I want to start by saying I appreciate Steven Soderbergh‘s passion as presented in the above “State of Cinema” speech he gave at the San Francisco Film Festival on Saturday, April 27. I watched all 30+ minutes nodding my head in agreement, finding comfort in his frustration only because it’s a shared frustration with the state of cinema (and/or movies) today depending on how you want to define the two as Soderbergh himself doesn’t see them as one and the same and even that, I agree.
However, within all that agreeing you have to then take a step back and evaluate everything that’s being said as an objective observer, which I’m happy to see Soderbergh does. His rant targets the studio system while at every turn he is able to interpret why things are the way they are.
He talks about how spending $60 million to promote a $100 million film is a better proposition for a studio than spending that same $60 million to promote a $10 million film. He uses a two-times multiplier to decide when a film is going to finally be in the black and by that math the $10 million film would need to make $140 million to make its money back while the $100 million film would need to make $320 million. By all counts, the chances of making that money back on the $100 million involves less risk.
Later in the speech he says, “I get it, it’s the studio, you need all kinds of movies: you need comedies, you need horror films, you need action films, you need animated films — I get it. But the point is, can’t some of these be cinema also?”
Well, let’s see…
Soderbergh begins by defining art saying, “Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information and to try and make sense out of all this chaos.”
If art is passing along “ideas and information” how many studio films would you consider art? I saw two major blockbusters recently and while each had their share of emotion and attempts at character building I would argue these were only peripheral elements, while the primary focus was spectacle and giant set pieces. Are these films still art?
Then we get to his definition of cinema:
Cinema is a specificity of vision, it’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form.
I can only imagine him coming up with that definition, shaping it over and over again to ensure it only included his own specificity of vision. Consider the number of major films out there that simply wouldn’t exist if a pitch had to meet each and every one of the criteria set out in that definition. It’s a definition that I feel boils down to two words — passion and responsibility — and Soderbergh exhibits both.
Soderbergh clearly has a passion for film, cinema, movies, whatever you want to call it, but I think the following says a lot more about what he’s looking for and how he feels about his position:
I’ve been in meetings where I can feel it slipping away, where I can feel that the ideas I’m tossing out, they’re too scary or too weird, and I can feel the thing–I can tell: it’s not going to happen, I’m not going to be able to convince them to do this the way I think it should be done. I want to jump up on the table and scream: “Do you know how lucky we are to be doing this? Do you understand that the only way to repay that karmic debt is to make something good, is to make something ambitious, something beautiful, something memorable?” But I didn’t do that. I just sat there, and I smiled.
Now there’s a ton of ego in this speech, but I’ve always believed truly great filmmakers need giant egos, otherwise they would be second-guessing themselves and allowing anyone to come along and change their mind. What is important about the comment I quoted above is the section I placed in bold, the moment he refers to a “karmic debt.”
For all the ego Soderbergh puts on display he still feels a debt to the audience to make something good, ambitious, beautiful and memorable. I wonder how many of today’s studio filmmakers can honestly say the same. How many of them can step back and look at their films objectively and say with confidence that their film met the standards Soderbergh is setting here?
To all of this, there is the obvious problem and it’s the hardest one to overcome. Soderbergh adds, “[T]he problem is that cinema as I define it, and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience.” Iron Man 3 hits theaters this weekend and it’s a perfectly fine movie if two hours of escapism are what you’re looking for, but to call it ambitious or memorable would be overstepping boundaries. It is, however, what the audience wants and they are primed to eat it up to the tune of nearly $1 billion over the course of its worldwide theatrical run.
There’s nothing wrong with Iron Man 3 finding success, but the one thing Soderbergh brings up that is very important in this case is that while Iron Man 3 is dominating 4,000+ screens it means there is little room left for anything else.
To hear Soderbergh describe the situation:
In 2003, 455 films were released, 275 of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released, so you’re not imagining things–there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. 549 of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in studio films, and yet, ten years ago: studio market share 69%, last year 76%. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie.
So what of it? If there were more theaters available would more people go see those 549 independent films? I think you’d be hard-pressed to convince anyone it would be cost effective, but the key to all of this, I think, is that while we can lament the quality and dominance of studio films we can appreciate the number of independents now available and the countless ways we can consume them.
To complain about the studios the way Soderbergh has done here is to simply give additional detail where before there were some grey areas. He’s spot on with his analysis and I agree, why not abandon work on just one of your half-billion dollar blockbusters and fund a handful of smaller films from respected filmmakers? Maybe one day that will come about, but right now the franchise wheels are turning as Marvel mania is dominating, DC is hoping to catch up and every slightly-known young adult series is snatched up for an adaptation, most of which will likely crash and burn, but the smoldering ashes will only linger for a weekend as we’re on to the next thing before we know it.
I have included the entirety of Soderbergh’s speech on the second page (via Vulture) or you can watch it all at the top of this post.
