When Hollywood Did It Right: Silence of the Lambs

The Hollywood "Programmer" meets Hannibal Lechter

EPISODE ONE: PREDATOR

EPISODE TWO: THE FIRM

EPISODE THREE: THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

Back in the 80’s and 90’s when the Hollywood movie studios were releasing multiple wide release movies every weekend… back when there was still a ravenous demand for theatrically released movies, this was… Hollywood developed a term for the kind of mid-range genre movies that consistently made the studios money, but which no one expected would change the world. These were the kinds of films that were intended as entertaining diversions for Americans to see on Friday nights outside of the big vacation release windows of the summer and at Christmastime, and not much more.

Typically these were thrillers, horror movies, sci-fi or contained action movies. They featured constrained budgets, second-tier movie stars and reliable workmanlike directors who were either young, talented and on-the-come (think Jim Cameron making “The Terminator”), or solid veterans who had consistently delivered profitable movies on time and under budget (Think John McTiernan in his “Thomas Crown Affair” period or Phil Kaufman directing ‘Rising Sun”).

When describing one of these movies a Hollywood executive would typically say “it’s a Programmer.” What this meant was, “it’s fun, and it’ll probably make money, but it’s not going to win anybody an Oscar or dominate the box office for twelve weeks.”

In the roughly two decades that we generally think of as the peak blockbuster period, call it 1977-2000, Holywood made literally hundreds of these “Programmers.” Most had their run and were quickly forgotten by the audiences who (mostly) enjoyed them, never to be spoken of again except in those frustrating conversations between couples who know they’ve seen that actor they’re watching on TV before but can’t remember exactly where and “oh, hey honey, I think he was in that movie we saw that one night when we were visiting my family in Tulsa six years ago… remember? What was that movie called?”

But every now and then, once in a blue moon, a “Programmer” would scale the heights and become something like art.

“Silence of the Lambs” has that feel of a classic “Programmer” which defied gravity and rose high above its station. The first clue is its release date… February 21st, 1991. February has traditionally been Hollywood’s dumping ground. It’s cold across much of the nation, the holidays have come and gone, and Americans of all stripes are glumly staring down the barrel of a long cold winter. No one is in a great mood and there’s no more difficult time of year to get people up and out of the house and into theaters. Hollywood typically avoids releasing their surefire winners during this period for fear they will underperform in the cold darkness of mid-winter.

But they have to release something. As the COVID lockdowns taught us, customers will quickly lose a habit like going to the theater if they aren’t given a reason to do so consistently. One way or another, Hollywood needs to release movies every weekend of the year. February has always been “Programmer” territory, and in 1991, “Silence of the Lambs” got the call.

“Lambs”, like many “Programmers”, was also what we commonly refer to here in Tinseltown as a “one quadrant movie”, meaning the audience for a very dark, violent serial killer movie is small and comprised mostly of a single demographic quadrant… in this case, young men.

The secret hope of every Hollywood executive then, as now, was that they might catch lightning in a bottle… that their “one quadrant” movie might break out and find a wider audience… that somehow, someway, their little “Programmer” might become an instant classic, make back many multiples of its budget and put that executive in line to run the studio one day.

It didn’t happen often… but it did happen.

But in order for that to happen, a movie needed to find lightning in a bottle not just once, but three times… with the actors, the script and the filmmaking. Often you get one or two. But it was, and is, rare to hit the jackpot on all three. “Silence of the Lambs” managed to pull off that elusive trifecta.

THE MOVIE STARS

Casting a movie is never an exact science, but it’s even less so with a “Programmer”… rather, it’s more like a kind of alchemy. The nature of a “Programmer” is such that you often do not have the kind of budget that allows for the casting of a giant movie star, much less two.

The process is best described as “one plus one equals three”, where the studio looks to hire two “lesser” stars in the hopes that when they appear on screen together, through a kind of silver screen magic that is hard to predict and impossible to explain, the chemistry of these two lesser stars together turns them into something more popular or desirable than the box office value of either actor on their own.

A good example of this phenomenon were the handful of profitable “Programmers” Paramount made in the 90’s by pairing Ashley Judd with a series of older stars like Tommy Lee Jones and Morgan Freeman. But it’s hard to think of a case where the “one plus one equals three” gamble worked better than it did with the unlikely combination of Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. Neither actor was a big movie star as far as the broader Friday night movie-going audience in 1991 was concerned. Nor was either actor previously known for this kind of darkly violent psychological thriller.

And yet when they appeared together on screen, in this movie, and in these roles, a kind of magic happened which resulted in one of the most famous pairings of the modern movie era, one which made both Foster and Hopkins bankable stars in their own right.

THE FILMMAKER

To the extent that “Silence of the Lambs” elevates itself to art, a lot of the credit for that achievement must go to the director Jonathan Demme, who resisted at every turn the walk-and-talk style of the typical crime thriller. As a result, the entire film is filled with iconic shots and sequences that are remembered vividly by almost everyone who has seen the movie, even if it was only once during its initial release.

The best example of the filmmaking genius Demme brought to “Lambs” would become one of the the great misdirects in cinematic history. You already know the one I mean… The FBI has finally identified the killer’s home and dispatched the Hostage Rescue Team to that location. An agent rings the doorbell as dozens of heavily armed agents stand nearby and out-of-sight, ready to crash through the windows and doors. In Buffalo Bill’s basement torture room a doorbell alarm begins to howl as his latest victim screams from the bottom of the viscera-splattered well where she’s being held. Bill angrily stalks up the stairs and opens his front door to reveal… not the HRT, but Agent Starling, who does not yet know who the man at the door really is. It is, perhaps, the perfect execution of Hitchcock’s “bomb under the table” strategem.

But while this may be the most memorable of Demme’s magic tricks, the movie is full of great moments both big and small. The first appearance of Lechter in his cage, separated from Starling by a thick plexiglass wall pockmarked with air holes. Lechter in his straight-jacket and “Friday the 13th” style hockey mask on the airport tarmac taunting Senator Martin. Sergeant Boyle hanging from Lechter’s cage like “Winged Victory”, backlit and disembowled. And of course, the infamous Buffalo Bill “tuck” sequence.

Even subtle touches like the creepy low-pitched sigh on the soundtrack as the M.E. removes the butterfly cocoon from the dead girls throat, and again the first time we see Lechter in his Jason Vorhees mask. These are the kind of little details that add to the audience’s subconscious unease and elevate the horror of the film.

But also, watch the way in which Demme shot the sequence where Starling and her friend Ardelia (Kasi Lemmons) work through Lechter’s clues and realize why Fredrica Bimmel was Bill’s first victim. Demme has the actresses speak directly into the camera in extremely tight closeups as they trade lines of dialogue. The closer the two women get to the answer, the tighter and more straight-on the shots become, until they are jarring, almost uncomfortable. It has the effect of bringing us into the conversation in a way that is unnervingly intimate, like we are becoming a part of a conversation we weren’t mean to hear.

In the modern movie environment where the old showbiz adage that you should “show not tell” has been completely upended and reversed as part of a general dumbing down of content, the scene where Lechter “wakes up” in the ambulance and removes Pembry’s face from his own as the camera hard cuts to Ardelia running silently down a long hallway as the soundtrack pounds away underneath her seems almost quaint in the way it invites the audience to understand that the news of Lechter’s escape has just broken without having to film each of the film’s major characters hearing the news in person.

This is classic, efficient old-fashioned filmmaking that seems in short supply here in a world where streaming audiences have to be kept constantly in the loop because they’re scrolling through their phones as they watch and only half paying attention to the story.

THE SCREENPLAY

Adapting a popular novel for the screen has an undeserved reputation for being an easy job. It is not. I’ve been around a lot of adaptations over the course of my career and even the ones that seem straightforward always get much more complicated the very moment you get under the hood. It’s impossible to include every crucial story point from a 100,000 word novel in a traditional two-hour, three-act film structure and figuring out what you must include and what you can let go is not as easy as it sounds.

Ted Tally’s screenplay adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel is brilliant. It won an Oscar for one thing, back when that actually meant something. Tally is a great structuralist and character builder, and his ability here to squeeze a complex criminal investigation and FBI pursuit into two hours while simultaneously building complex characters and developing an intense, almost romantic relationship between Starling and Lechter, all within an extremely limited amount of screenplay real estate is as good as it gets.

And since we spend a lot of time dunking on Hollywood’s addiction to woke messaging here at The Continental Congress, it’s worth noting that Tally takes time out of the story to make a political point about the struggles of women in traditionally male work spaces that is smart and pointed, and yet doesn’t come across as preachy modern political messaging.

At a West Virginia funeral for one of Buffalo Bill’s victims, Starling’s boss Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) puts the local Sheriff on his backfoot by subtly implying that he would prefer not to discuss such a sexually violent case in front of Starling because she is a woman. Later, while driving back to Quantico, Crawford senses that Starling is angry about the way he treated her… as someone “less than.”

Crawford: Starling, when I told that sheriff we shouldn't talk in front of a woman, that really burned you, didn't it? It was just smoke, Starling. I had to get rid of him.

Starling: It matters, Mr Crawford. Cops look at you to see how to act. It matters.

Crawford: Point taken.

And just like that, Starling completely changed Crawford’s thinking with respect to his female subordinates. Duly chastened, he won’t do that again. And lo and behold, no one had to be cancelled or reported to HR. This is how adults used to handle interpersonal problems at work back in the days before we all went crazy.

Subtly, in screenwriting as in life, is always better than whatever it is Hollywood is doing now.

As far as “Programmers” go, there are fewer opportunities for audiences to discover a “Silence of the Lambs” these days. Theaters used to be flooded with “Programmers” week in and week out, but sadly this is no longer the case. The reasons why are many and varied, but a big part of the problem is that the Holywood studios simply stopped buying them. If you bring a project like “Lambs” to the studios in 2024 what you’ll typically hear is something like “we can’t make these anymore, there are too many things like it on TV or at the streaming platforms and people won’t pay to see them in a theater anymore.”

The easy counter-point to that objection used to be movie star attachments. Historically, big stars wouldn’t do TV, and theaters were the only place where you could see them. A true movie star brought real value to a movie that you couldn’t get any other way. Shows like “Law & Order”, entertaining though they may be, simply could not complete with a young Jodie Foster going toe-to-toe with Anthony Hopkins… to say nothing of the truly incandescent stars like Arnold, Bruce, Gere, Julia, Cruise, Sly and Eddie.

But the star system is dead and it’s never coming back. Even the few big stars who remain do not protect their theatrical image the way they once did. Why pay to see George Clooney and Brad Pitt re-team in a theatrical film when you can stay home and watch “Wolfs” for free?

And you don’t even have to stop scrolling X while you watch.

Unfortunately, like the movie star system, I suspect that the elevated Hollywood “Programmer” isn’t coming back either. It’s a sad thing for those of us who love going to the movies, but as the man said, “I fight authority, authority always wins…”

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