores poorly and gets kicked out. Now I’ve tried to argue that the methodology of this testing doesn’t work. If you take a poster or a trailer and you show it to somebody in isolation, that’s not really an accurate reflection of whether it’s working because we don’t see them in isolation, we see them in groups. We see a trailer in the middle of five other trailers, we see a poster in the middle of eight other posters, and I’ve tried to argue that maybe the thing that’s making it distinctive and score poorly actually would stick out if you presented it to these people the way the real world presents it. And I’ve never won that argument …
Now, I’m going to attempt to show how a certain kind of rodent might be smarter than a studio when it comes to picking projects. If you give a certain kind of rodent the option of hitting two buttons, and one of the buttons, when you touch it, dispenses food 40 per cent of the time, and one of the buttons when you touch it dispenses food 60 per cent of the time, this certain kind of rodent very quickly figures out never to touch the 40 per cent button ever again. So when a studio is attempting to determine on a project-by-project basis what will work, instead of backing a talented filmmaker over the long haul, they’re actually increasing their chances of choosing wrong. Because in my view, in this business, which is totally talent-driven, it’s about horses, not races …
The most profitable movies for the studios are going to be the big movies, the home runs. They don’t look at the singles or the doubles as being worth the money or the man hours. Psychologically, it’s more comforting to spend $60 million promoting a movie that costs $100 million, than it does to spend $60 million for a movie that costs $10 million. I know what you’re thinking: If it costs 10 you’re going to be in profit sooner. Maybe not. Here’s why: OK, $10 million movie, $60 million to promote it, that’s $70 million, so you’ve got to gross $140 million to get out.
fn1
Now you’ve got a $100 million movie, you’re going to spend $60 million to promote it. You’ve got to get $320 million to get out. How many $10 million movies make $140 million? Not many. How many $100 million movies make $320 million? A pretty good number, and there’s this sort of domino effect that happens too. Bigger home video sales, bigger TV sales …
The sort of executive ecosystem is distorted, because executives don’t get punished for making bombs the way that filmmakers do, and the result is there’s no turnover of new ideas, there’s no new ideas about how to approach the business or how to deal with talent or material. But, again, economically, it’s a pretty straightforward business. Hell, it’s the third biggest export that we have. It’s one of the few things that we do that the world actually likes …
Taking the 30,000-foot view, maybe nothing’s wrong, and maybe my feeling that the studios are kind of like Detroit before the bailout is totally insupportable. I mean, I’m wrong a lot. I’m wrong so much, it doesn’t even raise my blood pressure any more. Maybe everything is just fine. But … admissions. This is the number of bodies that go through the turnstile, ten years ago [in America]: 1.52 billion. Last year: 1.36 billion. That’s a 10½ per cent drop. Why are admissions dropping? Nobody knows.’
Movies are filled with clichés, and so are books about movies. Probably the biggest cliché of all in a film book is to bemoan that movies aren’t as good as they used to be. Well, I love eighties movies so it seems apt that I should run to the cliché.
I quoted Soderbergh’s speech at some length because it seems to me that when you have a phenomenally successful studio director – as opposed to, say, a thirty-something woman in her bathrobe writing a book about her
Ghostbusters
obsession – saying that movies are getting worse, and for specific, very real reasons, he probably has a point. At the risk of sounding like Mad Ol’ Granny Time, sitting in my rocking chair and reminiscing about the glory days of art when people made PROPER movies like
Twins
and
Weekend at Bernie’s
, clearly the movie business is very, very different from what it was thirty years ago, and that is reflected in the movies it makes. It is simply impractical now for studios to make movies that aren’t (seemingly) guaranteed bankers. No longer is there the model that a studio would make one, maybe two big blockbusters a year and that would support smaller, weirder projects like
Field of Dreams
; now the whole business model is predicated on tentpoles. In 2013 George Lucas predicted that cinemas would soon be reserved for the special and few blockbusters, and they would be seen as a luxury pastime, like the theatre: ‘You’re going to end up with fewer theatres, bigger theatres with a lot of nice things,’ he said. ‘Going to the movies will cost 50 bucks or 100 or 150 bucks – like what Broadway costs today, or a football game.’
To a small degree, this is already happening, with big blockbusters going to Imax theatres. Studio movies have become too expensive to make, market and distribute, and too dependent on foreign markets, and so they increasingly feel like monolithic identikit juggernauts, because that’s what they are. The formula is safely conservative.
Ah, but what about the independent sector? you cry. Indeed, many of the best films of the past twenty-five years have come from the independent sector, from 1994’s
Pulp Fiction
to 2001’s
Mulholland Drive
to 2014’s
Boyhood
. In fact, some of my favourite movies from the eighties were produced independently, from
Dirty Dancing
(obviously) to Spike Lee’s wonderful
Do the Right Thing
, which still looks extraordinarily modern almost thirty years after it was made.
However, it has never been harder to get an independent movie released, despite all the advances in technology that have rendered them, ostensibly, cheaper to make. Soderbergh said:
In 2003, 455 films were released. Two hundred and seventy-five of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released. So you’re not imagining things, there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. Five hundred and forty-nine of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100 per cent increase in independent films, and a 28 per cent drop in studio films, and yet, ten years ago: studio market share 69 per cent, last year 76 per cent. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That’s hard. That’s really hard.
But this doesn’t mean that good storytelling is dying. Far from it.
No one is sitting around now and claiming this is ‘the Golden Age of American Movies’. Instead it is roundly agreed to the point of cliché to be the Golden Age of American TV, illustrated by the success of prestige box set shows such as
The Sopranos
,
Sex and the City
,
The Wire
,
Mad Men
,
Breaking Bad
,
Orange is the New Black
and
Transparent
. All these shows were made by cable networks such as HBO and AMC, and streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. This is where filmmakers and screenwriters can experience the luxury of making stories that aren’t intended to appeal to everybody, and where they can write stories about women, abortions, sex and older people. Shortly before Soderbergh made the above speech, he released his film about Liberace,
Beyond the Candelabra
, on HBO because ‘the feeling amongst the studios was that this material was too “special” [i.e., gay] to gross [the necessary] $70 million’.
Filmmaker Jill Soloway has worked in theatre, TV (she was the co-executive producer of
Six Feet Under
) and had made well-regarded independent films, including
Afternoon Delight
(2013), for which she won the Directing Award at the Sundance Festival. But when she got that award, instead of celebrating it, she immediately started worrying how she could make another film. ‘I was with all these other filmmakers and we were asking the question “What’s next?” Everyone there was so focused on distribution, and when you make a movie you have to beg and scrabble. And then this turned up.’