Don Wilkinson

The 1900s were the great century of film. With YouTube being the major innovation so far this century, the 2000s don’t look half as promising.

For the discerning filmgoer, a trip to the cinema today is about as exhilarating as listening to Henry Kissinger read aloud from War and Peace.
    Considering the abundance of stale titles such as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Funny People and Law Abiding Citizen polluting marquees, it is not difficult to see why. With this in mind, let’s take a journey down memory lane to see what was playing in movie theatres ten years ago; 1999 was the last great year of the last great decade of film.
    Paul Thomas Anderson wrote, produced and directed Magnolia, achieving an almost unprecedented final cut arrangement for a young filmmaker.
    David Fincher’s adaptation of Fight Club revived Brad Pitt’s sagging career after Seven Years in Tibet and provided legions of disgruntled, anti-conformist university students with a new bible.
    Charlie Kaufman finally got his script for Being John Malkovich off the ground, and, in director Spike Jonze’s hands, it became something of a miracle of niche-market-turned-mainstream filmmaking.
   Pedro Almodóvar wrote and directed All About My Mother, an independent Spanish-language film that was as popular with North American audiences as it was with critics.
   David O. Russell made Three Kings, a satire of the first Gulf War disguised as an action movie.
   Anthony Minghella brilliantly adapted Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, a feat that generations of filmmakers had failed to do, including Alfred Hitchcock – who adapted one of Highsmith’s earlier books, Strangers on a Train, into his 1951 classic – due to its homoerotic undertones.
   Making their film debuts, screenwriter Alan Ball and director Sam Mendes collaborated on American Beauty.
   And then there was also The Sixth Sense, The Cider House Rules, Boys Don’t Cry, The Green Mile, Eyes Wide Shut, Bringing out the Dead, Angela’s Ashes, Man on the Moon, The Hurricane, The Insider, The Blair Witch Project, The Matrix, Sleepy Hollow, Dogma and Election.

The year of the Y2K threat marked the death, retirement or sacking of many of these old-school execs

     Each one of these titles, aside from being great films or providing great entertainment – or, in some cases, both – was uncompromising and pushed the boundaries of film. They were also extremely influential.
     How many movies have since adopted the satiric tone and the matching slick visual style of Fight Club, the innovative CGI effects and editing of The Matrix or the post-modern comic absurdity of Being John Malkovich?
     How could so many great films come out in the span of one year? And then, in that very short time between December 31, 1999 and the new millennium, how could the quality of films go completely down the tubes?
    Well, I have three reasons for this phenomenon: recent “advancements” in communication technology, the single-minded business mentality of most movie studios – who used to seek out genuine talents and then proceed to market them, instead of growing their new stars in a back lot laboratory – and the leniency of most modern critics.
     For the purposes of this piece, I want to focus exclusively on the dramatic change in management of film studios. This didn’t just occur in Hollywood, or even only in America. It happened all over  the world.
     Movie executives of the “old mentality” had always been concerned with making money, but they also cared about making films that were worthwhile.
    They didn’t merely manufacture all of their films and their featured talents – they went out and hand-picked a great number of them. They were also willing to take artistic
risks. In other words, they helped make movies interesting.
    The year of the Y2K threat marked the death, retirement or sacking of many of these old-school execs. For example, Lew Wasserman, the longtime head of MCA Universal, left its board of directors in 1998.
     Robert Sarnoff, the president of NBC and of dozens of independent film companies, died two years prior.
     PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, the international independent production company responsible for films like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting  and The Big Lebowski was shut down by Gerard Kleisterlee, the new CEO of its parent company Phillips Electronics.
    Orion Pictures, which churned out Amadeus, Akira Kurosowa’s Ran and scores of Woody Allen movies, went belly-up.
   By 1999, three different filmmakers who had unprecedented final cut on their films, and, in some cases, control over studios, were dead (Akira Kurosowa, Stanley Kubrick and Alan J. Pakula).
   By the end of 1999, all of the films that had been given a green light by the retired veterans and disestablished companies were rolled out in compliance with the outstanding contracts. These included such titles as Three Kings, Eyes Wide Shut, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club and Being John Malkovich.
  This change in management not only accounts for the decline in new films and film talent in the 21st century, but also explains why such a disproportionate amount of great movies were released in 1999.
   “[The film industry has] become an inverted pyramid with a tiny bit of talent at the bottom, supporting a mass of pointless bureaucracy on top,” writer/director Terry Gilliam explained
in the recent documentary Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut).
   He’s right, but, unfortunately, virtually none of his contemporaries are lashing out against the system with him. If no one complains within the film circuit or the public forum, nothing will change.
   If management doesn’t smarten up soon, 1999 will remain the last great year for film.