When television captured the popular imagination of the 1950s, a rash of movies satirized Hollywood while also mythologizing it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
By 1951, television had already made such inroads on the income garnered by motion picture companies that the Golden Era which had prevailed until then was beginning to disintegrate. And by 1953, it had come to an end. Hollywood was a dismal, tragic place.
In the 1950s, we had all these B-grade science-fiction movies. The point was to scare the public and get them to buy popcorn. No attempt was made to create movies that were somewhat inherent to the truth.
I don't care about Hollywood films. I'm not against Hollywood films, you know? Hollywood films were very good before, in the 1950s.
The fact is that Hollywood, from as early as the sixties to the present time, has ghettoized cinema into the big industry, a marketing industry. In doing this, the audiences have lost touch with the aspects of film which were to be informative and educational and even spiritual.
In the 1950s we use to feel that television was taking away our comic readership; with today's exciting, powerfully visual movies I have to wonder about their effect on the kids' loyalty to the comic book medium all over again.
It's only in relatively recent years that Hollywood became the playground of multinational corporations which regard movies and TV shows as a minor irritant to their overall activity.
The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
I believe that movies are fast becoming antique and dinosauric as a medium. Film is a medium for the over-40s and television has gone the same way. If you're going to look towards the new generation, then of course you're going to have to be a lot more random, spontaneous, irreverent and provocative with your programming.
American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.
There's still a 1950s view of cinema, that there's one audience and they all want to see the same thing.