Bye Bye, New Old Hollywood

As an aspiring filmmaker, I'd love to see Hollywood die a gruesome death. So, you can imagine my excitement at Raleigh Studios’ recent announcement of its plans to create a "studio and entertainment complex" in Utah. Their announcement falls in line with a recent trend in the film industry. Hollywood can keep poppin’ flashbulbs, but it’s no longer the only place to make movies. Words cannot express the joy this would give me, though they may come close enough:

FUCK HOLLYWOOD.

Utah makes its claim with natural beauty. You only make a movie outside Hollywood if the cost is cheap or the scenery is otherwise unachievable. Utah has the best of both worlds. Utah boasts some of the world’s most spectacular landscapes. Why paint a natural backdrop when the real thing exists, and in your own backyard? What’s more, everything comes at a cheaper price! Watch your back, LA. Raleigh Studios’ announcement came as part of a recent diaspora away from Hollywood and into the wilderness of life outside of pop-culture.

New York City, Philadelphia, Michigan, Alaska, Chicago, North Carolina, Atlanta, New Mexico, and not to mention Vancouver (or many other Canadian cities) all want a piece of showbiz, and they’re taking it freely. You can’t blame them for trying, given the sorry state of the economy and the fact that the American entertainment industry generally controls all of Earthly Civilization. The other 49 want their share of the loot, so they’re baiting filmmakers with tax incentives. We’re talking big breaks, saving millions of dollars per production. Philadelphia, for example, offered a 25% tax credit for films that spend at least 60% of their budget in state. Since its creation, the Film Office of southeastern Pennsylvania has generated over $2 billion thanks to film and video productions. Obviously, both parties benefit. It’s a win-win that fundamentally changes the movie-making business. Good, maybe movies won’t suck anymore. These days the film industry concerns itself with business primarily, and with new competition around, LA will have a run for its money. It could be disastrous. You may need to avert your eyes.

Personally, I’ll kick back and marvel as the big companies struggle to push the limits of “spectacle” even further – once the novelty of 3D runs out they’ll need even newer, louder, bigger, more encompassing ways of distracting the audience. Common sense would demand a better product via genuine talent, or better stories, but business is about efficiency, and cheap shortcuts. I know from my experience in the field that Hollywood prides itself on its ability to sell bad movies. Gimmicks will only last so long, until people realize they don’t have the money to see the nineteenth edition of Fast and Furious, Too Fast Too Furious, or some other slight derivative of the words “fast” and “furious.” Hopefully, the dispersion of film production to new environments means raising the bar.

With any luck, decentralization of the film industry should result in a new oeuvre of movies. A new spirit for a new age. As an audience, we’ve been wading in the same recycled stories for decades. For whatever upsetting reasons, The Remake is in, and it’s only a matter of time until the pool of films ripe for remaking runs dry (don't be surprised if they start remaking remakes). In the meantime, studios around the country will produce specialized films that result of their unique settings. I base my hopeful argument around the idea that these unique locations will produce equally unique feature films. Enough decentralization could shatter Hollywood's thin plastic veneer - that sour pride running rampant, taking advantage of your wife and kids with cheap escapist gimmickry. Then may our film industry lead a way out of this muck of contemporary pop-culture we've gotten ourselves into, because Jesus, it’s about time.

Earth for the Transcendentalist

Koyaanisqatsi speaks without language. A montage of imagery, the shots create visual poetry, a sort of nature documentary absent of a narrator. The shots are bigger than life, taken from the air above natural wonders, or condensing the time of a day into seconds. Just watching, you feel the power of nature, and time. Koyaanisqatsi makes observations that allow the Earth to speak for itself, so eloquently - its own voice.

I mean: that for good reason, the government selected Koyaanisqatsi for preservation by the National Film Registry, listing it as, ""culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Koyaanisqatsi captures some of our most important history and packs it into the length of a feature film. The director, Godfrey Reggio, used artistic observation as a means of documenting the natural world and included humans, and civilization, in that definition of "natural world." Though, the film's perspective so alters your previous perceptions of our planet that you almost feel inhuman just watching it, and that's the point. In an interview, Reggio gave purpose to his choice of music over language, stating that music and images communicate to all people, without discriminating. With Philip Glass as composer, and Ron Fricke as cinematographer, it's not hard to speak without words. The result of the collaboration between these men is an amazing human achievement.

Then, it's no surprise Godfrey Reggio spent fourteen years in fasting, silence and prayer in part of his training with a group of Christian monks. After so much time in isolation away from mainstream civilization, he decided to make movies. In other words, he spent fourteen years exerting the entirety of his soul towards a specialized spiritual cause, abandoned that cause, and immediately picked up a camera so he could go off and document the world. Who wouldn't want to know what that man has to say?

Apparently, most people. Koyaanisqatsi was the first film of a trilogy, all of which films have struggled, for years, to find distribution. I'll remind you: the Library of Congress chose this film to be preserved, for as long as possible. Still, almost no one knows what "Koyaanisqatsi" is, and fewer have had the immense privilege of experiencing it. ...At least it's sitting in a vault somewhere.

Disney Markets Mother Nature (For All She’s Worth)

Disneynature: it’s like selling tickets to a funeral, or helping an old lady cross the street because she tips well.

On April 22, 2009, The Walt Disney Company will release the first of several films under its new subsidiary, Disneynature. Disney says the film, entitled, Earth, “…will take us on a tour of our home as we have never seen it before.” How many times have we heard that one?

It’s like the McDonald’s slogan, “I’m Lovin’ It!”

No, Disney’s intentions are about as green as a dollar bill. Take a look at Disneynature’s press releases, which shamelessly paint pictures of potential profits. The company cites the success of other nature films, such as Planet Earth and March of the Penguins, as motivation for entering the “market”: it wasn’t the interests of a young clownfish, Nemo, taken from his father - not the protection of a baby deer whose mother died dramatically at the hands of hunters - not the disappearance of “all the colors of the wind.” Instead, Disney chief-executive Bob Iger, described his eureka-moment in the formation of Disneynature as an attempt to copy March of the Penguins’ giant success: "After that came out, a lightbulb went off and we said that should have been a Disney film worldwide. That's part of the Disney heritage."

It’d be like if Obama used the line, “NO MORE TAXES!”

He’s right about heritage – Disney also turned to nature for ticket sales back in the 40s and 50s for the, “True-Life Adventure Series,” and even then, the company’s intentions proved questionable. For instance, the company actually staged natural scenes, as if putting on a play. Disney created the idea that lemmings commit suicide. Don’t worry, I doubt any lemmings were actually harmed in the production of the documentary, though the company purposely fabricated the morbid idea that lemmings jump of cliffs in procession. Literally – they took lemmings from Manitoba, their natural environment, and herded them off cliffs in Alberta for the sake of “documentation.” Similar to the way in which Bob Iger addressed the formation of Disneynature, Walt announced that the purpose of the company’s old-school docs, the “True-Life Adventure Series,” was to entertain, and not to educate. Apparently suicidal rodents are popcorn material!

It’s like the idea of “non-profit” oil drilling.

So, “heritage” as defined by Disney, means exploiting nature for the sake of profit, to put it simply, clearly, environmentally. The fact that Disneynature has come to be means that someone at Disney recognizes the precarious position of the natural world, and that it’s marketable. That’s fine. We get it… Hollywood is an industry. Shocking, then, that a company like Disney takes little to no precaution in exploiting the trend. Come on. We all understand the term “movie business.” Iger obviously ignores tact, and corporate identity, in the honesty of admitting financial motivations for the creation of an environmentally based subsidiary. Shouldn’t we expect Disney, manufacturer of pleasant dreams and childhood wonder, to put business aside and represent itself with exactly that fantastical attitude? And wouldn’t that work better anyway?

It’s like OJ writing and publishing a book about how he would have killed Nicole.

Look… I have nothing against entertainment. In fact, it’s what I’ll try to do for the rest for my life. There is, however, a certain liability that comes with being a powerful corporation that shapes the interests of children and adults alike. We’ve made it to the year 2009. We are struggling, truly struggling, to find a solution to our most threatening, potentially detrimental problems. The least Iger could do: “We recognize the importance of our natural world. Disneynature is our veritable attempt to become a part of the environmental discussion happening around the world.” Instead, Disney – creators of “the happiest place on Earth” - reasserts that business concerns itself with business primarily.

It’s like buying stock in the apocalypse.

That said, I can’t wait to see the films.

Earth for the Nostalgiac Italian

Now, let's look at how the Earth has been used to characterize timelessness. Let's look at the Earth as a symbol of the past, and as tradition. Let's look at it among the things that have made us who we are - as something we cannot escape, that makes us human in the most essential way.

In Luchino Visconti's, "The Leopard," (1963 adaptation of Lampedusa's 1958 novel), the Sicilian landscape is characterized as a symbol of permanence. The movie takes place just before the formation of Italy, while an aristocracy comes to an end and a new Italian empire will claim a nation - in a time of inevitable change Visconti uses landscape to reassert tradition. For Sicilians of this era the landscape was a way of life. Agriculture was business, but also lifeblood. So, in Visconti's film, we see dramatic portraits of yellow mountains accompanying triumphant scores. These scenes are meant to be as grand as the history of one of the world's most powerful empires. These expansive shots of Sicily's natural environment remind us of a simpler time, or place, in which humans lived off of the Earth, not vice versa.

The physical realm, the Earth and its forces of nature, represent tradition, the past, and certainly the state of Sicily in Visconti's, "The Leopard." Throughout the story, our main man Fabrizio, notices and is compared to the Sicilian landscape, which is characterized as dusty, immemorial, and harsh. The land resists change. Not even time can affect Sicily. It is an absolute whose permanence gives identity to its people: “The term ‘countryside’ implies soil transformed by labor; but the scrub clinging to the slopes was still in the very same state of scented tangle in which it had been found by Phoenicians, Dorians, and Ionians when they disembarked in Sicily, that America of antiquity” (Lampedusa 123). Because the land is unchanging, it is familiar. Because the land is familiar, it is comfortable, and ultimately reassuring. The landscape has the power to pacify Fabrizio, and eventually he realizes that Sicilian culture, and its people, are primarily a formation of time and the Earth.

Lampedusa's book was published posthumously in 1958, though it's written about the 1860s in Sicily, just before Italy became a nation. Visconti's filmic adaptation speaks at least of an Italian nostalgia, but also some kind of mainstream reverence for the Earth. Here, we see the Earth as a symbol of our past, of a life without new technologies, or cityscapes, or neighborhoods. We see the Earth in its transcendental beauty, so characteristic of that time. Take it as a reminder of what life could be like.