So, what is the sound of one critic "in conversation"? We've all come a little closer to answering that ancient riddle this week.
On Tuesday, as part of its Summer Movies "issue," Slate launched a conversation between its resident film critic, David Edelstein, and Wall Street Journal film critic [and this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism], Joe Morgenstern. Just one problem, Joe was a no-show. His silence was, as they say, deafening.
So, come Friday, Edelstein gamely rejoined the fray of one:
If anyone out there has a line on what really happened, operators are standing by in the comments.
Meanwhile, can we just all take a moment to mourn what might have been? In his opening post, Edelstein got at what makes Morgenstern the guy you want to hear from about the changing landscape of summer blockbusters, then and now:
You were a critic before and after the changeover (with a break in between to work in the industry), so your anecdotes might be more illuminating than mine. But here are two conversations I remember most vividly. In January 1988, I was at the Sundance Film Festival, where producer Gale Anne Hurd was on the jury. She couldn't believe what she was hearing from Hollywood about the cost of Die Hard. For one thing, Bruce Willis had been paid $6 million. Unprecedented! And for a television actor! Of course, certain infamous super agents took this as their cue to demand more and more money for their clients: Two years later, even Willis' wife, Demi Moore, was earning $12 million a picture (and those pictures were bombing).
The other anecdote involves Elvis Mitchell, who had a job at Paramount in the early '90s. One day he told me, with a little sneer, that executives there referred to Star Trek as "the franchise." I laughed derisively. The franchise! A franchise is a McDonald's, a True Value Hardware! Movies aren't franchises! Less than a decade later, the term "franchise" was used openly. A top executive at Warner Bros. earnestly explained to reporters that he wanted the studio to be in the franchise business exclusively—hence Batman, Harry Potter, etc. It reminded me of another story I heard, that in the '90s a studio conducted an expensive marketing study to determine which kinds of films were the most consistently profitable—the theory being that then it would only make that kind of movie. Months later, the answer came back. Yes, there was one type of film that did consistently better: sequels.
And as that chilling image fades to black, roll credits on "the people who ruined the movies," a noble failure. We can only hope that Edelstein & Morgenstern 2: Electric Boogaloo is already in preproduction.
*If one has a subscription, that is. It's not in the WSJ business plan to give that stuff away.
