Armstrong
FIL 2032 - History of Film II
UNIT THREE (Part Two):
Trends of the 70s Extend Into the 80s: The Introduction of 'High-Concept' Films:
The decade of the 1980s tended to consolidate the gains made in the seventies rather than to initiate any new trends equal to the large number of disaster movies, or "rogue cop" movies that characterized the previous decade.
Designed and packaged for mass audience appeal, few 80s films became what could be called 'classics'.
The era was characterized by the introduction of 'high-concept' films - with cinematic plots that could be easily characterized by one or two sentences (25 words or less) - and therefore easily marketable and understandable. Producer Don Simpson (partnered with Jerry Bruckheimer) has been credited with the creation of the high-concept picture (or "modern" Hollywood blockbuster), although its roots could be seen in the late 70s (i.e., the prototypical Jaws (1975), Saturday Night Fever (1977), Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979) - known in high-concept terms as, "Jaws in Space").
Simpson was the first producer to understand and exploit the significance of MTV. His action-packed, loud, flashy, simplistic, and tightly-structured films brought crowds to the multiplexes every summer. His lowest common-denominator films reflected the MTV generation, such as in his debut film Flashdance (1983) - with its pop soundtrack and iconic 'freeze-frame' ending. Other successes followed in the 80s: Beverly Hills Cop (1984) with its 'fish-out-of-water' high concept, the sexy Thief of Hearts (1984), the high-flying Top Gun (1986) - the epitome of Simpson's technique, and the stock-car racing film Days of Thunder (1990) again with Tom Cruise. By the end of the 80s era as a result, most films were not designed for 'thinking' adult audiences (such as Driving Miss Daisy (1989)), but were 'low-brow' for dumbed-down teen audiences looking for sheer entertainment value or thrills (for example, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), James Cameron's Aliens (1986), or Die Hard (1988)).
After the innovations of the 70s, films in the 80s were less experimental and original, but more formulaic, although there was a burst of films eager to capitalize on new special effects (CGI) techniques now available.
Predictions were grim for the industry - production costs were soaring while ticket prices were declining. The average ticket price at the beginning of the decade was about $3, and over $4 by the end of the decade, while the average film budget was over $18 million. However, fears of the demise of Hollywood proved to be premature.
Another Search for a Blockbuster:
The personal cinema of 70s auteur directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg was now superseded by the advent of the "blockbuster" phenomenon that they had created. The industry continued to pander to the tastes and desires of "young people" - one of the negative legacies of Star Wars (1977) of the late 70s.
Steven Spielberg's and George Lucas' names have often been associated with the term "blockbuster" - and their films inevitably continued to contribute to the trend during this decade, such as The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the great and exhilarating escapist-adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Return of the Jedi (1983), and the childhood fantasy hit E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) with a lovable stranded alien, inspired by Peter Pan, the resurrection themes of Christianity, and with an anti-science bias.
There were others that were successful, such as Ghostbusters (1984), Romancing the Stone (1984), and Back to the Future (1985), and their successive sequels.
Following this model, Hollywood continued to search, with demographic research and a "bottom line mentality," for the one large "event film" that everyone (including international audiences) had to see (with dazzling special effects technology, sophisticated sound tracks, mega-marketing budgets, and costly, highly-paid stars). Most big-screen event movies, scheduled to be released at advantageous times (at summer and Christmas-time) would take expensive fortunes to produce - but they promised potentially lucrative payoffs. In retrospect, many of the blockbusters in the 80s, such as those mentioned above, were well-constructed films with strong characters and plots not entirely built upon their special-effects.
Big Losers, Flops and Bombs: Turkeys of the 80s Decade
:
There were a number of highly-touted films of the era that fared very poorly. Within a few years, it was becoming clear that blockbusters would not always insure instant profits and success: Director Michael Cimino's and United Artists' incomprehensible, over-long epic Western film Heaven's Gate (1980) about Wyoming's Johnson County wars cost almost six times above-budget to produce (from $7.5 million to about $44 million). It was originally a 5-hour 25 minute version that was cut down to 219 minutes for its November, 1980 NYC premiere. The film was immediately pulled, re-cut and then re-released five months later (after being shortened by 70 minutes) in 1981 - and still failed due to bad press. It stunned its studio by becoming the biggest flop in film history at the time (US box-office was about $1.5 million) - it lost at least $40 million. UA's corporate parent, Transamerica, had to sell the studio to MGM for only $350 million as a result. [UA was responsible for earlier hits Midnight Cowboy (1969), Annie Hall (1977), and the James Bond films.]   Since then, the film has been synonymous for any film facing major financial disaster and for the director-centric era of the 70s. Bank-rolled support for independent 'auteur' directors of the New Wave of 70s directors (who controlled their own production costs with little studio oversight) ended when this film's director (Best Director winner for The Deer Hunter (1978)) was criticized as being self-indulgent, financially irresponsible and ego-driven. The end of the era also arrived due to similar failures by other auteurs: Peter Bogdanovich with At Long Last Love (1975), Martin Scorsese with New York, New York (1977) and even Steven Spielberg with 1941 (1979). [Martin Scorsese's planned film project Gangs of New York (2002) (with 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture), first conceived in 1978, was shelved as a result, and released many years after initial plans and screenplay completion.]
 
(Apparently the Poster People were confused with who was who.  Cameron Diaz sure doesn't look like Daniel Day-Lewis, and vice versa, I think...)
MGM/UA's and Terence Young's Korean War epic Inchon (1981) with Laurence Olivier (as General Douglas MacArthur) was produced by Rev. Sung Myung Moon and his Reunification Church - it was an embarrassment that was quickly withdrawn, with a budget of about $50 million and a US box-office of only $5 million.
Hugh Hudson's (famous for the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire (1981)) miscalculated historical epic of the American Revolution was WB's Revolution (1985), with star Al Pacino miscast as an 18th century New York fur trapper. It grossed only $359,000 on a budget of about $28 million. The film's colossal failure curtailed Hudson's major directorial efforts until the big-budget I Dreamed of Africa (2000) 15 years later, and Pacino wouldn't star in another film for four years (until Sea of Love (1989)).
John Huston's first and sole musical, Annie (1982), a dull, uninspired major flop (that barely broke even) - inspired by the Broadway musical. The rights to the show were sold in 1978 for $9.5 million, the highest amount ever at the time.
Howard the Duck (1986), based on Steve Gerber's 70s Marvel Comics character (which went out of print in 1981), and from executive producer George Lucas (and his screenwriting pal, director Willard Huyck), was one of the worst and least successful big-budget films ever made. Lucas hired Willard Hyuck and his wife Gloria Katz (the screenwriter for Lucas' film American Graffiti (1973)) to write the big-screen version. This misguided Universal film domestically grossed about $15 million on a budget of $30 million.
The highly-anticipated Shanghai Surprise (1986), produced by Handmade Films (headed by the Beatles' George Harrison), starred newlyweds: pop diva singer Madonna and volatile actor Sean Penn. Lacking a coherent plot and without any chemistry between the two leads in poorly-acted characterizations, the overlong film failed miserably (with a box-office take of only $2.3 million with a budget of $17 million) and was nicknamed "Flop Suey".
Columbia Pictures' and writer/director Elaine May's Ishtar (1987), was a poor imitation of the Hope/Crosby/Lamour "Road" pictures. It was a very expensive comedy film ($55 million) with only a small box-office gross of about $14 million, was a tremendous disaster and one of the worst films ever made according to some reviewers - in spite of its stars Warren Beatty, Isabelle Adjani and Dustin Hoffman (who won an Oscar the next year for Rain Man (1988)).
Writer/director Terry Gilliam's (of Monty Python fame) deeply-troubled but visually-captivating fantasy production of The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1989) was a major failure, due to production delays, legal issues, and on-location difficulties. Despite four Oscar nominations, it had a US gross of only $8 million with a film budget of about $46 million.
 
And one more at the start of the 90s, director Brian De Palma's political satire The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), vaguely based upon Tom Wolfe's best-selling saga about stockbroker Sherman McCoy, featured multi-million dollar contracts for its miscast stars Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis. Savaged by critics, it had a budget of $47 million, and grossed only about $16 million.
Unexpected Successes:
Who would know or be able to predict that other films would be successful: Victor/Victoria (1982), set in 1930s Paris, in which Julie Andrews pretended to be a man -- pretending to be a woman, something that confused James Garner; Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1982), a dark comedy about the search for stand-up comic celebrity by Rupert Pupkin (Scorsese's favorite actor Robert DeNiro), self-proclaimed as The "King of Comedy"; the film also featured an appearance by real-life comedian Jerry Lewis as arrogant Jerry Langford -- Pupkin's talk-show host idol -- who was kidnapped and tied up (and duct-taped) with assistance from his accomplice Masha (Sandra Bernhard) after Pupkin was snubbed, so that he could take his spot on the show; Milos Forman's Best Picture-winning Amadeus (1984), a biopic (adapted by Peter Shaffer from his own play) without big-name stars and about foul-mouthed genius Wolfgang Mozart (Tom Hulce) and a rival composer named Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) vying for the favor of an Austrian king.
 
 
James Cameron's The Terminator (1984) was a story about Sarah Connor - the unsuspecting future mother of John - the leader of a human rebellion against the machines (which were exemplified by the brutal metallic cyborg T-800 played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who journeyed back in time to assassinate her); the intense and lean film established an action film genre that extends to the present day.
The musical comedy Little Shop of Horrors (1986), originally a Roger Corman horror film in the 60s, about a florist shop that spawned a hungry plant named Audrey II that consumed demented dentist Steve Martin as one of its victims; its song "Mean Green Mother From Outer Space" was Oscar-nominated.
 
Tim Burton's ambitious, hyped and over-marketed production of a dark-shaded Batman (1989) - a Warners' mega-hit film promoted with lucrative merchandising that became the blockbuster hit of the last year of the decade, with an over-the-top performance by Jack Nicholson as the villainous Joker ("Where does he get those wonderful toys?") and comedian Michael Keaton in a serious, dual role as the comic book hero - the dark avenger of Gotham City.
Big Business Entertainment:
Film budgets skyrocketed due to special effects (expensive digital effects) and inflated salaries of name-recognition stars (and their agents). Big business increasingly took control of the movies and the way was opened for the foreign (mostly Japanese) ownership of Hollywood properties. To save money, many more films were being made in non-US locations by mid-decade.
A number of the studios were taken over by multi-national conglomerates as their entertainment divisions:
United Artists (acquired in 1969 by airline tycoon Kirk Kerkorian and temporarily abandoned) was bought and merged with MGM in 1981 to form MGM/UA; the company's film library was bought out by media mogul Ted Turner in 1986 for his cable TV channel, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.; then, in 1990 MGM was purchased by Sony Entertainment of Japan - home to both Columbia Pictures and TriStar Pictures (see below)
20th (or Twentieth) Century Fox was taken over by oil tycoon Marvin Davis in 1981 and then entered into a 50% shared ownership with Australian publisher Robert Murdoch in 1985, becoming part of Fox, Inc. The film production unit was renamed simply Fox Film Corporation in 1989, and by the end of the century became known simply as Fox .
Columbia Pictures was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 1982; (Tri-Star Pictures was also created - a joint venture of Columbia Pictures, HBO, and CBS); Tri-Star Pictures bought Loew's Theaters in 1986; British film producer David Puttnam briefly headed Columbia Pictures for a few years beginning in 1986; the Sony Corporation of America purchased Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc. and Tri-Star Pictures from Coca-Cola for $3.4 billion in 1989, re-naming itself Sony Pictures Entertainment; in 1992, Sony Pictures Classics became an autonomous company within Sony Pictures .
in 1966, Paramount became a wholly owned subsidiary of Gulf + Western Industries, Inc; in 1989, Gulf + Western was reconfigured and renamed Paramount Communications, Inc.; then in 1994, Paramount merged with Viacom International.
MCA/Universal (which had officially merged in 1962) became a powerful TV production company, and started its organized studio tours - one of LA's most popular tourist attractions; they were acquired by Matsushita Electrical Industrial, Co. in 1991; in June 1995, The Seagram Company Ltd. (VO) purchased a majority equity in MCA from Matsushita; then in late 1996, MCA Inc. was renamed Universal Studios, reclaiming its heritage as one of the industry's oldest and most prestigious movie studios .
Walt Disney Productions remained as one of the few studio-era survivors, with Michael Eisner as chairman and CEO beginning in 1984; it set up Touchstone Pictures in 1984 to make feature films that appealed to adult audiences; Buena Vista was Disney's distributor .
Warner Communications merged with Time, Inc. - announced in 1989 (and completed in 1990) to become Time-Warner, Inc., a component of the media empire AOL-Time Warner.
A few independent film companies, such as New Line Cinema and Miramax, began to make more experimental and offbeat films to fill the gaps provided by the major studios.
Because costly film decisions were more in the hands of people making the financial decisions, not the film makers, movies were made only if they could guarantee financial success, thereby pandering to a few select, well-known star names attached to film titles without as much attention paid to intelligent scripts. With this kind of pressure, the most popular film stars demanded higher salaries, up front, and well as a percentage of the film's gross take, earning as much as $20 million. Budgets and actors salaries skyrocketed out of control, and powerful agents for agencies such as Creative Artists Agency (CAA) negotiated outrageous deals.
Notable 1980s Milestones:
Thirty-six year old Sherry Lansing was named president of production at 20th Century Fox in 1980 - and became the first female to hold this position and head a major studio (she resigned in 1982 to become an independent producer).
In the early 1980s, Sony's superior video recording standard, termed Betamax, was overtaken by VHS (Video Home System) developed by JVC, with a longer record time of 2 hours; in 1987, when VHS commanded 95% market share, Sony finally began to abandon Betamax in 1980, Pioneer began to market its videodisk (laserdisc) players, thereby widening the availability of films for consumer viewing and purchase; In 1981, the music-video cable network MTV began broadcasting on August 1st at 12:01 am - the first music video that was aired was Video Killed the Radio Star - the debut single of the British duo - the Buggles.
Ronald Reagan, a former President of the Screen Actor's Guild (from 1947-1952) and governor of California, became the first movie-star President of the US (the 40th) in 1981. His conservative reign and hard-edged approach toward the Soviet Union was reflected in Hollywood's many action-adventure films of the decade with aggressive, macho stars (Rocky, Rambo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Clint Eastwood and others) - even his futuristic anti-missile defense system co-opted the name of Lucas' 70s film Star Wars (1977).
In 1984, the Voyager Company introduced its Criterion Collection line of 'special edition,' high-quality, feature-packed laserdiscs, often with state-of-the-art transfers, the CAV (full feature) format, the full theatrical 'letter-box' format, special commentary tracks and supplemental material, dual audio, interviews and annotated commentary by film-makers and scholars, director's cuts, deleted scenes, storyboards and production designs, and other bonus features (theatrical shorts or trailers, shooting scripts, posters, stills galleries, print booklets, out-takes, dual versions of a film, and other extras, etc.) that have since become commonplace on DVDs by the turn of the century.
New Technologies: Home Entertainment-Video, Cable TV, and Sound:
Cable TV networks, direct broadcast satellites, and 1/2 inch videocassettes (in the VHS format) in the 80s encouraged broader distribution of films. Sales and revenues from pre-sold theatrical features for videocassette reproduction and cable TV distribution contributed increased percentages for studios' earnings - sometimes outpacing box-office profits. [In an influential decision, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Universal v. Sony Betamax (1984) that home video-taping for personal use was not a copyright infringement.]
NOTE: My very first VHS recording (1982) was of the Michael Jackson "Thriller" music video (one of my exceptional musical pals, Chris Silagyi, of the late 70s "New Wave/Pop" band, 20/20, actually played me a demo version of the tune a YEAR prior to its actual album release.  My favorite part of the demo?  Vincent Price doin' some rappin'!  Little did I know...)
Many studios entered the business of producing films for commercial TV networks, and the release of their films for the home entertainment-video market became a profitable rental-sales business. The pre-recorded video of Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959) brought sales of over a million copies when it was released in 1986. And then to illustrate the burgeoning video industry over the next few years, 1988 sales of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) surpassed 15 million.
Tri-Star Pictures Motion Picture Company, one of Hollywood's major producer/distributors, was created in 1983 as a joint venture of CBS Inc., Columbia Pictures, and Time-Life's premium cable service Home Box Office (HBO) (founded in 1972). HBO and Showtime both functioned as producer/distributors in their own right by directly financing films and entertainment specials for their own pay-television cable stations. [In 1989, Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications, becoming the major media giant Time-Warner.] The spread of access to cable television (and satellite broadcasts) threatened traditional one-screen theaters and film attendance. On the other hand, multi-plex movie theaters with multiple screens spread across the country during the 80s, while the number of drive-in theaters drastically declined.
Multi-track Dolby stereo sound, the THX sound system (named after George Lucas' first feature film), and Dolby SR ("spectral recording") (all designed to produce higher quality sound, noise reduction, surround-sound and other special effects) were introduced in the 70s and 80s, and advertised as a special feature for films such as Amadeus (1984) and Aliens (1986). The first movie to be shown in a THX-certified auditorium was Return of the Jedi (1983). [In 1992, a new technology dubbed Dolby Digital was introduced to movie-goers in Batman Returns (1992), and then DTS Digital Sound made its debut in Jurassic Park (1993).]
 
Colorization' of the Classics:
After Ted Turner purchased the vast library-inventory of classic MGM and UA films in 1986 and proposed colorization of the B/W films, there was a bitterly-fought debate over the topic in mid-decade. Topper (1937) was the very first B/W feature film to be released to the home video market in 1985 in a 'colorized' version, using computer technology - a controversial modernizing technique at the time. Colorized ("computer-colored" or "color-imaged") films began to be broadcast on television for the first time in 1985. When the classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947), converted by Color Systems Technology (CST) for 20th Century Fox, aired in 1985, it became the highest rated non-network movie in syndication. Colorization became extremely controversial in the late 1980s, especially with regard to "classic" monochrome films such as Citizen Kane (1941) (which ultimately was not colorized). Other films to be colorized including, King Kong (1933), Hughes' The Outlaw (1943), Laurel and Hardy's Way Out West (1937), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and  It's a Wonderful Life (1946). By the mid-90s, colorization of films was no longer an issue.  Another, "passing fad" that didn't do much in returning an investment for either Ted Turner, or any others pushing "colorized" black and white movies.
The Trend Toward Teenage Comedies - The Teen Sex Comedy:
The trend for "youth films" began with a number of late 70s and early 80s films with young actors and actresses. Some attributed the trend toward teenaged cinematic fare to the tremendous success of Star Wars (1977) with young audiences. The films were entertainment geared for teenagers and pre-teen audiences (both were becoming sizeable segments of movie theatre attendance). At the end of the previous decade, Steve Tesich's Oscar-winning screenplay helped to highlight Peter Yates' youthful bicycle film, Breaking Away (1979), about four boys (Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, and Jackie Earle Haley) and their frustrations/hopes in a recession-affected Midwest college town - it was a portent of the times. Writer/director Barry Levinson's debut film Diner (1982) was a bitter-sweet, rites-of-passage tale of six male buddies in their twenties growing up in late 50s Baltimore and hanging out in the local diner Fells Point - with remarkably realistic dialogue scenes.
One of the earliest youth-oriented films was actually responsible for also launching the teen-sex film -- it was Porky's (1982) (followed by its sequels: Porky's II: The Next Day (1983) and Porky's Revenge (1985)). The R-rated film was typical of sex-drenched "dumbed down" films (with lots of gratuitous female nudity) telling about a group of horny males who sought sexual experiences and the loss of virginity through various sexual encounters and schemes (often humiliating) and by voyeurism.
 
Youth-Oriented (Yuppie) Films:
Female director Amy Heckerling's energetic, candid and unassumingly real Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), her directorial debut feature film, was the quintessential teen film of the 1980s. It included a number of stereotyped but realistic roles derived from screenwriter Cameron Crowe's (a former Rolling Stone writer) undercover study-exposé of L.A. high school life during a year at a San Diego HS: Stoned, unforgettable, bleached blonde California surfer dude Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) with checkered sneakers: "I've been stoned since the third grade"; Pudgy teenaged high-school freshman Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who awkwardly lost her virginity in a baseball dugout to older stereo salesman Ron Johnson (D.W. Brown), and after another sexual experience became pregnant and had an abortion; Stacy's 'worldly' friend Linda Barrett (Phoebe Cates) who taught her with a carrot, in the school's cafeteria, about how to deliver oral sex; Strict US history teacher Mr. Hand (Ray Walston); Ticket-scalping lecherous male Mike Damone (Robert Romanus) who impregnated Stacy during a quick sexual encounter in a pool bathhouse.
Yes, this is a German YouTube posting of the trailer for Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).  The text roughly translates as, "I believe I stand in the forrest."  Go figure...
[The film was also notable for being the American Graffiti (1973) of its decade, because it introduced so many new and future stars, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Nicolas Cage, and Anthony Edwards).] Strong sexual content included nude scenes for both Leigh and Cates. Heckerling's only other notable film (so far - don't write her off.  She's still writing stuff, perhaps to direct again) in her career was another teenage film - Clueless (1995) - a satirical, funny tale loosely based on Jane Austen's Emma, about an adorable but rich, bratty, self-obsessed and shallow Beverly Hills teenager named Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone), memorable for her color-coordinated designer wardrobe, and rich California slang.
The Rise of the Brat Pack:
Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire (1985) - a soap-operish, teen version of The Big Chill (1983) for the younger Yuppie generation with ensemble acting, was responsible for giving the self-indulgent, self-absorbed, and socially-apathetic stars who portrayed seven Georgetown graduates (up and coming yuppies) who hung out at a bar their detested nickname "The Brat Pack." Brat Packers in this film included:
Emilio Estevez
Judd Nelson
Mare Winningham
On and off screen, the stars wore designer clothes, drove the coolest sports cars, and projected a 'fast lane' cynical attitude about life.  And their Hollywood careers went...?
John Hughes' 'Teen' Films:
In the 1980s, the most consistent output, and the most watchable and solid films of the sub-genre of youth-oriented teen comedies starring teenage characters (who were experiencing adolescent angst) were from writer/director John Hughes. Hughes had first made himself known in the early 80s by co-writing National Lampoon's Vacation (1983) and scripting Mr. Mom (1983). He was responsible for a number of comedic, "teen"-oriented coming-of-age or 'rites of passage' films directed toward a youth audience, frequently emphasizing the tensions of the adolescent and post-adolescent years, the problems of growing up, the high school years, aspects of peer pressure, teen parties, money, rebellion, friendship, romantic relationships among teens, and family strains.
Hughes directed several popular films, after signing a three-year, $30 million deal including: Sixteen Candles (1984) with Molly Ringwald as a sensitive teen turning sixteen and having a horrible birthday, upstaged by her sister's wedding week; Weird Science (1985) a wacky comedy about two nerds who created the Ultimate sexy woman (Kelly LeBrock) through their computer and ideas from the Frankenstein (1931) film; The dialogue-rich, dark and provocative R-rated The Breakfast Club (1985) which told a story of five disparate, crudely-cliched high-school teens forced to be together (a teen version of an encounter group) during a Saturday detention, and struggling with issues of conformity and parental values, and the entertaining Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) which defined a teenage rebel of the 80s - a risk-taking, spirited high-school prankster and malingerer Ferris (Matthew Broderick), and his friend (Mia Sara), who ditched school (and Principal Rooney) for a day in downtown Chicago (filled with tips on how to fake a high fever, break into a computer system, and crash a parade).
Following his success with teen-angst romances, Hughes' next films were the adult comedy Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), and the less-satisfying adult-oriented She's Having a Baby (1988) with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern as yuppie newlyweds on the verge of parenthood. The film had an influence on the forthcoming entire sub-genre of baby films. [Hughes would strike gold in the 90s with the commercial giant Home Alone (1990).
Other Teen-Oriented Films:
Paul Brickman's satirically funny Risky Business (1983) (with its oft-quoted line: "What the f--k?") commented on the decade's materialistic greed by portraying a conservative teen named Joel Goodson (Tom Cruise in an early starring role) - noted for dancing in his underwear to "Old Time Rock & Roll" - who held an outrageous party in his house, and set up a profitable hooker-business (with call-girl Rebecca DeMornay) as a school project during his parents' absence. And director Susan Seidelman's successfully-marketed feminist screwball comedy Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) starred Rosanna Arquette and pop singer Madonna (in her film debut). It was set in the hip, 80's New Wave culture of New York's Lower East Village SoHo, and helped popularize the chart-topping song "Into the Groove." One of the best teen movies ever made was Rob Reiner's second feature film -- the romantic comedy The Sure Thing (1985), with 17 year-old John Cusack (as Walter "Gib" Gibson) searching for romance with beautiful, white-bikinied and California-tanned Nicollette Sheridan ("The Sure Thing") while finding real love with prim student Alison Bradbury (Daphne Zuniga) on the roof-top by film's end.
One of the best teen romance/comedies of the decade was Cameron Crowe's directorial debut film Say Anything... (1989) with John Cusack (as underachieving, trench-coated Lloyd Dobler) and Ione Skye (as beautiful valedictorian Diane Court) in outstanding roles as high-school graduates and unlikely lovers - the film was most noted for a boom-box blaring Peter Gabriel that he held above his head to serenade his girlfriend. 
Other films examined disenfranchised, alienated and coming-of-age youth including Rob Reiner's sentimental Stand By Me (1986) about the rites-of-passage of four small-town Maine boys (including River Phoenix, who died of a drug overdose in 1993 at the age of 23) in the 1950s while looking for the corpse of a dead kid. The horror/ comedy The Lost Boys (1987) was a teen vampire film with a tagline appreciated by teens: "Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire."
At least two films were related to books (dubbed 'yuppie fiction' or 'MTV novels') published by young authors about the 1980s cocaine-drug culture. Marek Kanievska's Less Than Zero (1987), set in Beverly Hills with college-aged teens (Andrew McCarthy, Robert Downey, Jr., and Jamie Gertz), illustrated both the bright side of the materialistic business world and the downside of failure and drug use. Director James Bridges' Bright Lights, Big City (1988), based on Jay McInerney's screenplay adaptation of his own 1984 tragi-comedy novel (his first) of the same name, starred Michael J. Fox as an aspiring writer and Manhattan yuppie whose life was brought down by drugs, alcohol, and nightlife. It co-starred Kiefer Sutherland (his hard-partying friend), Phoebe Cates (his model wife) and Swoosie Kurtz. The novel was named after the 60s song Bright Lights, Big City, originally sung by blues singer Jimmy Reed.
 
Endless Sequels - The Beginning of a "Nasty Trend"
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Throughout cinematic history, there has been a tradition of re-doing films in series or installments with familiar, recurring sets of performers and plot routines), such as the repeated appearance of Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp" character in numerous films, serials such as The Perils of Pauline (1914) with a returning heroine, the Universal horror film recycles (i.e., Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, etc.), The Thin Man (1934) mysteries, the many James Bond and Tarzan films, and Mickey Rooney's Andy Hardy movies, to name just a few.
Before 1980, there were very few sequels - maybe two or three each year. Beginning in the early 80s (and from then on), however, a mind-staggering, steady stream of mindless, crude sequels were produced each year, usually inferior to their originals - with some notable exceptions. Remakes and sequels, with the 'same story, different title' principle, were designed to defray the monetary risks of Hollywood film-making. Most often, these sequels were hastily-made, inferior knockoffs made by lesser film-makers and without key cast members (wisely reluctant to reappear) from the original. Predictably, the repetitive carbon copies usually resulted in dwindling box-office returns.
John Carpenter's highly-successful, low-budget slasher Halloween (1978) sparked a revival of horror films in the 80s and forever since. Other film-makers attempted to cash in on its success at the box-office with similar story-lines. A large percentage of the films in the 80s (and later) were nightmarish slasher films (e.g., the Evil Dead series, the very successful Friday the 13th franchise and series, and A Nightmare on Elm Street films (the first one by director Wes Craven) with a new villain - the terrifying burn victim Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) with knives on his fingers who appeared in bad dreams as a child molester). [There was also a 44-episode TV anthology in the late 80s and early 90s of Freddy Krueger films made-for-TV films, including Freddy's Nightmares: Dreams That Kill (1990) and Freddy's Nightmares: Freddy's Tricks and Treats (1990)]
Sequels and "variations" from Lucas and Spielberg:
The sci-fi films and sequels of George Lucas after Star Wars (1977), with Lucas as producer, were Eighties blockbusters: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) (the second in six planned installments of the original Star Wars saga) and Return of the Jedi (1983). The later film introduced Lucasfilms' THX sound system in theatres. Without the sequels, ancillary product sales and further merchandising would dry up.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) was a fast-paced, full-of-stunts (the gigantic boulder roll, for example, in the exciting opening) tribute to the serials of the 30s and 40s in Saturday matinees with its tale of the search for the Ark of the Covenant involving sadistic Nazis, a duplicitous Frenchman, snakes, an exciting chase sequence, the blinding-zapping climax, and a spunky love interest (Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood) for the bull-whipping, fedora-wearing lead character (Harrison Ford). After Raiders, Steven Spielberg completed his trilogy of the Raiders' explorer-adventurer-archaeologist hero with two more films in the 80s (and a fourth film added in 2008).
[It should be noted that the inferior Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), inspired the creation in mid 1984 of a new ratings category between PG and R (the new rating of PG-13 - meaning some material inappropriate for children under 13, unless accompanied by adult/parent), was due to an intense torture scene of a crazed Hindu priest ripping out a beating heart from a human sacrifice victim]
 
Spielberg also served as producer for a number of films: Barry Levinson's Indiana Jones type adventure The Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) with virtuoso special effects sequences created by Lucas' computer animators (Pixar), and the fantasy-comedy "Back to the Future" trilogy (with Robert Zemeckis as director). The first film in the enormously-successful film series was Back to the Future (1985), an inventive time-travel comedy starring Michael J. Fox as teenaged Marty McFly who cruised back to 1955 in a DeLorean with mad scientist-inventor Dr. Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and confronted intriguing 'what if' Oedipal questions regarding his parents (Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover).
An Indiana Jones-type adventure film Romancing the Stone (1984), also by director Robert Zemeckis, tried to capitalize on the decade's most popular films by taking a romantic fiction writer (Kathleen Turner) into an exciting, non-stop escapade in Colombia with a soldier-of-fortune (Michael Douglas). [The film also was the breakout film for Danny DeVito, who would later be a lead actor in Ruthless People (1986) and later would debut-direct Throw Momma From the Train (1987).] It was followed by the similar sequel, the romantic adventure comedy The Jewel of the Nile (1985). Although not the third film in the series, DeVito (as director), Turner, and Douglas were re-teamed in the failed black comedy The War of the Roses (1989).
Horror and Humor - Spielberg's teen-oriented productions:
Director Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982) was about a 5 year-old girl (Heather O'Rourke) who unleashed the spirits through the TV set ("They're here") and was kidnapped by unfriendly spirits, and a suburban house built over an old Indian burial ground.
Joe Dante's anarchic comedy Gremlins (1984) was about furry, loveable mogwai creatures in a Capra-esque small-town setting that mutated after being dowsed with water (or after being fed after midnight) into murderous gremlins - a reversal of Spielberg's own E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982); the subversive film famously included Phoebe Cates' monologue about how the sacred cows of Santa Claus and Christmas were ruined for her, and was partly responsible for the institution of the PG-13 rating The critically, poorly-received (I LOVE this movie!), kid-oriented adventure by director Richard Donner entitled The Goonies (1985) was about a group of kids who searched for treasure with One-Eyed Willie's treasure map.
 
Cross-Over TV Comedy Show Stars:
In the late 70s and early 80s, many budding comedians, including John Belushi, Bill Murray, Joan Rivers, Chris Farley, Robert Klein, Peter Boyle, Alan Arkin, Fred Willard, James Belushi, Shelley Long, and Martin Short, first appeared as sketch comedians in a Chicago troupe comedy theater named Second City. Its offshoot in Toronto, Canada featured Rick Moranis, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Martin Short, Mike Myers, and John Candy, among others. Many of them used Second City as a career springboard, and would go on to become well-known TV comedians and movie stars. NBC TV's live late-night show Saturday Night Live, which debuted in October of 1975, also provided its first cast of 'Not Ready for Prime Time Players" including Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Jane Curtin.
 
Cross-over film appearances of these improvisational, comedic stars now on sketch-based TV shows swelled in this decade. Two major stars, John Belushi (who appeared in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)) and Dan Aykroyd starred as recently-released Joliet prison inmates turned bandleader brothers Elwood and Jake (from their recurring sketches on the small screen) in director John Landis' The Blues Brothers (1980).
[A few years later, a helicopter accident on the film set of Landis' Twilight Zone - The Movie (1983) - based upon Rod Serling's classic sci-fi TV show, killed actor Vic Morrow (veteran actor, star of TV's Combat!, and father of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh) and two Vietnamese child actors. Landis was indicted with three counts of involuntary manslaughter, but finally acquitted during the nine-month trial that began in September 1986.]
Twenty-one year old comedian Eddie Murphy, another regular on Saturday Night Live, was emerging as a major star and box-office moneymaker with his first film, portraying convicted prisoner Reggie Hammond (and mismatched with Nick Nolte) in director Walter Hill's excellent cops-and-robbers action buddy film 48 Hrs. (1982). He also appeared in John Landis' Trading Places (1983) in which a rich man (Dan Aykroyd) traded places with a poor man (Murphy) as part of a dollar bet between the Duke brothers.
 
[In the late 80s, Murphy departed from his Beverly Hills Cop action-crime drama/comedy series, trying something different with The Golden Child (1986) and Coming to America (1988), a film about a pampered African prince (from the fictitious monarchic state of Zamunda) who journeyed to New York City to find a bride/queen - a story-line reminiscent of many 40s-era comedies. Paula Abdul was the film's choreographer.  [Comedian and writer Art Buchwald accused the film's producers at Paramount of plagiarism (the film's plot resembled his film treatment 'King for a Day'), and won a sizeable court judgment in 1995.] 
Ivan Reitman (known for the irreverent National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and Meatballs (1979) with Bill Murray in his first lead role as a goof-off summer camp counselor) directed Stripes (1981). In the film, Murray starred as a reluctant enlistee in the US Army (along with overweight John Candy as Ox and Judge Reinhold as stoned Elmo) who suddenly ran afoul of Sgt. Hulka (Warren Oates) - in a male version of Private Benjamin (1980). (The storyline in Private Benjamin (1980), with TV regular Goldie Hawn from Laugh-in playing a spoiled, self-obsessed Jewish princess who was widowed on her wedding night and then joined the Army, was reminiscent of the "This is the Army" comedies in the 40s and 50s.)
Murray also appeared in Harold Ramis' directorial debut film -- the popular anarchic comedy Caddyshack (1980) (with Chevy Chase in his second lead role after appearing with Goldie Hawn in Foul Play (1978)) as deranged golf-course groundskeeper Carl Spackler at the Bushwood Country Club, who tried to blow up a mischevious gopher enemy - an animatronic gopher named Chuck E. Rodent. Reitman also directed the immensely popular sci-fi comedy film Ghostbusters (1984), with a screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, and stars including Aykroyd, Murray, Ramis, and Rick Moranis. 
TV comedian Steve Martin (known for his "happy feet," rabbit ears, and arrow through the head on The Smothers Brothers Show and other variety shows) appeared in his first major film at the end of the previous decade, in Carl Reiner's The Jerk (1979). After Pennies from Heaven (1981), he also appeared in a few films that paid homage to classic Hollywood genres, including Carl Reiner's mock Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982) with Martin as detective Rigby Reardon mingling with footage from classic 40s noirs and other film stars, and the spoof of 50s mad-scientist films The Man With Two Brains (1983). This was followed by Carl Reiner's well-acted All of Me (1984) in which he shared a body and split personality with Lily Tomlin. Next was Fred Schepisi's update of the Cyrano de Bergerac romantic legend Roxanne (1987), and then he co-starred with John Candy (as a shower-ring salesman) in John Hughes' slapstick, screwball road film Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) about a nightmarish journey at Thanksgiving time.
 
Abrahams/Zucker Brothers:
The joke and pun-filled Airplane! (1980), from the trio of Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams, was inspired by the serious melodrama Airport (1970) and aggressively spoofed (like Mel Brooks had done earlier) the entire disaster film genre of the 70s with fast-paced jokes ("Don't call me Shirley"), sight gags, and sexual double entendres.
Abrahams and the Zuckers, the creators of Airplane! did not contribute to the sequel Airplane 2: The Sequel (1982), but they spoofed Elvis, 60's beach films and more in Top Secret! (1984). They resurrected their short-lived TV series Police Squad and brought Leslie Nielsen to the screen - perfect in the role as the deadpan, bumbling LA detective Lt. Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988).
 
Parenthood Comedies:
The gender-role comedy Mr. Mom (1983) starred Michael Keaton and Teri Garr as a couple who reversed their domestic roles - he wore a gas mask to change diapers and she got a job and saved the Tuna account. More challenges of parenthood were presented in two hilarious, but light-weight comedies: director Amy Heckerling's Look Who's Talking (1989) with unmarried single mother Kirstie Alley choosing taxi-driver John Travolta as the perfect father/baby-sitter for her baby (Bruce Willis provided the humorous "off-screen" voice and impressions of the child Mikey all the way from conception to age one); and director Ron Howard's heart-warming, thoughtful Parenthood (1989) with Steve Martin and Mary Steenburgen as model, middle-class parents in the middle of a four-generational family. Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame directed the romantic comedy Three Men and a Baby (1987), with 'foster parents' trio Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, and Ted Danson (an architect, a cartoonist, and an actor) as middle-aged, eligible bachelor-roommates with a infant girl on their hands - it was a re-make of the French hit Three Men and a Cradle (1985).
Animations and Kids' Comedies:
The ground-breaking, escapist TRON (1982) from writer/director Steven Lisberger used cutting-edge computer graphics combined with live action (featuring human stars Jeff Bridges and David Warner) in a tale set within a gladiatorial computer game. Technical breakthroughs were also accomplished in Robert Zemeckis' innovative Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) - the most expensive film of the 80s decade at $70 million. It seamlessly blended animated cartoon characters (superstar Roger and his wife Jessica voiced by Kathleen Turner) and live action in a hard-boiled, 1940s-style Hollywood murder mystery featuring Bob Hoskins as noir detective Eddie Valiant. [The film was a collaboration between Steven Spielberg and the Walt Disney Studio. Earlier, Disney had married animation and live-action in the 60s hit Mary Poppins (1964).]
Computer animation would become a dominant force in future years after Pixar's digitally-animated Tin Toy was awarded the Best Animated Short Film Oscar in 1988 - it was the first computer animated film to win an Oscar.
Disney also scored with one of its old-fashioned musical animations that appealed to both children and adults. Its 28th feature-length cartoon The Little Mermaid (1989) heralded a new generation of successful animations, with its classic tale by Hans Christian Andersen.
Traditional Films and Modern-Day Dramas:
Some of the films of the era seemed traditional and conservative reflecting the times, rather than being radical and innovative. Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan's landmark "coming-of-middle-age" film The Big Chill (1983), chronicled the reunion of a group of eight friends (ex-college radicals) during a funeral for friend Alex (Kevin Costner as the corpse - unseen and edited out of the film). They comprised a "Big Chill generation" who grew up in the 60s (Kevin Kline, Tom Berenger, William Hurt, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, Jobeth Williams, Mary Kay Place, and Meg Tilly). Kasdan's film marked the aging of the 'baby-boomer' generation (now growing into yuppies).
Romance was back in fashion in Norman Jewison's Italian-American romance/comedy Moonstruck (1987) with a widowed Loretta (Best Actress-winning Cher) finding love with the baker brother (Nicolas Cage) of her fiancee. Barry Levinson's entertaining, old-fashioned The Natural (1984) about a gifted baseball player, and Phil Alden Robinson's idealistically-uplifting fantasy classic Field of Dreams (1989) - also about baseball - with one of Kevin Costner's finest roles, reminded one of Frank Capra's films.
On Golden Pond (1981) (the first film that starred both Jane and father Henry Fonda and the first film pairing of Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn) earned two major Academy Awards - it was Hepburn's fourth Oscar award (a record) and ailing Henry Fonda's first, shortly before his death. The film was about a visit of estranged daughter Chelsea (Jane Fonda) with her aging parents. Director Ron Howard's sci-fi fantasy Cocoon (1985) told of a group of seniors in a Florida retirement home who were rejuvenated by an alien treatment in a "fountain of youth." Jessica Tandy starred as aging Jewish widow Mrs. Wertham with a tolerant black chauffeur (Morgan Freeman) in the South in Bruce Beresford's Driving Miss Daisy (1989), notable for winning both Best Picture and Best Actress.
An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) was a traditional romantic drama about the son of a career sailor (Richard Gere) who attempted to better himself by training at Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School, and who was eventually lifted up by love with townie Debra Winger (and a pal of mine, Lou Gossett, Jr., just happened to win the Academy Award for "Best Supporting Actor" for his portrayal of Sgt. Emil Foley).
Barry Levinson directed the award-winning, road-trip drama Rain Man (1988) with Dustin Hoffman as autistic idiot savant Raymond - the older brother of self-centered, manipulative hustler Charlie (Tom Cruise), who were reunited together after their father's death.
Writer/producer James Brooks also directed Broadcast News (1987) - a behind-the-scenes look at contemporary TV journalism and journalistic integrity through three characters: a dumb but handsome newscaster (William Hurt), smart but awkward newswriter and reporter (Albert Brooks), and over-achieving, high-strung network news producer (Holly Hunter) - all of whom, plus the director (for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay), received Academy Award nominations.
David Lynch directed the melancholy The Elephant Man (1980) about Victorian England's John Merrick - a grotesquely-deformed and alienated man (John Hurt) afflicted by a disease ("I am not an animal") that was treated by doctor Anthony Hopkins.
80s Melodramas and 'Tearjerkers':
The decade was also characterized by 'weepies' - films with strong emotional content that appealed, in particular, to female audience members, and often revolved around terminal illness. One of the most successful examples was director/writer James Brooks' first feature film - the bittersweet, Best Picture-winning melodrama Terms of Endearment (1983), based on the novel by Larry McMurtry. The multiple Oscar-wining film told about three decades in the troubled lives of widowed mother Aurora Greenaway (Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter Emma (Debra Winger), ending with a teary hospital sequence. It also starred Jack Nicholson as ex-astronaut and Aurora's next-door neighbor Garrett Breedlove engaged in a torrid affair with her. Other representative "tearjerkers include, Beaches (1988), Steel Magnolias (1989), and Fried Green Tomatoes (1991).
Martin Scorsese - "Raging":
Raging Bull (1980) was voted by American film critics at the end of the era as the best film of the decade and an abrupt turn-about from the triumphant Rocky (1976) of a few years earlier. Robert De Niro gained a record amount of weight (about 60 pounds) in order to accurately portray the beleaguered, machismo middle-weight boxer Jake LaMotta who had to battle 'Sugar Ray' Robinson and his brother Joey (Joe Pesci). Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) (from screenwriter Paul Schrader who had adapted Nikos Kazantzakis' novel and had provided scripts for other Scorsese films - Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980)) was controversial and considered blasphemous by fundamentalists for its human portrayal of the Christ figure (played by Willem Dafoe). The violence of vigilante cab driver Travis Bickle in Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) was echoed in the shooting of President Reagan by a Jodie Foster-obsessed John Hinckley, Jr. in late March, 1981.
Science-Fiction Films:
The cult science-fiction classic from Ridley Scott, the futuristic, visually-bleak, film-noirish Blade Runner (1982) with a Vangelis soundtrack, set in a squalid 2019 Los Angeles (in an amazing opening sequence viewing the cityscape), was based on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?. It unexpectedly grew in stature, popularity and acclaim over time as the decade advanced, but was originally pulled from theatres after an unsuccessful opening. Controversy arose over the voice-over of star Harrison Ford as the downbeat, called-out-of-retirement blade-runner Rick Deckard, and over the studio-appended 'happy' ending - both of which were excised in the Director's Cut released in 1991, that also restored a unicorn dream sequence.
Ken Russell's American-produced, suspenseful sci-fi thriller Altered States (1981), adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from his own book of the same name, was about the de-evolutionary, hallucinatory effects of mind-altering drugs and experiments on sensory deprivation in an isolation tank by a daring psychologist (William Hurt in a debut feature role) - noted most for its depiction of a psychedelic, hallucinatory experience and the exploration of the far reaches of the psyche.
John Carpenter's modern-day The Thing (1982) was set at the South Pole in an Antarctic research station that was threatened by a shape-shifting alien "thing" (with great special effects, but NOT for the squeamish) -- it was a remake of The Thing From Another World (1951), set at the North Pole. Paul Verhoeven's breakthrough film, Robocop (1987), starred Peter Weller as a police officer of the future after being killed in action in crime-ridden Detroit and being brought back by cyborg technology.
In addition to Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future films, the computerized visual effects of Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic dazzled in James Cameron's underwater alien adventure epic (a truly under-appreciated film, in my opinion) The Abyss (1989) - the spectacular 'sea tentacle' morphing effects would later be used to greater effect in Cameron's own megahit Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).
The Resurgent Wave of British Cinema:
Hugh Hudson's dark horse Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire (1981) opened the decade with slow-motion footraces under the credits and a Vangelis piano score. It starred Ben Cross as a Jewish athlete and Ian Charleson as a Christian Scottish athlete who competed in the 1924 Paris Olympics. During the victory speech of the film's Best Original Screenplay-winning writer, Colin Welland proclaimed "The British are coming!" The British film was victorious over Warren Beatty's three hour Communism epic Reds (1981) (with twelve Oscar nominations - four of which were for Beatty as producer, director, co-writer, and star, and with three wins), the story of the dawn of communist society told by American writer John Reed (Beatty) in 'Ten Days That Shook the World'. The romantic comedy Educating Rita (1983), starring Michael Caine as a cynical English literature lecturer and Julie Walters as one of his older working-class students, used Britain's Open University as its backdrop. In  My Left Foot (1989), Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for his portrayal of Irish writer/artist Christy Brown who suffered from cerebral palsy.
The following year, British director Richard Attenborough's epic Gandhi (1982), with Ben Kingsley in the title role as the 20th century pacifist leader, also succeeded by taking top honors (eight Academy Awards). Director John MacKenzie's modern-day crime film The Long Good Friday (1980) presented the threatened empire of London gangster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) over a "Good Friday" weekend. John Boorman's Excalibur (1981) resurrected the magic of the Arthurian legend. Scotland was the setting for the sword and sorcery fantasy epic Highlander (1986), starring Christopher Lambert as the great immortal Clansman who could die only by decapitation.
The Merchant-Ivory team of American-born director James Ivory, Indian-born producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer-Jhabvala generated sophisticated, nostalgic, intelligent, and lush costume dramas beginning in the mid-80s: A luminous and engaging E.M. Forster adaptation titled A Room With a View (1986) took multiple Oscar nominations and starred china-faced beauty Helena Bonham Carter and Daniel Day-Lewis in a story that began in Italy and ended in England, followed by: Maurice (1987), Howard's End (1991), and The Remains of the Day (1993).
And Those Crazy Australians:
The biggest international box-office hit of 1986 was Australia's surprise 'sleeper' comedy film "Crocodile" Dundee (1986) with Paul Hogan (known to American viewers as a spokesman for Austrialian tourism commercials) as the scriptwriter and in the title role as the rugged outback adventurer - at home in Bush Country and able to survive in the alien streets of New York with transvestites and street gangs. The film was the first foreign film that had the biggest annual US box-office gross to date.
Screen Biographies and Fact-Based Films:
The biopic made a comeback in films such as Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), with Best Actress-winning Sissy Spacek as the rags-to-riches country singer superstar Loretta Lynn who made it from Kentucky to Nashville, Mike Nichols' Silkwood (1984) - a fact-based story about 28-year old Oklahoma plutonium plant worker and union activist 'whistleblower' Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep), and Robert Benton's memorable Places in the Heart (1984) about a Depression-Era young widow Edna Spalding (Sally Field) with two young children.
British director Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom (1987) was set in the 1970s South Africa in a story featuring Kevin Kline as a white liberal newspaper editor, and Denzel Washington as outspoken murdered hero Steve Biko. Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning (1988), the story of the investigation of the 1964 murder of three civil rights activists, provoked controversy over its dramatic propagandist message regarding racism.
Epics in the 80s:
Large-scale, Best Picture contenders included Warren Beatty's big-budget epic Reds (1981) about radical American journalist John Reed (played by Beatty) during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and Bernard Bertolucci's engrossing and colorful The Last Emperor (1987) with nine Academy Awards, about the life of the last emperor of China - Pu Yi from childhood in the Forbidden City to his Emperor-ship and then to his lowly status as a gardener in Mao's China. It was remarkable that Bertolucci was allowed to film inside the Forbidden City.
Milos Forman's Amadeus (1984), adapted from Peter Shaffer's play, was about the legendary (foul-mouthed and silly) musical genius Wolfgang Mozart (Tom Hulce) and the plotting of his second-rate, intensely-jealous and bitter competitor Antonio Salieri (Murray Abraham). Richard Attenborough's major, epic-style British film - the screen biography of the Indian spiritual and political leader Gandhi (1982) was a major award winner due to Ben Kingsley's outstanding performance in the lead role.
Writer/director Philip Kaufman's epic screen tribute to the early years of the heroic US Mercury astronaut space program (and the first seven astronauts in the 1960s space program) The Right Stuff (1983) was a box-office failure (an underappreciated film, in my opinion), yet it received eight Oscar nominations (and won four). It was based on Tom Wolfe's best-selling book about the space race after the Russians launched Sputnik, highlighting the era of Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) breaking the sound barrier in the late 40s through the orbiting of the Earth in the early 60s by John Glenn (Ed Harris). The old-style, sweeping epic of the 50s and 60s made a comeback in the form of the grand-scale travelogue/romance Out of Africa (1985) based on the life and works of Danish writer Isak Dinesen (Meryl Streep).
War Films of the 80s:
In the Reagan era, Hollywood finally allowed Americans to come to terms with the Vietnam War and its aftermath in a combination of films employing a successful formula - a stoic, gung-ho action hero: Sylvester Stallone starred in director George Cosmatos' Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985) - part of a series of pro-American, revisionist Vietnam films. In this comic-strip-like action film, Stallone was showcased as a larger-than-life, ex-Green Beret macho commando/hero John Rambo saving American MIA POWs being held in Vietnamese prison camps. [The first film in the series was First Blood (1982), about traumatized war veteran Rambo who went berserk and became a killing machine using his guerrilla training after being mistreated and unfairly arrested in a small town by the sheriff (Brian Dennehy). 
 
Other films displayed more critical perspectives on war in general, and on other dramatic political upheavals in the world including, Peter Weir's historical anti-war film Gallipoli (1981, Aus.) about the futile campaign of Anzac recruits (two sprinters Archy (Mark Lee) and Frank (Mel Gibson)) against the Turks in 1915 - ending with a haunting freeze-frame on the Anzac battlefield at Gallipoli; Wolfgang Petersen's historically-accurate and claustrophobic Das Boot (1981, W. Germ), a terrifying war drama about a German U-boat in the North Atlantic during WWII.  It became one of the most successful foreign-language films ever (with six Oscar nominations!), and Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields (1984) which visualized the horrors of war (during Pol Pot's regime) in a story of the friendship between NY Times reporter Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) and his Cambodian aide Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor) who became separated during the Khmer Rouge bloodbath.
Also, Stanley Kubrick's first film after seven years was the unforgettable and provocative picture Full Metal Jacket (1987) - filmed on a set that re-created Vietnam in East London; uniquely, it depicted urban rather than jungle combat in Vietnam; And, Tony Scott's ultra-positive, macho Top Gun (1986) with ear-shattering, competitive acrobatic flying sequences, a rock soundtrack (from Simpson/Bruckheimer) and award-winning hit song by Berlin, "Take My Breath Away," and, mega-star Tom Cruise as Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell - a crack, fighter pilot trainee at the US Navy's Fighter Weapons School at San Diego; noted for the line: "I feel the need - the need for speed."
 
Musicals:
Although the much-publicized Annie (1982) by renowned director John Huston failed, other non-traditional dance musicals flourished - Staying Alive (1983), written and directed by Sylvester Stallone, starred John Travolta (in his 10th film) as an aspiring Broadway dancer (six years after Saturday Night Fever (1977)); Although successful at the box-office, it contributed to the downfall of Travolta's career for the rest of the decade.
Adrian Lyne's slick Flashdance (1983) was the immensely popular, highly kinetic, music-video style film - with an Oscar-winning title song by Irene Cara. It featured 19 year-old Jennifer Beals in her first starring role as Alex - a day welder in Pittsburgh and night dancer in a men's club who aspired to successfully audition for ballet school.
 [The film almost singlehandedly inspired off-the-shoulder, oversized torn sweatshirts, legwarmers, the aerobics exercise class craze of the 80s, and the skillful art of removing one's bra from under one's shirt; it also introduced two newcomers, writer Joe Eszterhas and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (who went on to produce Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Top Gun (1986), among other films)]
Footloose (1984) with John Lithgow as a strict minister and Kevin Bacon as the illegal dancer in town featured Kenny Loggins' hit single of the title song.
The teen-oriented dance/romance Dirty Dancing (1987) about a young girl named Baby (Jennifer Grey, Joel Grey's daughter) finding sexual awakening with Patrick Swayze in the early 60s through wild dancing at a Catskills vacation resort.
Western-style Saturday Night Fever film, James Bridges' Urban Cowboy (1980) featured Houston honky-tonks, mechanical bull-riding in bars, blue-collar cowboys, and country music dancing (including the Cotton-Eyed Joe) - and popular young stars John Travolta and Debra Winger.
The Continuing Rise of Independent and Non-Hollywood Films:
Independent (or "indies") films made by various directors and writers provided uncompromising, low-budget, original visions of reality outside the studio system, following in the tradition of the first wave of independents by John Cassavetes in the 60s. Innovative films included Jim Jarmusch's acclaimed minimalist road-film comedy Stranger Than Paradise (1984) (that won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 1984) and another odyssey film of three escaped prisoners entitled Down By Law (1986).
Writer/director David Lynch made some of his best films in the 80s. His brilliant but disturbing Blue Velvet (1986) starred Dennis Hopper who revitalized his acting career in the repulsive role as the villainous, sadistic, and blackmailing Frank Booth toward a brutalized Isabella Rossellini. The unique film visualized the repulsive and twisted horrors that lurked behind ordinary small-town life - all stemming from the mysterious discovery of a severed human ear in a field by a naive college student.
German film-maker Wim Wenders directed the haunting Paris, Texas (1984) with Nastassja Kinski (as a lost wife working in a peep-show behind a one-way window) and Harry Dean Stanton as wandering husband Travis (on an obsessive quest to piece together his family) in an impressive Sam Shepard adaptation. The non-linear film included a Ry Cooder soundtrack, and an impressive opening credits sequence in the desert.
Maverick filmmaker Jonathan Demme (noted for The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Philadelphia (1993) in the next decade) began his career as a B-movie director/writer and trainee under Roger Corman, and had a number of cult classics in the 80s, including: Melvin and Howard (1980), the concert documentary Stop Making Sense (1984) about the Talking Heads with singer/guitarist David Byrne, Swing Shift (1984), Something Wild (1986) - filmed here in Tallahassee and Quincy, FL)), Swimming to Cambodia (1987), and Married to the Mob (1988).
The first feature film from independents Ethan Coen (producer) and Joel Coen (director) - the complex, suspenseful film noir thriller,  Blood Simple (1984) - truly one of their best films, in my opinion)) was just the beginning of their many off-beat, dark-edged films - this one featured the screen debut of Coen regular Frances McDormand. It was a tale of murder, mis-read motives, a premature burial, plot twists, and a gruesomely-impaled hand (belonging to vile private eye M. Emmet Walsh). The black comedy won the Grand Jury Prize at the newly-created Sundance Film Festival. Raising Arizona (1987) was next - an original, contemporary screwball comedy-farce about the kidnapping of a baby (one of the Arizona quintuplets) by a childless couple (Holly Hunter and Nicolas Cage).
Writer/director Michael Moore's iconoclastic documentary Roger & Me (1989), an expose about the disastrous effects of the closing of a General Motors plant (headed by CEO Roger Smith) on Flint, Michigan, earned almost $8 million - the highest ever earned for the "documentary" genre.
 
Spike Lee and John Singleton in the '80s:
Black movie-making emerged in a stronger state in the mid-80s, with films from independent film writer-director- star Spike Lee.  His modest debut was with the hip romantic comedy She's Gotta Have It (1986), about a liberated, sexually-voracious Brooklyn woman named Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) and her three boyfriends; the film was reportedly made in about two weeks with over-drawn credit cards budgeted at about $175,000. Then came, School Daze (1988) which told about factions in an African-American Southern college.
Do the Right Thing (1989) is Lee's finest film to date.  It is a thought-provoking, controversial, crackling, prefiguring study of racism in America that is seen in the explosive conflict and relations between Italian- and African-Americans, Koreans and white law-enforcement in a Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood block during a stifling hot summer day. (The film was bolstered with Public Enemy songs on the soundtrack). Jungle Fever (1991), Lee's film after Do the Right Thing examined inter-racial romance.
Twenty-four year-old John Singleton would soon join Spike Lee as an influential black moviemaker in the early 90s with his debut film - the coming-of-age drama Boyz 'N the Hood (1991), one of the highest-grossing films ($57 million) ever directed by an African-American. With his film, Singleton became the youngest nominee for Best Director in Academy Award history, and the first African-American to be nominated as Best Director.
Re-Runs of Previous TV Material:
Hollywood studios turned for script material to vintage 50s TV series: The serious, popular detective series Dragnet was converted into the comedy Dragnet (1987) with Dan Aykroyd impersonating Jack Webb's speech and deadpan manner (e.g., "Just the facts, Ma'am") as a squarish detective; Tom Hanks starred as Aykroyd's non-conformist partner Pep Streebeck, and Joe Friday's original partner in the TV series, Harry Morgan, was featured in a cameo as police captain Bill Gannon.
A beloved television series was re-worked in Brian De Palma's Chicago crime film The Untouchables (1987), with a script from Pulitzer-winning playwright David Mamet, a score from Ennio Morricone, borrowings from the 'Odessa Steps' sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925), and Robert De Niro as Al Capone, Sean Connery as honest Chicago cop Jimmy Malone - an Oscar-winning role, and Kevin Costner as Prohibition-era federal agent Eliot Ness
Brian De Palma:
In the 80s, De Palma was also credited with many sensational, Hitchcock-like thrillers: Dressed to Kill (1980) (paralleling Psycho (1960) and its shower scene); Blow Out (1981), a Hitchcockian type film that paid homage to Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) and Coppola's The Conversation (1974); The X-rated (then revised to R) Scarface (1983) with "Godfather" actor Al Pacino as Tony Montana - a violent update of Howard Hawks' gangster classic Scarface (1932), soaked with blood and cocaine powder in a story of "Scarface's" rise from Cuban emigre-dishwasher to Miami drug lord, along with icy blonde wife Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer); The daring erotic thriller Body Double (1984) (similar to the voyeuristic Rear Window (1954) and obsessive Vertigo (1958)) with a semi-pornographic theme and an infamous drill-murder, featured a memorable, pseudo 'music video' of "Relax" from one-hit group Frankie Goes To Hollywood -- set in an S&M porno film.
PG-13 Ratings Debut, and R-Rated, Adult-Oriented Features:
For most of the 70s and part of the early 1980s, the increase in violent movies, horror films, and slasher films (with an increase in depictions of violence toward women) encouraged Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) to finally take action. The MPAA created a new ratings category between R and PG known as PG-13. It issued its first PG-13 rating (after the inappropriately PG-rated Poltergeist (1982) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) from Spielberg for its heart-ripping sequence) for right-wing writer/director John Milius' Red Dawn (1984), an imaginative tale reflecting fears of a Russo-Cuban invasion of the American heartland. By 1986, a rating of PG was automatically given to films with swearing and narcotics use.
Paul Mazursky's R-rated Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), with Nick Nolte as a homeless person (similar in character to Spielberg's alien E.T.) befriended by a filthy rich Beverly Hills couple, was noted for being Disney's (under the name of its adult-oriented subsidiary Touchstone Films) first film to use the 'F' word.  The biographical R-rated romantic drama Sid and Nancy (1986) was a story of punk rock, heroin addiction, infatuation and doomed love between Sex Pistols' singer Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman) and groupie Nancy (Chloe Webb).
There were a few adventurous American films, with R ratings, that were specifically aimed at adult audiences. As the decade was just about to dawn, Richard Gere bared all (one of the first instances of a male star appearing nude) as a high-living, convertible-driving gigolo in director Paul Schrader's American Gigolo (1980), accompanied by Blondie's song "Call Me."
Reflecting the Puritan morality of the late 80s, however, and inspiring many talk-shows on its issues of marital infidelity and the dangers of dating, was Adrian Lyne's follow-up film to Flashdance (1983) - Fatal Attraction (1987), a suspenseful, melodramatic, erotic thriller about one-night stands, sexual games, and obsessive love (with Glenn Close as Alex Forrest - a murderous jilted, stalking woman). Its crowd-pleasing ending was determined by focus groups and preview audiences and substituted for the original version found in the script and filmed earlier. 
Revival of Film Noir with Neo-Noir Films:
Dark, shadowy scenes, deadly females, and menacing circumstances were brought back in modern, revisionistic film noirs in this decade. Lawrence Kasdan's first film was the steamy, modern-day Floridian, 40's style film noir Body Heat (1981) (with Kathleen Turner in a sexy screen debut) - based upon the plot-line of Double Indemnity (1944) with William Hurt as the sexually-horny lawyer duped by a rich, gorgeous trophy wife. Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson instilled heavy sex in the kitchen into Bob Rafelson's lackluster remake of the 1946 classic film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981).
Taylor Hackford's Against All Odds (1984) attempted to loosely remake the classic Out of the Past (1947) with Rachel Ward as spoiled heroine Jessie (the Jane Greer role), Jeff Bridges as ex-football star Terry Brogan (the Robert Mitchum role), and James Woods as gambler/businessman Jake (the Kirk Douglas role). Cast members from the original film in the remake included Jane Greer (now as the mother), and Paul Valentine (as a two-bit hood in the original, but now as "Councilman Weinberg"). The Coens' Blood Simple (1984) featured sleazy characters, an endless murder scene, and double-crosses - all characteristics of classic film noir.
Alan Parker's occult post-noir Angel Heart (1987) (originally X-rated) featured a seedy private detective's (Mickey Rourke) search for a missing singer in New Orleans for a devilish client Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) and involved voodoo, corruption, devilish circumstances - and an infamous sex scene (restored on unrated video/DVD releases) between Rourke and "The Cosby Show" star Lisa Bonet.
The first film appearance of serial killer Hannibal Lecter (later appearing in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Ridley Scott's Hannibal (2001)) was in Michael Mann's thriller Manhunter (1986). Jim McBride's erotic crime noir The Big Easy (1987) featured Cajun music (my good friend, Lisa Jane Persky as Police Lieutenant, McCabe) and a slick detective's (Dennis Quaid) murder investigation and romance with a repressed DA (Ellen Barkin). Ridley Scott directed the visually-compelling top-notch romantic crime thriller Someone to Watch Over Me (1987), while Roger Donaldson's No Way Out (1987) was based on John Farrow's classic The Big Clock (1948). Al Pacino played a New York police detective who fell for one of his suspects (Ellen Barkin) - a potential serial killer in the tense Sea of Love (1989).
The 1990s - Decade of Money, Mega-Spending and Special Effects:
In the 1990s for the most part, cinema attendance was up - mostly at multi-screen cineplex complexes throughout the country. Although the average film budget was almost $53 million by 1998, many films cost over $100 million to produce, and some of the most expensive blockbusters were even more. In the early 1990s, box-office revenues had dipped considerably, due in part to the American economic recession of 1991, but then picked up again by 1993 and continued to increase. The average ticket price for a film varied from about $4.25 at the start of the decade to around $5 by the close of the decade. As indoor multiplexes multiplied from almost 23,000 in 1990 to 35,600 in the year 2000, the number of drive-ins continued to decline (from 910 in 1990 to 667 in 2000).
There still existed an imbalanced emphasis on the opening weekend, with incessant reports of weekly box-office returns, and puffed-up reviews and critics' ratings (still happening to this day). The belief was sustained that expensive, high-budget films with expensive special effects (including shoot 'em-ups, stereotypical chase scenes, and graphic orchestrated violence) meant quality. However, the independently-distributed film movement was also proving that it could compete (both commercially and critically) with Hollywood's costly output.
Pressures on conventional studio executives to make ends meet and deliver big hit movies increased during the decade. Higher costs for film/celebrity star salaries and agency fees, spiraling production costs, promotional campaigns, expensive price tags for new high-tech and digital special-effects and CGI (computer generated images), costly market research and testing (to develop risk-averse, formulaic, stale, and over-produced films), scripts created by committee, threats of actor and writer strikes, and big-budget marketing contributed to the inflated, excessive spending (for inferior products) in the Hollywood film industry. True character development, interesting characters, credible plots, and intelligent story-telling often suffered in the process.
High-Cost Demanding Stars:
In the mid-1990s, perks and the excessive demands of mega-stars sometimes reached epidemic proportions for many of the highest-paid stars (including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Eddie Murphy, Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Demi Moore, Julia Roberts, and others). They often demanded script approval prior to filming, directorial and other casting choices, approval of the use of images for publicity, restrictions on film scheduling, studio-paid personal and entourage jet travel, various 'extras' (such as a personal gym and trainer/nutritionist, limo service), their choice of the positioning of credits (for example, above the title and in relation to other stars), the inclusion of nudity and other 'body-related' clauses, and final-cut approval. For example, at one time, Jack Nicholson wouldn't agree to filming during LA Lakers' basketball home games, and Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner and Tom Cruise would have the studios pay for their private jets.
To promote her film Ghost (1990), Demi Moore (who earned the nickname "Gimme" Moore) traveled with a bodyguard, masseuse, hair stylist, cosmetician, fashion consultant, and an assistant (who had an assistant). Reportedly, she ordered studio chiefs to charter two planes for her and her entourage while promoting both of her flop movies Striptease (1996) and G.I. Jane (1997). Her support staff for the freely-adapted $50 million film The Scarlet Letter (1995) was no different, while the movie bombed and earned only a small fraction of its budget.
And Julia Roberts (with a $10 million salary) ordered the studio to have a jet ready in London to fly from Pinewood Studios back to the US for the weekend during the making of Mary Reilly (1996), at a cost of more than $41,000 per month--for approximately three months. It became clear that once stars were earning multi-million dollar salaries, a director and a studio could easily lose control of the film, especially when the demanding star was also one of the film's producers. Ironically, however, a highly-paid star in a big-budget film didn't guarantee a film's success.
The Digital Age and Home Viewing:
The VCR was still a popular appliance in most households (about three quarters of them in 1991) and rentals and purchase of videotapes were big business - much larger than sales of movie theater tickets. Rather than attending special film screenings, members of the Academy of Motion Pictures viewed Oscar-nominated films on videotape, beginning in 1994. The signs of the burgeoning of the digital age portended revolutionary change. In 1990, Kodak introduced the Photo CD player. And in 1992, the Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, was also made available on CD-ROM. By 1992, broadcast TV was beginning to lose large numbers of viewers to cable-only channels.
By 1997, the first DVDs (digital video discs) had emerged in stores, featuring sharper resolution pictures, better quality and durability than videotape, interactive extras, and more secure copy-protection. In just a few years, sales of DVD players and the shiny discs proliferated and would surpass the sale of VCRs and videotapes.
And with the digital revolution, some pioneering film-makers were experimenting with making digital-video (DV) films, pushing digital imagery and special effects, or projecting films digitally. A number of films also used special-effects CGI in more subtle, innovative ways:
Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy (1990) was the first 35 mm feature film with a digital soundtrack .
Wolfgang Petersen's In the Line of Fire (1993) included retouched footage of political crowd scenes .
Jurassic Park (1993) was the first film with DTS sound.
Forrest Gump (1994) used digital photo trickery to insert a person into historical footage, to erase the legs of amputee Gary Sinese, and to enhance the ping-pong game.
Lars von Trier, founder of the Dogme 95 movement, directed the distinctive Breaking the Waves (1996) and showed how digital-video (and its hand-held cinema verite look) could be viable for dramatic feature films .
The English Patient (1996) was the first Oscar-winning American film with a digitally edited soundtrack - two of its nine awards were for Best Film Editing and Best Sound.
George Lucas' Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) included characters that were entirely digitally rendered, such as Jar Jar Binks .
 
One of the emerging trends of the late 80s and 90s was that although about the same number of pictures were produced as in the "Golden Age of Hollywood" (about 450-500 in a year), many of the films that were produced (some estimates say 40%) went directly to video (laserdisc or DVD) or cable with no cinematic theatrical release at all. And the window of time between a film's theatrical opening and availability for cable TV or home viewing shrunk. The proliferation of films helped to assuage the tremendous appetite for new products demanded by cable stations, video rental stores, the local megaplexes, digital satellite services, foreign markets, and the Internet. In the early 90s, the World Wide Web was born, and home computers were becoming the hot new technology - with vast repercussions for the film industry. [One of the decade's many films about malevolent computers was The Net (1995) with Sandra Bullock - a God awful film, in my opinion]
Groundbreaking Internet Film-Marketing: Case Study - The Blair Witch Project
Foretelling new methods of Internet-based marketing, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick's roughly-made, offbeat independent film The Blair Witch Project (1999) (from small-time distributor Artisan Films) was a quasi-documentary about an October 1994 horrifying camping trip and investigation of a local legend that was experienced by no-name actors: three vanished Montgomery College student film-makers (Heather, Josh, and Mike) in Maryland's Black Hill Forest (near Burkittsville).
The cult film reaped a greater audience (and box-office receipts) from Internet exposure and astute promotion and marketing. The 'Blair Witch' website, a popular destination for web surfers (with millions of hits), created tremendous advance buzz (is it real?) for this low-budget film that was directed by a group of students from the University of Central Florida in eight days. It was innovatively shot on 16mm B/W and color digital video, and basically looked like a home-made film with unknown actors and poor production values. Surprisingly, it easily became one of the most profitable films (percentage-wise) of all time, grossing $140.5 million (domestic) and $249 million (worldwide), but budgeted at only about $60,000 [a tremendous profit-ratio]. Remarkably, it had no stars, no large marketing budget, no state-of-the-art special effects, and no creatures/monsters. Many believed that the story was true, rather than the ingenious marketing hoax that it was.
I'll gladly show you my Blair Witch Project, With Dogs (1999) anytime.  Just ask!
Changes in The Major Studios:
1990:  Warner Communications and Time Inc. merged to form Time/Warner, the largest communications merger to date, at a cost of $14 billion.
Late 1990:  Japanese corporation Matsushita Industrial, Inc. acquired the entertainment conglomerate MCA/Universal for $6.1 billion.
1991:  MGM Studios struggled under its new chief Alan Ladd, Jr. (until replaced by Frank Mancuso in 1993).  Brandon Tartikoff chaired Paramount (until replaced by Sherry Lansing in 1992).
1994:  Viacom bought Paramount Pictures after a bidding war with USA Networks/QVC.  Disney became the first studio to gross $1 billion at the box office.  Showtime Networks and Castle Rock Entertainment entered into a multi-year, 50-picture exclusive output deal.
1995:  Seagram bought MCA/Universal from Matsushita for $5.7 billion and renamed it Universal Studios.  Disney bought the ABC Network.  Two members of the Creative Artists Agency, one of the world's leading talent and literary agencies, moved to head Hollywood film studios: Ron Meyers to MCA, and Michael Ovitz to the Disney Company (until 1996).
1996:  Time/Warner acquired Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting System (TBS), including its cable TV stations and its extensive film library.
1997:  Orion Pictures was sold to MGM.
A Newcomer Studio - DreamWorks:
It was significant that the first new Hollywood studio in many decades, DreamWorks (SKG), was formed in October 1994 as the brainchild of director-producer Steven Spielberg, ex-Disney executive producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film producer/music industry giant David Geffen. The studio's first theatrical release was first-time feature director Mimi Leder's The Peacemaker (1997) starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. This was followed by Amistad (1997), Mouse Hunt (1997), Paulie (1998), Deep Impact (1998), and Small Soldiers (1998). Their first real hit was also their first film to be nominated for Best Picture - Saving Private Ryan (1998).
After their first major animated film Antz (1998), they also turned out The Prince of Egypt (1998), the claymation Chicken Run (2000), Joseph: King of Dreams (2000) (direct-to-video), The Road to Eldorado (2000), and Best Animated Feature-winning Shrek (2001).
By decade's end, DreamWorks had three consecutive Best Picture winners:
Sam Mendes' suburban satire American Beauty (1999)
Ridley Scott's sword and sandal epic Gladiator (2000)
Ron Howard's biopic A Beautiful Mind (2001)
In addition to producing films, DreamWorks also produced TV shows (Spin City, Freaks & Geeks, The Job, Undeclared), and music, including the soundtracks to DreamWorks films and record deals with popular artists. One of the new issues that all studios and other media industries had to confront was the pirating of films, and the illegal sharing/swapping of MPEG music files.
Independent Films:
Existing alongside mainstream Hollywood film production is that of the independents. By the end of the decade, most studios had formed independent film divisions (such as Fox's Searchlight division) that would make films with artistic, edgy, or 'serious' social issues or themes, and without major Hollywood stars. Unlike the glitzy Academy Awards Oscars, the IFP Independent Spirit Awards - founded in 1984 - honored visionary, innovative film-makers, and unsung actors and actresses in independent films who "embody independence and who dare to challenge the status quo." Indicative of the times, in the 1996 Academy Awards race, four of the five Best Picture-nominated films (all but Jerry Maguire (1996)) were from independent studios.
The Independent Film Channel was launched by the Bravo cable network in 1994 as an outlet for independent films. In similar fashion, in 1995, the Sundance Channel was created by the Showtime cable TV network (in partnership with Robert Redford). Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute (established in 1980) took over the Utah/US Film Festival. In 1991, it was renamed the Sundance Film Festival (the film festival was held annually since 1981 in January in Park City, Utah and expanded in length) - "dedicated to the support and development of emerging screenwriters and directors of vision, and to the national and international exhibition of new, independent dramatic and documentary films."
By the end of the decade, however, independent film-making had become more mainstream and institutionalized - sharing some of the same concerns and corporate worries that traditional Hollywood studios had always confronted.
Miramax Studios:
The small, independent Miramax Studios, formed in 1979 by brothers and co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein (the name was derived from the combination of their parents' names: Miriam and Max; Sorry, but they always remind me of two guys who should be affilitated with the Mafia, if they ain't), produced and distributed independent and foreign, and then - more recently - even mainstream films. Miramax made a name for itself in the late '80s and '90s by making "art" films and the small independent and foreign language movies that other studios refused to make, including Working Girls (1987), Italy's Best Foreign Language Film Cinema Paradiso (1988, It./Fr.), the UK's award-winning My Left Foot (1989), Steven Soderbergh's Sex Lies and Videotape (1989), Stephen Frears' The Grifters (1990), former video store clerk Quentin Tarantino's heist pic Reservoir Dogs (1992), and Jane Campion's New Zealand pic The Piano (1993).
It shrewdly marketed writer/director Neil Jordan's original British film The Crying Game (1992) with a surprise gender twist experienced by Forest Whitaker, earning Jordan a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. In 1993, Walt Disney Studio Entertainment acquired the maverick studio for $65 million - a move that encouraged other Hollywood studios to begin buying up indie production and distribution companies.
Miramax's biggest cult hit of the 90s was Quentin Tarantino's  Pulp Fiction (1994), made with a budget of $8 million, and went on to win the Palm d'Or at Cannes and seven Oscar nominations, Miramax Studios then gathered together a stable of hip, young actors including Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon. During the decade, Hollywood was disturbed that Miramax did so well, with the releases of Kevin Smith's low-budget black and white debut film Clerks (1994), Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Sirens (1994), Larry Clark's Kids (1995), Sling Blade (1996) and Swingers (1996), the Best Original Screenplay-winning Good Will Hunting (1997), the Best Picture-nominated Italian film Life is Beautiful (1998), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and The Cider House Rules (1999).
Miramax began an unbroken, eleven-year streak lasting from 1992 until 2002, of Best Picture-nominated films each year, beginning with The Crying Game (1992). It was the longest streak for any company since the Academy limited the Best Picture nominees to five films in 1944.
Miramax's sister (or subsidiary) company Dimension Films, specializing in horror films and science fiction, revitalized these genres with Scream (1996, 1997, 2000) and Scary Movie (2000, 2001) series.
Trends in the 90s: Films with Serious Themes
The trend toward sequels from the previous decade continued, but Hollywood was also attempting to deal with serious themes, including homelessness, the Holocaust, AIDS, feminism, and racism, while making bottom-line profits. There were a number of mainstream films that confronted the issues in a profound way. Director Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia (1993) was the first big-studio attempt to deal with AIDS, winning for Tom Hanks the first of consecutive Best Actor Oscars. He starred as a lawyer with AIDS who found that Denzel Washington was the only person who would take his case.
With seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, Steven Spielberg's long and serious B/W Holocaust 'prestige' epic Schindler's List (1993) was a significant milestone but also a grim story about an opportunistic German businessman (Liam Neeson) in Poland who ultimately saved over 1,000 Jews from a Holocaust death by employing them as cheap labor. This historical drama was released only a few months after Spielberg's major entertainment blockbuster Jurassic Park (1993).
Soon before its bankruptcy in 1991, Orion Pictures distributed the three-hour western - director/producer/actor Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990), that retold the story of the Wild West from the viewpoint of Native Americans and displayed some of the subtitled dialogue in Sioux. Kevin Costner starred as Lt. John Dunbar who married Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell), and inadvertently became a hero. The film won the Best Picture Academy Award and six other Oscars, the first "western" to do so since Cimarron (1931).
Orion also released Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991), a chilling thriller about serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and featuring Jodie Foster as young agent Clarice Starling seeking help from the psychopath to catch another psychopath named Buffalo Bill. The remarkable film swept the top five Oscars (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Writer) - it was the first horror film to be so honored. [It repeated the earlier success of two other sweep films: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and It Happened One Night (1934).]
The immensely popular box-office hit Forrest Gump (1994) by director Robert Zemeckis looked back on the 60s and Vietnam War era through the eyes of a slow-witted Everyman (Best Actor-winning Tom Hanks with his second Oscar win), reportedly with an IQ of 75. He would spout Gump-isms ("Life is like a box of chocolates") and the film's exceptional special effects placed the unassuming Forrest within documentary newsreels - creating the illusion of meeting with Presidents (Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon), missing legs and the finale's floating feather.
Racial issues and social tensions were disturbingly portrayed by Michael Douglas in Falling Down (1993). Actor Tim Robbins' independent film Dead Man Walking (1995) confronted the issue of capital punishment in a powerful tale with Oscar-winning Susan Sarandon portraying real-life Catholic nun Sister Helen Prejean as a death-row spiritual counselor for convicted murderer and rapist Sean Penn. In Scent of a Woman (1992), Best Actor-winning Al Pacino starred as a blind ex-Marine (Col. Frank Slade), known for saying "Hoo-hah!", who intended to commit suicide - until hiring a young college student (Chris O'Donnell).
Female Directors into the 90s:
Similarly, from the 80s into the 90s, female directors were exerting greater influence and demonstrating their skill within the film industry: Barbra Streisand with her first film Yentl (1983) (as director/producer/co-writer/actor) and The Prince of Tides (1991), Penny Marshall with the soul-transference fantasy/comedy Big (1988) starring Tom Hanks as a youngster in an adult body, Penelope Spheeris with Wayne's World (1992) starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey from TV's Saturday Night Live, Kathryn Bigelow with the exciting, fast-moving action-crime film Point Break (1991) and the dark, virtual reality futuristic film Strange Days (1995), and New Zealand director Jane Campion with the Oscar winning sensual and haunting masterpiece that was filmed from a female perspective The Piano (1993) - a love story set in 19th century New Zealand about the tragic consequences of an arranged marriage and erotic passion between mute Holly Hunter and native Harvey Keitel.
Director Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own (1992) was the true story of WWII manpower shortages that impacted baseball. Tom Hanks managed an all-female baseball team which included Geena Davis and Madonna.
Writer/director Nora Ephron, famous for When Harry Met Sally...(1989) created the witty, simple  romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle (1993) (a re-make of An Affair to Remember (1957)) with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as the perfect couple brought together by a talk-radio program. Ephron also directed the fantasy comedy Michael (1996) with John Travolta as the atypical title character - an angel (with wings) who drank, smoked, swore, and lived in Iowa.
After her success in The Silence of the Lambs (1990), actress Jodie Foster became a producer and director for Egg Pictures, releasing her directorial debut film Little Man Tate (1991) and then a comedy about family relationships on Thanksgiving weekend titled Home for the Holidays (1995).
Shifting Action in the '90s:
There seemed to be a significant shift toward action films in the 90s - with their requisite speed, kinetic hyper-action, and of course, violence. Most of the biggest and popular films were not dialogue-based and character-driven. One of the greatest summer smashes of the decade was Andrew Davis' The Fugitive (1993) - a spin-off from the celebrated 1963-67 TV series (with David Janssen), with Harrison Ford as the wrongly-convicted surgeon Dr. Richard Kimble in flight from dogged US Marshal (Tommy Lee Jones) and in pursuit of a one-armed man. Brian De Palma's big-budget slick summer blockbuster Mission: Impossible (1996) derived from the popular 1960s TV series, was financially successful given its Tom Cruise star power and huge marketing campaign. 
During the 1993 filming of the martial arts action-thriller adapted from a comic book, The Crow (1994; a fave of mine), Bruce Lee's actor son Brandon was killed in an accident on the set (and it was an accident - no conspiracy theories, please). Hong Kong action director John Woo proved that he could make mainstream Hollywood films with the high-powered Broken Arrow (1996), his second US film, and filled with Woo's trademark action sequences. He also directed Face/Off (1997), a brilliantly-acted film with stars John Travolta as an FBI agent and Nicolas Cage as the villain - who both swapped faces after plastic surgery.
Jan de Bont's action disaster-thriller Speed (1994) was just as its title suggested - a fast-paced, out-of-control tale about a mad bomber (Dennis Hopper) vs. an LA SWAT team cop (Keanu Reeves), and a runaway suburban LA bus (driven by Sandra Bullock) wired to explode if it slowed below 50 mph. The vacation-cruise sequel Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997) paled in comparison. The producers of Top Gun (1986) made their last film The Rock (1996) - Michael Bay's successful action thriller with an all-star cast set on the island prison Alcatraz, with renegade Marines (led by Ed Harris) and a task force teaming Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.
Major Blockbusters: Phenomenal Successes
Since the making of Jaws (1975), studio executives were primed toward making blockbusters to meet the bottom line. In the 90s, many of the greatest box-office hits of all time (in the top twenty) were made and marketed with sophisticated publicity and merchandising campaigns:
Steven Spielberg's and Universal's f/x laden Jurassic Park (1993) (based upon Michael Crichton's 1990 novel) with photo-realistic, computer-generated dinosaurs spliced into live-action sequences, i.e., the car-crunching T-Rex sequence; Adrian Lyne's Indecent Proposal (1993), in which wealthy Robert Redford offered one million dollars as the price-tag for one night with married Demi Moore; Chris Columbus' Mrs. Doubtfire (1993); Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump (1994); The Lion King (1994); The apocalyptic disaster film ("Earth! Take a good look. It could be your last") from director Roland Emmerich Independence Day (1996) - that set a record by grossing $100 million in box-office receipts during its first six days, and won a Best Visual Effects Oscar - mostly for the sequence of the White House exploding; Twister (1996) - about the chasing of tornadoes by researcher Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) while trying to divorce his wife Jo (Helen Hunt); Titanic (1997); Men in Black (1997) - with Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as black-clad buddies on a mission; The Mummy (1999), a glossy remake of the original, with French Foreign legion hero Brendan Fraser stumbling upon an ancient city in Egypt and awakening high priest Imhotep.
But the biggest box-office ($294 million) and critics favorite - and psychological thriller - was writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999) - about a 9 year-old boy (Haley Joel Osment) who saw ghosts of dead people (with the memorable tagline "I see dead people") all around south Philadelphia, and who shared his ghostly experience with child psychologist Bruce Willis. The mysterious film from an unknown director generated much talk over its unexpected twist ending. [There were at least five films famous for their gripping twist or surprise endings in this decade: The Crying Game (1992), Se7en (1995), The Usual Suspects (1995), and Fight Club (1999) could be added.]
Hollywood was relieved (and recouped its costs) when its traditional kind of blockbuster did well in the summer of 1991, evidenced by James Cameron's expensive sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). It featured superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger ("Hasta la vista, baby!") as a T-800 cyborg, and incredible, quicksilver "morphing" effects of the opposing, molten-metal T-1000 android (Robert Patrick) produced with high-powered Silicon Graphics super-computers). It was the first film with a $100 million budget. [Cameron had written and directed the earlier low-budget The Terminator (1984) with modest success. Likewise, he had transformed Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) into a big-budget sequel titled Aliens (1986).]
Writer/director Cameron's next film (with secret agent Arnold Schwarzenegger as Harry) was True Lies (1994) - a Bond-like spy-adventure packed with special effects, thrills, an exciting jet and car chase over the Florida Keys, and tongue-in-cheek comedy about how Harry's wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) didn't know his occupation. [It was the first movie with a budget to exceed $100 million, and eventually grossed $365 million.] Ridley Scott closed the decade with the Best Picture, multiple-Oscar winner Gladiator (2000), a computer-enhanced Roman Empire sandals-toga epic with Australian actor Russell Crowe as the virtuous and wronged Maximus who sought revenge in the Coliseum.
The Phenomenon of Titanic:
Writer/director James Cameron solidified his reputation as the undisputed king of mega-blockbusters in this decade with his studio-shared (Fox and Paramount) Titanic (1997) (grossing $600 million in the US alone, and $1.8 billion worldwide for the studios). It was the first film with a budget exceeding $200 million. Titanic retold the spectacular, epic-disaster of the 1912 ill-fated, maiden voyage cruise of the R.M.S. Titanic, when it was pierced by an iceberg. The tense scene of the sinking of the ship was created with state-of-the-art digital effects and a life-size version of the ship. In addition, a secondary love story between star-crossed lovers - poor passenger Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and upper-class Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), told in flashback by an older Rose (Gloria Stuart) slowly built to the inevitable conclusion. [Titanic became the highest grossing and most successful film of all time (passing the megahit of the past Gone with the Wind (1939)); It was the most expensive film in Hollywood history estimated at about $200 million; It tied Ben-Hur (1959) with its eleven Oscar wins]
The Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix:
Writers-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski's second feature film (following Bound (1996)) was the ambitious and inventive virtual-reality flick The Matrix (1999). It starred Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves, and won four Academy Awards (all in sound, editing, and visual effects technical categories). Slacker hacker Thomas Anderson/Neo (Keanu Reeves) was called as a messianic figure to save the world (of approximately the year 2199) from virtually indestructible Sentient Agents. The blockbuster's wild popularity was due to its combination of comic-bookish plot, mysticism, philosophical complexity, computer-enhanced digital effects of its unbelievable action scenes, flying bullet-dodging ("bullet-time") and intriguing virtual worlds in which reality was redefined as a computer simulation. It helped to illustrate what the future would be of futuristic sci-fi action films with slick and smart plots, and jaw-dropping action.
Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarrintino - Solid, Significant Directors of the '90s:
Martin Scorsese directed the following in the decade before the turn of the century: The graphically-violent and compelling GoodFellas (1990) - a virtuoso adaptation of Nicolas Pileggi's best-selling book Wiseguy and a true-life account of gangster/FBI informant Henry Hill (in the witness protection program ultimately) noted for his statement: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster", with fellow gangsters Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci ("I'm funny how? Like a clown? I amuse you?"); Cape Fear (1991), a commercially-successful remake of director J. Lee Thompson's 1962 thriller film (with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum), with Robert DeNiro as a vengeful, psychopathic ex-convict stalking defense attorney Nick Nolte; The costume drama The Age of Innocence (1993), an adaptation of Edith Wharton's 1920 novel of passion, hypocrisy, sexual longing and emotional/ psychological repression set in 1870s Victorian New York society, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer as illicit lovers, and Winona Ryder (who had a Best Supporting Actress nomination); Casino (1995), a Las Vegas-based gangster film (again from a Pileggi adaptation) set in the 1970s, with favorite stars Robert DeNiro (as gambling executive Ace) and Joe Pesci (as Mob enforcer Nicky), and Oscar-nominated Sharon Stone (she won the Golden Globe award for Best Actress) as a hedonistic, drug-addicted ex-prostitute named Ginger McKenna; Kundun (1997), a unique, episodic, historical epic about the 14th Tibetan Dalai Lama's life, with visually-rich cinematography by Roger Deakins; Bringing Out the Dead (1999), a stunning urban drama about a haunted New York paramedic/ambulance driver (Nicolas Cage); the film reunited Scorsese with his frequent scriptwriter Paul Schrader, who scripted Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988); Gangs of New York (2002), a period drama from Herbert Asbury's book, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Cameron Diaz; nominated for 10 Oscars (without any wins).
Violence accompanied a number of films of emerging maverick writer/director Quentin Tarantino, a self-promoting videostore clerk who demonstrated his exciting, self-taught, original filmmaking genius (with generous helpings of violence, sex, and profanity) in his first film Reservoir Dogs (1992). The cult hit broke many of the rules of conventional crime films in its tale of a group of color-named criminals whose jewelry heist went awry. It began with a deconstruction of Madonna's 'Like A Virgin' and even featured director Tarantino as Mr. Brown.
Tarantino served as co-screenwriter (with Roger Avary) and director of an acclaimed (Best Screenplay-winning) follow-up, low-budget independent film Pulp Fiction (1994). The Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner and seven-time Academy Award nominee was an ultra-violent, intermingling, non-linear trio of criminal life stories intertwined in a sleazy Los Angeles (involving hitmen, a crime boss' overdosing wife played by Uma Thurman, and a boxer - Bruce Willis) that gave John Travolta a super-star comeback (famed as a hitman for talking about what the French call fast-food Big Macs). It began with and returned to a scene of Pumpkin and Honey Bunny holding up a restaurant.
Director/screenwriter Tarantino also followed up with a more mature character study in his leisurely crime thriller Jackie Brown (1997) with ex-blaxploitation 70s star Pam Grier in a stand-out role as an ex-con.
Nineties Neo-Noirs:
Belfast-born actor/director Kenneth Branagh directed his second film (following his revisionist rendering and scripting of Shakespeare's Henry V (1989)), the intelligent and suspenseful noir thriller Dead Again (1991). In the film, Branagh starred as a cynical L.A. private detective who investigated a twisting cycle of murder involving a mysterious amnesia victim (Emma Thompson, Branagh's real-life wife at the time).
A master of modern noir, writer-director John Dahl contributed three great stylish neo-noirs in the decade:
Kill Me Again (1989), Dahl's film debut, with Joanne Whalley-Kilmer as a ruthless, deceptive woman involved in an intricate plot of double-cross between psychotic mobster Michael Madsen and private eye Val Kilmer hired to fake her own death.
Red Rock West (1993), a great sleeper film, with Nicolas Cage as a loser-drifter caught in a twisting murder plot and a case of mistaken identity in an isolated Wyoming town, with a psycho contract killer (Dennis Hopper) and the intended femme fatale victim (Lara Flynn Boyle).
John Dahl's contemporary film noir The Last Seduction (1994), starred Linda Fiorentino in an outstanding, single-minded role as a scheming, amoral, sexy and lethal femme fatale; the film was broadcast on HBO cable TV before being released in theaters - thereby eliminating and invalidating its eligibility for an Oscar nomination (Best Actress or Best Picture)
Gus Van Sant's dark comedy-satire To Die For (1995) featured Nicole Kidman as obsessed and determined cable-TV weather reporter Suzanne Stone who sought to have Joaquin Phoenix kill her obstructive husband Matt Dillon. Bryan Singer's mystery/crime thriller The Usual Suspects (1995), screened at Sundance, had a complicated screenplay and a surprise ending. It starred Kevin Spacey in his first Oscar-winning performance of the decade as a petty crook - and the all-knowing, black-hearted villainous crime lord Keyser Soze. Spacey also appeared in British theater director Sam Mendes' motion-picture directorial debut picture - DreamWorks' brightly-colored black comedy about an unhappily-married couple in suburbia, American Beauty (1999) and became a multiple Oscar winner for his role as head of the dysfunctional family. While his real estate-selling wife (Annette Bening) was having an affair, he was obsessing over his daughter's cheerleader friend (Mena Suvari).
Curtis Hanson, who had earlier directed the thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), directed the much-acclaimed, modern film noir and police drama L.A. Confidential (1997), set in early 50s Los Angeles and adapted from James Ellroy's crime story. A shooting at an all-night diner set the stage for the film. Two of its Aussie stars, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce, became more familiar to movie-goers since 1997, as has character actor Kevin Spacey (who portrayed a detective who also served as a TV consultant). The film received nine nominations and two Oscars (Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Kim Basinger).
The Coen brothers continued to make twisted but influential independent films, including the gangster film Miller's Crossing (1990), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), and the film-noirish, Oscar-winning black comedy Fargo (1996) - their most conventional film to date, about a kidnapping-blackmail scheme that went awry. It had a twisting plot and featured Best Actress-winning Frances McDormand as a determined, pregnant Minnesota police sheriff investigating a triple-murder, and William H. Macy as the perpetrator - a desperate used car salesman. The pair also directed the quirky The Big Lebowski (1997) with Jeff Bridges as a stoned, bowling-loving 'Dude' caught in a complex case of mistaken identity.
The Struggling Musical Genre:
There was very little evidence of films from the musical genre beyond just a few examples: the first major Hollywood musical in almost a decade and a half was director Alan Parker's Evita (1996) - based on the stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice and starring an impressive Madonna in the lead role as Argentina's first lady Eva Peron. The film won Golden Globe Awards for Best Comedy/Musical and Best Actress, and one of its songs, "You Must Love Me" won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. A second example was Woody Allen's revival of the musical-romantic comedy - Everyone Says I Love You (1996).
Some of the best musicals of the decade were animated features (see more below), jump-started by Disney's The Little Mermaid (1989). Some examples included: Beauty and The Beast (1991), the only musical nominated for Best Picture for many years and the first animated Best Picture nominee in Academy history, Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Anastasia (1997) - the first animated feature film from 20th Century Fox, and The Prince of Egypt (1998) - DreamWorks' first animated feature film.
Some Highlight Comedies from the '90:
Harold Ramis' excellent existentialist romantic fantasy Groundhog Day (1993) featured Bill Murray as an egotistical TV weatherman doomed to experience deja vu and repeat the same day over and over again (February 2, 1992) - beginning with a Sonny and Cher song - during the Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania "Ground Hog Day" festivities. Ron Underwood's enjoyable and funny City Slickers (1991) followed a group of suburbanized, married, mid-life friends (including Billy Crystal as 40 year old Mitch Robbins) on a two-week cattle drive led by Curly - a weathered and grizzly trail boss (Best Supporting Actor Oscar-winning Jack Palance). Their experience was repeated in the sequel City Slickers: The Legend of Curly's Gold (1994) with virtually the same cast. Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon were brought together as two long-time feuding, cantankerous neighbors who pursued the same woman in Grumpy Old Men (1993).
Tim Burton saluted a 50's maverick, angora-wearing director-writer-producer (one of the worst, but praised cult and B movie film-makers of all time) in his black and white Ed Wood (1994), with Johnny Depp in the title role and Best Supporting Actor Oscar-winner Martin Landau as horror star and morphine addict Bela Lugosi.
Robin Williams played a homeless tramp (searching for the Holy Grail) and Jeff Bridges portrayed a shock-jock who instigated a shooting tragedy in Terry Gilliam's fantasy comedy The Fisher King (1991). Joe Pesci played a New York lawyer called to defend an accused relative, but found himself out of his element in Alabama in My Cousin Vinny (1992).
In Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Nicolas Cage lost his fiancee Sarah Jessica Parker to gambler James Caan in a bet and had to travel to Hawaii and then back to the strip - where he parachuted down as a sky-diving Elvis. And in in a romantic comedy set in 1985, The Wedding Singer (1998), Adam Sandler (as broken-hearted wedding singer Robbie Hart) was left at the altar, while Drew Barrymore (as waitress Julia Sullivan) was engaged to the wrong guy.
 
The Super-Stardom of Jim Carrey:
Hammy and crude, face-twisting, clownish comedian Jim Carrey, of Fox TV's comedy show In Living Color, began to make a name for himself in Tom Shadyac's directorial debut film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1993) as a low-cost, Florida missing-animals detective searching for a kidnapped dolphin (the mascot for the Miami Dolphins football team). His next two films propelled him into super-stardom - both were from New Line Cinema (purchased by Ted Turner in 1993): Peter Farrelly's very low-brow physical comedy Dumb and Dumber (1994) starred Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels as Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne (memorable in a hilarious bathroom scene) - two manic, intellectually-challenged buddies on a cross-country road trip to Aspen, Colorado to deliver a briefcase; Chuck Russell's adventure/fantasy/comedy The Mask (1994) combined gags with great cartoonish digital effects when Carrey, as shy bank teller Stanley Ipkiss, donned an ancient, magical mask and was transformed into a green superhero; the film marked the debut of actress Cameron Diaz.
The sequel Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995) suffered from a poor script and infantile-minded comedy. Carrey turned to more legitimate acting at the end of the decade in two films. In Peter Weir's comedy/drama The Truman Show (1998), Carrey played the role of Truman Burbank, a happy suburbanite resident of the paradisical fictional community of Seahaven, and the unwitting, imprisoned star of a real-life documentary TV series ("On the Air, Unaware") created and controlled by Christof (Ed Harris). And in Milos Forman's biopic Man on the Moon (1999), he assumed the role of legendary comic Andy Kaufman. In consecutive years, Carrey won the Golden Globe Best Actor award for both roles, but was un-nominated for an Academy Award.
Notable British Films:
The most successful British film of the first half of the decade was Mike Newell's surprise hit Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), an intelligent, well-scripted romantic adult comedy about the major rites of passage in life (and death). It featured a long-running romance between a reserved Britisher and confirmed bachelor (Hugh Grant) and attractive American (Andie MacDowell), with a hilarious bit-part by Rowan Atkinson (aka Mr. Bean).
Writer-director Scott Hicks' Australian/UK film Shine (1996) told the story of recovering gifted pianist David Helfgott (Best Actor-winning Geoffrey Rush) with a history of mental problems. Due to the film's popularity, the real-life Helfgott went on a musical concert tour, but received mostly negative reviews.
The decade's most successful British film was first-time director Peter Cattaneo's Best Picture-nominated The Full Monty (1997) about a group of displaced, unemployed Sheffield steel-mill workers who become 'Chippendale-style' male strippers. It brought new popularity to two hits: Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing," and Donna Summers' "Hot Stuff." The edgy and visually-fresh film about drug addiction, Trainspotting (1995) was based upon Irving Welsh's famous novel set in Edinburgh, with original Scottish characters (and unknown actors) including Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie, and featuring a pulsing soundtrack with Iggy Pop singing "Lust for Life". Although not a British film, Rob Roy (1995) starred Liam Neeson as 18th century Scottish legend Robert Roy MacGregor based upon Sir Walter Scott's legendary novel.
Distinctive Independent Film-Makers:
In the 90s' era of blockbusters, independent films made significant headway. The major studios set up specialty art-house production and distribution divisions, such as Sony Pictures Classics and Fox World Cinema. There were any number of shoestring-budget, non-mainstream films that appealed to disenchanted Generation-Xers, from directors such as Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, Edward Burns, Todd Solondz, Gus Van Sant and Jim Jarmusch.
Richard Linklater:
Writer/director Richard Linklater's first feature Slackers (1991) was a free-form, low-budget film that defined a generation of dead-beat, drop-out, misfit individuals living on the edge of the college town of Austin, Texas during a 24-hour period. [Many of Linklater's films would be contained within a 24-hour time frame.] The word 'slacker' was immediately seized upon as a word to define a group within the twenty-something subculture. His next film, a rambling ensemble drama Dazed and Confused (1993), dubbed 'the American Graffiti (1973) of the 90s', followed graduating Texas high-school students on their last academic day in the Bicentennial year of 1976. The quotable, archetypal film introduced many exceptional acting newcomers to audiences, including Milla Jovovich, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Renee Zellweger, Matthew McConaughey, Cole Hauser, Adam Goldberg, and Joey Lauren Adams.
Linklater's more accessible and sweet film Before Sunrise (1995) followed the overnight budding romance between a traveling young American (Ethan Hawke) and a French student (Julie Delpy) in Vienna, and the dialogue-heavy SuBurbia (1997), an adaptation of writer/actor Eric Bogosian's play, examined a group of punk twenty-somethings outside a suburban Austin convenience store. In the new decade, Linklater's innovative 6th film, Waking Life (2001) combined digital video and animation to produce a highly philosophical avant-garde film.
Kevin Smith: The Jersey Trilogy
Writer/director Kevin Smith's first film (the first in a so-called "Jersey trilogy") was a dead-pan, low-budget, comedy cult film titled Clerks (1994) made in grainy 16 mm and originally rated NC-17 for foul language - it chronicled one day in the unglamorized, working-class life of Dante (Brian O'Halloran) - a twenty-two year old college dropout and Quick Stop convenience store clerk in New Jersey with his video-store clerk best friend Randal (Jeff Anderson). Smith went on to make Mallrats (1995) about two suburban New Jersey 'slackers' (Jason Lee and Jeremy London) who retreated to a shopping mall after being dumped by their girlfriends (Shannen Doherty and Claire Forlani), and then the low-budget comedy-drama Chasing Amy (1997) - an honest and appealing story of love between two New Jersey comic-book artists (Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams). Smith's final film of the decade was the controversial religious satire Dogma (1999), with Linda Fiorentino as a Catholic abortion clinic worker, Alanis Morissette as God, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as banished fallen angels, Chris Rock as Rufus (the 13th Apostle), and Salma Hayek as a celestial muse named Serendipity.
 
Original Films of the Decade:
Tim Burton's fantasy romance/comedy Edward Scissorhands (1990) starred Johnny Depp as the scissor-handed title character who was created by Vincent Price and adopted by an Avon lady. Mike Nichols' The Birdcage (1996) was the American version of La Cage Aux Folles (1978), a weird in-law story about a young man who brought his fiancee home to meet his parents. Robin Williams starred as gay nightclub owner named Armand Goldman, and Gene Hackman as a right-wing conservative politician - whose daughter is engaged to William's son. Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995) remade La Jetee (1962), starring Bruce Willis who came back from the future (the year 2035) to learn what killed 5 billion people years earlier. Wes Anderson's Rushmore (1998) was an unusual but smart comedy about an improbable love triangle between precocious 15 year-old 10th grade private school student Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), his befriended depressed local steel factory millionaire/magnate and jaded mentor Herman Blume (Bill Murray), and Rushmore Academy's recently-widowed first-grade teacher Ms. Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams). And Reese Witherspoon starred as determined Student Council candidate Tracy Flick in Alexander Payne's satirical Election (1999).
One of the most original, bizarre and surrealistic films of the 90s was Spike Jonze's debut feature Being John Malkovich (1999) with an inventive script by executive producer Charlie Kaufman - the story of a street puppeteer/filing clerk (John Cusack) in a Manhattan office building who discovered and entered a sealed portal that led into the mind of actor-celebrity John Malkovich. At the end of the decade, Darren Aronofsky's shocking anti-drug Requiem for a Dream (2000) featured numerous addictions (food, diet pills, TV, and heroin) exhibited with an intoxicating style. It starred Oscar-nominated Ellen Burstyn as a diet-pill-popping, Coney Island widow/mother of her junkie son and his girlfriend( Jennifer Connelly).
David Lynch directed the weirdly-perverse, surreal and erotic Wild At Heart (1990) with Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage as on-the-road lovers Sailor and Lulu. His next film was the truly bizarre, breathtaking and enigmatic Lost Highway (1997). He finished the decade with an uncharacteristic, G-rated, sentimental, real-life tale The Straight Story (1999), about an aging brother's (Best Actor-nominated Richard Farnsworth) lawn-mower journey to visit his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton).
Documentary Films:
In the documentary film genre, the most critically-acclaimed documentary appeared mid-decade: director Steve James' videotaped three-hour Hoop Dreams (1994), the six-year dramatic, uphill story of two hopeful teenaged, inner-city African-American basketball players (William Gates and Arthur Agee) in Chicago (with partial athletic scholarships at St. Joseph's - a predominantly white, suburban Catholic school) who struggle and aspire to be superstars in the NBA.
Animated - and Family Oriented Films:
Disney's studios had a number of animated-cartoon feature classics in the 90s: Beauty and the Beast (1991), the first animated feature ever to be nominated as Best Picture; Aladdin (1992), an 'Arabian Nights' tale about a street urchin who fell in love with a princess, with the hit song "A Whole New World" and Robin Williams as the voice of the Genie; The Lion King (1994), featuring Jeremy Irons as the voice of Scar and the theme of the 'Circle of Life'; its sound track was available in stores three weeks before its film opening; the romanticized fantasy Pocahontas (1995) - the first Disney animated feature based on historical fact; it had an outdoor premiere in Central Park, New York City on June 10, 1995 attended by nearly 100,000 people - the biggest premiere of any film ever; winner of two Oscars: Best Original Musical or Comedy Score, and Best Song "Colors of the Wind"; The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996); Mulan (1998), an expensively-made story of ancient China; Tarzan (1999), the first full-length animated feature about "the King of the Jungle" and winner of Best Original Song (Phil Collins) for "You'll Be In My Heart"; Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), based on the Jules Verne adventure; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) with Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Donatello succeeded (and grossed $130 million) with stylish comic-book violence and licensed product merchandising until the public was saturated with two more sequels in 1991 and 1993; Beethoven (1992) was about a tiny puppy adopted by suburb-dweller Charles Grodin that grew into a giant, slobbering and destructive St. Bernard who was threatened by an evil veterinarian (Dean Jones); Free Willy (1993) told of a boy (Jason James Richter) punished for vandalism by having to clean up the graffiti mess at a theme park, where he developed a close emotional bond with one of the performers - a killer whale named Willy (Keiko).
Director Henry Selick's and Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) was a monumental work of art - a stop-motion animated and musical fable. It was followed by producer Burton's and director Selick's PG-rated James and the Giant Peach (1996) - about the fantastic adventurish journey of a young boy, and the PG-rated comic fantasy Monkeybone (2001), based on Kaja Blackley's comic book novel Dark Town - with a title character combining traits of Curious George and Bart Simpson. Chris Noonan's magical Australian film Babe (1995), about a talking pink piglet with a talent for herding sheep for Farmer Hoggett, was an unexpected success. It featured Ferdinand the duck, Duchess the cat, and a sheepdog named Fly. The sequel Babe: Pig in the City (1999) was a darker version of the original.
John Lasseter's and Pixar's Toy Story (1995) (with the tagline 'To Eternity - and Beyond!') was the first feature-length film completely animated by computer - the film and its pioneering digital animation studio Pixar won a Special Achievement Award. It featured cowboy toy Woody (with voice of Tom Hanks) and the futuristic, high-tech Buzz Lightyear (with voice of Tim Allen) and a richly detailed and imaginative world. Its blockbuster sequel was just as remarkable and considered the superior film, Toy Story 2 (1999) - produced by Pixar Animation Studios. Barbie, the most popular toy of the 1900s, made her movie debut in the popular film, and Kelsey Grammer provided the voice of the Prospector. Woody was threatened because he was regarded as a highly-collectible 1950s TV character. The film also featured the poignant "You've Got a Friend in Me" and Randy Newman's Oscar-nominated "When She Loved Me."
Japan's collectible Pokemon trading cards and video games (Nintendo and Game Boy) became enormously popular with America's children, courtesy of Warner Bros. studios. The crude and cartoonish Pokemon: The First Movie (1998), dubbed in English for American audiences, had the most lucrative Thanksgiving weekend film opening of the 1900s when released in the US in 1999. Its "pocket monster" star was Pikachu, a bright-eyed, baby-talking yellow creature with a lightning-bolt tail. The gross-out, vulgar feature South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999) rivaled Disney's family-oriented animations, and produced an Oscar-nominated song "Blame Canada"with bawdy lyrics - ("Time's have changed, Our kids our kids are getting worse, They won't obey their parents, They just want to fart and curse!...").
 
Adult-Oriented Films:
Filmmaking and production expenses continued to escalate, as well as the violence and sex depicted. In some cases, the returns were enormous. Henry and June (1990), based on Anais Nin's memoirs, was the first film to be released with the NC-17 (No Children Under 17 Admitted) rating (which had replaced the old "X" rating in 1990 without the commercial stigma) for its explicit handling of sex.
Director Paul Verhoeven was successful in the early part of the decade with Total Recall (1990), and the commercially-successful investigative thriller Basic Instinct (1992) - the year's most popular movie. In 1990, scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas had sold his script for the erotic thriller for a record $3 million to Carolco Pictures. The film included gory violence, uncrossed/panty-less legs during a police interrogation, and sleazy, steamy sex scenes between Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone (playing a bi-sexual blonde suspected of murder), and with psychiatrist Jeanne Tripplehorn. Verhoeven's much-hyped, widely-distributed, NC-17 rated Showgirls (1995), teamed with writer Joe Eszterhas, became a camp classic rather than the erotic, Las Vegas lap-dancing drama it was supposed to be.
Director Milos Forman's sympathetic portrayal of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt (Woody Harrelson) as a First Amendment hero in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) brought criticism to the film. The eroticizing of gruesome car crashes in David Cronenberg's graphic Crash (1996) also engendered controversy and brought an NC-17 rating. Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997) examined the world of late 70s and 80s pornography with Mark Wahlberg as well-endowed adult film star Dirk Diggler, Burt Reynolds in a comeback role as a director/producer of skin flicks, Julianne Moore as veteran porn star Amber Waves, and Heather Graham as an uninhibited Rollergirl. Adrian Lyne's controversial Lolita (1997) with nymphet teenager Dominique Swain, a remake of Kubrick's 1962 classic, first aired on Showtime cable TV, and then experienced distribution problems.
Please, oh, please, can I be a "Boogie Knight," too?
The most anticipated film was legendary director Stanley Kubrick's psychosexual Eyes Wide Shut (1999), his final film released posthumously in the summer of 1999, with real-life husband/wife superstars at the time (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who would later divorce in 2001). The dreamy, visually-beautiful, thought-provoking film was a sexy adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Dream Story (Traumnovelle) and destined to become a Kubric classic. Although it was condemned as misogynistic, out-of-touch, and uncompelling, the story was about a Manhattan doctor (Cruise) who, after hearing an emotional confession from his wife (Kidman), explored his own sexuality during a tortuous, adventurous nocturnal journey (including a visit to a masked orgy in Long Island featuring all-nude naturally-endowed females). Segments of the orgy scene in the film were digitally-altered in order to bring the film an R-rating.
2000 and Beyond -The First Decade of the New Millennium: Change and Innovation:
Although technically, the new millennium dawned on January 1st 2001, the new decade of films (and film history) began on January 1, 2000. It began with trumped fears over Y2K and major terrorists attacks on 9/11/2001, was marked at its midpoint with the devastating natural disasters of the Asian tsunami of 2004 and of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and ended with the financial meltdown of the economy (the second crash and recession of the decade). The end of the decade was punctuated by James Cameron's revolutionary and major blockbuster film Avatar (2009), the highest grossing (domestic) film of 2009 - and of the decade. [It became only the fifth film in movie history to exceed $1 billion in worldwide grosses, and did so in less than 3 weeks.] The film soon surpassed the highest-grossing (worldwide) film of all-time - Cameron's own Titanic (1997).
The decade was overwhelmed by the ascendancy of Google, Amazon, YouTube, the blogosphere, Craigslist, new media and social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc), reality TV (capped by Survivor and American Idol), the popular game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Netflix, and 24/7 cable news shows - all competing for audiences or market share. New tech products included ubiquitous laptops (smaller and smaller), the iPod, Skype, Hulu, eBooks, Blackberrys and smart phones. Television moved from analog to digital broadcasting - and new flat-screens replaced bulky cathode-ray tubes, video rental stores converted to DVDs, and dial-up connections became broadband. Answering machines, real Rolodexs, reservations by phone, heavy phonebooks and cellphones, lickable stamps, VHS tapes (and players) and insertable floppy disks all went by the wayside.
Although the first TiVo digital video recorder (DVR) shipped in early 1999, it wasn't until the decade of the 2000s, after further technological improvements, that it became a commonplace media appliance for recording TV programs - allowing for 'time-shifting' of viewing, and for fast-forwarding through commercials. However, the majority of DVRs now in use were being installed in cable or satellite set-top boxes, threatening to make stand-alone TiVo machines also obsolete. Sensationalized celebrity deaths were a new phenomenon -- surrounding the demise of Anna Nicole Smith, Michael Jackson, and Farrah Fawcett - among others.
Happenings in Entertainment:
Some of the historic events related to the world of entertainment happened in these explosive, fast-moving ten years:
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2000: The last original "Peanuts" comic strip appeared in newspapers one day after its creator Charles M. Schulz died of colon cancer. The popular comic strip debuted 50 years earlier.
2000: File-sharing site Napster was sued, for illegally distributing songs.
2001: Apple announced iTunes at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, for organizing and playing digital music and videos, and the first iPod was released.
2001: DVD sales revenues first exceeded VHS videotape sales revenues.
2001: The dot.com tech bubble burst.
2001: director Pitof's dark 19th century crime fantasy Vidocq (2001) was the world's first-completed theatrical feature film shot entirely on Hi-Def digital video. This first full-length, all-digital film was shot using a Sony HD-CAM 24P1 (1080p, 24fps) high-definition digital camera, producing astonishing visuals. It was released a year before George Lucas' and Hollywood's first big-budget all-digital production of Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002).
2002: The much anticipated online movies-on-demand venture formed by five major Hollywood studios (Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros.) was launched with the establishment of MovieLink. This marked the first time a large supply of recent, popular films were available legally on the Internet via a broadband connection.
2002: Controversial white rapper Eminem entered the mainstream with the release of his movie 8 Mile (2002). It was the first film with an Oscar-winning rap/hip-hop song ("Lose Yourself").
2003: Social networking website MySpace began.
2003: Tabloids were addicted to the 'supercouple' of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, dubbed by the name-blend "Bennifer" (a combination of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez), who appeared together in Gigli (2003).
2003: By mid-March, DVD rentals first topped those of VHS videotape rental revenues.
2003: Hollywood action film star Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected the 38th governor of California.
2004: Facebook launched.
2005: The first YouTube video was uploaded in late spring, but the site didn't officially launch until November 2005. The site soon became the most prominent and popular participatory site for uploading, viewing, and sharing self-produced video clips.
2005: The action sequel Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), the first Sony Pictures film, was also the first feature film to be released on Blu-Ray Disc, a next generation, high-definition optical disc format. The popularity of the new DVD format (and the start of a new optical disc format called Blu-Ray) completely doomed the once-ubiquitous VHS videotape cassette format. In early 2006, the last major Hollywood motion picture to be released in VHS videotape cassette format was David Cronenberg's crime-thriller A History of Violence (2005).
2005: The trend of developing a name-blend for a celebrity super-couple continued with the prominent media and tabloid obsession over Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, dubbed "Brangelina." Their secret real-life pairing was rumored when they co-starred together in the action film Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), leading afterwards to Pitt's separation and divorce from Jennifer Aniston in 2005 after five years of marriage.
2006: The social networking and blogging site Twitter was founded and debuted.
2007: The first broadband movie ever distributed by a major studio was Paramount's prankster sequel Jackass 2.5 (2007), marking a new age of online-first movie distribution.
2007: The film magazine Premiere, which first began publishing in the US in the pre-Internet world of 1987, issued its final print publication with its April 2007 issue.
2007-2008: The Writer's Guild of America (WGA) went on strike in early November after a stalemate in negotiations occurred with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Issues included increased compensation for the film and TV writers for DVD residuals and compensation for "new media" distribution (content distributed through emerging digital technologies, such as the Internet, including downloads, streaming, smart phones, and video on demand, etc.). When the 3-month strike ended in mid-February 2008, it was estimated that it resulted in a total loss of $2.5 billion show-business.
2008: A backlot fire at Universal Studios destroyed several icons from movies, such as Courthouse Square, the clock tower from Back to the Future, and the King Kong exhibit on the studio tour.
2008: The video website Hulu launched.
2009: For the first time since 2002, domestic movie ticket sales surpassed revenue from the purchase of DVDs. The recessionary economy and the current transitionary stage from DVDs to Blue-Ray and to video-on-demand digital downloads through Internet-enabled televisions, were partially accountable for the reversal.
Writer/director Jason Reitman's Up in the Air (2009) was an insightful quasi-comedy, perfectly reflecting its time of economic distress at the end of the decade, about a single, corporate down-sizing hit-man (George Clooney) happily in the business of career-transition - traveling around the country and firing employees, until the threat of video-conferenced, technological firings imperiled his own job.
The After-Effects of 9/11 and the Iraq War on Film:
As often happens, war (or politically-oriented or anti-war) films with ties to current 'headline' events go into a period of declining popularity, especially when the country is actually fighting a long and drawn-out war. The 'Second' Gulf War (Operation Iraqi Freedom) was soon the source of Hollywood interpretations, but it appeared that American audiences did not want realistic war dramas -- war was the ultimate 'reality TV' -- during actual wartime.
Warner Bros.' terrorist-themed action film Collateral Damage (2002), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, originally due to be released on October 5, 2001, was postponed until early February 2002, due to the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. At the same time, Ridley Scott's intense combat film Black Hawk Down (2001), released only a few months after 9/11, captured the visceral tension of a disastrous helicopter mission in Somalia in 1993. Spike Lee's 25th Hour (2002) was a post 9/11 examination of racial hatred, fears and prejudice, portrayed in the character of convicted NY drug dealer Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) who was facing seven years in prison. Its most memorable scene was a scathing diatribe of ethnic/socio-economic archetypal slurs delivered before a mirror. The first 9/11 related feature film from Hollywood, on the 5th year anniversary, was Paul Greengrass' and Universal's real-time drama United 93 (2006). Another 9/11 related film was Paramount's and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006) that opened in late summer, and told the story of two Port Authority cops (Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena) who were among the last rescue workers to be pulled from the rubble.
The innovative documentary film Voices of Iraq (2004) was made by distributing 150 inexpensive, lightweight, digital video-cameras to the people throughout Iraq - the film's subjects and participants. Over 400 hours of film footage was edited down to less than 80 minutes, and although presumably unbiased, it presented a fairly positive view of the US.
Filmgoers were mostly reluctant to attend films that dealt with the realities of the unpopular war (and mentioned the word "Iraq" or "war" in ad campaigns), and film studios shied away from making war films for much of the decade. However, there were some exceptions. Director Irwin Winkler's R-rated war drama Home of the Brave (2006) told about four American soldiers (Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Biel, Brian Presley, and 50 Cent) on their last mission in Iraq when they were ambushed. Subsequently, they suffered both physical and emotional trauma upon readjustment to civilian life in Spokane, Washington. It was the first major Hollywood feature film to depict returning soldiers from the war in Iraq. Made on a budget of $12 million, the film was a serious flop, earning only about $500,000 (worldwide), and only $52,000 domestically. It recouped some of its losses from sale of DVDs, at $4.7 million.
There were lots of other Iraq War-related box-office casualties, especially in 2007: Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah (2007) reflected the confusions and atrocities of war in its story of a retired Vietnam vet (Tommy Lee Jones) searching for his missing, returned Iraqi War soldiering son near his Army base in New Mexico, where the Iraq War was only a backdrop. Michael Winterbottom's sad A Mighty Heart (2007) told of the kidnapping-disappearance of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002 and his truth-seeking wife Mariane's (Angelina Jolie) heroic search for him. South African director Gavin Hood's coldly observant war on terror drama Rendition (2007) starred Reese Witherspoon as a determined, pregnant American wife whose Egyptian-born, chemical engineer/husband - falsely-accused of being a terrorist suspect - was detained and tortured in a secret detention facility in Northern Africa.
 
Brian DePalma's fictional anti-war documentary Redacted (2007), with the tagline: "Truth is the first casualty of war," was a fictional story based on real events in Iraq (including the 2006 rape/murder of an Iraqi teen girl by two US soldiers) -- it was a daring recreation of videos/blogs made by soldiers serving in Iraq, to bring the 'redacted' (edited or altered) sensitive and confidential information into the open. And writer and first-time director James Strouse's understated Grace is Gone (2007) told about a grieving Minnesota father (John Cusack) who took a road trip with his two young 12 and 8 year-old daughters to a fictional Florida theme park (Enchanted Gardens) where he struggled in the catharctic ending to tell them that their soldiering mother Grace had been killed in Iraq.
Kimberly Peirce's raw Stop-Loss (2008) explored the human consequences (post-traumatic stress disorders, or soldiers going AWOL) of the questionable military policy dubbed 'stop-loss' which allowed the US government to involuntarily extend a soldier's enlistment contract for duty in Iraq. The realistic terrors of the Iraq War for a squad of bomb defusers were dealt with in Best Director-winning Kathryn Bigelow's tense war thriller The Hurt Locker (2009), the Best Picture of its year.
The Major Hollywood Studios in the 2000s:
The Hollywood studio system during the 2000s was mostly dominated by six global entertainment companies or conglomerates, which made about 90% of the North American films:
Time Warner (formerly Warner Bros.)
20th Century Fox (purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation)
Viacom (formerly Paramount)
Walt Disney (joined with Pixar)
NBC Universal (owned by GE and merged with NBC, formerly Universal)
These six companies generally farmed out the production of their films to literally dozens of other independents and in-house pseudo-indie subsidiaries (such as Warner's New Line, Fox's Searchlight, and NBC Universal's Focus Features). At mid-decade in 2005, independent films made outside the Hollywood system faced an uphill battle. This was the first year since 1995 that every $100 million hit came from a major studio.
The first major business deal of the 20th century was the America Online (AOL) purchase of Time Warner, Inc. for an estimated $182 billion - in stock ($163 billion) and debt ($17 billion). America Online was one of the largest Internet access subscription service companies and Internet providers in the US. The historic merger, the largest corporate acquisition and the most expensive buyout on record in the country's history, created a global media and entertainment conglomerate, bringing together America Online and CompuServe on-line services and Netscape's Internet browser with the Warner Brothers studio, Cable News Network (CNN) and the Time publishing empire. The merger reflected the growing dominance of the Internet in areas such as publishing, music, film, and broadcasting. However, by the end of the decade (2009), the merger of the decade ended -- Time Warner announced that it would spin off AOL as a separate independent company.
In 2005, Viacom's Paramount Pictures acquired the 11-year-old DreamWorks studio (founded in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen) for approximately $1.6 billion. The stand-alone studio's demise marked the end of a Hollywood era, although it had reached a creative peak in 1998-2001 when its most popular and critically-successful films were released, including Saving Private Ryan (1998), American Beauty (1999), Gladiator (2000), A Beautiful Mind (2001) - and Shrek (2001) - they had three consecutive Best Picture winners beginning in 1999. DreamWorks ended its troubled 2 1/2 year partnership with Paramount in late 2008. A few months later in early 2009, DreamWorks realized its intentions to reinvent itself as an independent company. It signed a long-term, exclusive 30-picture distribution deal with the Disney Company for five-years. Future films would be released by Disney's Touchstone Pictures division.
Also, movie mogul brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein ceased being co-chief executives at the Disney-owned film production company Miramax, in September of 2005. [In 1993, Disney acquired Miramax for about $80 million - a studio known for creative and independent film making and production. Miramax was responsible for some of the most successful films after the merger, including Pulp Fiction (1994), The English Patient (1996), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Good Will Hunting (1998), Chicago (2002), and Cold Mountain (2003).] The Weinstein brothers established The Weinstein Company, founded in 2005 after they left Miramax.
In late 2009, Walt Disney Co. purchased comic book and action hero company Marvel Entertainment for about $4 billion. Marvel was the comic-book company behind X-Men and Spider-Man. Disney's Pixar animation unit was expectant over the opportunities that the Marvel acquisition would generate.
Using Social Media Networking to Market Films:
In the latter half of the decade, Hollywood studios realized that they could leverage the popularity of social networking sites (such as Facebook and Twitter) to market films, encourage positive word-of-mouth, raise awareness, and stimulate ticket sales, by grassroots Internet campaigns and promotions. Millions of Facebook fans signed on to be followers of the romantic vampire Twilight sequel, The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), and an official Twitter page was also established for the film. The first screening of director Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) from Universal Pictures at the annual Comicon convention in San Diego was packed by people who won admission via Twitter. Warner Bros. and director Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are (2009), adapted from Maurice Sendak's classic children's tale, had more than 1.5 million devotees on its Facebook page as the film was first debuting in theatres. The movie's website also offered an iPhone app. And Lionsgate Entertainment's Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009), promoted and produced by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, sponsored a weeklong Twitter-based charity fundraising and promotional campaign using TwitCause, run by the San Francisco online forum called Experience Project Inc.
The best example came from the low-budget, breakout, independent horror film Paranormal Activity (2009). Filmed in 2007 in only ten days, it was budgeted at only $15,000. San Diego filmmaker Oren Peli's film first gained a cult following after being screened at the 2008 Slamdance Film Festival. Then, it was shown - in limited release - in college towns throughout the country at midnight shows. The studio launched a campaign with the Eventful feature developed by a San Diego company known for promoting concerts. With its Internet feature called "Demand It," Paramount asked users -- fans and would-be watchers, to help determine the film's fate and see if it warranted a potential wide-release in additional markets. When one million frenzied fans demanded to see it, the film was expanded to 160 screens, and grossed $7.9 million in box-office revenue, breaking the record for highest grossing weekend ever for a film playing in less than 200 theaters. It went on to become a surprise box office hit, due in part to a grassroots Internet campaign that included a "Tweet Your Scream" promotion using the social networking site Twitter. It eventually made estimated earnings of $107.9 million (to date), an almost 720K% return on investment.
But sometimes, the hype of Web marketing could also doom a film -- Sacha Baron Cohen's shock comedy Brüno (2009) bombed despite pre-release buzz, because moviegoers emerged from early showings and warned other Twitter followers to avoid the film. The same thing occurred a few years earlier, when Snakes on a Plane (2006), starring Samuel L. Jackson, created a pre-release Internet blogging frenzy, but then after the film's release had only modest returns.
New Blockbuster Benchmarks
:
Nothing characterized the decade more than the ever-increasing budgets, box-office returns, and benchmarks set for films. In recent times, it was a major milestone if a film reached a total of $100 million in domestic gross earnings. Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) is often cited as the first $100 million in domestic theatrical rentals. Now, however, $200 million was the new bar for a blockbuster, and the $100 million mark was only significant as a benchmark, i.e., the comic-book blockbuster Spider-Man (2002) was the first film to pass the $100 million level in a single weekend, a record also soon surpassed.
One of the most recent records to be broken was for budget/production costs, when Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) became the most expensive picture ever made at $300 million. Routinely, however, many 'event' films cost $200 million. And for only the fifth time in all of film history, a film has reached $1 billion at the box-office (worldwide) - James Cameron's Avatar (2009).
At the end of 2009, the domestic yearly box-office gross total topped the $10 billion mark (at $10.6) for the first time ever. Prognosticators were anxious to see which films would break further benchmarks, with possible clues from past top-performing examples.
The Decade's Steady Stream of Box-Office Blockbusters and Sequels:
The decade spawned many new blockbuster series (or franchises), sequels, serials, or reboots, often featuring comic-book superheroes, fantastical tales (based on previous novels by Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, and C.S. Lewis), CGI-animated characters, or action-thrillers. It could easily be said that some of the biggest films of the decade were based on adaptations of previous artistic works:
Books (i.e., the LOTR's trilogy, the Harry Potter series, the Narnia books, the Twilight saga, Brokeback Mountain, etc.) Comic Books (X-Men, Spider-Man, also The Dark Knight)
TV shows/Cable TV series (Sex and the City (2008), based upon HBO's 1998-2004 series)
TV movies (i.e., High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008), based upon a Disney Channel original movie, and its 2007 TV sequel)
Broadway plays (Chicago (2002), based upon the 1975 musical)
Rides at Theme Parks (the Pirates of the Caribbean movies)
Broadway musical plays based on movies (Hairspray (2007), based on 2002 Broadway musical, that was based on John Waters' film Hairspray (1988))
Many of these huge money-making franchise-blockbusters were the top-grossing films of their individual years in the decade:
2000: How the Grinch Stole Christmas
2001: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
2002: Spider-Man
2003: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2004: Shrek 2
2005: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
2006: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
2007: Spider-Man 3
2008: The Dark Knight
2009: Avatar
In just one year, 2002, three of the four top-grossing films (domestic) were franchise sequels: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002). The number one film of the year Spider-Man (2002) had its own profitable sequels in 2004 and 2007.
The original Star Wars trilogy and its three Prequels (1999-2005), a total of six films (not including re-releases) currently hold the # 1 place as the top-grossing (domestic) film franchise. However, the Harry Potter film franchise (6 films from 2001 to 2009) may eventually end up being the most commercially-successful Movie-Series Franchise of All Time, once new installments are released in the coming decade. Following close behind was the franchise of 22 James Bond-related films (from 1962 to 2008), and the 7 Batman-related films (from 1989 to 2008).
Many of the biggest blockbuster film franchises of the decade did not receive high marks for film-making quality, with some exceptions (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the first Shrek film, etc.). Some of the factors that could spell the end of franchises have included aging stars (i.e., the Die Hard or Indiana Jones films), the high-salary demands of actors, accelerating expenses, unoriginal and unsatisfactory plot-lines and an over-reliance on CGI and special effects (the Star Wars prequels, for example), and the end of source-materials (such as in the case of the filmed Harry Potter books). However, with the proliferation of franchises in the decade, it wasn't likely that they would disappear anytime soon.
The Significant Impact of Females - and Female Audiences at the Box-Office:
Female audiences helped to significantly drive the box-office for a few films in the decade. The best example was female director Catherine Hardwicke's vampire romance Twilight (2008) which earned $70.6 million in its opening weekend box-office - breaking the record for the biggest opening for a female director, previously held by Mimi Leder for Deep Impact (1998) at $41.1 million. At the time, it was the highest-grossing film by a female director, at $193 million (domestic) and $385 million (worldwide), soon to be surpassed by its own sequel The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), with $143 million in its opening weekend, and grossing $293 million (domestic) and $703 million (worldwide). Catherine Hardwicke became the only female director to launch a successful franchise - so far. The success of the two films was fueled by young females: 75 percent of the movie’s audience were female - and half were under 25, a new fan-girl contingent dubbed "tweens."
Also, the romantic comedy Sex and the City (2008) was the biggest 'chick flick' on record at $153 million (domestic) and $415 million (worldwide), and The Devil Wears Prada (2006) was another huge moneymaker at $125 million (domestic) and $327 million (worldwide). Other predominantly female audiences spurred these three 2008 films: the 3-D documentary, live-action G-rated concert film Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (2008), High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008), which broke the U.S. record for the highest-scoring musical opening (at $42 million domestic), and the film version of the ABBA musical Mamma Mia! (2008) starring Meryl Streep.
Although women remained in the minority in terms of film-making (as directors, writers, and producers), 2009 was a watershed year: (1) Kathryn Bigelow's Best Picture-winning The Hurt Locker (2009) marked the first ever Oscar win for a female director (and American director) as Best Director, (2) Betty Thomas became the most-successful female director at the domestic box-office, for her holiday hit Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009) - it was the first female-directed film to gross more than $200 million (at $218 million in mid-March 2010), (3) director Anne Fletcher's The Proposal (2009) (starring Sandra Bullock) was a tremendous hit, scoring $164 million (domestic) at the box-office, (4) It's Complicated (2009), directed and written by Nancy Meyers and starring Meryl Streep, made $112 million (domestic) at the box-office, (5) Best Actress Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side (2009) and veteran actress Meryl Streep both outperformed their male counterparts fairly consistently. Streep competed against Bullock and was Oscar-nominated for her lead role in writer/director Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia (2009), which made $94 million (domestic) at the box-office.
 
Twisting, Enigmatic, Cult-Favorites of the Decade (so far...):
The era of the 2000s seems to be currently noted for unique, enigmatic, thought-provoking cult favorites, including these notable examples:
Writer/director Christopher Nolan's, uniquely-told, engaging independent film Memento (2001) with its time-shifting, episodic, neo-noirish and non-linear tale. It was a huge success, for its reverse-chronological order, non-linear innovative structure. The puzzling film-noirish story told about a haunted, tattooed protagonist (Guy Pearce) suffering from short-term amnesia while searching for the truth regarding the rape/murder of his wife, as he interrogated characters including a crooked cop (Joe Pantoliano) and femme fatale barmaid (Carrie-Anne Moss). It was up for two Academy Award nominations in 2001, but didn't receive any awards.
Writer/director Cameron Crowe's rock 'n' roll romance Almost Famous (2000), his coming-of-age tribute to his days as a teenaged rock journalist, on the road with up-and-coming early 1970s band Stillwater and groupie Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), with its most memorable "Tiny Dancer" scene.
Richard Kelly's time-travel sci-fi cult classic Donnie Darko (2001) was about a paranoid, troubled schizophrenic teenager who survived a jet-engine crashing into his bedroom, and had visions of a giant bunny (Frank) who predicted Doomsday in 28 days. The original film was little noticed when originally released, but midnight screenings and the release of the 2004 "Director's Cut" on DVD helped it to become a major cult favorite.
Best Director-nominated David Lynch's surreal, enigmatic, puzzle-box mind-bending, modern noir film about Hollywood, obsession and unrequited love, a contract hit, dashed dreams and suicide titled Mulholland Dr. (2001), which portrayed the twisting, and shifting identities of its two female protagonists - wholesome, pert blonde Canadian ingenue and aspiring actress Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts), and her dark-haired brunette/blonde counterpart - a full-bodied amnesiac and bi-sexual femme fatale named 'Rita'/Camilla Rhodes (Laura Elena Harring).
Brian DePalma's slick crime thriller Femme Fatale (2002), a cinematically and visually-inventive masterpiece that opened with a breathtaking jewel heist at the Cannes Film Festival (and a double-crossing faked switch of a diamond-studded bra). It starred Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as the thieving heroine with a stolen identity, shifting realities and ended with the film's major "it's a dream" plot twist.
Before Sunset (2004) - Richard Linklater's nine years-later sequel to Before Sunrise (1995), provided naturalistic, honest, real-time conversations in Paris between two reunited, would-be lovers (Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy).
the whimsical romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) was inventive scripter Charlie Kaufman's bizarre, artful and absurdist fantasy about the lobotomizing erasure of painful romantic memories in the relationship between two ex-lovers (Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet).
Other films that have been, at present, "popular" during this century, include: scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman's offbeat, convoluted follow-up to Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), David Cronenberg's thriller A History of Violence (2005), the futuristic dystopian sci-fi Children of Men (2006, UK), Guillermo Del Toro's bold childhood fantasy Pan's Labyrinth (2006, Sp.), and writer-director Quentin Tarantino's two-part derivative revenge epic Kill Bill (2003-2004) followed by his exploitative Grindhouse entry Death Proof (2007) with a classic car chase.
Kill Bill
The Successful Return of Adult-Oriented, R-Rated Comedies, Rom-Coms, Teen Sex Comedies, and 'Bromances':
Although PG and PG-13-rated films have generally proven to be the biggest moneymakers, the decade has so far proved that semi-offensive R-rated comedies, including retooled romantic comedies and 'bromances' (guy-meets-guy romances) containing generous portions of profanity, sex and nudity, and debauchery, could also be popular - and appealing to male audiences. But sometimes success bred repetitiveness and exploitation. Although there were some bright spots, it was a decade of prurient films with abundant and gratuitous T&A nudity, in-the-toilet gross-out humor and jokes about oral sex, farts and excrement, homosexuality, penis size, and incest - and more.
As if the original box-office teen comedy hit American Pie (1999) and its first two sequels (American Pie 2 (2001) and American Wedding (2003)) weren't enough - the oft-told tale of high school (and college) boys searching for sex - four more direct-to-video (DVD) spinoffs were also generated. One of the significant commercial trends in the film industry, exemplified by these films, was to release 'unrated' versions of R-rated (and PG 13-rated) films on DVD and videocassette, often with additional racy content that would have undoubtedly changed their original MPAA ratings.
The four American Pie Presents: sequels were released in both R-rated and Unrated versions (including the scenes that were removed in order to receive an R-rating):
American Pie Presents: Band Camp (2005)
American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile (2006)
American Pie Presents: Beta House (2007)
American Pie Presents: The Book of Love (2009)
Three more R-rated, un-PC gross-out comedy films (for strong sexual content, gross humor, language and some drug content) followed the same pattern of rowdy hijinks, topless nudity, and raunch. They were the tired and contrived sex-and-school romp National Lampoon's Van Wilder (2002) about a seventh year undergraduate student (Ryan Reynolds) at Coolidge College who, among other things, hired busty young women to be "topless tutors." It was followed by an unconnected sequel Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj (2006), and a prequel Van Wilder: Freshman Year (2009).
The R-rated Not Another Teen Movie (2001) was also released to serve as a tasteless parody of Hollywood teen (high school) flicks from the last few decades. It used cliched lines of dialogue and most of its unoriginal characters were stereotypical teen portrayals (for example, the Pretty Ugly Girl, the Popular Jock, the Bitchy Cheerleader, the Token Black Guy, the Dream Girl, the Naked Foreign Exchange Student).
Judd Apatow's directorial debut breakthrough film The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), a hilarious sex comedy that signaled the return of raunchy R-rated fare, about a middle-aged male virgin (Steve Carell) seeking a sex partner and finding love with an appealing, intelligent newly-single mother (Catherine Keener); Wedding Crashers (2005) - surpassed There's Something About Mary (1998) as the top R-rated comedy in two decades (although surpassed by The Hangover (2009)).
Apatow helped to foster the burgeoning careers of Steve Carell, Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen. A new generation of comic male actors, dubbed the 'Frat Pack' or 'Slacker Pack' (Jack Black, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and Owen and Luke Wilson) had emerged in the 2000s, and appeared together in many films, including, actor/director/producer Stiller's own Old School (2003), Zoolander (2001), Dodgeball (2004) and Tropic Thunder (2008).
Major Stars of the Decade and Declining Star Power:
One of the major trends of the decade was that there were fewer A-list star-driven hits, from the likes of Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise, due to the rise of pre-established franchises and the emergence of often younger or unknown stars. For example, the pairing of Johnny Depp and Christian Bale in Michael Mann's gangster film Public Enemies (2009) was no guarantee of box-office success -- its production budget of $100 million was barely matched by its domestic earnings of $97 million. When star legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino shared the screen for the first time in Michael Mann's crime film Heat (1995), it was a major event - and the film was a critical and commercial success. Now, their teaming in the R-rated crime thriller Righteous Kill (2008) opened to negative reviews and the film (that barely recouped its expenses) was considered one of the worst of the year.
Many films without big-name stars did very well during the decade, bolstered by lots of new faces and names. Examples included the low-budget, docu-style sci-fi hit District 9 (2009) (made by a first-time feature film director Neill Blomkamp, and with unknown actor Sharlto Copley) and The Hangover (2009) - the fastest R-rated comedy to reach the $200 million mark (it took 30 days) and the top R-rated comedy ever, also with a trio of unknowns (Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms and Bradley Cooper). A number of other unknowns appeared, such as Chris Pine (as James T. Kirk in the Star Trek (2009) reboot), or Megan Fox (as Mikaela Banes in the Transformers films). Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson became the young stars of the Harry Potter films, while Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson took the spotlight for the Twilight films.
Even though Erin Brockovich (2000) brought mega-star actress Julia Roberts her first Best Actress Oscar, and she became the highest-paid actress (and one of the most powerful actresses) in Hollywood at the time, according to Forbes Magazine and other publications (she was the first female to crash the $20 million salary barrier for her role in the film), her star-drawing film power and earnings potential slightly declined during the decade. However, she could still generate millions for herself - in early 2010, she signed a contract with cosmetics giant Lancome to become its 'latest face' - a deal reportedly worth $20 million.
Mission: Impossible III (2006) failed to be the action-thriller blockbuster that it was destined to be - it had a $47.7 million opening weekend at U.S. theaters, below the $65 million to $70 million that had been projected by some box office trackers. Speculation arose that this was, in part, due to cocky mega-star Tom Cruise's erratic behavior and off-screen public relations disasters, evidenced on NBC's Today Show with Matt Lauer, and the couch-jumping incident on the Oprah Winfrey Show. His strident Scientology advocacy and his denouncements in May 2005 against Brooke Shields regarding her use of anti-depressants for post-partum depression were also the focus of criticisms. At one time, 44 year-old Cruise was the industry's most successful and best-paid actor, but was dropped by parent company Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and by his film studio, Paramount Pictures for his "unacceptable conduct" - after a 14 year production pact. However, Cruise still had considerable appeal and box-office clout -- from 1986 to 2008, he appeared in the most $100 million dollar-grossing films (15 blockbusters), making him the most 'over-paid' actor in big-budget movies.
In 2008, Will Smith was the highest-paid Hollywood actor earning $80 million, while second place went to Johnny Depp with earnings of $72 million. Will Smith was the first (and only) actor to have eight consecutive movies take in more than $100 million at the domestic box office. However, the box office star's appearance in the drama Hancock (2008) fell far short - the $55 million-budgeted film took in only $70 million in domestic earnings. The only thing that saved the film was its foreign box-office. His wife Jada Pinkett-Smith had the most consecutive $100 million gross movies for an actress: 4 films. Her seven $100+ million films included: The Nutty Professor (1996), Scream 2 (1997), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), Collateral (2004), Madagascar (2005), and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008).
Forbes also reported that 23 year-old actress Keira Knightley became the second highest-paid Hollywood actress with earnings of $32 million in 2007 for her role in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) followed by Cameron Diaz with earnings of $50 million for her roles in the Shrek films and the romantic comedy, What Happens in Vegas (2008). It was announced in 2006 that actress Reese Witherspoon would attain the highest salary for a female for one film, becoming the highest paid actress of all time, for her $29 million deal to star/produce the horror thriller Our Family Trouble (2011). Her salary beat the previous record of $25 million held by Julia Roberts for Mona Lisa Smile (2003).
 
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the highest grossing actress of the 2000s decade was Emma Watson, for her six live-action Harry Potter films (2001-2009), which earned $1.7 billion (domestic), or $5.4 billion (worldwide) - or roughly $900 million per film (worldwide). Likewise, her lead co-star Daniel Radcliffe was the highest average-grossing box-office star in a leading role in the decade, averaging about $285 million (domestic) per film.
Technological and Special Effects Innovations During Our Decade (and Class Together):
 
George Lucas' second Star Wars pre-quel, Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002), the fifth film in the hugely successful Star Wars series, was the first big-budget major Hollywood film shot entirely with digital video cameras (at 24 fps) - best screened in theaters equipped with digital projectors. The 96-minute long film Russian Ark (2002) (aka Russkiy kovcheg) from director Aleksandr Sokurov was the longest single-shot feature-length narrative film (with no cuts) in movie history, as the camera roamed through the halls of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg during 19th century Russia. Its tagline described: "2000 cast members, 3 orchestras, 33 rooms, 300 years, ALL IN ONE TAKE." Able Edwards (2004) was the first publicly-released feature film shot entirely without physical sets against a green screen. Produced in similar fashion was the big-budget Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) with very photo-realistic, all-CGI backgrounds and live actors. Human actors were completely filmed in front of a green/blue screen with no background sets at all.
Director Peter Jackson's absolutely lack-luster re-make of King Kong (2005), the tragic beauty-and-the-beast love story of the 1933 Kong film, featured a computer-generated Kong. It was somewhat remarkable for having the largest number of special/visual effects shots in a single film, surpassing the previous records set by Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005), and Jackson's own trilogy of, The Lord of the Rings films. The more than 3,200 final shots in the film were culled from 3 million feet of live-action footage and 2,510 visual effects shots. (but, who cares - - It was still a terrible movie!)
Visual Effects: The Technique of Performance Capture:
Performance capture (or motion capture) became more widespread and sophisticated as a special effects technique in the 2000s. Performance capture referred to a digital blend of live performance and animated elements. Actors wore heavy, dot-sensor-covered spandex body suits and a helmet, and initially acted out their scenes in isolation from other sets, props, costumes, or actors. Expressions and movements were first recorded by digital cameras as 3D "moving data points" - and afterwards, the digitally-recorded performances were translated and embellished by key-frame artists and integrated into an exclusively virtual environment.
In the second part of Peter Jackson's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), CGI-imagery was combined with "motion capturing" (of the movements and expressions of actor Andy Serkis, who also served as the voice) to produce the barely-seen, supporting character of Gollum (originally known as Sméagol)
Performance capture-advocate Robert Zemeckis experimented with the technology in his own The Polar Express (2004); in his next film, Beowulf (2007), an adaptation of the Old English epic poem, he used advanced motion-capture technology to transform live action into digital animation - it was released simultaneously in standard 2-D and non-Imax 3D versions and had the biggest 3-D rollout of any film in history (to date). The technique was also used in Disney's and Zemeckis' 3-D A Christmas Carol (2009), an adaptation of Dickens' 1843 classic story, in which Jim Carrey played multiple roles, including old miser Scrooge (at different stages of his life) and the three Christmas ghosts; it was released in both Disney Digital 3-D and IMAX 3-D (it was the first Disney animated film released in this format).
Director Zack Snyder's Watchmen (2009), a filmed adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel (a 12-issue publication by DC Comics between 1986 and 1987), featured the photo-realistic, all-CGI character of the all-powerful, blue-glowing "atomized" scientist Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) which was also created with the process of motion capture.
James Cameron's ambitious, monumental animated/live-action fantasy Avatar (2009), his first feature film since Titanic (1997), was a futuristic, epic 3-D film with ground-breaking special effects involving performance capture. The expensive sci-fi romance epic was set in the year 2154 and told about invasive Earth-dwellers (created as avatars) seeking the rare mineral unobtanium on the distant alien moon of Pandora, inhabited by indigenous blue-skinned, 10 foot tall Na'vi.
The Expansion of 3-D and IMAX Releases: The Future of Film
The decade of the 2000s saw advancements in 3D and an explosion of releases of both 3-D films and IMAX films. There were many varieties of 3-D, including Disney Digital 3D, Real D 3D, InTru3D, D-BOX, and IMAX 3D. And with many more theatres converted to the 3D format, that meant increased demand and bookings (and ticket prices) for 3D films. Would 3D be the future of filmmaking, a logical extension of CGI? One of the major concerns of the burgeoning trend toward 3D was the availability of theater chains to meet the demand.
Films released in IMAX 3-D included: Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) and Aliens of the Deep (2005) and many other IMAX-only short features, as well as portions of feature films, such as The Dark Knight (2008).
The DreamWorks sci-fi spoof of 50s monster movies Monsters vs. Aliens (2009) was the first computer-animated feature film to be shot directly in stereoscopic 3-D -- dubbed the Ultimate 3-D. Previously, 3-D CGI films were made in a non 3-D version and then dimensionalized. The film was about the growth of Californian Susan Murphy (voice of Reese Witherspoon) who was hit by a meteor on her wedding day and grew to monstrous size (49 feet and 11 inches) and was named Ginormica.
3D releases included: Spy Kids 3D: Game Over (2003), The Polar Express (2004), Chicken Little (2005), Monster House (2006), Superman Returns (2006) - with 20 minutes in converted 3D, Meet the Robinsons (2007), Beowulf (2007), Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (2008), Bolt (2008), My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009) - the first R-rated horror film released in Real D 3D, Coraline (2009), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009), Up (2009), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), The Final Destination: Death Trip 3D (2009), A Christmas Carol (2009), and Avatar (2009).   2010-2011 3D film releases included: Pixar's Toy Story 3 (2010), Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2010), and Shrek Forever After (2010) - to name just a few.
Text written by Tim Dirks and edited by Malcolm Armstrong (© 2015, all rights reserved)
END of Unit THREE Notes
(PART TWO)