Without Hollywood, they say, Los Angeles would just be Phoenix with a coastline. This year, as deadlines approach for strikes by actors and writers, LA is facing the possibility of becoming, for a time, exactly such a characterless, movie-less sprawl. Rumours are flying: the studios actually want the strikes, the actors don’t, though their representatives are talking tough. And the writers? Well, they’re only writers, after all. Talks keep breaking down an inch away from agreement.
Television companies are preparing to flood the schedules with even more reality-TV programming (It’s cheap! It’s popular! It’s not unionised!) to fill the holes created by The Strike. There’s plenty of bad feeling in the air, and a growing sense of inevitability. The shutdown is “going to happen”, (which means it either will or it won’t).
And in the midst of this uncertainty, the movie community awaits its annual you-love-me- you-really-love-me festival of big-business
interests disguised as individual achievements. The lobbying season is over.
The city is no longer being bombarded by “for your consideration” videotapes. Famous rock stars are no longer playing impromptu gigs in old folks’ homes in the hope of garnering a few votes for best song from elderly academicians resident therein. The votes are in. The Oscars are coming.
The movies are LA’s culture. At the weekend, big audiences go to the new pictures the way the opera-loving Milanese go to an opening at La Scala. I haven’t seen such enthusiastically participatory audiences anywhere outside the Indian subcontinent. This can get irritating, for example when a big guy with his ass hanging out of his pants groans loudly every time Penelope Cruz appears on screen in All the Pretty Horses (“My God, she’s so beautiful! Oh, oh, he’s going to fall for her! Unh-unh, here comes trouble!”), or when a five-year-old insistently asks her parents, during the interminable Cast Away, “Mommy, when is the volleyball going
to talk?” (Footnote: Wilson the volleyball’s performance is the best thing in this leaden movie. Why wasn’t Wilson nominated for best
supporting actor? It’s a scandal.)
Angeleno enthusiasm can, however, also be thrilling. I can’t remember ever seeing a western audience react to a new film the way a packed afternoon audience on La Brea responded to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Even by LA’s standards, the whooping and cheering was astonishing. The audience knew it was sharing a very special experience – the arrival of a great, classic film – and was simply transported by its brilliance. Anyone who thinks DVDs will someday replace moviegoing should have been there.
Those politically correct killjoys who have denigrated Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a piece of latter-day orientalism, a Western appropriation of Eastern manner and material, would have seen an audience as diverse as America itself: Korean Americans, Chinese Americans,Hispanic Americans, African Americans easily outnumbered any Waspy orientalists who might have been there enjoying it for the wrong reasons.
Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray reached smaller audiences, in their native Japan and India, than the commercial movies of their
contemporaries. That doesn’t make The Seven Samurai inauthentic, or the trashy products of mainstream Bombay cinema “more Indian” than Ray’s masterworks. So, yes, Jackie Chan sells a lot of tickets, and, yes, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon draws on a long tradition of martial-arts movies. But Jackie Chan movies are cardboard fun, and Ang Lee’s beautiful, intimate epic is – one would have thought self-evidently – a luminous work of art.
In the context of the Academy Awards and the shadow of the strike, the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is especially significant. It is being talked about as the breakthrough movie that has taught Americans to accept subtitled films into the giant cineplexes where the big money is made.
And this is why the various players – but the studios above all – may be making a big mistake if they think they can ride out the strike without losing their stranglehold on the market. In the 1960s and early 1970s, a flood of great non-American film-makers prised Hollywood’s fingers off the cinema’s throat for a few years. The result was the golden age of sound cinema, the time of the great films of Kurosawa and Ray, of the French new wave, of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti, of Andrej Wajda and Ingmar Bergman.
Now, once again, world cinema is blossoming, in China, in Iran, in Britain. And it may just be that the mass audience is ready, at long
last, to enjoy rather more diversity in its cultural diet. After all, there are plenty of dreadful American films we could all cheerfully do without – the appalling, ultra-rightwing new Robert de Niro vehicle Fifteen Minutes, with its saintly cops and corrupt journalists, is just one such farrago.
The Oscars usually show us how Hollywood sees itself. Ridley Scott’s technically brilliant but woodenly scripted Gladiator is the big-studio candidate for honours, just as the latest sentimental Miramax confection, Chocolat, leads the charge of the smaller guys. Comedy comes off badly, as usual – the Coen brothers have to be content with just a screenplay nomination for the wonderful O Brother, Where Art Thou?
There’s no nomination for George Clooney’s delicious, hairnet-wearing performance in this movie, or indeed for Renée Zellweger’s moving, subtle work in the title role of Nurse Betty.
But behind all this familiar manoeuvring, the tiger is crouching, the dragon hides. And if by some chance the one genuinely great movie to have been nominated this year runs away with the big prizes, it may just be the wake-up call that Hollywood needs. When the world’s finest film-makers are coming after your audience, it may not be such a smart idea to shut your industry down.
The Oscars ceremony shows on M-Net from 7pm on Monday March 26