I’m in the screenwriter business and so I can tell you with some authority that Robert Towne was a great screenwriter… one of the best to ever do it. Alongside the other titans of his era, he helped to define modern screenwriting. Sadly, there aren’t many of them left, now. And the kinds of movies they wrote have all but disappeared from theaters.
The movies written by guys like Towne were the first “adult” films I can remember falling in love with as a kid. Sure I loved “Star Wars”, “Jaws” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” too, but it was movies like “Chinatown”, “Apocalypse Now”, “Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” which taught me that there was a whole wide world of “Adult” stories, characters, dialogue and themes out there with which I could exercise my expanding mind. I didn’t know movies could be made like that. It felt like I’d been let in on a secret no one else knew.
But Towne was also a relic of a very different Hollywood, one that passed away a long time ago. Of his three eclectic seminal films, “The Last Detail”, “Chinatown” and “Shampoo”, only one (Chinatown) can plausibly be argued as a film that a Hollywood studio would make and release theatrically today, and I have my doubts about that one, too.
In reading about Towne’s storied career this week, I was shocked to discover that “Shampoo” grossed $50 million dollars domestically on a budget of $4 million in 1975. To put that in perspective, Alex Garland’s “Civil War” (technically not a studio movie it must be said) made $68 million on a $50 million budget. For those keeping track at home, that means “Civil War cost as much as “Shampoo” made, and the domestic upside on “Civil War” was a mere $18 million. Hardly seems worth it. And yet, “Civil War” was celebrated as a surprise hit and Hollywood breathed a collective sigh of relief as the movie (eventually) dragged itself into profitability.
“Shampoo” came at a time when the big Hollywood studios often made smaller more challenging movies for adults. That they don’t anymore can be blamed in large part on budgets. It’s impossible to make a studio movie star movie for $4 million dollars these days, or $40 million for that matter. It seems clear that the studios have concluded that the audience for movies like “Shampoo” either isn’t there anymore, or isn’t worth chasing given the cost of mounting a movie in the current environment. And so we have multiplexes flooded with an endless array of superhero movies, nostalgia animation and action franchises featuring guys who really are “too old for this shit.”
Once upon a time, modestly priced movies that made multiples of their budgets… movies like “Chinatown” and “Shampoo”… were the engine that drove the movie business. Modern Hollywood refers to these movies as “singles” and “doubles”, and just as in baseball, you need a lot of them between homeruns if you want to win. But these days, if the movie doesn’t cost at least $100 million to make, the studios just aren’t interested.
I once asked a studio head of production what kind of movies he was looking for and he said “I need billion dollar franchises.” I laughed until I realized he wasn’t kidding. This is the mentality of the Hollywood studios in 2024.
There’s little point complaining about this sad state of affairs. To do so risks being cast out of polite conversation via the “old man yells at cloud” principle, and in any case there’s nothing to be done about it. But it’s worth pointing out that there was a time when “Jaws” and Star Wars” existed alongside “The Last Detail” and “Shampoo”, and this was in indication that Hollywood was, once upon a time, a fully-diversified and healthy business. In the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, if one kind of movie suddenly stopped working at the box office, it didn’t matter, Hollywood had a million other kinds of movies waiting in the wings to pick up the slack.
Not so anymore. In the wake of the mass corporatization of Hollywood, the studio scales have tilted hard away from art towards commerce. Perhaps too far.
Now, there is nothing at all wrong with Hollywood summer blockbusters… I love them as much as the next guy. I’ll be at the theater for “Deadpool & Wolverine” along with everyone else on opening weekend, and I’ve written in these pages about how much I enjoyed “The Fall Guy”. which I also saw the weekend it opened. But sometimes I want something different. There’s generally not much to learn from a big action movie, no matter how much fun it may be. And sometimes I want to be challenged. Sometimes I want to think. Sometimes I want “All The President’s Men”, “Network”, “Bridge on the River Kwai”, “Chinatown”, “The Wild Bunch”, “Absence of Malice”, “M*A*S*H”, “The Magnificent Seven”, “The Shootist”, “Bad Day at Black Rock”, “Three Days of the Condor” or “Judgment at Nuremberg.”
So now tell me… which theater do I go to here in 2024 in order to find studio movies like that?
If we could ask Towne for his opinion on modern Hollywood, I’m certain he would echo many of the same studio criticisms I’ve made here, but I suspect he would reserve some blame for the audience as well.
In that spirit, last week I published this observation via “Substack Notes”:
This is the problem as I see it…
Hollywood announces a sequel or reboot
Everyone complains… “another sequel or reboot? Is Hollywood out of ideas? Give us something original!”
Hollywood releases “Argyle”, “Ungentlemanly Warfare”, “Boy Kills World” and “Horizon”
No one cares, no one goes and the movies bomb
Hollywood throws up its hands and greenlights another batch of sequels and reboots
Everyone complains… “another sequel or reboot? Is Hollywood out of ideas? Give us something original!”
Rinse and repeat…
To prove the point, I propose an experiment. Let’s all meet back here one crisp Fall day in mid-September… when we do, I think you’ll find that the biggest box office hits of the 2024 summer movie season will have been “Inside Out 2”, “Bad Boys 4’ and “Wolverine 8 meets Deadpool 6.”
So while it’s true on the one hand that corporate Hollywood only sems to want to make billion dollar franchise sequels and reboots rather than “singles” and “doubles”, it is also true that modern American audiences no longer have any appetite for the kind of movies that generally account for those “singles” and “doubles”, which is to say modestly-budgeted original movie star dramas and thrillers aimed at adults.
As a result, we have a Hollywood ecosystem that is almost totally depedent on one kind of movie (the four quadrant franchise blockbuster). And as any competent investor will tell you, that is not a recipe for long term financial success.
Forget it, Bobby… it’s Tinseltown.
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Nice tribute to Robert Towne. I have read Sam Wasson's "The Big Goodbye" and he has a lot to say about Towne as a screenwriter and a (flawed) man. I think the flawed man aspect is why you don't get real movies these days. We have to go through a generation or two of anointed flawless people as screenwriters before the whole thing collapses and we start over again with people who can write stories.
Hollywood has also killed the low and medium budget comedy. That’s why there are no more teen movies for young people to see in theaters. I could make 20 movies with the budget of one Marvel movie. American Pie cost 13 million and grossed 235 million worldwide. The biggest “Star” in the movie was Eugene Lévy. It spawned 3 sequels and made stars of at least three of the cast members. Not one studio would make it today. The list goes on and on. My kids love going to the movies but we are letting them down when it comes to comedy. It’s like the NBA. Everyone wants to shoot threes and they by pass an easy layup.