Is this a dumbing down of the masses? I don’t think so, it’s more an outright extinction of the old-school cinematic experience and a sucker punch to cultural perseverance. People now go to the movies for a different kind of experience. The culture has drastically shifted to television.
Soderbergh saw the writing on the wall, telling an audience at the San Francisco International Film Festival, “The meetings have gotten pretty weird. There are fewer and fewer executives who are in the business because they love movies. There are fewer and fewer executives that know movies… You’ve got people who don’t know movies and don’t watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you’re going to be allowed to make.”
So what can talented filmmakers, whose names aren’t Tarantino, Nolan and Scorsese, do to continue working and exploring new avenues without having their art compromised? How about migrate to television, which has turned into a better-suited setting for their artistic needs.
“The sad thing,” says HBO programming chief Michael Lombardo, “is that a world has closed to a group of serious storytellers—and there are some stories that should be told in a two-hour format. Our success is a sort of silver lining in a story that’s economically driven by what studios are doing to try to survive in a complicated international market. But the losers ultimately are people who are looking to appreciate serious work in film.”
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