The Puttnam Problem
Hooray for Broadway
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By and large, it was a year characterized by technological achievements and refinements, particularly the elaborate doubling techniques that yielded two Lily Tomlins and two Bette Midlers on screen at once in Big Business, Jeremy Irons playing a pair of twins in Dead Ringers, Eddie Murphy impersonating a whole group of barbershop regulars in Coming to America, and Bob Hoskins interacting with animated characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. These roles obliged each actor to speak to empty space before the special effects were added, and the results were decidedly mixed. In the cases of Tomlin, Midler, and Murphy (the latter in multiple disguises), it seemed too often to be empty space that was speaking to the actors rather than the other way around. Irons, on the other hand, offered the year’s most astounding actorly tour de force by interacting with himself so seamlessly that, by around the halfway point in Dead Ringers, it was possible to tell which twin was which in a matter of seconds. And Bob Hoskins did a very persuasive job on his own in convincing us that Roger Rabbit was more than just a gleam in animator Richard Williams’s eye.
One of the most hopeful signs of the year was the commercial success of Wim Wenders’s trilingual Wings of Desire, if only because the popularity of subtitled films in the U.S. has never been lower. According to Rob Medich in the December issue of Premiere, the grosses for foreign-language films in 1987 “accounted for less than one-half of 1 percent of the $4 billion in movie ticket sales in the United States.” Medich went on to quote film school teacher Arnie Baskim: “Americans are only interested in themselves. So they’re only interested in foreign films if there’s an American lead in the foreground and a foreign locale in the background.”
American independents are currently experiencing a serious crunch for pretty much the same reason that foreign films are becoming more scarce: the studio majors are forcing them off the market. The media, of course, play a complicitous (and wholly undemocratic) role in this process. The sort of hoopla that routinely accompanies even many of the worst studio releases–including junkets for the press, guest appearances on Today, Carson, Letterman, etc, promotional shows on cable, and up-front treatment by TV and newspaper reviewers–is almost never given to low-budget independent efforts, no matter how good or important. Compare the minuscule amount of attention paid to a Jon Jost film or Coverup or Patti Rocks next to the monolithic fanfare that greets a piece of tripe like Arthur 2: On the Rocks. Instead of free and equal products competing in the marketplace, we have the sound of a mosquito struggling to be heard over the electronic amplification of the takeoff of a super-jet.
