Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Is the cinema, as writers from David Denby to Susan Sontag have claimed, really dead? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, films are better than ever—we just can’t see the good ones. Movie Wars cogently explains how movies are packaged, distributed, and promoted, and how, at every stage of the process, the potential moviegoer is treated with contempt. Using examples ranging from the New York Times ’s coverage of the Cannes film festival to the anticommercial practices of Orson Welles, Movie Wars details the workings of the powerful forces that are in the process of ruining our precious cinematic culture and heritage, and the counterforces that have begun to fight back.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Media Tie In, Politics, Criticism, American, Conspiracy Theories

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Nate D]

On the vertically integrated production-marketing-journalism system of American cinema. I'd rather read Rosenbaum more talking directly about films he cares about than the apparatuses around them (as he does in a few essays here), but any of his film writing is worth a look.

[Andrewh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rosenbaum is one of the best film critics working but this book is a real old cut and paste job, basically a compiliation of some of his articles in the Chicago Reader and elsewhere. The main argument, as such, is that, pace 'mainstream' critics such as David Thomson and David Denby, cinema is not in decline. Clearly, Hollywood cinema has been in severe decline since the end of the golden era of the 70s (usually marked by the success of Star Wars and the emergence of a new marketing of films to younger, supposedly less discriminating audiences), but Rosenbaum wants to argue that world cinema (that is, non-Hollywood film) is in grat shape but - and this is the key issue - US audiences are prevented from seeing these films by the PR/marketing machine, which tries to dictate their taste. The argument is usually made that US audiences don't like subtitled arthouse movies, but JR says that this is not subtantiated and that these movies are never given a chance. It may be true, but the reality is that most people would watch such films on the readily available DVDs now, and arthouse cinema is almost dead in most cities, even in 'cultured' Europe. The wider, more Chomskyan, argument is that Hollywood is part of a brainwashing cultural machine that excludes any oppositional voices, and culturally isolates the US in the world, which leads to its pernicious foreign policies. I am not sure that this was any less true in the golden era of 1940s/50s Hollywood, though. His film criticism is generally very acute but this is not really a book with a coherent argument to make.

[Sadra · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتابی خوب از جاناتان رزنبام منتقد آمریکایی که روشن‌گر نکات قابل توجه زیادی درباره رسانه‌ها و سلسله مراتب شرکت‌های توزیع فیلم است. به عنوان مثال جریان به اصطلاح مستقلی که تهیهٔ آثار آن را میرامکس انجام می‌دهد و در جشنواره به اصطلاح مستقل ساندنس توفیق می‌یابند را مورد انتقاد قرار می‌دهد. همین طور از فیلم‌های مستقل و مجهور نام می‌برد و به راستی در این زمینه آگاهی بخش است.

اما دربارهٔ ترجمه فارسی باید گفت که به طرز وحشتناکی ایرادات ویرایشی دارد. از غلط‌های املایی («پرتقال» نوشتن کشور پرتغال) گرفته تا استفادهٔ بی‌مورد و بیش از اندازه از ایتالیک و ایرانیک تؤامان... جا انداختن فاصله‌ها و چسبیدن کلمه‌ها و موارد خیلی زیاد این چنینی. از همۀ این‌ها که بگذریم، از بدسلیقگی در نوشتن عناوین فیلم‌ها (که در چنین کتابی کم هم نیستند و اهمیت بالایی هم دارند) به این صورت که به اصطلاح مصطلح «فینگلیش» نوشته شده‌اند و نه فارسی‌اند و نه انگلیسی... نمی‌توان گذشت. در این کتاب مهم است که فیلم‌های نام‌برده را پیدا کرده و تماشا کرد یا درموردشان خواند یا... اما با این وضع حتی خواندن نام آن‌ها مشکل بزرگی شده است. مثلاً به جای «د ایدیتز» که در کتاب آورده شده، باید یا ترجمۀ نام فیلم بیاید (که کار سختی هم نباید باشد فهمیدم اینکه این فیلم در ایران به عنوان «احمق‌ها» شناخته شده است) و در پانویس یا در پیوستی در آخر کتاب نام اصلی فیلم به انگلیسی بیاید: The Idiots.
این فقط یک مثال بود از صدها فیلمی که رزنبام در کتاب نام برده و خواننده لازم است بداند که مؤلف درباره چه حرف می‌زند.
مخلص کلام... نمی‌دانم شخصی که به عنوان ویراستار کتاب از آن در شناسه نام برده شده چه کرده‌است؛ اما در چاپ‌های آتی ناشر باید توجه داشته باشد که کتاب نیازمند یک ویراستاری اساسی است.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See (A Capella Books, 2000)

I am enough of a film geek to have a favorite critic, and that is Jonathan Rosenbaum. About five years ago I discovered a website called They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, which keeps a list of the top thousand movies ever made, based on heuristics applied to a large number of surveys of film critics (the only thing I know for sure is that more recent surveys count more). The idea of a list of a thousand movies intrigued me, and I started searching out these lists and compiling them into a big spreadsheet. As of now, I have eleven of them. Many are compilations put together by many critics, as TSPDT's list is. But I heartily agree with Roger Ebert's manifesto against IMDB's Top 250, which posits the alternative sentiment that such a list compiled by a particular person allows for the jagged edges and anomalies that are elided by compilation lists. So I'm already predisposed to lists of this type put together by single critics. Of those, I have four so far, from Scaruffi, Thomson, Yamann, and Rosenbaum. As I've gone through the lists over the years and watched a number of the 3,811 films to be found there, I've discovered that Rosenbaum's list is by far the closest to my tastes; I've discovered a huge number of wonderful films I might never have seen before had I not discovered that list. (A representative sampling of films on Rosenbaum's list that don't appear on any of the others I now adore: The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, The Mysterious Object at Noon, Passionless Moments, The Tracker, A Great Day in Harlem, and Deep Cover, and to mention two I already loved before Rosenbaum alone called them out, Hammett and Martin.) And I still have so much to discover on that list. Some of it because my god, who has time to watch a thousand films in five years if one is not a professional reviewer?, and because despite some of the things I talk about below, the thesis of Rosenbaum's delightful, if somewhat dated, polemic Movie Wars still holds true: despite the fact that it's so much easier to find world cinema these days than it was in 2000, there's still so much that's simply nowhere to be found.

Rosenbaum's thesis, as the subtitle tell you, is that the American studio system, which (understandably) treats films as a business first and foremost, is inherently inimical to anything and anyone who treats films in any other way. As in, say, simply loving them because they're films, as Rosenbaum does. Towards the end of the book, he says something like “I don't care what you do with the big mainstream releases as long as you allow me and my friends to go off in the corner and do our own thing, and we can't as of now.” (I apologize for my horrid paraphrasing; I've gone back through the book, which I couldn't highlight because I got it from the library, and I can't find the exact quote. I'm convinced it's somewhere in Chapter 9...) And he's absolutely right. It wasn't long at all after this book was released that the minor scandal was uncovered of studios who were planning remakes of Asian horror films buying the American distribution rights to those films and refusing to release them on Region 1 DVDs until those same American remakes were released. Surprise: Rosenbaum covers that exact scenario in this book, with Harvey Weinstein as the criminal. (Rosenbaum harbors a special hatred, it seems, for Weinstein's black heart. For different reasons than I do—or than I did, before reading this—but all the same. [My beef with Harvey is his insistence that all Miramax features clock in as close to ninety minutes as possible, which much of the rest of the Hollywood machine has copied, thus destroying the possibility of us finding an American version of Bela Tarr, at least anywhere in Hollywood. Could Costner have even managed to make Dances with Wolves, as awful as it is, only ten years after he actually did? The magic 8-ball says not likely.])

And while this book is well worth reading for the sake of reading it, because Rosenbaum is an excellent writer indeed, and one is liable to come up with any number of film recommendations one doesn't already have unless one has hunted down his thousand-films list, the astute film buff will likely start thinking “that's no longer true.” early on, and that feeling will never let up. The reason: the internet. Rosenbaum mentions at least twice the near-impossibility of finding a VCR in America in the eighties that could play PAL/SECAM videos. When I went looking for an all-region DVD player in the early 2000s, while they were “unofficial” and you had to use software hacks to unlock region-freedom, I found one within hours, for about twenty bucks, and suddenly my library of Region 2 British TV comedy and Regions 2/3 Asian horror were suddenly viewable. As a side note, despite most if not all of those discs now being available natively, I still have my region 2 and 3 discs. I hold a grudge for a long, long time, and Disney's not getting a cent out of me to replace any of those with Region 1 DVDs. Why should I?

More to the point, file-sharing, as uncouth a topic as it may be, is making things available one can't even find on DVD. In many cases, despite what all those “don't steal movies!” ads found in your local multiplex want you to believe, this is entirely intentional, either because a particular movie has been banned somewhere in the world (official versions of both Grotesque, banned in England in 2009, and A Serbian Film, banned in Australia in 2010 [and again in 2011 after being recut to the Aussie film board's standards, to rub salt into the wound!], were published to the Internet by the studios themselves to get around the censorship) or because it's simply not available for the reasons Rosenbaum delves into in this book. If you're an American, there's at least a chance you've seen the late Edward Yang's Yi Yi, which not only got a surprisingly wide theatrical release here for a subtitled film, but shows up on a fairly regular basis on some of the wider-reaching film channels (IFC and Sundance). And if you're aware of Yang, you've probably googled him once or twice and found that true film buffs around the world, as well as the few American critics who have been lucky enough to see it, consider A Brighter Summer Day to be Yang's best film, or at least one of his best. (Since I'm already talking about my thousand-best compendium, A Brighter Summer Day appears on six of those lists, including Rosenbaum's [in fact, Rosenbaum lists it as one of his hundred favorite films]. Pertinently, four of those lists are either exclusively written by or mainly comprised of foreign critics.) As I write this, I have unofficial word from Criterion that a DVD release of A Brighter Summer Day, presumably a 20th-anniversary edition of some sort, is planned for 2011; it will be the first domestic release of what one can only say is widely-regarded in the film world as a major modern classic. In order to see it between its 1991 debut and now, given that even overseas it's been out of print for a while in a lot of countries, your best shot was a wobbly VHS-AVI transfer that's been traded by net-enabled cinephiles for the past decade or so. That's how I saw it. When the studios tell you “don't download movies!” in the trailers, they're all about not wanting you to download the stuff you can go to your local redbox and rent anyway. That is, after all, what Rosenbaum is saying here: if it's not what the studios consider a marketable resource, they don't care. If they did, we wouldn't have had to wait twenty years for a film critics across the globe consider a masterpiece. (Why was it never released here? It's three and a half hours long. I may not be right to entirely blame Harvey's ninety-minutes-and-out stance, but I'd bet this week's paycheck on that being a big part of it.)

I rush to add that the Internet has not cured all the world's filmic ills, not by a longshot. Of course, there's the difference between film and video, which Rosenbaum talks about extensively here. I know I'll never get to see A Brighter Summer Day in 35mm. (For modern features, though, I do think this is somewhat mitigated by the rise of filming directly on video, viz. Danny Boyle, or to use Rosenbaum's own example, Thomas Vinterberg; whether it's transferred to film later or not, it's still video. I also wonder about the use of DVD projection in cinemas, which is definitely on the rise; may have to email him about that.) To be entirely honest, I never really thought much about the differences between film and video, other than the size of the screen on which they're played and the ways in which the transfer to DVD manages to screw up the sound mix on about 99% of the DVDs I've ever watched—the voice is always far too low and the special effects too loud. (If you want almost cartoonishly exaggerated examples of this, rent Nine Dead Gay Guys and Faust: Love of the Damned, two movies whose sound mix was competent theatrically but was so awful in transfer I knocked stars off my rating.) And then there are the movies that no one ever seems to have thought to put on DVD that no one ever did a VHS-AVI transfer for. Do you know how long I spent looking for a copy of Memories of Underdevelopment (this time thanks to TSPDT's list; Rosenbaum omits it) before it finally showed up on DVD a couple of years ago? You don't want to, you'd think I was an obsessive nut. Well, you probably do anyway, but still.

And, of course, the 'net found me TSPDT, which led me to Rosenbaum's list, which led me to Rosenbaum's book, which I have not spent nearly enough of this review talking about. (For the record: this link will not survive at Amazon, where all external links are cut, but for those of you reading it on a site not full of censorious assholes, you can find Rosenbaum's list of 1000 essential films here: http://www.alsolikelife.com/FilmDiary....)

I was about to start the next sentence “So I'll go back to talking about Movie Wars”, but then I remembered one other piece of the book that's since been validated: Rosenbaum suggests (outright states at least once, if I recall) that the American public's tolerance for subtitles is a whole lot greater than the American studio system suggests. That hypothesis has been very well validated by three Hollywood studio productions since the book was written: Cary Fukunaga's Sin Nombre in 2009 and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto in 2004 and 2006 respectively. All were created within the system, and no one spoke a word of English in any of them. All made their budgets back at the box office (and obviously The Passion did significantly better), which is how Hollywood measures success, no? We should note that Sin Nombre, the top film in Ben Mankiewicz' Best of 2009 list, did so while showing on a maximum of eighty-three screens (both of the Gibson features maxed out at over 2,500). Hey Hollywood, can I have my Takeshi Kitano movies on the big screen now, please?

Okay, so now I'll go back to talking about Movie Wars. Not that there's really much else to say; if you're an American film buff, you want to read this book. Rosenbaum points out a whole lot of things that you may have never thought of, and his righteous indignation at such things as Miramax's buy-and-hoard attitude toward foreign films, as discussed above, is a joy, not to mention the kind of thing one doesn't normally find in film books not written exclusively for the academic market. And if you're one who's interested in what's going on cinema outside our borders—Rosenbaum writes in his self-interview afterword that he wants to believe most American film buffs “want to be citizens of the world”—then not only will you get a number of awesome recommendations for stuff you may not have ever heard of (I'll give you one of Rosenbaum's tips: as of 2000, anyway, he believed Abbas Kiarostami was the best director working in the world at the time, and when you consider the passion of his writing about, for example, Hsiao-Hsien Hou in earlier chapters, that really says something), but you'll learn a good deal about how he thinks we view the rest of the world, and how he thinks the rest of the world views us. “To me, what's surprising is not [the fact that “during the first two months of its run, twenty-one million French viewers have seen Titanic”], but the large number of people there [over eight million] who went to see a strictly non-Hollywood feature [Asterix and Obelix Contre Cesar, which opened the same weekend].” (p. 214) Personally, I think the latter had something to do with the great Gerard Depardieu playing Obelix. And I will note, with grim amusement, that Asterix and Obelix Contre Cesar is to this day not available in America. ****

[Lucas Foster]

For cineastes only!

[Evan Pincus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part impassioned and optimistic plea for film critics to respect their audience rather than serving the interests of the “movie-industrial complex,” part anthology of iconic Rosenbaumian sarcasm. Well worth the read - Rosenbaum is fun to engage with in ways many less insightful critics aren’t.

[Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is fascinating both for it's well argued points and it's view of the historical moment in which it was released (2000). While Rosenbaum almost certainly wrote this book after reaching a critical mass of frustration at the state of American movies, his negativity can get the better of him at times. Nevertheless, most of the points he makes are well researched and valid. Fortunately, the book is actually a bit outdated: since 2000 the explosion of the internet, the rise of online BitTorrent sites, Netflix, and an ever expanding globalization have helped to vastly improve the awareness and availability of some of the films and filmmakers he champions (and many more). However, it serves as a great history lesson to take a second look at how certain events and films were covered by the press and how they were distributed, if only to make us always think twice about what we are reading and seeing.

[Nathan Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rosenbaum's been one of my favorite film writers since I first encountered him as a teenager, but I've never read any of his longer-form works. This probably wasn't the ideal one to start with, as it's really a compilation of several polemics he put down regarding the general state of cinema as of the late 1990s; a lot of his points, especially about the way that Hollywood studios cordon off and restrict esoteric films, are still valid, while some are specific to the era. (For example, accessibility itself is less of a problem now -- with the vast majority of films relatively easy to access online, legally or illegally -- than advancement of audience education and knowledge.) And he proves prophetic in his broadsides against Miramax and Harvey Weinstein. The book's a pleasure to read, but its thesis is convoluted in the sense that it doesn't really have one. (There's a whole chapter about Orson Welles' career, which is superb but only tangentially related to his ostensible main point.) What he really seems to want to do is complain about other film critics, most of whom (especially David Denby; I have a soft spot for his favorite target Janet Maslin, but mostly because of her music writing -- I don't think she knows that much about cinema or literature) deserve it. The whole last chapter is a self-written Q&A criticizing the rest of the book. So it's a pleasure to read and a delightful performance, especially if you're in the mood for some grousing and some generally unimpeachable prose and passion, but there are better ways to encounter Rosenbaum. I'm glad I've got something of his on the shelf now, though, and I'll follow up quickly with one of his more coherent efforts.

[James Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

All of Rosenbaum's tics are here: name-dropping, contrariness, paper-thin political justifications for all of his whims of taste. Still, 20 years later what sticks out is how right he is about virtually everything (especially Harvey Weinstein). All of his targets deserve it, all of his nastiness is justified, and the films and filmmakers he champions really are wonderful. Reading this in the era of hegemonic poptimism was productive: it turns out that reactionary poptimism was always hegemonic but critics now are just way less embarrassed about how incurious they are.

[Dan Spaventa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great critic's blistering and prescient takedown of Hollywood's waning interest in making compelling movies. His obliteration of the AFI Top 100 list and comparison of reactions to Small Soldiers and Saving Private Ryan were my favorite sections.

[Meshach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rosenbaum's argument is very sound. It's unfortunate that as American audiences aren't provided with films that are obsure or foreign. I wish the studio system appealed more to niches than a wide audience. We would be able to see more thought-proving cinema and not just accessible blockbusters

[James]

Peter Bradshaw

[Jez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haven't you heard, Hollywood has got mad cow disease? Mr. Rosenbaum single handedly takes on Hollywood and, well, doesn't win, obviously. He does however strike a blow, albeit a meagre one, for filmmakers of foreign and non-mainstream films everywhere and for U.S. audiences who - despite the claims made by Hollywood to the contrary - don't just want to watch the dull, patronising, pedestrian fare that they allegedly deserve. The author puts forward a strong case for American moviegoers being open to, and interested in the wider world, and that the stranglehold of the Hollywood Mafia and their nincompoop soldier/critics of the 'two thumbs up, way up' variety have been actively supressing that interest for decades in the pursuit of the Hollydollar. The notions that U.S. audiences cannot, will not watch subtitled films, black and white films or anything that is not directed by one of Steven Spielberg's acolytes are shown up as the standard absurdist rhetoric the critics of such esteemed publications of The New Yorker expound on a regular basis. If you like to feel smug by reading said publication you may feel like a bit of a tit after reading this.

[Ally McCulloch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally finished Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See by Jonathan Rosenbaum. It was brilliant. Any book about film will be outdated, however, there is a really problem with being limited in trying to find foreign films in this country. Blame it on lack of interest from the masses. Blame it on ignorant film critics. Blame it on distributors. Rosenbaum ultimately places the responsibility with each individual. I'll take the challenge to promote real cinema and to ignore Hollywood's machine. Who cares about the films that are an insult to intelligent people?

[Kristy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look at the film industry and an exploration of why so many movies are crappy, why the good movies we want to see never play in our town, and why the media and the film industry blames all of that on us. Are the masses really so dumb? This is a collection of articles and essays that Rosenbaum published elsewhere, with some editing and the addition of an introduction and conclusion to tie it all together -- occasionally repetitive, but most of his arguments are worth hearing more than once.

[Eric Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provocative and impassioned, but J.Ro also comes off as harmlessly cantankerous at the precise moments when he evidently thinks he's at his most hard-hitting, and he sometimes tilts his lance towards the dread man-o-straw arguments (you could make a drinking game of it: tip one back upon each reference to the Miramax/Weinstein empire).

[Patrick J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of the essays are collected at Jonathanrosenbaum.com, but still... having them available consecutively makes it easier to connect Mr. Rosenbaum's thoughts on Mass Media organization. I can't think of a better contemporary American writer dedicated to film.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a slut for Jonathan Rosenbaum, and this was the book that led me to him.

[Mitch Anderson]

come for the discussion on modern critical discourse and examination of the studio/audience/critic relationship, stay for the HOT TAKES and BEEF