Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema

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Babe, and Il Postino, dismissing it as “Depraved Heart.” But the movie’s Oscar

wins were solid evidence that occasionally a big-screen epic could capture the

Academy’s favorable attention. Indeed, since such Best Picture Oscars were

not common for epics, Braveheart received a good jolt of adrenaline at the box

office from its Best Picture win.

TOY STORY

Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation studios collaborated on the first

full-length animated film that was created entirely by artists using computer

technology, and which was made over the course of four years. It could be de-

scribed as a buddy picture with toys, meant to appeal to adults in its audience

as well as children. Composer Randy Newman did the score and contributed

three new original songs, which he performed as well.

Conceived and directed by John Lasseter, a former Disney animator who

won an Academy Award in 1989 for a short entitled Tin Toy, the story of

Toy Story is about Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), a traditional pull-string

cowboy, and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), a spaceman action figure, and how

the two learn to overcome their differences. Casting for voices in many ways

is like casting for any film. Voices needed to match character traits and the

situations they’ll be in, and the use of the voices of known actors from popular

movies is considered to help enormously in attracting audiences to these films.

Toy Story includes voice work for Mr. Potato Head by Don Rickles, Slinky

Dog by Jim Varney, and a flirtatious Bo-Peep by Annie Potts. Woody is the

young boy Andy’s favorite toy until he discovers Buzz. Buzz and Woody

squabble, unexpectedly enter the big bad outside world, and must avoid the

grasp of the sadistic neighbor kid, Sid (Erik von Detten).

Although excluded for consideration from all the standard Academy

Award categories—including Special Effects—Toy Story was widely recog-

nized as being significant and marking a turning point in cinema history. Joe

Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal wrote: “My only concern in sending

adults to see Disney’s Toy Story, the first full-length animated feature created

entirely by computers, is the danger of wonderment overload. . . . [It] gives

grounds for reassurance about the future impact of technology on the visual

arts.” The readers of the other pages of the Wall Street Journal saw another

response to this breakthrough in moviemaking, as Disney’s stock rose signifi-

cantly after a great holiday season run for Toy Story.

Two decades after the appearance of Jaws, high concept was by now rid-

ing high in Hollywood, and Toy Story was high concept with a vengeance.

Burger King ran out of the action figures made for the movie tie-in. As

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Morgenstern’s analysis asserted, kids like it because it shows toys coming alive

after hours; adults think it’s a moving meditation on identity, packed with

clever-cool jokes.

The entire culture of the toy world, including Mr. Potato Head and Slinky

Dog, come alive. Is it the future of toons? A typically Disneyesque story-

line, Toy Story joins the ranks of classics like Snow White and Fantasia. Toy

Story explores social hierarchies, camaraderies, romantic impulses, fears, and

insecurities.

David Ansen wrote in Newsweek:

The computer-made Toy Story pops off the screen with shiny wit, rich

characters, and a very human heart . . . [and a] vibrancy that is totally un-

like traditional hand-painted animation. . . . Toy Story is a marvel because

it harnesses its flashy technology to a very human wit, rich characters, and

a perception no computer could think of, that toys, indeed, are us.

Most likely the best summation of Toy Story was provided in the industry’s

leading trade journal, Variety, by the critic Michael Rechtschaffen:

Walt Disney continues its long domination of cutting-edge animation with

the computer-generated Toy Story. The very good news is that, in addition

to stylistic innovation, the film sports a provocative and appealing story

that’s every bit the equal of this technical achievement.

While excluding Toy Story from Oscar consideration in 1995, the Academy

nonetheless bestowed a special Oscar, outside all the normal categories of the

award, on the movie’s creator, Lasseter.

ANOTHER MIRAMAX WINNER

The English Patient, the Academy’s Best Picture for 1996, was written and

directed by Anthony Minghella and produced by Saul Zaentz. Zaentz, who

lived and worked in Berkeley, California, although considered an outsider

to Hollywood, had two previous Best Picture Oscars with One Flew over the

Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus. According to an article in Newsweek, Twentieth

Century-Fox was behind the movie’s financing to begin with, but pulled out

when Zaentz and Minghella refused to cast big enough stars, such as Demi

Moore, who reportedly was eager to be in it and whom the studio wanted.

So, in the emerging Hollywood style of differentiating between big-budget

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high-concept movies and smaller-budget films that could be marketed as

having an “independent edge” to them, Twentieth Century-Fox begged off,

only to find The English Patient soon reborn as a project for a Fox subsidiary

called Searchlight. Fox Searchlight was so named because this subsidiary

studio ostensibly was continually looking for new directors, new talent, and

more independent and edgy projects that were waiting to be discovered. Fox

Searchlight immediately partnered with J&M, a British firm, to coproduce

the movie, which, in turn, opened the way for Miramax, now considered the

juggernaut of independent movies in the United States (even though it had

been acquired by Disney) to invest $27 million in the project and to become

the movie’s distributor. It was this pivotal film that opened the way for mo-

tion picture industry observers to acknowledge Miramax as a major player in

Hollywood right alongside the major studios.

Minghella brought with him the kind of pedigree that devotees of in-

dependent film admire. After a brief career as a university lecturer, he had

become a playwright. He directed his first feature film, Truly, Madly, Deeply,

in 1991 and followed two years later with Mr. Wonderful, a movie produced in

the United States starring Matt Dillon and Mary-Louise Parker. A preproduc-

tion article in Variety assessed the prospects of The English Patient:

This detailed, time-jumping study of the intertwined fates of several of

battle’s victims carries the prestige to be a strong attraction for upscale

audiences, and Miramax can be counted upon to push it as far into the

mainstream as possible.

Far from echoing the wild praise for the adaptation frequently found in the

reviews at the time, the leading trade magazine focused on how the screenplay

actually functioned, “nudged in the direction of fairly conventional adulterous

melodrama, even as the characters’ British reserve keeps the central romance

somewhat emotionally restrained.”

The project emerged as perfect crossover material and constituted the

first true jewel in the Miramax Company’s crown. Janet Maslin, writing in

the New York Times, greeted the film as “a stunning feat of literary adaptation

as well as a purely cinematic triumph.” Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel was a

dreamlike, nonlinear tale to which the film’s writer-director remained faith-

ful. The script indulged the exotic material shaped from the mind of a terribly

disfigured central character—a British airman, horribly burned and now lying

in a hospital bed in Tuscany in the waning months of World War II.

Praise was lavish for the great polish of John Seale’s cinematography,

Stuart Craig’s production design, Gabriel Yared’s music score, and Walter

Murch’s editing. Any reasonably successful adaptation to film of this popular

but labyrinthine novel appears destined to have been widely admired, espe-

cially by those who had any acquaintance with The English Patient as a book.

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Much, of course, comes apart before being finally reconciled and re-

solved in this convoluted work. As the movie’s central figure and narrator,

Laszlo de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), delves deeper into the two central, parallel

narratives of the story, it turns out that he isn’t English at all, but rather a Hun-

garian count whose body is broken and badly burned. The cast is complex as

well: Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) and an exotic Sikh named Kip (Naveen An-

drews), a mine expert who is constantly courting danger, each bring another

facet of life into the villa where Almásy is recuperating, and, in so doing, they

are constantly pushing the patient into new memories and new pain.

At the end of the day, The English Patient may be regarded as quite an

old-fashioned movie—extravagantly romantic, full of spies, intrigues, battles,

and a sandstorm—but it also is a contemporary epic of the 1990s that is ellipti-

cal in its structure, so that the audience is forced to piece together its fragments

in order to discover its logic as a modernist melodrama.

Time’s Richard Corliss swooned over this movie that he found to be

“beyond gorgeous.” As he explained:

All year we’ve seen mirages of good films. Here is the real thing. To

transport picture-goers to a unique place in the glow of the earth, in the

darkness of the heart—this, you realize with a gasp of joy, is what movies

can do.

Indeed, this kind of praise was typical of the broad, positive critical response to

the film, which found few negative reviews. Indeed, the edition of the novel

when re-released as a tie-in to the movie, quickly reached number one on

the New York Times best-seller list by early December 1996. The movie itself

claimed a total of nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

FROM WORLD WAR II TUSCANY TO

FROZEN MINNESOTA, YOU BETCHA

For many industry insiders, the odds-on favorite to capture the Best Picture

Oscar for 1996 was Fargo; instead, it won only two categories: Best Actress

(Frances McDormand) and Best Writing (Ethan and Joel Coen). Financed

by Polygram, in association with Working Title Films, and released by

Gramercy, Fargo was produced by Ethan Coen and was directed by his

brother Joel. The movie’s $10 million budget was considerably less than

the budget for the Coen brothers’ most recent previous feature for Warner

Bros., The Hudsucker Proxy.

Frances McDormand stars in this offbeat script as Marge Gunderson, a

local police chief in a sleepy town in northern Minnesota, who is pregnant.

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Marge’s husband has a passion for drawing duck designs and hopes to have one

of them purchased by the Postal Service. When it is only selected for place-

ment on a three-cent stamp, Marge consoles him. Theirs is a warm, unpreten-

tious marriage, and their love for each other is sincere.

By contrast, Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), a car salesman, lives

a sterile life symbolized primarily by his mistreatment at the hands of his

father-in-law (Harve Presnell), who owns the automobile dealership where

Jerry works. Jerry plots to kidnap his own wife (Kristin Rudrüd) for ransom.

Lundegaard is, as critic Gene Siskel phrased it, “a classic everyman in the tradi-

tion of Willy Loman [in Arthur Miller’s classic play The Death of a Salesman].”

Struggling financially, unable to impress his father-in-law and his banker

friend into supporting a development scheme, he hires Carl Showalter (Steve

Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife with the

intent of getting his father-in-law to pay her ransom, which Lundegaard will

pocket. Buscemi and Stormare combine as a pair of especially unappealing and

inept bad guys with a dose of wry comedy underlying their characters through

most of the film. Holed up in a hideaway cabin, Grimsrud winds up killing

their captive, and then Marge makes her arrests. Industry observers agreed that

their performances in Fargo moved McDormand, Macy, and Buscemi up to

the next level as screen talent in Hollywood’s eyes.

Fargo is a dark comedy based on a quirky script, frequently playing

cleverly with conventions from different movie genres and adding in scenes

that do not advance the movie’s story so much as they convey a sense of the

fictionalized upper Midwest that gives the movie its title. For example, there

is a brief scene of Marge meeting a high school classmate who had a crush on

her for lunch at a restaurant. He is a buttoned-down Asian-American engineer

(Steve Park), and their scene comes to absolutely nothing, violating one of the

fundamental principles of standard narrative screenwriting. In a similar man-

ner, Marge’s pregnancy is visible throughout the film, but is entirely incidental

to the plot. It is part of her character, but serves no storytelling purpose. The

movie begins, moreover, with a false claim that the movie is based on the case

of a true murder.

The Coens, who grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, poke fun

at their characters’ favorite foods, local idiom, and seemingly witless con-

versations, but in Marge they create a wondrous human being and a great

heroine. With Swedish actor Stormare playing the kidnapper and killer

Grimsrud, the exact opposite is created: a sullen, and inarticulate, lout, with

neither sense nor scruples.

The Coen brothers continued their in-joke humor and toying with

movie conventions right into the film’s end credits, attributing to the fictitious

Roderick Jaynes the role of editor, as they had on two earlier movies, Blood

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Simple (1984) and Barton Fink (1991), when the Coen brothers themselves

were the actual editors. Indeed, Roderick Jaynes gained an Academy Award

nomination for his “presumed” role on the movie. As the Coen brothers were

quoted as saying: “Multiple murders aside, it is our warmest movie.”

As a deft independent feature, unusually quirky and decidedly edgy, Fargo

had a lasting resonance with audiences and critics alike. It was very much a

movie self-consciously made for viewers in the know about movies and is full

of insider jokes and allusions to cinema history. Much in the same way, the

Coen brothers themselves are insiders to modern independent film and are at

the center of its culture. Ethan Coen is married to film editor Tricia Cook,

and Joel, an M.F.A. graduate from the Film School at New York University,

is married to the movie’s lead actress, Frances McDormand. Fargo initially

grossed just over $5 million in its domestic release.

As Fargo’s director of photography, Roger Deakins was applauded for

taking on the challenge of making snowbanks and snow-covered parking lots

visually exciting. The photography is haunting, and the occasional whiteouts

are used to great effect. Deakins won a Best Cinematography Oscar for his

efforts. In this movie, Joel Coen took a more observational approach with the

camera than in any of the Coen brothers’ previous movies, underscored by

the fact that they think of all their movies, including Fargo, in terms of fairly

long and sustained scenes.

Gramercy Pictures president Russell Schwartz claimed that “with Fargo,

the marketing job was to remind the Academy of the fun time they had

watching the film, giving them an opportunity to see it a second time.” In

Hollywood, much was made of the freshness of setting the movie so solidly

in the Minnesota–North Dakota nexus and using the local dialect portrayed

in the movie, for example, “You betcha” and “Darn tootin’.” Still, there’s a

lightness of tone in the movie that, perhaps, helped keep even Minnesotans

and North Dakotans from being more upset with the stereotypes.

As Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review of the movie:

Testing limits, breaking boundaries, going too far: the Coen brothers’

eclectic films, ranging from the great (Barton Fink) to the inscrutable (The

Hudsucker Proxy), always manage to make that their guiding principle and

secret weapon. They are road movies headed toward the tricky unknown,

and Fargo finds the Coens roaming exuberantly across their favorite terrain.

And that terrain is a buoyant mixture of expert style and goofball content.

David Denby, writing in New York, observed:

Fargo is not completely an exercise in attitude. The movie is more than

mere hipster sarcasm. The Coen brothers have created an unusual kind of

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suspense: When is blandness really fortitude? When is it faith and courage?

. . . The Coens are not realists; their style is a modern equivalent of the

dramatic mode known as “the comedy of humors” in which characters are

obsessed with a single desire or dominated by a single trait.

The farce in Fargo keeps slipping into horror. A state trooper is shot and

killed, as well as two witnesses who happen to be passing by. Here violence

just happens, with shocking bluntness and slovenliness. As a British reviewer,

Tom Shone, wrote in the London Sunday Times: “The Coens have an abiding,

if mischievous, respect for the soft fug of American good cheer, and a feath-

erlight touch for the tiniest of key changes necessary to transpose normality’s

soft lullaby into something more threatening.”

The review in the trade journal Screen International offered:

Maybe the return to familiar turf has enabled the Coens to transcend the

ironic detachment and arch cleverness that has marked their recent work—

and banished them to the art house fringe. Despite the freezing tempera-

tures, Fargo is the Coens’ warmest and most satisfying film to date. . . . The

Coens have toned down their kinetic camera trademarks and hyperactive

tracking shots in favor of a determinedly low-key approach. . . . [McDor-

mand] lends a human dimension so far missing from the Coens’ oeuvre,

enabling the brothers to connect with—rather than simply impress—the

specialized film-going public. They go back to their stylistic roots of

broader humor as well as to their own geographic roots growing up outside

of Minneapolis to create a small-scale character-driven gem.

The aged Stanley Kauffmann, writing in the New Republic, who called Fargo

tolerable, still found cause to complain about its “wobbling in tone. Carter

Burwell’s score seems like it was written for a different picture.”

TITANIC . . . IN STORY, IN

PRODUCTION BUDGET, AND IN PROFITS

Although there had been numerous books on the sinking of the Titanic, and

several feature films and documentaries made about the catastrophe, James

Cameron’s interest in the subject was inspired more by the 1985 discovery of

the sunken ship than by any previous film or book about it. A new project

about the Titanic was developed by Cameron’s company, Lightstorm, to be

written and directed by him. Paramount Pictures agreed to partially back the

project, but capped its investment at $65 million. About 60 percent of the

financing for the film came from Twentieth Century-Fox, so that this massive

New Hollywood Enters the Digital Age 299

undertaking was a truly unusual case of two of Hollywood’s oldest and best-

known studios partnering for the same production.

A 1997 release, Titanic won the Academy Award for Best Picture for that

year. The movie was full of classic themes: life and death, class and wealth,

humanity vs. nature. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio starred, but at that

point neither of them was regarded as an A-list talent who could assure the

producers much in the way of audience.

Much of Titanic was filmed at Fox Studios Baja, at Rosarito Beach, Baja

California, in Mexico just south of San Diego. Although newly built for the

production of Titanic, these facilities, of course, had the capacity to be leased

in the future to generate continuing revenue for Fox. Nevertheless, the pro-

duction risk was still high. Cameron, a forty-three-year-old Canadian, had the

reputation in Hollywood as a brilliant but difficult filmmaker. CBS television

had a miniseries in the works for November, also called Titanic, which starred

Peter Gallagher, George C. Scott, and Eva Marie Saint. In addition, a musical

entitled Titanic opened on Broadway while the film was still in production.

By April 19, 1997, the Los Angeles Times reported “Epic-Size Troubles

on Titanic,” noting that the budget was about to surpass Universal Pictures’

financial debacle Waterworld and that Titanic was behind schedule to open for

the coveted Fourth of July weekend premier. The Screen Actors Guild even

sent investigators to query Cameron’s reputed “perfectionism” for cost over-

runs approaching $75 million. A staggering 1.6 million feet of film were shot,

with 1.3 million feet printed.

An article in Time claimed to expose tactics on the film’s set as Cameron

rushed to meet the planned release date, overworking and underfeeding of

the crew. The article did suggest that such conditions were not unusual, how-

ever, as these same steps that rushed work and exploited the craft personnel

frequently had been taken on others of Hollywood’s big megabudget “event”

movies in order to try to complete them on time. Industry observers gave

much credit to the project’s “other” producer, Jon Landau, for steering Titanic

through roiling and troubled waters to its conclusion.

Once the film was completed, audiences were responding positively,

and the enormous box office take was becoming clear, the establishment of

the motion picture industry enthusiastically endorsed its success: Titanic won

a record-tying (Gone with the Wind, 1939) eleven Academy Awards on Oscar

night, including Best Picture. The film’s earnings eventually topped $1 billion

just for the movie’s theatrical release.

Titanic isn’t a disaster movie, according to Cameron. “It’s a love story,

but don’t worry, the ship does sink.” From the very first sneak preview of the

completed film in Anaheim Hills, California, at the end of August, audience

response cards praised not only Titanic’s technical aspects but also the tender

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romance of the characters played by Winslet and DiCaprio. It was the most

ambitious Hollywood movie of the decade, made by a Canadian who as a

nine-year-old boy was inspired toward directing, according to his mother’s

recollection, by seeing Godzilla at a matinee in his hometown of Niagara Falls,

Ontario. Cameron worked for Hollywood’s “B-movie” legend, producer

Roger Corman, and then went on to direct Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, True

Lies, and Terminator 2 before Titanic.

James Horner scored the music, which was performed by a 100-piece

orchestra. Eager publicists called its running time “2 hours and 75 minutes.”

Charles Champlin regarded it as a cultural artifact of the dimension of a

Jaws or Schindler’s List. Said former film and television producer Dominick

Dunne: “This is a film that surprised them all in Hollywood. They were

going to throw Cameron to the dogs. Now he will sweep the Academy

Awards.” Mike Medavoy, at the time the chairman of Phoenix Pictures, at-

tributed a portion of its staggering earnings to the love story that appealed to

younger girls, especially under the age of seventeen, who were going back

repeatedly to see it. So, in sum, it was a perfect “chick flick” and period

piece rolled into one.

DiCaprio enjoyed an especially popular publicity tour of Japan, where

Michika Ishikawa, critic for the weekly TV Cinema Report, observed: “In Ja-

pan, if the young girls don’t catch fire, you can’t have a hit.” The film’s world

premiere was at the Tokyo International Film Festival during the first week

in November.

According to veteran producer Al Ruddy, by casting DiCaprio and

Winslet, this became a movie for eight- to eighty-year-olds, almost a kind of

throwback to Classic Hollywood, and a movie that would not have succeeded

nearly as well had it cast better-known screen stars. Anthony Lane said in the

New Yorker that by some miracle, in spite of its three-hour-and-fifteen-minute

length, it turned out to be the least boring movie of the year.

Cameron at one point noted that he interpreted the sinking of the Titanic

as a warning that the old, elitist social structure was not going to last much

longer. By contrast, University of Southern California history professor Steven

J. Ross, writing in the Los Angeles Times, argued:

Yet, beneath the liberal veneer of Titanic and cross-class fantasies of the

1920s are highly conservative attitudes toward class relations. Cameron

concedes a moral superiority to his blue collar protagonist, but in the end it

is the rich who triumph, while the poor return to their “proper” place.

However, China’s Communist president Jiang Zemin declared himself the

number-one fan of the film, which became enormously popular in China.

As reported by Time, Jiang said: “This movie gives vivid descriptions of the

New Hollywood Enters the Digital Age 301

relationship between money and love, rich and poor, and the performance of

all kinds of people in danger.”

Such an enormously expensive movie, which gravitated toward becom-

ing its own franchise, of course drew criticism. J. Hoberman, writing in the

Village Voice, claimed that the movie hit its own fatal iceberg almost imme-

diately. “To call the ‘framing’ story tacky does an injustice to its torpor. . . .

Two thousand passengers, and not one recognizable human being.” The Com-

monweal review claimed that Titanic was broken in half:

The first ninety minutes is Harlequin romance drivel starring Leonardo

DiCaprio as a bohemian artist and Kate Winslet as a society debutante who

cross class barriers to fall in love. . . . Titanic will win the best-picture Oscar

this year, but it is strictly in its second-half that James Cameron becomes

the one-and-only poet of disaster movies.

The Los Angeles Times, in an unusual gesture, even opened its pages to a

column written by Cameron himself excoriating Kenneth Turan, the Times’s

regular movie reviewer and a severe critic of Titanic. Cameron wrote: “Year

after year, he [Turan] has become further and further removed from the

simple, joyful experience of movie-watching.”

According to L.A. Confidential director Curtis Hanson: “The worst thing

that has happened to the movie business is the public’s obsession with the

box office—turning every weekend into a horse race.” Two studios and one

obsessed writer-director appear to risk everything. Alas, before the end of the

year, reported Variety, Titanic had already sailed past $100 million in domestic

ticket sales in just twelve days, and it gathered another $60 million in the next

five days. From Britain to Beijing, the film conquered audiences all around

the world, where earning eventually surpassed the domestic gross revenues.

It became the biggest-grossing film of all time in just ten weeks and passed a

billion dollars in rental receipts by early March 1998. In addition, Sony Mu-

sic had sold 9.2 million copies of the film’s soundtrack, featuring the music

of Horner, and merchandisers and marketers were rushing to come up with

product tie-ins.

The general appeal of the movie came from its delivery of even greater

grandeur than the audience anticipated, its engaging story, and the special

effects and the sound design. The popular print and TV movie critic Roger

Ebert observed in a magazine called Outlook that this “high-tech melodrama”

had created neither just success nor just popularity, but genuine and heartfelt

enthusiasm. Many viewers returned to see the film a second or third time on

the big screen in a theater, perhaps anticipating that much of the film’s effect

would be lost on the small screen of a television set when watching it as a

rental or a telecast.