{"id":602228,"date":"2023-12-23T20:31:01","date_gmt":"2023-12-23T17:31:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/was-this-hollywoods-worst-year-ever\/"},"modified":"2023-12-23T20:31:01","modified_gmt":"2023-12-23T17:31:01","slug":"was-this-hollywoods-worst-year-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/was-this-hollywoods-worst-year-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"#Was This Hollywood\u2019s Worst Year Ever?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n A favorite parlor game<\/a> for film buffs is to pick Hollywood\u2019s greatest year and then argue. The obvious answer \u2014 1939, the certified Golden Year \u2014 always gets the most votes, but a few eccentrics make the case for a dark horse.\u00a01928 was Peter Bogdanovich\u2019s choice, the year that saw the apotheosis of silent film aesthetics before synchronized sound ruined everything. 1974 \u2014 Chinatown<\/em>, Godfather II<\/em>, The Conversation<\/em>, et al \u2014 draws a lot of ballots. Media<\/a> critic Brian Raftery emphatically declared 1999 \u201cthe Best. Movie. Year. Ever.\u201d in a book with the same title and punctuation. Nothing much past 1999 gets a mandate outside of the more outr\u00e9<\/em> precincts of the internet. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n But what about Hollywood\u2019s worst<\/em> year \u2014 its annus horribilis maximus<\/em>? And what are the criteria to measure the depths of badness? The dismal quality of the films? The profit margins of the studios? The level of contempt hurled at Hollywood for being, in turn, the Sodom on the Pacific, Moscow West, or Wokester Central? \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n The question is prompted by end-of-the-year mutterings that 2023 may be in the running.\u00a0The double strike of screenwriters (148 days) and actors (118 days) shut down production and left the kind of bitter aftertaste that makes it hard to kiss and make up. Gold chip stocks like MCU and Disney \u2014 come to think of it, that\u2019s actually the same stock \u2014 were left tarnished and dented after a string of would-be blockbusters went bust. Warner Bros. seemed more interested in tax write offs than releasing films. Of course, the most worrisome visitation was AI, a threat to the very personhood of the talent that may well warrant the most apocalyptic of alarums.<\/p>\n

\n On the other hand (and this is a game of at least two hands), 2023 has been a great year for Hollywood cinema. Moviegoers flocked to the flashy fem-centric magic of Barbie<\/em> and Taylor Swift.\u00a0National treasure Martin Scorsese delivered quality work on screen canvases big (Killers of the Flower Moon<\/em>) and small (TikTok).\u00a0A cycle of intelligent biopics \u2014 Oppenheimer<\/em>, Priscilla<\/em>, Ferrari<\/em>, Napoleon<\/em>, and Maestro<\/em> \u2014 offered a high-nutrition alternative to a slate of by-the-numbers remakes and sequels. No year in which a three-hour film about Cold War security clearances rakes in a billion dollars in global box office can be written off as a total failure. (By the way, it\u2019s pronounced bi-o-pic<\/em> not bi-op-ic<\/em>, so please stop.)<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>

A sign refers to A.I. as striking SAG-AFTRA members and supporters picket outside Disney Studios on day 95 of their strike against the studios on October 16, 2023 in Burbank, California.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mario Tama\/Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n The folks happ<\/a>y to see 2023 in the rearview mirror join a long line of Hollywood doomsayers who have taken a perverse satisfaction in forecasts of imminent catastrophe. The end, it seems, is ever nigh for the motion picture industry. So, the nominees for Worst. Movie. Year. Ever. are numerous and the competition fierce. \u00a0Sometimes producers didn\u2019t know how good they had it; sometimes they were whistling past the graveyard.<\/p>\n

\n 1921 was the first year Hollywood really found itself in a political-cultural buzzsaw. Just as the gears of the machine of the classical studio system began turning, the industry was hit by a series<\/a> of scandals that appalled Victorian-bred\u00a0moral guardians \u2014 divorces, drug overdoses, murder (in 1922, of the director William Desmond Taylor, shot in the heart, said the tabloids, by a \u201cvindictive woman\u201d), and, above all, the three sensational trials (1921-22) of famed comedian Roscoe \u201cFatty\u201d Arbuckle, accused of manslaughter and rape in the death of actress Virginia Rappe during a weekend bacchanalia in San Francisco. Churchmen and women\u2019s groups hyperventilated about the parasites who had \u201cinfested the film colony in Hollywood\u201d and called for a purge of the \u201cundesirable men and women.\u201d By 1921, thirty-six states were either passing or considering statewide censor laws to \u201celiminate suggestiveness and immorality from the screen.\u201d \u201cDrive out the rotters\u201d and \u201cweed out the scum,\u201d demanded Billboard<\/em>, and that advice came from a friendly source.<\/p>\n

\n By way of damage control, the moguls formed a cartel, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and appointed a front man and flak catcher, the politically astute Presbyterian Church elder Will H. Hays, formerly Postmaster General<\/a> for President Warren G. Harding. On July 5, 1922, in one of his first official acts, Hays went before 5,000 members of the not-to-be-messed-with General Federation of Women\u2019s Clubs and assured the ladies he would raise \u201cthe moral and artistic standards\u201d in both the city of Hollywood and its films.\u00a0He set up a list of \u201cdon\u2019ts and be carefuls\u201d to guide film content (ultimately formalized and expanded under the Production Code Administration in 1934) and tried to shut down the after-hours raves with the insertion of morality clauses into actors\u2019 contracts. (\u201cThe actor [actress] agrees to conduct himself [herself] with due regard to public conventions and morals and agrees that he [she] will not commit anything tending to degrade him [her] in society or bring him [her] into public hatred, contempt, scorn, or ridicule.\u201d It goes on.) For the next twenty-three years, Hays held the political censors at bay and studio fixers kept the scandals out of the headlines.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Paramount<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>

At Paramount Studios, make-up and painter workers picket in front of employee entrance during a strike in Los Angeles on August 1, 1937.<\/span><\/p>\n

Everett<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n That one-two shuffle \u2014 wherein the motion picture industry gets rocked by a shock to the system, followed by an adaptation that not only meets the challenge but turns it to advantage \u2014 set a pattern for Hollywood\u2019s crisis management forever after. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n In any year-end wrap up of industry blues, however, the bottom line for a bad year is always the bottom line \u2014 the profit margin as measured in weekly attendance figures and box office gross. No surprise then that the early years of the Great Depression \u2014 any one of them \u2014 were ranked within the industry as the worst year ever, until the next one. \u201c1931 holds the distinction of being the worst year (financially) in the history of the motion picture industry,\u201d declared film critic and future screenwriter Robert Sherwood in the New York Evening Post<\/em>, a superlative soon surpassed by 1932 (\u201cthe industry\u2019s sickest year\u201d) and 1933 (\u201ca good year to forget\u201d). Even Will Hays was hit hard, having to swallow a 60 percent salary cut from $600,000 to $240,000 per year. Things turned around in 1934, but the memory of the cascade of worst years put the disappointments of future years in perspective for the first generation of moguls.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n In looking back at 1931, Sherwood hedged his bets and noted that the year also gave birth to the wisecracking gangster film (Little Caesar<\/em> and Public Enemy<\/em>), the fast-talking news<\/a>paper film (The Front Page<\/em> and Five Star Final<\/em>), and the defiantly talk-less City Lights<\/em>, from the only person who could get away with it, Charles Chaplin. As Orson Welles reminds Joseph Cotten in The Third Man<\/em> (1949), unsettling times can nurture artistic renaissances while serene prosperity yields only the cuckoo clock.<\/p>\n

\n Money aside, certain years just find Hollywood in a temperamental funk. Catherine Jurca\u2019s ironically titled Hollywood 1938: Motion Pictures\u2019 Greatest Year<\/em>, published in 2012, chronicles what at the time seemed like an awful year, 1937, so awful that the business \u00a0orchestrated a massive makeover in 1938 to get its grove back.\u00a0 The industry felt it \u201chad lost touch with is audience,\u201d writes Jurca, and an \u201cirate, disgusted public was staying away from the movies.\u201d\u00a0That is, staying away by 1937 standards: attendance was a robust 12,000,000 per day or 83,000,000 per week in 1937.<\/p>\n

\n To rekindle the romance with the lost audience, all the major studios collaborated in an unprecedented campaign to make movies must-see again.\u00a0Under the slogan \u201cMotion Pictures\u2019 Greatest Year,\u201d it banked on a series of \u201csuperspecial\u201d productions that turned out to be not so special, like the turgid costume dramas Marie Antoinette <\/em>and The Great Waltz<\/em> (for the latter, MGM launched a \u201cbring back the waltz\u201d ad campaign that failed to resonant with Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington fans). \u201cBy fiat, it had declared a middling year its best ever, but neither press nor the public had finally been persuaded,\u201d notes Jurca. If only the industry hadn\u2019t jumped the gun, the slogan would have been truth in advertising in 1939. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Embassy<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>

Crowds outside of the Embassy Newsreel Theater in New York City circa 1938.<\/span><\/p>\n

Everett<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n The war years were so spectacularly good that not even the most pessimistic prognosticator could see a dark cloud. For Hollywood, the most murderous passage in the twentieth century meant boom times. \u201cYou can open a can of sardines nowadays, and there\u2019s a line waiting to get in,\u201d crowed Variety<\/em> in 1943.<\/p>\n

\n The upbeat mood did not last long. In 1946, the year he produced The Best Years of Our Lives<\/em>, Sam Goldwyn lamented that Hollywood \u201chas run dry of ideas.\u201d Actually, the ideas were there, but the audience was being siphoned off by a living room rival that, year by year, caused the weekly attendance graph to spike ever downward.<\/p>\n

\n Sometimes even money won\u2019t make a year look good. 1967 was \u201ca year of spectacular recovery,\u201d said the New York Times<\/em>, but a shift in the role of Hollywood in American life left veteran moviemakers with a vertiginous sense that the film business was now a young man\u2019s game. In Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood<\/em>, Mark Harris registered the seismic upheavals of 1967.\u00a0 \u201cYoungbloods v. moguls\u201d read the headlines, with the outcome of the fight card a foregone conclusion once Bonnie and Clyde<\/em> and The Graduate<\/em> hit screens. \u201cThe rule book seemed to have been tossed out,\u201d Harris wrote. \u201cWarren Beatty, who looked like a movie star, had become a producer. Dustin Hoffman, who looked like a producer, had become a movie star.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n The years since have generated their share of transformative tumult in Hollywood (VHS, DVD, cable, etc.), but the hysteria tamps down the minute the industry figures out how to exploit the menacing competition as a new revenue stream. The major exception, of course, came not from the introduction of a rival entertainment platform but from the quite literal plague that shut down theaters and hobbled production in 2020. Anyone who thinks 2023 was a bad year has a very short memory. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n Since you ask, my own candidate for Hollywood\u2019s annus horribilis maximus<\/em> is 1948, a year that smacked the industry senseless with three roundhouse blows \u2014 technological, \u00a0economic, and political.\u00a0The first intimations of dislocation came on Tuesday nights when exhibitors in the New York area began noticing a statistically terrifying correlation between empty theaters and NBC\u2019s Texaco Star Theatre<\/em>, a variety show featuring a heretofore no-billed vaudeville clown named Milton Berle. \u201cIf we have a good picture to show our customers on Tuesday nights, we don\u2019t even know that Berle is alive,\u201d scoffed exhibitor Walter Reade Jr., in nothing-to-see-here mode.\u00a0He was not prophetic.<\/p>\n

\n The news got worse. On May 3, 1948, a long-postponed reckoning came due when the Supreme Court issued the Paramount Decree, which ruled that the vertically integrated system whereby the same studio entity owned the means of production, distribution, and exhibition, was a monopoly in restraint of trade. (The DOJ first filed the case in 1938, another reason it was not Motion Pictures\u2019 Greatest Year.) Former Supreme Court Justice James F. Byrnes had pled the case for the studios, arguing that the motion picture industry had \u201cits back to the wall and is fighting for its life.\u201d Unmoved, the courts and the DOJ ordered the \u201cdivorcement\u201d of production from exhibition. <\/p>\n

\n At The<\/em> Hollywood Reporter<\/em>, editor-publisher Billy Wilkerson issued a mark-my-words warning that turned out to be prescient. \u201cTheater divorcement will change every department of the motion pictures,\u201d he said. \u201cIt will cause an entire business revolution within our industry.\u201d The vaunted \u201cgenius of the system\u201d \u2014 what the French called\u00a0the quality control of the factory that was classical Hollywood cinema \u2014 could not exist without the economic structure that sustained it. (In 2020, having second thoughts, the DOJ terminated the Paramount Decree.)<\/p>\n

\n Finally, 1948 was also the first full year of the enforcement of the Hollywood blacklist, mandated by the studio heads after the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings into alleged communist subversion in Hollywood in October 1947. In 1922, the \u201cundesirable men and women\u201d in Hollywood had to sign contracts with morality clauses; in 1948, they had to sign loyalty oaths.<\/p>\n

\n Cumulatively, the onslaughts from TV, the DOJ, and HUAC created a misery index high enough to rank it on any list of the Worst Movie Year Ever. On the other hand, pace Orson Welles, 1948 was also the dateline for John Huston\u2019s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre<\/em>,\u00a0Howard Hawks\u2019s Red River<\/em>, and, getting in just under the anti-communist gun, Abraham Polansky\u2019s Force of Evil<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n Taking the long view then, 2023, is, at best, a so-so candidate in the superlative badness sweepstakes.\u00a0 Of course, 2024 could be worse, but, in the spirit of the time of year, it seems more appropriate to wish that \u2014 in Hollywood and elsewhere \u2014\u00a0the next year is the annus optimus<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A favorite parlor game for film buffs is to pick Hollywood\u2019s greatest year and then argue. The obvious answer \u2014 1939, the certified Golden Year \u2014 always gets the most votes, but a few eccentrics make the case for a dark horse.\u00a01928 was Peter Bogdanovich\u2019s choice, the year that saw the apotheosis of silent film…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":602229,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/GettyImages-200495655-001-copy.jpg?w=1024","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[134361],"class_list":["post-602228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-hollywood-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/602229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}