Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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282 Chapter 15
Spielberg told an interviewer for the Jerusalem Post that, when prep-
ping Schindler’s List, he could only find documentaries, and no feature films,
about the Holocaust to watch in preparing his film, even though Hollywood
had been founded and led for years by Jewish moguls. While Schindler’s List
received much praise for taking on its topic, and although free morning
showings of the film were provided to high school seniors in many places,
there were the occasional voices of skepticism about the movie. The Times of
London wondered in print: “Has the century’s most grotesque event simply
fed into the maws of Spielbergian optimism?” J. Hoberman of the Village
Voice compared Spielberg’s presentation of the chosen Jews on the list to “a
transport of underprivileged waifs [on] a special trip to Disneyland.” The New
York Times’s Frank Rich wrote that the film “is already taking on a life of its
own, wrapping the movie and the Holocaust in a neat, uplifting Hollywood
ending.” Rabbi Eli Hecht’s critical column in the Los Angeles Times in early
1994 regretted the glorification of the “unworthy” Schindler and bemoaned
a contemporary Jewish penchant for portraying themselves as victimized like
the actual sufferers of the Holocaust. The article drew much response, some
of it quite heated, and most of it in disagreement with Hecht’s viewpoint. A
number of Middle Eastern and other Muslim counties banned or restricted
the film’s showing.
THE DIGITAL ERA SETS IN
The actual physical materials and the hands-on processes of filmmaking
had changed little during the seventy-five years from World War I into the
mid-1990s. Filmmaking meant the use of celluloid film for the process of
recording pictures, and the exhibition of motion pictures to movie theaters
required celluloid prints. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, though,
digital processes would penetrate deeply into motion picture production,
distribution, and exhibition. By the mid-1990s, the first wave of digital tech-
nologies was having an impact, primarily on motion picture postproduction,
in editing and sound.
Professional editors and sound mixers and sound editors were the first of
the Hollywood craft personnel to have to adjust to the new technologies. For
these postproduction crafts personnel, the process was essentially a given: wean
yourself away from the tactile customs of handling celluloid film in workprints
and working with full-coat magnetic film to which sound had been transferred
from quarter-inch tape, and develop a new set of skills—looking at a computer
screen and handling picture materials and digitized sound at the click of a
New Hollywood Enters the Digital Age 283
mouse. This technological revolution spread fast, and like past previous adjust-
ments in moviemaking dictated by technology, were accepted fully.
The new digital world meant that the potential of ancillary earnings for
movies increased greatly over whatever they had been during the 1980s and
early 1990s because of videotape. The transfer of motion pictures to DVDs
meant far superior quality of picture and sound when compared to videotape,
and rentals and sales of DVDs by the early twenty-first century had expanded
rapidly. For example, anyone who wishes to do so may now watch a movie
on a cell phone. The impact of digital technologies on the exhibition sector
of the motion picture industry has been revolutionary.
Just what, however, did this digital revolution truly mean for Hollywood
in terms of what viewers saw on the screens in movie theaters? First of all,
digital filmmaking meant that many of the illusions we see on-screen could
be accomplished with ever greater mastery, and the creation of special effects
in movies was transported onto an entirely new plane. Digital technologies—
especially computer-generated imagery, or CGI—lent themselves perfectly
to action films, sci-fi adventures, movies with talking animals, and advances
in production design that were handled in computers. For example, a scene
filmed on a street in Los Angeles with the cast in parkas and mittens, could
then be turned into a Buffalo, New York, winter scene by digitizing in snow
on the ground, snow banks along sidewalks and curbsides, and a raging snow-
storm for good measure, all during postproduction.
This was new and advanced, of course, but movies had been about il-
lusion since their beginning, and Hollywood was no stranger to convincing
effects in any era. Seventy years earlier, the snow banks of Alaska in Charlie
Chaplin’s The Gold Rush had been created by hauling sand from the beach in
Santa Monica seven or eight miles up to the studio, then treating the sand and
filming it to look convincingly like snow. The tornado in The Wizard of Oz
was made by filming a damp white sock being dangled in front of a fan. Digital
filmmaking, however, allowed for clever mixing of animation and live action in
movies, such as 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Six years later, a major Hol-
lywood feature prominently used digital technology to create the semblance of
a character being present and part of historic events in Forrest Gump.
A HOLLYWOOD DOCU-FABLE
It did not take a lifetime to make Forrest Gump, the Oscar winner for Best
Picture of 1994, but it felt that way for Wendy Finerman, the thirty-three-
year-old producer who nursed the project along to completion. After nine
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years in the works, this sweet-natured movie about a slow-witted man who
follows the tide of American history from the late 1950s onward, opened to
solid audiences amid reviews ranging from mixed to enthusiastic. It made an
immediate impression, however, on most professionals in the film industry.
Forrest Gump ranked at number 71 on the American Film Institute’s 1996 list
of the greatest American films.
An adaptation from the novel by Winston Groom by screenwriter Eric
Roth, the protagonist Forrest Gump becomes a football star at Alabama, a
Vietnam War hero, a Ping-Pong champion in China, and a dumb-luck mil-
lionaire. Finerman, a Wharton M.B.A. and the wife of Mark Canton, the
chairman of Columbia/Tri-Star, was floored by the novel when she first read
it in 1985 in galleys before it was published. “When do you come across ma-
terial that literally makes you laugh and cry at the same time?” she wondered.
Roth, however, made the love story the spine of the film, and on the basis of
that script, Paramount bought into the $45 million project. Robert Zemeckis,
director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the Back to the Future trilogy, was
tapped to direct it.
Paramount publicity started calling it a “docu-fable,” in which the viewer
sees thirty years of history almost exclusively through the protagonist’s per-
spective. With a mid-July release on 1,595 screens for the weekend, it came
out of the starting gates with startling popularity, even though, as Zemeckis
pointed out, the movie lacked many of the elements common to popular for-
mulas: there was no villain, for example, and there is an absence of conflict.
The movie took up CGI where it had left off in 1988 with Who Framed
Roger Rabbit? Digital effects not only give the illusion of Forrest meeting presi-
dents Kennedy and Johnson but also added Ping-Pong balls to his matches.
Forrest teaches dance steps to Elvis Presley and helps John Lennon learn how
to compose.
Although Forrest Gump’s sentimentality irritated many critics, audiences
overwhelmingly were pleased. “Life is like a box of chocolates,” as Forrest
says, “you never know what you are going to get.” For moviegoers in their
thirties and forties, Forrest Gump manages to push nearly every historical,
cultural, and sociological button. In its first sixty-eight days, it became the
highest-grossing domestic release of all time at $248 million. Conservative cul-
tural critic Michael Medved told a newspaper: “For me, the great secret of the
film’s popularity is that it connects with our tremendous national yearning for
innocence, and for recapturing lost innocence.” A sea of books, calendars, and
other related products followed in the wake of its runaway success at the box
office, even though Paramount had issued absolutely no franchising licenses
when the movie was first released.
New Hollywood Enters the Digital Age 285
Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun and president of the Berkeley Students
for a Democratic Society from 1966 to 1968, complained that the movie por-
trayed 1960s antiwar activists as “drug-crazed, women-beating monsters.”
Critic Anthony Lane, writing in the New Yorker, called it “a goofy, indo-
lent, wander through the past.” By contrast, the Variety review argued:
Forrest Gump is whimsy with a strong cultural spine . . . shrewdly packaged
to hit baby boomers where they live, offering us a non-stop barrage of emo-
tional and iconographic identification points that will make post-yuppies feel
that they’re seeing their lives passing by onscreen.
Forrest’s true love, Jenny (Robin Wright), indulges all the excesses of the late
1960s and early 1970s, but as Robert Alleva’s review in Commonweal points
out, the fantasy of Forrest Gump doesn’t really take place in a fantasy world, but
rather in the real world that we inhabit. If this, however, is the essence and
the problem of Zemeckis’s fairy tale, it is one that arises from the fundamental
tensions of movies as a medium in which artifice is inevitably based so strongly
in photographic realism.
For Janet Maslin of the New York Times, the best moments of Forrest’s
benign whimsy brought to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s early fiction. Zemeckis
called it “an allegory of all that’s good and pure about America.” Barbra Strei-
sand commented that she “was thrilled to see a film about decency doing so
well.” One agitated Time commentator announced that the story of the kind
and selfless Forrest Gump, who believes in goodness and friendship and honor
and who triumphs over affliction, actually poses a danger of leading Americans
to “a mindless, heartless conservatism.” Interestingly, however, Forrest Gump
even found a following in Communist China, where it was called The True
Story of Ah-Gan, a clever play on the twentieth-century Chinese classic The
True Story of Ah Q, a popular and renowned political satire.
Of course, Forrest Gump wasn’t the only movie that summer that got
similar treatment as fodder for political interpretations and elevation onto the
fields of America’s culture wars. Of Disney’s movie The Lion King, which
relates the tale of a lion cub who struggles against an evil uncle, Wall Street
Journal columnist Neil Chethik wrote: “It strongly reinforces the stereotypes
of men as peer-driven competitors and women as helpless, hapless victims.”
Nationally syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman found the movie to reinforce
male prejudices, as did Carolyn Newberger, a professor at Harvard. A spokes-
woman for Disney, the production company for The Lion King, however,
pointedly urged such guardians of cultural propriety and political correctness
to “get a life.”
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THE SHANK
Critics were generally positive about The Shawshank Redemption when it came
out in 1994, but subsequently, in the Internet age, the movie has become a
perennial contender in popular voting for the best film of all time. On the
Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), it competes neck-and-neck with
The Godfather as a contender for the number-one spot. Younger moviegoers
and movie buffs adore it. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the
movie has become known affectionately among a generation of college stu-
dents simply as The Shank.
The writer-director of The Shawshank Redemption, Frank Darabont, how-
ever, recalls: “We couldn’t beg people to go see this movie when it first came
out.” The appeal of The Shawshank Redemption among younger audiences has
continued to grow. Offering an explanation of this, Orange County Register
critic André Moouchard writes:
The episodic nature of the movie is critical. Films like Shawshank Redemp-
tion . . . can deliver their punchy message every few minutes, not unlike
network television shows. Movies that tread more complex themes, or
depend on more visual panache—movies that in essence play like mov-
ies—don’t do as well in heavy-rotation style cable. For instance, The English
Patient, a slow but visually arresting film, has been a spotty performer on
cable.
Taking a slightly different read on it, Jason Gay, writing in Gentlemens Quar-
terly, caustically remarks:
Jackasses don’t even call it The Shawshank Redemption. It’s simply Shaw-
shank, as in “Dude, Shawshank, best movie ever made.” Why do they
love it? Simple. The Shawshank is the most shameless male-bonding movie
ever. . . . Shawshank is like the Jackass Steel Magnolias. There’s a reason they
run it 785 times a week on cable.
Darabont initiated the project as an adaptation from a Stephen King short
story entitled “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.” The film’s
producer was Niki Marvin, and Tim Robbins signed on in 1993 for the lead
role. Shooting began in the summer of 1993 at an abandoned prison in Mans-
field, Ohio. The studio, Castle Rock, wanted “Rita Hayworth” dropped from
the title because it thought that promoting the film was already going to be
tricky, and it didn’t want to risk further confusion for potential viewers. The
film was a Columbia release.
New Hollywood Enters the Digital Age 287
Under director of photography Roger Deakins, the film is shot in warm
blues and grays, which, according to film critic Sheila Whitaker, “avoids all
the clichés of prison and male bonding.” Indeed, Deakins won the American
Society of Cinematographers award for achievement that year for his work
on it.
Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a banker, is sent to Shawshank Prison for
the murder of his wife and her lover. There he meets Red (Morgan Freeman),
who is also incarcerated for murder. James Whitmore plays another veteran
con, the prison librarian. Andy does taxes and runs scams for the fanatically
religious warden (Bob Gunton) to earn perks, but he becomes so valuable that
the warden can’t afford to have Andy paroled.
The Los Angeles Times film critic, Kenneth Turan, judged the screenplay
to be overly sentimental: “Solid portrayals, but a dubious treatment.” Variety’s
criticism, written by Leonard Klady, concluded:
There’s a painstaking exactness that is both laudable and exhausting. The
nineteen years that the film’s protagonist spends behind prison walls is a
term shared by the audience. . . . Definitely a film requiring careful nurtur-
ing, Shawshank will need critical kudos and year-end honors to maintain
slow but consistent box office. . . . A testament to the human spirit, the
film is a rough diamond. Its languors are small quibbles in an otherwise
estimable and haunting entertainment.
Still, overall, its length drew flak. Jon Silberg’s review in Boxoffice concluded
that this adaptation of the King story had “attributes,” but that they didn’t
“justify its excessive length.” Likewise, critic Leslie Camhi panned it in the
Village Voice, and writing in New York, David Denby referred to the movie as
“142 minutes of hard labor . . . a gray, gray movie . . . the worst movie title
since The Hudsucker Proxy.”
Nonetheless, the president of Castle Rock, Martin Shafer, who called
his company “script-driven,” paid Darabont, a first-time director, $750,000
plus a percentage of the net profits and gave him a $25 million budget for
the production. Darabont was the son of Hungarian refugees who fled that
country after the anti-Communist uprisings of 1956. He was born at a refugee
camp in France in 1959 and then moved with his parents to Los Angeles, but
he never attended film school. In that sense, his professional biography is like
many of the filmmakers of Classic Hollywood. After completing high school
at Hollywood High, he worked around movie sets, getting his first steady
work as a production assistant on low-budget horror films. Subsequently, he
began writing scripts and negotiating his way through the Hollywood business
toward his professional goal. Darabont also won the Humanitas Prize (founded
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in 1974 to reward writers for communicating human values in their scripts)
for his screenplay’s “ringing affirmation of the centrality of hope in human
life.” Darabont gave the prize money to the AIDS project of Los Angeles in
memory of his agent, Allen Greene, who had died of AIDS in 1989.
PULP FICTION
Variety’s review enthusiastically welcomed the second feature film written and
directed by Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, as a marvelous encore to his first,
Reservoir Dogs.
Quentin Tarantino makes some of the same moves here but on a much
larger canvas, ingeniously constructing a series of episodes so that they
ultimately knit together, and embedding the always surprising action in a
context set by delicious dialogue and several superb performances.
By now, Tarantino also had two previous screenplays to his credit: Natural
Born Killers (directed by Oliver Stone) and True Romance (directed by Tony
Scott).
Pulp Fiction was distributed by Miramax, a rising independent company
founded by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who had scratched their way
to Hollywood from a launching pad of promoting rock bands in Buffalo, New
York. And find their way they did. By 1994, Miramax was regarded as a new
kind of Hollywood phenomenon, and its place in the Hollywood firmament
was clear. And, if the Weinsteins were becoming the new equivalent of Hol-
lywood moguls, director Tarantino was equally well on his way to the status of
Hollywood legend. In typical New Hollywood fashion, the list of major Hol-
lywood names linked to the production package that had been put together to
finance Pulp Fiction—Lawrence Bender, Danny DeVito, Michael Shaberg, and
Stacey Sher—was hardly surprising. (Displaying the kind of playful link any
true fan of Pulp Fiction would like, producer Bender’s company name, A Band
Apart, had been derived from the title of a 1964 film by Jean-Luc Godard
entitled Bande à Part [Band of Outsiders].)
Tarantino, also, was no film school product. As one of the most insightful
attempts to explain Tarantino’s success, movie critic David Denby wrote in
an article for New York:
Like the earlier movie-men, Tarantino is immersed in cinema: he even
comes garlanded with a myth comparable to Scorsese’s asthmatic, movie-
enriched childhood. A sort of southern California swamp-mall creature, he
New Hollywood Enters the Digital Age 289
rises, unschooled, from a clerk’s position at a video store with thousands
of films in his head and grand ambitions in his heart. Having seen and di-
gested everything, he understands the logic and secrets of movie genres. . . .
Therefore, he can play, he can mix cruelty and formal inventiveness (some-
times the formal play itself is cruel), teasing, undermining, subverting, while
telling a story at the same time.
To paraphrase film critic Pauline Kael, Tarantino’s approach to moviemaking
as a career derived from his getting drunk on movies!
There are elements in Pulp Fiction, however, that appear to go against
the grain of movie history. The single story isn’t the point, and Tarantino
completely eschews psychological realism as either drama or allegory. In-
stead, he gives his viewers a string of screen personalities, played by John
Travolta, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel,
Samuel L. Jackson, and Christopher Walken. The tales are simple sketches:
a hit man placed in uneasy and dangerous proximity to his gangster boss’s
wife; a second hit man who undergoes a change of heart; a boxer who is to
take a dive, but doesn’t.
Lionized as an artistic risk taker, for the late 1990s Tarantino was
anointed the director that most budding filmmakers wanted to be, displacing
Martin Scorsese. His outrageous characters reveal their deeper feelings in long
takes blessed with an absolute torrent of words, which are simultaneously
poetic and profane.
Pulp Fiction, consisting of a prologue and five chapters, winds up back
at the prologue when two undernourished, fidgety young people, Tim Roth
and Amanda Plummer, trying to think of places to rob, decide to rob the
one they are in. So Pulp Fiction ends with Roth apparently moving in on
Jules, the ostensibly reformed hit man played by Jackson who faces a new
moment of truth as he fingers his revolver under the table. Reviewer Todd
McCarthy applauded Tarantino’s buildup of tremendous tension in a scene,
only to spice it with humorous non sequiturs. Janet Maslin, writing in the
New York Times, went further, calling it “a stunning vision of destiny, choice
and spiritual possibility.”
Praised as a brilliant postmodern film noir, Pulp Fiction won the pres-
tigious Golden Palm at the Cannes International Film Festival, besting the
favorite for the award, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Red, which earlier
had won Best Picture awards at both the Berlin and Venice film festivals.
The soundtrack for Pulp Fiction does not have a score in the conventional
sense; rather, its music is an amalgam of blaring surfer music, down-and-dirty
funk, and atmospheric folk and rock songs spanning five decades of Ameri-
can popular music. In fact, Tarantino remarked in one interview that he cast
Thurman because she fit the image that came to him in his mind’s eye as he
290 Chapter 15
was listening to a song, “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” which is heard in
the movie’s soundtrack.
A marketing rush by Miramax claimed the movie’s first weekend box
office take was more than $9 million—a figure that competitors argued was
grossly inflated and that drew threats of a lawsuit against the Weinsteins’ com-
pany for false marketing. The cost to Miramax of the overall promotional plan
for Pulp Fiction matched or exceeded the actual costs of the movie’s produc-
tion, which was about $8.7 million. The scheme was made possible only by
the fact that Disney had purchased Miramax for $60 million just prior to the
release of Pulp Fiction. In its theatrical run, the movie earned $107 million,
and then promptly sold a record three-quarters of a million units in its initial
run for video rentals.
The line between independent film and studio product was already
blurred considerably when Disney purchased the leading independent com-
pany, Miramax. Additionally, in the Hollywood of the mid-1990s, in terms of
tie-ins, the edgy, indie feature Pulp Fiction and the principles of high concept
appeared to merge. The Pulp Fiction script was turned into a book and mar-
keted as a successful hot item.
A wide range of critics called it the best film of the year, which provoked
a severe rebuke from columnist Joe Urschel in USA Today. Urschel argued
that filmmakers and movie critics who applauded Pulp Fiction were taking no
moral responsibility for antisocial movies, likening them to tobacco company
executives playing down the relation of cigarettes to health problems. In
retort, academician Roger Shattuck asked what Tarantino, Baudelaire, and
Nabakov have in common. Taking Pulp Fiction as a less serious subject, Gilbert
Adair in the London Times summed it up in three words: “Nasty, brutish, and
stupid.” The New York Times Sunday Magazine headlined an edition with the
title “Evil’s Back,” featuring an article on Tarantino and Pulp Fiction, written
by Marshall Arisman.
BRAVEHEART
Alan Ladd Jr. and Bruce Davey produced 1995’s Best Picture Oscar winner,
Braveheart, based on a screenplay written by Randall Wallace. Based on the
story of thirteenth-century Scottish patriot Sir William Wallace, it was filmed
entirely at locations in Scotland and in London at the Shepperton Studios.
Ladd had taken the project with him from MGM when he left there as CEO
in the summer of 1994. Mel Gibson, whose Icon Productions had an invest-
ment in Braveheart as well, originally was slated only to direct the film—even
though he had not directed an action movie before—but wound up starring
New Hollywood Enters the Digital Age 291
in it, too. Cast as King Edward’s daughter-in-law was French actress Sophie
Marceau, a recent winner of the French equivalent of an Oscar, the César,
but hardly a known box office draw for audiences in the United States. The
village girl with whom William falls in love is played by another newcomer,
Catherine McCormack.
An epic entitled Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson, was being filmed at the
same time. The industry trade papers took this to be an emerging strategy of
Paramount’s parent company, Viacom, using the “split-rights” model to hedge
against production costs that might not be covered by gross rentals, whereas
the parent company of Fox, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., was committed
to holding exclusive rights to its productions. Indeed, the Variety review at
the time of the movie’s opening predicted that the lack of marquee appeal,
beyond Gibson himself, and its thirteenth-century subject matter would likely
prevent it from effectively “hacking its way through this summer’s pack of
aspiring blockbusters, its merits notwithstanding.” By Labor Day, Braveheart
had grossed $60 million in domestic rentals.
David Denby, writing in New York magazine, called Braveheart dismis-
sively “the kind of movie in which one man shows his affection for another by
knocking him down.” Newsweek’s Jack Kroll, however, thought Gibson as a
director had found a well-balanced blend of romantic and documentary styles
and had achieved an honorable shot at a big, resolute ode to human freedom,
like Spartacus (1960)—although, at three hours, he considered Braveheart way
too long. Many other reviewers commonly compared it favorably alongside
two strong movies from the early 1960s, Spartacus and Lawrence of Arabia,
accepting the movie’s length as appropriate to its epic qualities. Richard
Schickel in Time, however, lambasted the movie’s length, complained about
its unhappy ending, and found King Edward (Patrick McGoohan) lacking in
villainy and true evil; his conclusion, “too much, too late.” Rob Roy, after all,
was already languishing in America’s movie theaters before sparse audiences.
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) predict-
ably judged Edward’s throwing his son’s male lover out a castle window to be
offensive: “The message of this film is that all gay men are idiot effeminates
and that they’re really annoying, so it’s okay to get rid of them.” Argued the
Village Voice: “Anyone who reviews this film without raising the issue of gay
portrayals is not fulfilling his or her responsibility as a critic.” The mainstream
popular press opted to generate lots of kilt stories and sidebars, but the alter-
native press picked up their message. Andy Lein, writing for the Los Angeles
Reader, lambasted Braveheart as “Out of kilter . . . overlong . . . historically
ridiculous, and homophobic.”
An Entertainment Today article blasted the Academy for giving the Best
Picture Oscar to Braveheart over films like Sense and Sensibility, Apollo 13,