Death of movies greatly exaggerated

Every year you read about how the movie business is collapsing, but, then, it just keeps sort of trundling along. This summer was widely reported to be one of catastrophic flops marking tectonic shifts that will soon dump Hollywood to the bottom of the ocean, but, after a terrible start to 2013, domestic box office was up 7% for summer 2013 versus summer 2012, despite the 3D fad continuing to fizzle out. (And the summer season growth would have been 12% except that last year's The Avengers was such a giant hit.)

And that's just measuring the century old business model of getting customers to leave their homes and go to a theater, which is a downright quaint way of doing things. They have lots of other ways to make money.

The Coen Brothers are out promoting their upcoming December movie about a folk-singer in pre-Bob Dylan Greenwich Village:

Q. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas recently talked about the state of the movie business and how frustrated they are with it. ... It’s a recurrent theme — the crisis in film. 

Joel Coen: It’s definitely harder now. On the other hand, I think you can exaggerate that, too, because the movie business in the United States, despite the sort of ups and downs of the economy, is still a very healthy business. And that healthy business is going to support — and it always has — a lot of niche moviemaking. More than you might expect it to, given the mentality. There’s still a lot of interesting stuff being made which is completely outside of the kind of trend that we’re describing, you know? 

Ethan Coen: We’ve always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We’re actually strangely consistent in that respect. We’ve been able to keep making movies because of that and also because, strangely, we’ve had studio patrons, starting from Barry Diller. Sometimes they're establishment people who know they’re not going to make huge amounts of money, but they like your movies. They’re moviegoers, too. 

Joel: And mostly they’re making blockbusters, but when you get in a room with them, they go, “Go off and make your movie, and I’ll do it as long as I can’t get hurt too bad.” 

The Coen Brothers are like Woody Allen in this regard -- investors don't demand they maximize ROI as long as they don't Heaven's Gate them -- except that, in contrast to Allen, there are two of them, they are a couple of decades younger, and, on average, they take twice as long to make each movie, so with four times the amount of man-years per movie, their average film's quality/originality is much higher than Allen's last dozen.

A movie executive

The movie and TV industries are among the rare holdouts to having their cost-structures ruthlessly rationalized. Movie executives are generally not lacking in chutzpah, but even they have more dignity and self-awareness than Silicon Valley billionaires, so they don't lobby Congress about how the crippling best boy and key grip shortages mean that movies will be rotting in the soundstages unless Hollywood gets 100,000 more visas to bring in foreign workers to do the gaffering jobs Americans just won't do.

Moreover, the movie business is full of weird cross-subsidizations that any MBA with a spreadsheet would target for elimination. Most notably, teenage fans subsidize grown-up movie-goers. The wealth generated by blockbusters helps pay for Coen Bros.-type movies, both because investors lavish a fraction of their summer profits on fall movies, and because talent charges less to work on prestige pics.

Also, teenagers subsidize grown-up tastes even within summer blockbusters. The summer's biggest hit movie, Iron Man 3, for example, was a lot better than it had to be (e.g., Sir Ben Kingsley's role). 

By the way, to change the subject to sibling rivalry, over the last 29 years I've read dozens of joint interviews with the Coen Brothers (who are not twins), and I still can't tell them apart. Their public affect is not like, say, Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. Brothers usually take pains to distinguish themselves from each other (for instance, one identical twin recently informed me that he has 20-22 eyesight while his brother has 20-24 eyesight). In contrast, the Coens, who have gotten an awful lot of work done together, don't. I suspect they have fairly conscious strategies and rules for minimizing and managing sibling rivalry, but I don't know what they are.

My son tells me that a few years ago, the Coen Brothers came to his college to give a speech or receive an award or something, and the students buzzed for a week afterwards about the surprising fact that the Coen Brothers had arrived in separate limousines coming from separate directions. It had never occurred to the college film fans that the Coen Brothers are different individuals with distinct lives who don't live together in one big Coen Brothers House.