List in the Pocket
With both a year and a decade now drawing to a close, the number of lists indicating the best and the most seems greater than ever. So pronounced, in fact, is this listomania concerning the 80s that in many cases it had already moved into full gear by late October, while the decade still had a good nine or ten weeks to go. The Tribune’s Sunday arts section, for example, got its critics to come up with their ten-best lists for the 80s in time for an October 22 publication date, while the movie magazines Premiere and American Film, which plan their issues much further in advance, hit the stands with their own hit parades in early November.
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Once upon a time, a “turkey” was a bad film, and a movie that lost money was a “bomb.” This was certainly true in 1980, when Harry and Michael Medved published The Golden Turkey Awards. It was even true in 1985, when the same Medved brothers brought out Son of Golden Turkey Awards. Back in those days of yore, calling a movie a turkey was a matter of taste and opinion, and tastes and opinions differed widely. (The Medveds, for instance, included both Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, two of my own favorites, in their first book, The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.)
Baseline’s list of top turkeys, however, refers strictly to box-office performance, suggesting that taste and opinion have finally given way to the bottom line. This is part of a much broader trend that also includes widespread public interest in the weekly list of box-office grosses (the 80s version of a popularity poll), which is now a regular feature in many newspapers. As far as our mainstream media seem to be concerned, the effect of a film that really matters is not whether it changes minds, hearts, or lives, but whether or not it makes a few millionaires richer. This appears to be the underlying assumption, at any rate, of most of the entertainment “coverage” (i.e., free advertising) that currently clogs the media–an unprecedented atmosphere of hype in which a TV show like Entertainment Tonight is almost as prominent as the evening news preceding it, and in which “commercial-free” cable TV is as devoted to hawking the latest releases as the networks are to selling beer and automobiles.
Heaven’s Gate (1980)
Empire of the Sun (1987)
For purposes of contrast, let’s look at the ten movies of the 80s that, according to Variety, made the most money–a list that, like the preceding list of Baseline’s, doesn’t include any of this year’s releases (because they’re still counting those grosses):
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
