Phil Hoad
Hollywood’s elite aren’t short of socialising options in the first quarter of each year, but on February 16 this year the glitzy haze alighted on the Beverly Wilshire hotel. A month after the Golden Globes, three weeks before the Oscars, the stars were on full meet-and-greet for the Movies for Grownups gala, an event recognising filmmaking by the over-50s. Robert De Niro, Jeff Bridges and Morgan Freeman turned up to collect awards. There were unlikely guests from the do-not-go-gently camp: Juliette Lewis and Sean Penn. On stage Penn got into the spirit of things: “If you really wanna feel old, Spicoli’s turning 50 this August,” he told the audience.
Thus Jeff Spicoli, Fast Times at Ridgemont High‘s eternal truant prince, was outed as one of the baby boomer generation. This part of the filmgoing audience has become increasingly important in recent years: the audience share among 45s to 65s has increased dramatically in the past decade, as the boomer group, born during the birth explosion between 1946 and 1965, passes through middle age and out the other side.
In the United Kingdom the number of cinema tickets sold to over-45s doubled, from 19-million to 38-million, between 1997 and 2007: the boomers are now roughly a quarter of all cinemagoers, up from 15% in 1997.
The Sex and the City women would be horrified if you said it aloud, but they scrape into the demographic (with some ease in the case of Kim Cattrall — born 1956). Their values — evangelised again in the sequel — are pure late-boomer: confident, youth-oriented, consumerist. Good news for cinema, in other words.
“The baby boomers are mature, but they have eclectic tastes and they’re very mobile,” says Mark de Quervain, marketing director of Vue Cinemas. “These days, the older generation are going to cinemas more than they ever used to and have a much more vibrant outlook on life.”
But the cinematic equivalent of 50 Quid Bloke, the colossus with the bulging wallet whose rock ‘n roll dreams were the record industry’s last best hope, isn’t well catered for by the mainstream. Despite the growing demand, it’s still difficult to find films that explicitly engage with their lives.
‘Hollywood’s lost quadrant’
There’s the occasional curio like Wild Hogs or Space Cowboys, part of the one-last-blast genre that retunes the action-comedy model for an older audience. Directors such as Nancy Meyers, who has managed to chat consistently to her peers with her range of glossy coffee-table comedies, such as Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, are scarce. It will be interesting to see whether Sex and the City can survive as a franchise as its characters move past 50.
Astonishingly, it wasn’t even routine to show test screenings of films to groups of over-50s until recently. They’ve been referred to as Hollywood’s “lost quadrant”.
“It’s kind of mind-boggling to figure out why they would overlook this enormous audience that not only has the dollars, but also the time,” says Nancy Perry Graham, vice-president of the American Association of Retired People (AARP), the organisation behind the Movies for Grownups gala. She says the film industry is slowly waking up to the size of AARP’s following.
“We have started over the past four years to gain some traction, because studios are beginning to realise that when we write about a movie and 35-million people read it, it actually can affect box office.”
AARP has focused on pushing the Hollywood films it approves of: mostly classy mantelpiece offerings such as The Queen or Invictus. But influencing the age bias that permeates the industry is an “uphill battle”, in Graham’s words. Especially in the youth-obsessed United States, films that address ageing are seen by development executives as a box-office Âpassion-killer.
Producer Kevin Loader, who, with director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi, broke new ground with The Mother in 2003, tried to address late-life sexuality again in 2006’s Venus. It featured an unconsummated tryst between a teenager, played by Jodie Whittaker, and the film’s box-office draw, Peter O’Toole. The budget was larger this time and Miramax were on board as US distributors.
“The minute we got Miramax involved,” says Loader, “we started to get a lot of notes worried about morbidity. They were extremely worried about whether the age difference would seem pervy and distasteful. I don’t think they ever understood the fact that what Roger and Hanif were trying to do was something rather sweet. It’s not about lust; it’s about a yearning for youth.”
The Venus team used a policy of “stubborn defiance” to protect their vision, but Miramax baulked at a wide release. “They made it niche because they knew they could get that to work. They knew they could sell O’Toole as an Oscar nominee. What they were really doing was shutting down its potential in America.”
Overlooked for profits
The stats seem to back Loader up. The audience for films like Venus is out there, but they’re being overlooked in the rush for speedy profits.
“Hollywood is show-me-the-money,” says Graham, “and the young audience is the one that will turn out in big numbers for opening weekend and also go back two or three times to a movie. So they’re the obvious low-hanging fruit.”
Nigel Cole, director of Calendar Girls, points out that the weekend combine-harvest doesn’t necessarily suit older viewers: “Baby boomers have more complicated lives — they may not be able to go on the opening weekend. They may not want to. They may want to see what the word of mouth is. So the pattern of release has got to change, so movies can hang in longer and make their money over the longer term.”
He knows better than most that, in the current climate, it can be career-damaging for a director to look too cosy with the mature set.
Calendar Girls was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic and a rare case of a boomer-targeted film that met with no executive resistance, owing to its killer premise. But, on the back of a previous film, 2000’s Saving Grace — which starred Brenda Blethyn as a middle-aged, well-to-do widow who gets entangled in marijuana dealing — it actually had the effect of making Cole seem “desperately uncool” and smothering his career. “It did have the effect of tagging me in that genre,” he says. “It was something I’ve had to work hard to get over. It didn’t occur to me I might get pigeonholed.”
Should the boomers actually bear responsibility for cinema’s fixation on youth? The coming-of-age of the boomer generation, full of idealism and creativity, led to the flowering of innovative, artist-driven “new Hollywood”, in the shape of artists such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. But this generation — financially secure, indulged and the first able to live prolonged childhoods and adolescence — was also the one that supported the industry’s shift to corporatised, blockbuster production lines, a process begun with Jaws.
Films sought not to challenge, but simply to appeal to the greatest possible numbers — which meant getting kids into cinemas.
Those two threads — postwar optimism and the pursuit of material wealth — continue to intermingle, making it dangerous to generalise about the largest generation on record. Loader points out the tension between art and profit in the work of its most famous filmmaker: “Even when Spielberg does a blockbuster like War of the Worlds, that film is about parenting. Actually, his concerns aren’t necessarily juvenile ones.”
Point of no return
So it is difficult to isolate the point of no return, after which the boomers ceded control of the screens to their own children.
“Probably at some point during the 1980s when movies started to be made with the fraternity audience in mind,” says Loader. “Was it Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?”
But the cult of youth combined during the 1980s with something even more corrosive to cinema’s artistic hopes, according to Cole: the changes in corporate culture and regulation that encouraged the untrammelled pursuit of profit, something Gordon Gekko — another boomer icon with an imminent comeback — would have approved of.
“I’d like to make tens of millions,” Cole says. “I have no problem with that. But there are other goals than simple maximisation of profit: making a product you’re proud of, having a business that employs a number of people. The film industry needs to learn that. We can all earn good money without having to do $200-million at the box office.”
It wasn’t just studios embracing the quick buck. Exhibitors, too, found ways to increase revenues, at the expense of the adult market. Making a profit was easier if you didn’t have to maintain landmark cinemas and could instead herd your audiences into cheaply built sheds, each housing multiple indistinguishable screens, making the experience of movie-watching less civilised and less attractive to adults. As Cole observes of his local multiplex: “I went at the weekend with my kids: it was a big chain, it was disgusting, it was ugly, uncomfortable. Like going to an NCP car park.”
Not everyone believes the baby boomers fatally infantilised cinema, though. De Quervain doesn’t see a problem. “I don’t think there is a shortage of films for older people. What pops into my mind are things like Crash and Little Miss Sunshine — maybe not massive breakout films, but they’re certainly for a more sophisticated audience. Of course a sophisticated movie doesn’t have to be for an older person.”
That last part does seem a half-admission that older demographics aren’t targeted as mercilessly as younger ones; many of the films De Quervain mentions are family movies, as though grownups only matter to the moviemakers if they have children, and extra spending potential, in tow. He acknowledges that the industry needs to “get better” at figuring out what the middle-aged want. But he also flags up the host of changes Vue has been making in the hope its multiplexes will become more appealing environments for adults.
Mathieu Ravier, artistic director of Sydney’s Young at Heart festival, the only major film event in the world for seniors, thinks it’s just a matter of time before cinema adapts further — not just to the baby boomers, but to ageing populations everywhere in the West. “Attitudes towards older cinemagoers are changing rapidly as the industry better understands the shift in consumer behaviours. The success of films such as The Last Station, It’s Complicated and Julie & Julia reflects that. The industry is not ageist: it simply follows the money. When films featuring older protagonists or more mature themes begin to make money, more of them will be made.”
Graham believes that the stars themselves have the pivotal role to play in legitimising movies for the age group: “Many older actors and actresses in Hollywood talk about the fact that roles dry up as they get older, but I think it would be great if some would take the step to be on the cover of our magazine, and show [ageing] is a good thing. Because the celebrities who have been on there have always come back and said the impact was better than they had imagined.”
Citing Crazy Heart, she talks about legacy and second chances as being the quintessential themes that resonate in the new boomer films, “making things right as you get older”. The boomers may have been in the doghouse in recent years — accused of lining their own pockets at the expense of future generations — so it would be the least they could do to change cinema one more time: pulling it back from the brink of imploding under its own superficiality. There are worse bets; the numbers, at least, are with the boomers. — Guardian News & Media 2010