And that’s a real problem in criticism today… I’m thinking more of amateur criticism.

The “problem” he’s talking about isn’t important. I’m more interested in his invocation of ‘amateurs’ (translation: bad), which presumes the existence of ‘professionals’ (translation: less bad).

You might be thinking “obviously there is a difference.” There was. When film critics were pretty much only employed by newspapers and TV stations, the distinction made sense. Pauline Kael was a professional critic. The bloke down the pub who liked movies was not.

Today, the line is blurred. Influencers ‘review’ films before anyone else. Richard Brody’s on TikTok. YouTube creators earn more than staff writers. Pauline and the bloke down the pub would both have a Substack.

So what does it mean to be a professional critic now? Getting paid for writing or talking about film doesn’t seem sufficient. Nor does having an audience. What’s left?

Once, critics operated as tastemakers. In the halcyon days of the monoculture, audiences’ only real connection with films was intermediated by critics, who would shape and contextualise what filtered down. There were few critics working, meaning each had outsized influence. This was particularly pronounced pre the mid-1970s, when films were rolled-out gradually (making those first reactions crucial), but it lasted all the way into the 1990s. “The first trade review always carries more industry weight than it probably should” wrote indie producer John Pierson in 1995. “However the first major consumer newspaper reviews are far more telling.”

Now, any one critic is just a leaf in the wind. “The more visible movie reviewing becomes,” wrote David Bordwell, “the less important any one reviewer seems.” There are some outstanding critics working today - Adam Nayman and Amy Nicholson and Justin Chang and Manohla Dargis to name a few - but how many people are going to see films because they recommend them? In place of individual taste we have the Almighty Aggregator. Did this movie get 2.8 on Letterboxd? Probably a skip. 80% on Rotten Tomatoes? Take my money.

Up to a certain point, film appreciation is a numbers game. But cranking your figures up doesn’t cut it either. Having an unholy number of notches on your cinematic bedpost is no longer scarce. An ecosystem of podcasts, physical media labels and enthusiasts has already strip-mined cinema history. ‘I can give you a great recommendation’ just isn’t that impressive a skill any more. In five minutes of research anyone can compile - and recommend to others - a list of Ten Great J-Horror Movies Worth Their Time, without ever having to sit down and actually watch one.

So if the distinction between amateur and professional isn’t based on audience, money, influence or recommendation…. What’s left?

Two hallmarks of modern film writing are ubiquitous here on Substack. They are two versions of the same impulse: to use a film as a springboard for discussing Something More Important, namely either: (1) The World, or (2) Yourself.

On the former, the formula goes something like this: pick a hot-button issue; identify a film or group of films that speak to that issue; take the side that your readers likely agree with; cherry-pick a couple of examples from the film - and hey presto you’ve got a 1,500 word ‘take.’

On the latter, when struggling to identify something interesting to say about a film, you can simply make it about you. Suddenly, the words come gushing out of every orifice. After all, what in the world could possibly be more interesting than yourself? (I often have to expel hundreds of words of indulgent nonsense from my writing, but hey at least it’s warmed up my fingers).

Both are, of course, perfectly valid modes of writing. When done well (which is, admittedly, rare), they can be exceptional. I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum. But they cannot be used to distinguish amateur from professional criticism for the simple reason that anyone can do them. You don’t need any specialist knowledge about a film to be able to tie it to your own experience or the latest news item. It is a purely extractive process.

Which finally leads me to my point. Specialist knowledge. Professional critics pursue a level of technical, craft, academic, formal, theoretical and historical knowledge that lets them do things amateurs can’t. They know more shit. And the more shit you know, the better job you’re going to be able to do at communicating the parts of films that us rubes do not understand.

This extends beyond films and into other artforms. Cinema is a Frankenstein’s monster, and a professional critic wants to understand its constituent parts. I’m reading David Bordwell’s The Rhapsodes, and one of the things he writes about is how his leading 1940s critics - Agee, Farber, Ferguson and Tyler - “all were polymaths, bringing experiences of other arts to bear on the cinema.” Manny Farber, for example, trained as a painter and “brought a concern with fastidious craft, pictorial design, and emotional expressivity to his thinking about films.”

If this all sounds like gatekeeping: it’s the opposite. One way to think of a ‘professional’ is that they are performing a role based on some skill or credential that a hobbyist does not have. In some industries, like the sunlit uplands of law, this means you have gone through some expensive training program and are regulated and insured and whatnot. Not the case for film criticism. The barriers to entry are insanely low. Information isn’t scarce, but doing the work is. Nolan’s point, I think, is that an awful lot of people writing about film aren’t putting this work in. We can! All it takes to become a professional critic, in the words of Otis Ferguson, is “a constant and humble passion to know everything of what is being done and how everything is being done.”

If you approach cinema with this kind of bloodthirsty curiosity, then all the modes of criticism I’ve spent the last 1,000 words dismissing will become relevant again. People will trust your taste. You can make eclectic recommendations that aggregators wouldn’t dream of. You can use the specifics of the movie, rather than bland generalisations, to write outwards into the personal and the social. And yes, you can build a brand and even have some influence. But all this is rooted in, first and foremost, the pursuit of knowledge.

The irony is that the best way to accumulate this knowledge and hone this curiosity is to write a fuckload of amateurish stuff, and to do so without compunction or shame. I have written this essay to cajole and berate myself as much as anyone. So if you read this and feel disheartened, don’t be. Remember this: everyone’s an amateur, the only difference is that some are putting the work in to become a professional.

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Today’s article is FREE for everyone to read. Then, below the paywall, I share my thoughts on everything I’ve watched and read this week. Last week: The Odyssey, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, Cutter’s Way and In the Mood For Love.

There was a Treehouse of Horror episode that terrified me when I was younger. For reasons I can’t recall, it ends with the Simpson family getting graphically turned inside out, revealing body-shaped bags of crimson guts and protruding bone.

This is how I’ve felt over the last few months. The way I think about film, and much of what I read about it, has been pulled apart from the inside. The culprit is a series of blogposts written by David Bordwell dismantling “the One Big Idea that every intellectual has about popular culture.”

The Big Idea seems straightforward. Movies reflect how a society – or at least a significant section of one – thinks. By analysing a film, we can better understand a country’s mood and anxieties.

Common examples of this line of thinking include “X meets the moment,” “Y was produced by a country in a state of paranoia/fear/mourning/pride/anger,” and “Z reveals a country in thrall to bloodthirsty capitalism/wet-lettuce liberalism/patriarchal cruelty/the woke mind-virus.”

Seriously, you see stuff like this everywhere. I mean, look at this guff, from a 2025 article:

“Certain eras retreat into wish-fulfilment. The Reaganite 1980s unleashed a wave of ‘roided-up bodybuilders on enemies home and abroad. America was back, baby: bigger, meaner, and manlier than ever. Following the War on Terror, studios fed us morally straightforward fantasies of spandex-wearing heroes solving our problems with a wink, a quip and a well-timed punch.”

“In the aftermath of Watergate, the New Hollywood spat out tales of angry, suspicious men being crushed by vast conspiratorial systems, whether the government, the mob, or the family.

“When historians look back at 1970s cinema, they see a society processing the collective trauma of Watergate and Vietnam. When they look at 1999, they see one grappling with corporate alienation and the spiritual exhaustion of office life. In 20 years […] they’ll see a culture grappling with the post-social media, post-COVID, post-AI collapse of shared reality.”

(The author of all three of these paragraphs, by the way, was an amateur hack who goes by the name “Ed William.”)

So, what’s wrong with reflectionism? Let’s apply a few of Bordwell’s arguments to the aforementioned Watergate theory (which, to be fair to the amateur hack formerly known as Ed William, has been cited in far more prestigious establishments than this one).

The claim seems uncontroversial. All the President’s Men, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor and The Conversation deal with conspiracy and paranoia. They were released during or shortly after Watergate. Watergate was a big deal. Hey presto: the films reflect the paranoid atmosphere of mid-1970s America.

If you’re paying attention, you may have already noticed a flaw. Movies take a long time to get made. Often, films that Meet The Moment^TM were conceived and produced long before The Moment existed.

The Watergate hearings began in May 1973. How many of these films were written and made by then? All the President’s Men passes the test, for obvious reasons. Three Days of the Condor is a little murkier, given that author James Grady started writing the novel it was based on sometime around 1971. But the film itself wasn’t shot until after Nixon’s resignation. So I’ll give it a pass.

The Parallax View partly fails the test. It was based on Loren Singer’s novel, which was published in 1970 and first developed as a screenplay in 1971. Production began in April 1973, just before the hearings. The Conversation definitely fails. Francis Ford Coppola started writing the screenplay in 1966 and finished in 1970. Principal photography was completed by the time the hearings started.

Already, the post-Watergate paranoia argument is under threat. Two of the main films held up as evidence were conceived before the break-ins had even happened.

This alone isn’t sufficient, of course. Regardless of when or why they were made, perhaps these films’ popularity is evidence that they captured the zeitgeist? In this case, the argument goes, the American public were thirsty for some paranoid movies because American political life had become so conspiratorial.

For this argument to work we’d need to establish that the films were popular. All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor certainly were - they were both among the top-ten highest grossing American films in their release year. But The Conversation and The Parallax View were not. If paranoid audiences wanted paranoid films, why didn’t they bother showing up to the latter two?

Even when a film is popular it doesn’t tell us much about why people saw it. Most people don’t go to the movies for politics. They could have gone to see Three Days of the Condor because they fancied Robert Redford, or because their dinner plans got cancelled. And there would have been a sizeable chunk of people who saw the movie and simply didn’t like it, or didn’t even consider its political resonance, or loved the fact that it made the CIA look powerful and scary.

And then we have to look at the other popular films in those years. In 1976, the year that All the President’s Men was released, the highest grossing film was Rocky, and the third highest grossing was A Star is Born. Joining them in the top ten were films like King Kong, The Bad News Bears and Midway. So what latent national emotion were all the people who loved these films tapping into? Nostalgia? Athletic achievement? Hubris? Name me a major political event, associate a mood with it, and I bet I will be able to find you a group of contemporary films that speak to that mood.

We haven’t even got into the fact that audiences aren’t demographically representative of the population at large, nor that Three Days of the Condor later became popular in the Soviet Union, where one can assume the zeitgeist was a little different.

You could argue that I have fixated unfairly on Watergate. Throw in Vietnam, both Kennedy assassinations and any other handpicked piece of 1960s and early 1970s historical flotsam, and one could argue the era’s movies were reflecting a deeper undercurrent of paranoia. Trouble is, now the argument becomes almost impossible to falsify. If we’re just pointing to a general paranoia, almost any thriller becomes malleable enough to fit into the theory. What evidence is there that this attitude existed, beyond the fact it was on the screen? And, even if it did exist, specifically how did it translate to the screen?

Reflectionism trades close readings of the choices made by filmmakers, and the traditions those filmmakers are working in, for sweeping statements about zeitgeists.

Repudiating reflectionism does not mean rejecting the importance of Watergate or paranoia to American cinema. But it does mean meeting each film on its own terms or, as Bordwell says, “by taking film as film.” Rather than seeing these films as a cultural reflux - a body politic spewing up whatever was upsetting its stomach - we can see them as a product of all kinds of (often contradictory) technical, commercial, historical, formal and aesthetic choices and traditions. The fun of writing and talking about film is in confronting and contextualising these choices and traditions.

A movie’s political or societal observations are embedded by the people who make the movies, not by society at large. These people each bring their own set of prior experiences (which often are dramatically different to those of the viewer). The Conversation speaks to a different paranoia (obsessive, guilty, personal) than Three Days of the Condor (institutional, impersonal). All the President’s Men and The Parallax View were both directed by Pakula and shot by Gordon Willis. Was the country paranoid or were they? How does 1971’s Klute, another Pakula/Willis surveillance thriller, fit in? What similarities and differences does it have to the post-Watergate films, and what does this tell us?

I’m just spitballing. There are thousands of different ways to tackle the films’ handling of paranoia without blandly citing a national mood. How is it embedded in their formal and aesthetic decisions? Where does the gesturing at current events read as cynical? What commercial or technical forces were at play? How has the thriller genre traditionally handled paranoia, and how do these films subvert or use these conventions?

Part of the problem is that culture sells. I note with amusement that the article I quoted above is my best performing piece on Substack. But, as Bordwell said, “movies are worth studying for themselves, not just as channels for Op-Ed memes.”

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Below the paywall: my thoughts on The Devil Wears Prada 2, The End of Oak Street, Tony and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In. If you enjoy my writing and want the unfiltered Ed Experience, please consider a paid subscription.

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Every Saturday I publish a column on everything I’ve watched or rewatched that week, plus whatever other ephemera drifts through my skull. Last week: The Sacrifice, Spider-Man, Splitsville and Dead Calm.

Appropriately for the biggest screen in Britain, the BFI IMAX is guarded like Troy. Its battlements are the busy Waterloo roundabout; its gates a network of dank underpasses best described as piss tunnels.

I hadn’t breached the cinema’s defences since 2024. This time I was there for my third viewing of The Odyssey, my first in 70mm. Seeing the film in its full glory confirmed what I already suspected: it’s a major work, perhaps Nolan’s best.

Christopher Nolan’s worlds are clean and clinical, almost puritan in their sexless order. Even his dreams are geometric contraptions (Inception); Rubik’s cubes mechanically constrained by a precise, mathematical logic. Homer’s The Odyssey is spectral. It is a world of gods and monsters; dreams and nightmares. To try and rationalise its wisp-like nature is to chain the god of wine himself.

On paper, Nolan appears to do exactly that. His decision to banish the Gods sounds like the kind of left-brained intellectualisation that led him to a more ‘realistic’ Batman. But this is not a coldly rational film, nor an atheistic one. As a filmmaker, Nolan is blessed with tools that Homer didn’t have. His gods exist in the film’s juxtaposition of sound and image, and in the seams of its edit. Represented cinematically, no talking God could be as celestially visceral as the cacophonous destruction of Odysseus’ ship after he has been lured “onto Poseidon’s ocean. Under Zeus’ sky.”

The secret sauce is Jennifer Lame’s edit, which balances Nolan’s blunter instincts with a slippery, elliptical style that achieves the sensation of a dream, if not the logic of one. She is unwilling to let the film’s muscular images stand as monuments to themselves, instead deploying a machine-gun-cutting style to bombard us with flashes that dissolve on contact. And she collapses time and geography: folding flashbacks into flashbacks; past into present. The combined effect is something like waking up from a dream and feeling the preceding night’s events slipping through your fingers. She is the Dionysus to Nolan’s Apollo.

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Prior to our siege of the BFI, we conquered the Prince Charles. Upon seeing its schedule for this insignificant August Sunday afternoon I felt what can only be described as a cinematic form of inceldom: an emasculated fury at what I, as a non-London resident, cannot have:

AMELIE (35mm)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (35mm)

RAN

ANGEL’S EGG

NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE

HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE

AKIRA

We were there for Nirvanna the Band the Show The Movie, a newish sci-fi comedy from Toronto duo Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, based on their cult 2007-2009 web series.

I wish I had something insightful to say about this film. I could tread water and spend a paragraph or so telling you the premise, but either you already know that or you’re familiar with Google. So I’ll just say that it was both the most I have laughed in the cinema, and the most I have heard a cinema laugh, this decade. It’s rare for a movie adaptation of a series to feel like anything other than an extended episode. This doesn’t. It’s an astonishingly ambitious film, both at the micro level (the guerrilla-execution of its set pieces and technical wizardry of its effects work are pretty breathtaking) and at the macro, in how it juices its defiantly lo-fi origins for the cinema without ever losing its identity. It’s as miraculous a balancing act as what Nolan and Lame achieved in The Odyssey.

Ambition is in short supply among the protagonists of the excellent Cutter’s Way (1981), a minor-key noir I caught at home on a rather lovely Radiance 4K.

Noirs have a high floor. Even the genre’s lesser films, with their fleshy blend of sex, murder and mystery, will usually entertain, if little more. The best, though introduce a confounding element; a cross-rhythm that cuts against the central mystery. Here, it is the titular Alex Cutter, an impotently furious Vietnam veteran played right to the edge of caricature by John Heard. That he succeeds as a character is a credit to both the strength of Heard’s performance and Ivan Passer’s direction.

A moustache-wielding Jeff Bridges plays Richard Bone (what a name), a sleazily charming gigolo who ambles his way through the bedrooms of Santa Barbara’s upper crust. When he is wrongly blamed for a murder he believes was committed by a wealthy businessman, his friend Cutter becomes obsessed with the case.

Cutter is a wretched creature. Vietnam broke him, taking an eye, an arm and a leg in the process, and he has returned to a country that mocks him for his sacrifice. His disillusionment bursts from his body like splintered bone. He wants, needs, someone to blame. In the murder case, with its seeming moral straightforwardness, he sees a chance to make himself whole. Bone, who skipped Vietnam, has no such purpose. I’m realising as I’m writing this that their relationship is an oddly familiar parallel to the Elliot Page - Robert Pattinson dynamic in The Odyssey (exactly the kind of serendipity I was hoping this roundup format would produce).

Cutter’s Way fits into the time-honoured noir tradition of scheming idiots getting in way over their head. But Passer, who grew up in Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation and later fled after the Soviet invasion, does not approach his characters as insects under a glass. His film is empathetic, using plot as an excuse for character rather than the other way around. It is closer to the character studies of the New Hollywood than the sexy mysteries of the 1980s - more Klute than Body Heat.

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In sharp contrast to the muted colour palette of Cutter’s Way (an homage to the black and white of noir’s bygone era) is the lusciousness of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), about a man and woman who fall in love after discovering their spouses are having an affair with each other.

The film creates mood through the accumulation of detail. Shadow on wall, spoon in coffee, mustard on plate, slippers on hardwood. The camera glides like a dancer’s dragging leg. The characters’ illicit meetings are shot through reflections or around corners, as though we’re peering in on something we shouldn’t be seeing. The streets and walkways are often strangely empty, almost purgatorial. Our leads flirt in subtext, rarely saying what they think, instead implying it by role-playing conversations with their spouses.

Richard Brody, the New Yorker film critic, recently made the point that a film’s “story” is a product of aesthetic choices. In other words, we can’t separate how we experience a story from the way it’s told.

In the Mood for Love is a great demonstration of Brody’s point. All of these formal choices create a tone, yes, but they are also how we experience the repressed longing and sensory intensity of the story.

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Alexander is a man of words, prone to despairingly cerebral monologues that are patiently tolerated by his young son, temporarily rendered mute by a throat operation. He lives in a beautiful house on a beautiful island, unbothered by civilisation and politics and God. It is his birthday - some inconsequential number between 50 and 70 - and he is having an odd little party attended by his resentful wife, a philosophical postman and a suave doctor who may be his wife’s lover.

Civilisation, politics and God. Tonight, these three horsemen return, heralded by the roar of fighter jets and a television broadcast announcing an impending nuclear holocaust. Confronted by existential desolation, Alexander turns to action, praying for salvation and offering to give up everything he loves in return. When morning comes, he must live up to his side of the bargain.

I recently collapsed in a cinema’s bathroom. It was 11.30 at night, and I had just seen David Lowery’s Mother Mary. I was viscerally repelled by that film’s sanctimonious drudgery. Perhaps that’s why I fainted. I spent the night awake in a hospital waiting room, until being discharged at 10am. I tell this story because The Sacrifice, in its conventional three-act structure, achieves the uncanny sensation of a sleepless night better than any film I’ve seen.

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Before nightfall, the film accumulates detail. We encounter Alexander’s spiritual isolation; his nihilism, which is masked as intellectualism and cushioned by material comfort. Oddly for a director as visually able as Tarkovsky, key information is delivered via lengthy monologues. Unfurled via long takes, this table-setting becomes confrontationally theatrical at points, particularly when we leave the shimmering natural beauty of the island’s exteriors (shot by Bergman regular Sven Nykvist) for the house’s cloistered interior.

It is the second act when Tarkovsky’s carefully laid dominoes begin to topple. The scream of the fighter jets is a great piece of sound design: the film, so quiet until this moment, roars; the house, so still until now, shakes. Alexander’s stupor - and ours - is broken. Night has fallen.

The overwhelming dread of these middle sections affected me deeply. It is rare to see a film embrace hopelessness so wholeheartedly. Melancholy is not the right way to describe it, for this implies a certain midnight-blue-wistfulness. The despair that falls upon the characters is black. The film literally loses colour: gone are the vivid greens and deep browns of the first act, replaced by a sickly, desaturated palette.

Tarkovsky made this film in Sweden, with many of Bergman’s regular collaborators. Like much of Bergman’s work, the film is rooted in the German tradition of Kammerspiel - chamber play - using theatrical staging and domestic minutiae to psychologically pressure-cook its characters. Unlike Bergman, though, Tarkovsky uses close-ups sparingly. Instead, he stages his action from a cold distance, allowing actors to move in and out the frame. We are denied the relief of a cut; the humanity of a close-up.

The dread is total. Alexander’s wife, whose viciousness imbalances the film, has a panic attack. Now, the first act’s quietness, and Tarkovsky’s merciless reluctance to cut, take effect. She screams, and begs, and screams. We are desperate for her to be put out of her misery, but also out of ours. She cannot escape, and neither can we. When the doctor injects her, it is a relief. Faced with such despair, we long for the tranquilliser.

Alexander’s response is quieter. He prays to the God he claims to not believe in. Now the film enters the realm of magical realism, with a pair of possibly supernatural encounters (whether Christian or Pagan, Tarkovsky leaves open to interpretation).

And then it is morning. Colour has returned, and the hallucinatory events of the night before already feel like a dream. This is what a sleepless night feels like.

But Alexander has a bargain to keep. Now the film’s tantric quality reveals itself. There have been pleasures of the mind aplenty, but pleasures of the body - the primal viscera of cinema - have been largely withheld. The release, when it comes, is hellishly, dementedly ecstatic.

This was Tarkovsky’s final film. It is dedicated to his son; echoed in the film’s final shot, which is stubbornly hopeful. Tarkovsky called the film a parable, but it is not nearly so didactic as that. The true nature of Alexander’s sacrifice - if indeed he made one at all - is left open.

The nuclear apocalypse that hangs so heavy over The Sacrifice is small-beer by Spider-Man’s stakes (or “small potato” as one cameo character declares early in the film). It is precisely this stake-inflation that has plagued recent instalments of the MCU. If anything can happen, and unhappen, anywhere in the multiverse, why should we care about whatever the conflict du jour is?

It is admirable, then, that Spider-Man: Brand New Day puts to the side the multiversal shenanigans of recent entries and focuses on the rather more parochial concerns of a talented young man reckoning with a non-existent social life.

If The Sacrifice is a film about the desperate horror of impending death, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is about the grim reality of a lonely life, and the film is at its best when it is leaning into its everyday stakes, brought to life via some real on screen chemistry between Tom Holland and Zendaya.

It is a bluntly effective film; less frictionless than Jon Watts’ preceding trilogy and quite charming in its messiness. It delivers what critics of recent instalments of the MCU have been calling for: grounded storytelling and practical(ish) craft, while its obligatory wider-universe cameos at least read as thematically cohesive rather than nakedly cynical. But there is a lifelessness to proceedings: its beats are predictable, its emotional arcs telegraphed well in advance. And the central metaphor falls flat. This is a film about puberty (Peter is losing control of his body and emotions), but we have already spent three films (and an entertaining opening montage) watching him become a man.

Lifeless is not a word you can throw at Splitsville, a 2025 romantic comedy about two intertwined couples in purportedly open relationships (Dakota Johnson, Michael Angelo Covino, Adria Arjona and Kyle Marvin).

There are faults common to the genre. The middle section meanders, a swerve into earnest melodrama feels unearned, and decision-making is often plot rather than character driven. But I didn’t particularly care. It’s too damn funny (and well-made) for quibbling.

Though a post-80s romantic comedy in structure, Splitsville differs in tone to Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers; more farcical and slapstick. More physical, too, with one glorious extended fight sequence worthy of Buster Keaton. Farce only works when it’s delivered in earnest, and some actual filmmaking gives heft to the film’s antic sensibilities: it was shot in 35mm in real locations, with attention paid to out-there concepts like framing and composition. Some of the takes even last a minute-plus: Tarkovsky-esque in the current climate. It is an easy watch, but it’s not weightless.

A note on Adria Arjona. It is a mystery how someone so otherworldly beautiful can be so fundamentally silly. There is an unstudied, “yes-and” looseness to her performance style (see also: Hitman). She is a delight to watch. I hope the rumours of her playing Wonder Woman aren’t true. Stoic heroism would be a waste of her talents.

The week’s watching was rounded out by Dead Calm, a nasty little 1989 thriller about a bereaved couple (Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman) who encounter a dangerous stranger (Billy Zane) out at sea (yes, he’s a murderer). It tested my patience.

The film is trapped between its intentions as a psychological thriller and the cultural gravity of the slasher genre. It succeeds as neither. The former would require more mystery around Zane’s character. The latter would require more lambs to the slaughter (as it is, all of Zane’s kills happen off screen). And there is a structural flaw. For much of the film, our two protagonists are separated. Sam Neill must escape a sinking ship; Nicole Kidman must escape a leering Zane. Movie logic demands that the three characters reunite for the final set piece, so the middle sections, though well-executed, are wheel-spinners.

There is, though, a wordless sequence at the beginning of the third act that achieves a poetic harmony of sorts, cross-cutting between our three characters, now separated, as they grapple with their fates against the setting sun. An overwrought choral soundtrack goes into overdrive. Total Cinema, baby.

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A criticism often levied at contemporary young actors is that they have a “face that’s seen an iPhone.” Backrooms is made by a face that’s never not seen an iPhone. It is, by virtue of Kane Parsons’ age, the most online film to ever trouble the US box office.

It shows. Plenty of critics have rightly noted that Backrooms is split between the eerie liminality of the backrooms themselves (effective!) and the traumacore, screenwriting 101 plot (clunky!) What this overlooks is that the film’s most conventional elements are precisely what make it feel so weird.

Liminality isn’t new, and the backrooms sequences are indebted to Lynch and Kubrick, among others. They are well-executed, but they aren’t that odd if you’ve seen similar movies before. Meanwhile, the film’s attempt to situate itself in an analogue 1990s world of self-help tapes, camcorders and fax machines is so uncanny, so divorced from any tangible sense of what a pre-internet world was like, that Reddit is awash with theories that the entire movie takes place in the backrooms.

Until recently, every movie we saw on the big screen carried some traces of the Before Times in its cultural DNA. They bled through in how characters used technology, how they spoke, how they interacted with the world.

Now, things are changing. I’m 33 years old, so hardly over the hill, although my knees have started to go and I can no longer handle a hangover. But I’m old enough to know what a pre-ubiquitous-internet world was. I remember having to ask my parents whether they were expecting any phone calls before dialling up to play games on Miniclip. Even when I was a student in the 2010s, I remember us being mildly inconvenienced, rather than existentially terrified, at the prospect of not having wi-fi in our new house for several days.

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Like steel on flint, good friction is creatively generative. It can come from a clash of collaborators: Scorsese and De Niro debating a character choice, or Jack Fisk and Emmanuel Lubezki lighting a set. It can come from process: Paul Thomas Anderson and his team waiting two days to screen dailies, or Phil Tippett studying four-legged animals to give The Empire Strikes Back’s walkers greater weight. It can even come from budget: forcing directors to deploy imaginative solutions to circumvent limited locations, performers or special effects.

Bad friction is creatively sapping. It’s the loose fabric at the back of a trainer, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing at your heels. Even the most patient filmmaker has been driven to the edge of driving hot needles through their eyeballs by contracts and rights and permits and insurance and budgeting and scheduling. Or the continuity tracking of costume design across different shooting days and locations. Or taking half a day to rig a crane for a four-second shot.

The great promise of technology is that it can eliminate the bad friction. The great threat of technology is that it can eliminate the good friction.

When adapting to new technology of any kind, the central issue therefore becomes identifying the parts of the process that should not be smoothed away and protecting them at all costs.

For seasoned pros, this is fairly easy. They know enough about their working methods to identify which parts are precious. For the rest of us, it is fairly hard. Without sufficient practical experience, we can easily mistake good friction for bad. Add to this our reasonable human impulse to take shortcuts, and you have a recipe for a kind of creative flattening. What’s that phrase about the baby and the bathwater?

I am at fault. In my bones, I believe in a sort of soft-auteurism. I believe directors often infuse a film with a part of themselves, and that it is rewarding (not to mention fun) to trace this across their filmographies. Perhaps you feel the same. So we talk in hushed tones of Kubrick as this otherworldly visionary, or Hitchcock as a meticulous control freak. And there is, of course, truth in these assessments. But they neglect the collaborative nature of filmmaking, implicitly replacing it with the idea that a movie is perfectly formed in the director’s head, and everything else is just a delivery mechanism to get it out. The whole process of filmmaking gets reduced to expensive, time-consuming meat puppetry. Bad friction.

And remember what happens to bad friction? It gets eliminated. Why have a production department, when it’s all in the director’s head? In fact, why bother having any other humans at all?

The responsibility, I think, of any of us who write about, talk about, care about movies, is to do the work to identify and celebrate the good friction. To make the positive case for when and why it is best to do it the hard way. This means studying craft. It means trying to make stuff ourselves. And yes, it means changing how we talk about directors.

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Irving Thalberg is the patron saint of middle managers. Sandwiched between studio chief Louis B. Mayer and the legions of writers, directors, actors and artisans in MGM’s employ, he spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s shaping the Dream Factory’s golden era.

This was the age of the Hollywood central producer. Under this system, studios concentrated creative and financial responsibility for their output in one man (it was always a man). And it was Thalberg, “the boy wonder,” who pioneered this approach, overseeing the production of more than 400 films during his twelve years at MGM while cultivating stables of writers (F Scott Fitzgerald, Frances Marion, Anita Loos) and stars (Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford) that were the envy of the industry.

Everything went through Thalberg. His days were a whirlwind of script meetings, editing sessions, production meetings and rough-cut screenings. He plunged into every stage of the production cycle, working with writers, directors, editors, composers and department heads to midwife the studio’s pictures from conception to release.

To identify raw story material for his factory, Thalberg commissioned a battalion of readers to plough through thousands upon thousands of potential properties. In “any given year during the early 1930s,” writes historian Thomas Schatz, “MGM’s readers filed reports on over 1,000 novels and original scripts, over 400 short stories, and on 1,500 plays and 1,300 works on foreign language.”

Thalberg, who was only 26 when he joined MGM in 1925, was openly described as a genius by his peers. He had a near-supernatural knack for identifying a good story, and for shaping it in a way that was both creatively ambitious and commercially attractive.

For the readers under his tutelage, he developed a guide designed to help them spot the latent potential in the stories they reviewed. He called this guide his Ten Commandments.

For years now I’ve been stubbornly trying to become a better movie-watcher. By this, I mean developing the context, language and historical understanding I need to properly appreciate what’s in front of me. Such is the task of the ambitious cinephile.

So when I stumbled upon Thalberg’s Commandments, in Schatz’s excellent The Genius of the System, the effect was like a lighthouse in a storm. Nearly 100 years later, they remain (with a healthy dose of linguistic jiu-jitsu) excellent advice for how to better appreciate what’s on the screen.

For paid pilgrims, I’ve shared the Commandments below, along with some notes on how I interpret them. Which ones do you agree with?

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(1) Your most important duty is to find great ideas. You’ll find them buried under tons of mediocre suggestions

In ’s 9 Rules of Criticism, he describes the life of a critic as follows:

You seek out greatness as your daily routine.

What a wonderful phrase. Is this not the higher calling, not just of a critic, but of any of us who vociferously consume culture?

Consumption can become an end in itself, a Sisyphean exercise of racking up the numbers. But each time we think of a piece of art as just another notch on the bedpost we’re contributing to a flattening effect; a homogenisation of our cultural experience.

I’m being aspirational. I love Letterboxd as much as anyone. But it’s helpful, I find, to remember the “why.” We are seeking greatness.

This means reorienting our consumption from passive to active; mindless to mindful. It means treating each film on its own terms. It also means becoming both familiar with, and sensitive to, the mediocre. If you find that everything meets your standards, then they’re probably too low…

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As a smug metropolitan British liberal, I am genetically predisposed to the smug metropolitan British liberal comedian, Stewart Lee.

In his 2018 show Content Provider, Lee takes a swipe at Brexit.

Now, I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, cos I was trying to write a show that I could keep on the road for 18 months and as I didn’t know how Brexit was going to pan out, I didn’t write any jokes about it in case I couldn’t use them in the show and monetise the work I’ve done, right?

So, I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, cos I didn’t see the point of committing to a course of action for which there’s no logical or financial justification.

It’s a clever joke. We in the Brexit-hating audience duly laugh, of course, followed by a self-satisfied cheer and ripple of applause. Lee crouches, grimaces, and turns against us.

That’s right, clap the things you agree with! Clap, clap, clap! Agree, agree, agree!

“Did you see Stewart Lee in Southend?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it funny?”

“No, but I agreed the fuck out of it.”1

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In the late 2000s, there was a minor event known as the “Great Financial Crisis.” Surprisingly, this led people to feel a little hard done by modern capitalism. By the late 2010s/early 2020s, this anger curdled into a wave of movies that fantasised about browbeaten workers unleashing bloody vengeance on wealthy villains.

These movies are satirical. They employ ludicrous, clearly fictional scenarios like a luxury restaurant that slaughters its guests or a billionaire paedophile island. They are cathartic, too, systematically dehumanising and humiliating their villains for our amusement.

I’m a bit late to the “Eat the Rich sucks” bandwagon.2 A common critique is political: these films are made by corporations providing a harmless outlet for our frustration while retaining the structures that suppress us. They offer fantasies of individualistic vengeance that undercut the cooperative action truly required to achieve change. Et cetera.

My issue is different. Eat the Rich cinema is bad art. It is designed to make people who already think a certain way feel better about themselves for doing so.

writes that “all art has some moral purpose—it surprises or familiarises in order to call us to the things of this world.” Eat the Rich cinema abandons this moral purpose. It neither challenges our worldview nor helps us clarify it. We may have a good time, but our understanding of reality remains the same.

Lee’s Brexit bit is a well-constructed joke, just like Ready or Not is a well-constructed thriller. But the challenge to the audience, and thus the artistry, emerges from his follow-up, which replaces our self-satisfaction about Brexit with unease at how easily we were manipulated by the joke. Ready or Not provides no such concerns. Everything we bring into the movie is left safely intact.

“Hmmm,” you may be saying, “not every movie has to be some sophisticated deconstruction of our worldview. It could simply be entertaining while gesturing at some larger themes.” To that I say: where is your ambition? Where are your standards? The great works of pop entertainment had a moral purpose. The Rebel Alliance was inspired by the Việt Cộng!

It’s no coincidence that the one Eat the Rich movie that can claim to be art is the one that sits most uncomfortably in the subgenre. The fact that Parasite can alternatively be read as a story of middle-class envy, a reactionary fable or a sweeping critique of capitalism speaks to its ability to both surprise and familiarise; to “call us to the things of this world.”

Not every movie should be a poke-in-the-eye provocation. I don’t think the answer is Eat the Poor (although the little stinker in me would at least like to see a filmmaker give it a try). Nor do I want a happy-clappy “we’re all friends and should get along” Panglossianism. But if Eat the Rich is to endure as a subgenre worth our time, it needs to aspire to more than getting us to agree the fuck out of it.

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Hello, pilgrims.

Today’s post is especially for you, my beloved patrons. Consider it a cinematic ménage à trois: three hot and sweaty bodies of writing, bound together by a shared purpose.

Here’s what’s on the agenda:

• We return to The Cinephile’s Bookshelf, finding contemporary lessons in a critic’s evisceration of 1960s underground film.

• I break one of my own rules by ranting about something awful.

• The king of physical media helps us understand what the f*ck acting actually is.

The nice part of having paid subscribers is earning money. The hard part of having paid subscribers is doing things to earn money. Do let me know if you like this new format. My plan is to publish these regularly, alongside my usual essays, which will continue to be free for everyone.

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The Cinephile’s Bookshelf

The death of high standards

A product of the 20th century, the poet and film critic Parker Tyler (1904-1974) possessed that deeply regrettable critical artefact known as “nuance.”

He was embedded in the underground film scene of the 1960s - the world of Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage - which in turn had evolved from the pre- and post-war avant-garde. So, it must have been with dismay that his buddies on the scene read this 253-page evisceration of the technical and artistic ambitions of many of the movement’s leading prospects.

This is a boggy, dense book - almost confrontationally hard to parse. If approached as a 101 guide to underground film, it’s unreadable. As a ferocious argument for why filmmakers and critics should maintain high standards, it remains fiercely relevant.

It was his passion for the avant-garde that made Tyler so willing to criticise it (remember what I said about nuance?) He believed that underground filmmaking was capable of producing great art. Many experimental filmmakers already had. But by the 1960s, the movement had abandoned its technical, intellectual, and aesthetic standards.

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This weekend, I spotted a billboard advertising Slow Horses author Mick Herron’s latest book, Clown Town:

IN A WORLD RUN BY IDIOTS, THESE SPIES FIT RIGHT IN

Replace “spies” with “protagonists,” and you have a pretty good thesis statement for contemporary American cinema. Over the past few years, our movies have subjected a successi…

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Like last time, the list threatened to get out of hand - if you’re not included and would like to feature in the next edition, just drop me a DM.

I’ll wet your whistle with a recommendation of my own: Raymond Fielding’s The Techniques of Special Effects Cinematography, which explores the arcane methods of 20th-century special effects artists. I wrote about the book for The Cinephile’s Bookshelf, a series I’ve launched for paid subscribers: The Saddest Textbook I’ve Ever Read.

For future instalments of The Cinephile’s Bookshelf (and more), you can subscribe to my shiny new paid tier…

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Alright then. Buckle up, it’s book time.

Max Cea (Nothing Bogus)

MIKE NICHOLS: A LIFE; by Mark Harris (2021)

I’m not done with it but I’ve been enjoying Mark Harris’s Mike Nichols biography. I was particularly interested to read about his experience on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which is one of my favorite films. For such a masterfully blocked and staged film, it’s amazing the degree to which he was figuring out how to work with a camera in real time. There were a few movies he watched a bunch in prep and one of them was 400 Blows - to remind himself that a first film can be exceptional. A good reminder, and very inspiring.

Writer and filmmaker is the proprietor of the excellent Substack , the home of a consistently surprising goodie bag of essays, Q&As, production listings and more. What sets Max apart is his curiosity - he balances everything from well-researched deep dives into lesser-known film scenes to thoughtful industry commentary to behind-the-scenes interviews.

Courtney Daniels (Courtney Daniels)

SAVE THE CAT! GOES TO THE MOVIES: THE SCREENWRITER’S GUIDE TO EVERY STORY EVER TOLD; by Blake Snyder (2007)

The book I’d recommend is Save the Cat Goes to the Movies. Because after you read several ‘beat sheets’ of well-known movies, you start to notice patterns. You start to get a feel for the rhythm of how good stories go, how they’re built. And it’s good to be reminded that story/structure usually doesn’t just happen organically with the first draft. You have to purposefully make it good, and that requires work.

is a filmmaker, author and podcast host. If you’re considering making your first low-budget movie and don’t know what to expect, her article How my movie shoot is going is an excellent starting point. She was too modest to recommend her own book, so I’ll do it for her: she’s the author of Yes You Can: How to Make a Movie for Almost No Money, which excerpted a couple of times over at his Substack (1, 2). Get yourself a copy!

Decarceration (From The Yard To The Arthouse)

FLICKER; by Theodore Roszak (1991)

The novel Flicker (Theodore Roszak) is, among other things, a story about a lifetime of film. It is also, in essence, a book about film history, and to many readers, it is a bone-chilling thriller. But I was most struck by a protagonist, a young man who, like many of us, ends up chasing a girl into a new interest. He follows her into the movie theater and never leaves, swept up in the stories and narratives flickering in front of his awed face. His mild interest turns into a curiosity, and then an obsession.

As Flicker shifts through the decades, it becomes about a cinephile’s favorite topic – lost films. It’s something that occupies a disproportionate amount of my brain. The meme is that men are preoccupied with the Roman Empire. My preoccupation is similar, but instead of Caesar, it’s the missing reels of The Magnificent Ambersons, it’s Jerry Lewis’ The Day The Clown Cried, it’s the half of a movie shot for a remake of a Revenge Of The Nerds remake in the mid-00’s before it was abandoned by Fox. In Flicker, it’s a silent film adaptation of Hearts Of Darkness that’s said to be cloaked in the occult. While people have only been uncovering separate cels and small moments of footage, the director, Max Castle, has been missing.

But until a nightmarish finale, this becomes a book about a small film community. Men and women grow up, their grow old. Boys become men, while older men age out, and as the years go by, women seize a larger share of the cinephilia. And as Max Castle segues into legend, others arise to take his place. But are they acolytes, or do they know more about Castle than everyone else for certain reasons? Flicker becomes a mystery that gets tangled in memory, as films become totems in our mind, shifting through time to become either what we think is the truth, or what we remember is a lie.

You won’t find a braver, more singular film critic than , the writer of From The Yard To The Arthouse. He combines candid, forthright criticism with bracing insights into criminal justice, insights he learned the hard way after spending several years in prison. The great joy of his Substack is reading him rediscover his passion for film, and by extension, for life, in real time. He recently hit 500 posts, a remarkable achievement by any standard. A true gift to the Filmstack community.

Cole Haddon (5AM StoryTalk)

THE FILMS IN MY LIFE; by Francois Truffaut (1975)

A foundational part of my cinema-loving life was reading film criticism/analysis from both brilliant critics – even ones I often disagreed with – and actual filmmakers. The latter is more difficult to find because most screenwriters and/or directors, at least the good ones, typically don’t run around criticizing other people’s work even for posterity. This is why François Truffaut’s The Films in My Life is such an illuminating joy to read, in part because he understood it wasn’t especially helpful to anyone to blow up other people’s work for personal kicks. He writes from a place of passion and it’s contagious.

Let’s be clear here. If you’re going to read Truffaut, you should start with his book Hitchcock/Truffaut (and then watch the film about it). It’s a master class on everything to do with filmmaking – and visual storytelling. But after you’re done with that, you should move on to The Films in My Life to better understand how to deconstruct films and, through Truffaut’s life experience (including work as a film critic), begin to develop the vocabulary necessary to interpret yourself through film. When you’re done, you can then watch the films and director filmographies he discusses to begin developing your own opinions on them. In this regard, you will discover some of the greatest, often overlooked directors of the 20th century and place yourself light years ahead of others who have relatively shallow cinematic toolboxes from which to build their own films and other stories.

is a screenwriter, novelist and the brain behind 5AM StoryTalk, one of my favourite Substacks. As well as being a great writer, he is one of the most generous folks on this platform, offering his subscribers a ridiculous number of hand-curated resources like screenplays, interviews and even paintings, all designed to help us become better artists and students of cinema. His copy of The Films in My Life is also the cover image for this post…

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Jen Harrington (INSPIRED)

HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT; by François Truffaut (1966)

I’ve never been one much for film academia - maybe because I went to film school twice (two of the purported best, in fact) and all I got was student loan debt that will follow me to my grave. Not that I think film criticism and analysis don’t have merit, because they do, it’s just been… tainted for me. So when it comes to traditional texts, my best experiences were my first ones, before I became jaded by all the people telling me what to think and then charging me for it.

I have bought Hitchcock/Truffaut by François Truffaut for many people as it’s my go-to gift for anyone I know who loves film. It’s an entire film education in one book and inexpensive enough that you probably don’t even have to put it on your credit card. I grew up loving Hitchcock - well before I understood the brilliance of his direction - and just liked the morbid fun he had with dark material. Then, as a teenager, Truffaut broke my mind open with his disregard for how I thought movies were supposed to be. So, as I learned more about film history and the Cahiers du Cinéma, I was shocked to discover that Truffaut had idolized Hitchcock. You just don’t think that super smart French arty guy is going to be obsessed with genre-loving Hollywood guy.

Thank God he was because there was no one better to interview such a master of the craft. He gets technical, he gets philosophical, he breaks down Hitchcock’s whole filmography. You learn so much, appreciate so much, by the end of the book. And you probably won’t even have to explore your financing options to get your hands on it.

is a professional screenwriter and filmmaker who writes about how to build a career in the industry. I first discovered her via her excellent account of how she sold her first script - recommended reading for anyone dealing with creative stagnation of any kind. She is also running a screenwriting competition over at her Substack, . What’s stopping you from entering…?

Kelli McNeil-Yellen (KLA Media Group)

HOLLYWOOD COCKTAILS; by Tobias Steed and Ben Reed (1999)

One of my favorite film-related books is Hollywood Cocktails, by Tobias Steed and Ben Reed, because let’s face it, most Hollywood legends (films and stars) have a drink associated with them that lasts far longer than they do.

The dirty gin martini, shaken, not stirred, ala James Bond.

The French 75, ala Casablanca.

Pinot noir, ala Sideways.

The list goes on.

The book also captures a vibe, a vibe I think all folks who chase a career in Hollywood aspire to reignite. The attention to detail that Steed gives in his prose feels like reaching back into the past, when effort and friction felt like they meant something, and the labor they commanded meant the product was worth consumption. The analogies between today’s instant gratification cycle and what was previously expected from creatives could not be more distinct.

The book also features a beautiful layout: lush, gorgeous photos from some of the most classic movies in Hollywood as well as thematic recipes. Added bonus: if you’re suffering from writer’s block, all one need do is thumb through the pages and let your favorite classic film (and drink) take you away.

da da da dee da da da.... (to the tune of “As Time Goes By”)

I give this book a 10/10 for inspiration and a 2/10 for productivity.

As someone who jumped from law into the creative world, I always admire people who have made similar transitions. After twenty years working in marketing and PR, Kelli made the leap to filmmaking with an award-winning Slamdance film, DARUMA. Over at , she brings her hard-earned insights in marketing and PR to the indie film world. No amount of reading can substitute for that type of experience.

Courtney Romano (Let’s Go Again)

A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN; by George Saunders (2021)

This is not a book about film. This is not even a book about storytelling. This is a book about discovering your own taste. And in my estimation, one of the most vital skills to develop as a filmmaker is your own personal sense of taste, divorced from the groupthink of algorithms and viral strategies, and instead fully embodied through your own weird little interior world. It’s these weird little worlds we each have that come alive in movies - through the story arcs of course, but also the symbols, and the intuitive choices, and the voice-y parts. And more than that, in an industry that is so difficult, knowing your taste and making decisions from your own sense of taste makes the challenges much more fun. Finding people who vibe with your sense of taste is fun. Discovering how your personal taste has changed over time, and understanding what that might mean about your own personal alchemy is fun. I believe audiences can feel that kind of fun-having in every frame. That, to me, is the X factor. So it begins with knowing what you like. ’ book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is an invaluable resource for practicing finding your taste, and having fun while doing it. When my kids reach their early 20s, I’ll force them to read it every five years henceforth. It’s essential.

is a driving force behind the burgeoning non-dependent filmmaking movement. She’s a selfless supporter of indie filmmakers, filling her Substack, , with a cornucopia of resources for anyone looking to build a sustainable body of work outside of traditional channels. Her recent post, 64 ways to try non-dependent filmmaking & free yourself from Hollywood, is an excellent starter pack for the NonDe curious.

Mikhail Skoptsov (Textual Variations)

THE SECRET HISTORY OF STAR WARS; by Michael Kaminski (2008)

In the course of studying film and TV over two decades, I’ve come across many amazing books by professional scholars and academics, which shaped my research interests and methodology. One the most insightful and influential, however, has been The Secret History of Star Wars, fan Michael Kaminski’s independent eye-opening account of the evolution of Star Wars as a longform multi-part story.

Its goal was to debunk the most popular myths and widely accepted official claims about the film franchise’s creation, such as the notion that Lucas had known from the outset that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father and that he had written the original Star Wars trilogy as a single, elaborate script that he then divided into three parts.

By drawing on archival newspapers, behind-the-scenes magazine articles, audio and print interviews, early script drafts, production notes, and documentaries among other sources, Kaminski not only proves that Star Wars was in reality an unplanned, unstable, ever-changing narrative shaped by everything from practical filmmaking considerations to unforeseen real-life events, but also illustrates that the creative process itself is inherently fluid and prone to organic evolution.

Reading it thus made me recognize how serialized film and television narratives are actually constructed and how common it is for their creators to invoke the myth of a preexisting master plan to create a sense of unity. This, in turn, inspired me to study how and why stories evolve over time, which is central to my writing today, and to one day write a book that similarly demystifies the construction and evolution of a cinematic franchise, whose history has been extensively mythologized.

For all these reasons, I strongly recommend reading The Secret History of Star Wars. Whether you’re a budding filmmaker, fan, critic, or academic, I’m sure you’ll learn something from it.

is a media scholar and critic (given that he holds a PhD in modern culture and media, I really should be calling him “Dr Skoptsov”). His Substack, , has a unique angle: it examines how and why movies transform over time, leading to multiple different versions being in circulation. His pieces are always thoughtful and heavily researched: this essay from 2024 is an excellent, practical overview of both how the VFX pipeline works and how it was affected by COVID.

Ellis J. Sutton (Notes From the Studio)

CREATIVITY, INC.: OVERCOMING THE UNSEEN FORCES THAT STAND IN THE WAY OF TRUE INSPIRATION; by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace (2014)

I first heard about Creativity, Inc. when I was working at Netflix, grabbing drinks with another assistant and venting about how it felt like Hollywood didn’t have a real system for consistently making movies better. I remember asking if there was anywhere that actually got this right, and she immediately said Pixar. She told me they had written a book about their process and specifically recommended the expanded edition because it builds on and updates the original. That alone stuck with me, and when I finally read it, it completely reframed how I think about creativity and building great work.

The biggest thing I took away from Creativity, Inc. is that you have to leave room for failure. Not just accept it, but actively build for it. Failure is a part of the creative process, and more than that, it’s critical to achieving excellent outcomes. You cannot assume that without failure you’re going to get to something great. Failure is what allows you to experiment, and experimentation is what allows you to discover, and discovery doesn’t happen without unexpected outcomes. At the same time, the book really reinforces how important it is to have the right people. You can give a good idea to a mediocre team and they’ll probably mess it up, but if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they’ll make it better, throw it out, or come up with something better entirely. That shifts the focus away from just chasing ideas and toward investing in people, because people are the ones who ultimately drive outcomes. And I think that’s where something like Hollywood gets complicated. It is a people business, but it’s not always about whether you’re choosing the right people for the right moment, and not just at the top, but across the entire system. Because anyone can have a good idea. That’s another thing the book reinforces. Ideas can come from anywhere, at any level. And while it can feel like noise when you’re getting feedback from everywhere, the reality is you don’t control where the best idea is going to come from. The job isn’t to shut it out, it’s to get better at filtering it.

That’s where something like the Braintrust becomes important, and not just in name, but in how you build it. It’s not about surrounding yourself with people you’re comfortable with, it’s about surrounding yourself with people who are honest, candid, and actually make the work better. People whose notes genuinely improve the story, not just reinforce what you already think. Because you will naturally default to your friends and the people you trust, but you have to ask if those people are truly helping you get better. And if excellence requires failure, then you also need to be able to fail enough times to reach it, which means you need to be able to iterate quickly. Excellence doesn’t always come from taking more time, it comes from the number of iterations, from trying, learning, adjusting, and repeating over and over again. So if you can fail fast, you should, because it compresses the process of getting better. And if you can’t fail fast, you should still be failing, because stopping is the only thing that guarantees you won’t get there. And I think all of that leads to the simplest idea in the book, which is that the goal is not ease, the goal is excellence. It’s easy to optimize for the safest path, the most straightforward path, but that rarely leads to anything special. The path to excellence is harder, more uncertain, and more demanding, but it’s also the path that leads to something meaningful.

While many of us talk about what’s wrong with the industry, has rolled up his sleeves and started fixing it. As well as writing , where he shares wisdom earned from seven years working in the entertainment business, he’s the co-creator of , an extremely cool grassroots microcinema movement. This post is a great introduction to the project. If only I lived in Los Angeles…

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The video game era is here. All hail the video game era.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s newly minted Filmstacker :

Speaking of video games, that was my overwhelming takeaway from CinemaCon—they’re not only the new superhero for studios, they’re the new Everything […] This is not only the vanguard of studio filmmaking, it’s easily the most untapped resource given the 40-plus-year history of gaming.

Sounds grim, right? Just as superheroes hit the limits of their powers, studios find another source of IP to shove through the sausage factory. There is the unmistakable stench of butts-in-seats cynicism to the whole affair. One Intellectual Property After Another.

It’s less bad than you think. Actually, that’s a hedge. I’ll rephrase. It’s good.

Studios have always followed the money. Westerns, musicals, slashers, historical epics, young adult dystopias: Hollywood history is littered with the bones of genres once enthusiastically embraced by the industry’s powerbrokers.

Today, the pivot revolves around IP and brand identity rather than story and genre. Hence the cynicism. But that’s the world we’re stuck with. Rather than comparing this latest development to a mythical ideal of artistically motivated studio filmmaking, isn’t it better to compare it to, I don’t know, the world we’ve actually been living in for the last 10+ years?

If I had to choose between a world where superheroes are the “vanguard of studio filmmaking” and a world where video game movies fulfil the same function, I’d choose the latter.

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Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Cinephile’s Bookshelf. In this new series, I hunt down rare, out-of-print and obscure film books and excavate their secrets. Today, we add our very first book to the shelf: Raymond Fielding’s The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography.

The Hunt

Visual effects wizard Phil Tippett describes first discovering The …

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Stop moaning. Don’t be a cynic. Don’t indulge the cynics…

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American cinema has long flip-flopped between revealing the world as it is and the world as it wants it to be.

Certain eras retreat into wish-fulfilment. The Reaganite 1980s unleashed a wave of ‘roided-up bodybuilders on enemies home and abroad. America was back, baby: bigger, meaner, and manlier than ever. Following the War on Terror, studios fed us morally straightforward fantasies of spandex-wearing heroes solving our problems with a wink, a quip and a well-timed punch.

Other eras are more cold-eyed. Historically, when cinema has been most culturally virile, it has produced tight, thematically cohesive, fiercely contemporary clusters that diagnose the anxieties of the current moment.

In the aftermath of Watergate, the New Hollywood spat out tales of angry, suspicious men being crushed by vast conspiratorial systems, whether the government, the mob, or the family (The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, The Conversation, Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor). The late 1990s introduced a series of passive, emasculated office drones flailing against the crushing weight of corporate mediocrity (Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, The Matrix, Office Space).

This push-and-pull between confrontation and retreat is a feature of cinema, not a bug. Movies are made of flesh and blood. Behind every film are dozens, hundreds, thousands of imperfect humans, each bringing their own hopes, fears, and preoccupations. They’re made by institutions, too: companies, nonprofits, and governments with mandates to fill, stakeholders to satisfy, and markets to please. Every movie reveals something about the world it was made in.

I am resolutely not one of the “cinema is dying” crowd. There have been hundreds of incredible, important movies in my adult life. I could solely watch 2010-2025 cinema for the next 30 years and still be finding cool new stuff in my sixties.

But for all the individual high points of the last 15 years, the medium as a whole has been losing contact with reality. At its best, cinema functions as a cultural antibody: a mirror to, rather than an escape from, society at large. In recent years, the dominant preoccupation has instead been wish-fulfilment, expressed through superhero fantasies, hermetically sealed character studies, and the retreat of auteurs to period pieces (no, smartphones aren’t an excuse).

There are a couple of obvious exceptions, but neither of them quite scratches my historical itch.

First, “Eat the Rich” (Parasite, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, Ready or Not). This is a cluster of thematically aligned films, yes. But it reads as escapism. "Rich People Are Bad, So Let’s Laugh At/Punish/Expose Them” isn’t a provocative thesis. Eat the Rich is to the financial crisis as superheroes are to the War on Terror: a retreat to moral simplicity and wish fulfilment in the face of forces we don’t understand.

Second, Elevated Horror. On the “world as it is vs world as you want it to be” scale, Elevated Horror sits firmly in the former’s camp (unless the world you want involves being possessed by a trickster demon). But though the trauma-coded language of Elevated Horror was new, its thematic preoccupations - psychological implosion, the sins of the father, grief - weren’t. With some exceptions (e.g. Get Out), these movies were more attempts to reflect eternal human truths than cohesive statements on the cultural moment.

Which brings us to 2025. When historians look back at 1970s cinema, they see a society processing the collective trauma of Watergate and Vietnam. When they look at 1999, they see one grappling with corporate alienation and the spiritual exhaustion of office life. In 20 years, when they look back at Eddington, Bugonia, One Battle After Another, House of Dynamite, Weapons, Cloud, It Was Just An Accident, No Other Choice, and 2024’s Civil War, they’ll see a culture grappling with the post-social media, post-COVID, post-AI collapse of shared reality.

Are you an American? Are you an alien? Are you my father? Were you my torturer? Do I have a job? Why do you hate me? Is there a nuke? Are you my enemy? Is COVID real?

These are the questions haunting the 2025 canon. Consensus truth has dissolved. Trust in institutions has collapsed. Conspiratorial thinking reigns.

These are films soaked in disorientation and anxiety; in a sense of existential confusion about a world changing in ways their characters don’t understand. Importantly, they are all set in or around the present day. They even feature smartphones and social media!

For the first time in years, cinema is behaving like a cultural antibody again. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but so was Fight Club and The Conversation. Perversely, I read these movies’ cynicism as optimism. What is art for if not to help us process times of immense change? That movies still can be an outlet for our hopes and fears is a sign that the medium still has a role in our future.

As to where that immense change leads? I’ll leave that one to the historians.

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I. The Battle of the Smellies

December 2, 1959. Something is brewing in the bowels of the DeMille theatre.

Cufflinks, diamonds and champagne. On screen: Behind the Great Wall, the first feature-length documentary by a Western director in China. An afterthought.

Tiger hunts and orange slices. A fisherman’s jet-black bird retrieves an unsuspecting salmon; the crowd mumbles their approval.

Then: it’s released. Seeps from the air conditioning in a fine mist, catching the projector like dust in a streetlight. Citrus… bitter… not bad. Then more. Dozens of them. Each heralded by white subtitles splayed across the screen. Each welcomed with a groan. Jasmine, soy sauce, tiger, grass, pine. They combine into one big stink; a cinematic Dutch oven.

Pinched noses; scrunched brows. Pencils already scratching. “Strong enough to give a bloodhound a headache,” declares Time.

AromaRama was its name. The first “smellie” ever commercially released.

Not the last. A few weeks later, Scent of Mystery premieres, starring Casablanca veteran Peter Lorre.

AromaRama was a gimmick. Scent of Mystery uses a different technology. Smell-O-Vision is supposed to be the real deal.

Its mogul backer, Mike Todd Jr, pulls out all the stops. LP soundtrack; limited edition perfume; paperback edition; publicity stills. Elizabeth Taylor is flown out to demo the tech to eager studio executives. A defence contractor is tapped to manufacture hundreds more machines.

The film begins. One by one, thirty smells are released with a distracting hiss. A hint of brandy floats through the theatre as a character sips his coffee. Someone slips in a busy market; the scent of banana skin identifies the culprit.

Time offers a faint whiff of praise. “At least [the smells] don’t stink so loud” as the toxic fumes of AromaRama. It’s a Pyrrhic victory. The smelly winter is over. Neither technology would be commercially used again.¹

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II. Viva La Revolución

Something else lingered in the late 1950s Hollywood air. The smellies were just the latest desperate salvo in what was fast becoming an all-out war.

The defenders: the behemothic movie studios who had dominated American entertainment since the 1920s.

The aggressor: television.

The small screen had threatened to come for movies ever since the 1920s. War and depression had held it at bay. No longer. Television spent the 1950s mercilessly encroaching on cinema’s turf.2 The result: thousands of theatres in the red, with thousands more barely in the black.

Not since the introduction of sound had cinema faced such a threat. If any Tom, Dick or Harry could flip the box on from their couch, why would anyone pay their hard-earned money to go to the cinema?

Samuel Goldwyn (as in the “G” in “MGM”) saw the writing on the wall.3 “The thoroughgoing change which sound brought to picture making will be fully matched by the revolutionary effects […] of television upon motion pictures,” he declared in 1949. “I predict that within just a few years a great many Hollywood producers, directors, writers, and actors who are still coasting on reputations built up in the past are going to wonder what hit them.”4

By the late 1950s, the movie industry had spent nearly a decade scrambling for the silver bullet that would stop television in its tracks. The smellies were just the latest misfire. A few years previously, major studios had launched ambitious 3D projects, culminating in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder in 1954. The movie was a triumph; the technology…less so. By 1955, the 3D experiment had been abandoned.

Goldwyn was right. Television was revolutionary. American theatre attendance never returned to its pre-war peak. The studio system collapsed, ending the careers of hundreds of establishment figures who’d grown comfortable in the ancien régime. Movies changed, perhaps irreversibly.

But reports of cinema’s death were greatly exaggerated. The smellies were a wet fart of a response. But they weren’t the only response. Movies found new ways to combat, ally with, and learn from their cocky young rival.

Far from killing the movies, television caused a shockwave of technical, formal, stylistic, production and marketing innovations that endure to this day. These were complicated, diffuse and unpredictable. Some were positive; others weren’t. But none were terminal. Cinema endured. There was life in the old dog yet.

III. Yes, Size Matters

It didn’t take long. Within a couple of years of television’s rude arrival, cigarette-chomping Hollywood executives had arrived at a consensus.

Thanks to television, routine fare no longer cut the mustard. Audiences “will no longer buy tickets at the theater, except to see the very highest form of entertainment,” declared the vice president of Paramount. “Far superior to what they can see on television free.”5

Movies needed to Go Big or Go Home. Like any suitor whose pride is under threat, Hollywood set out to expose the cocky young upstart for the fraud it was: convenient, maybe, but sorely lacking the goods in the trouser department.

3D and the smellies backfired. But these were small experiments. Meanwhile, studios were rolling out their big guns.

First, image size. By the 1940s, the industry had settled on the boxy “Academy” aspect ratio of 1.37:1.

Like an annoying little brother wearing his older sibling’s hoodie, television stole that ratio and made it its own. So, the big brother changed styles.6 Goodbye box, hello rectangle. In 1953, 20^th Century Fox debuted its CinemaScope technology, whose ratio was a glorious 2.35:1:

Widescreen had arrived. Over the coming years, many studios either rented CinemaScope or explored competitors, marketed with confusingly similar names like Cinemiracle, Cinerama and VistaVision (used in two magnum opuses: Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956)).7

Some filmmakers despaired. “The long and narrow frame is only good for filming snakes and funerals,” deplored Fritz Lang. Close-ups had long been relied on to showcase emotion and beautiful actors. Who wouldn’t want to see every detail of Grace Kelly’s face on a 20-foot-high screen?

Now, this weapon was firing blanks. In widescreen, the conventional close-up left a distracting space on either side of the subject’s face. Even worse: early widescreen technologies were anamorphic. The edges of subjects’ faces were distorted and stretched, an effect tastefully known as “the mumps.”

Many responded by reviving an old silent era trick of “clothesline” compositions: arranging actors horizontally across the frame.

It was a pretty bland strategy. These early clothesline movies ended up looking shallow, unimaginative. “I don’t know how to direct people in a row,” complained one director. “Nobody stands in rows!”8

By the mid-1960s, these teething pains evaporated. Anamorphic lenses were toast. The non-anamorphic, less distorted Panavision (also 2.35:1) had emerged as the industry standard. Clothesline composition was sent back to the depths from whence it came. Widescreen’s victory was total. 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 ratios became the norm.

Ford’s desert; Kubrick’s space; Cameron’s sea. Thanks to television, the great vistas of cinema were born.

Image size wasn’t the only thing getting an upgrade. In 1939, The Wizard of Oz had wowed audiences by piercing Kansas’ monochrome drudgery with the glorious technicolour of Oz. But market and technological forces had conspired to keep colour movies rare in the years that followed.

That all changed in the early 1950s, when Eastman introduced a less vibrant, less detailed, but easier to process alternative to Technicolor, imaginatively named Eastmancolor. Now, more movies could show off all colours of the ‘bow and stick one up to television in the process.

While widescreen remained a competitive advantage for cinema, the small screen quickly adapted to the threat of colour. By the early 1960s, television and cinema weren’t simple enemies anymore. Even as the studios bemoaned television’s impact, they gorged themselves on the young upstart’s cash by selling their libraries for syndication. These devil’s bargains were profitable, with Warner Bros chalking up $21 million by selling its entire pre-1950 library to Associated Artists Productions in 1956.

So, when colour televisions hit the market in the 1960s, networks weren’t interested in dusty old black and white movies. They wanted the real deal: full-throated colour bonanzas. Studios became even more incentivised to shoot in colour, to preserve that sweet, sweet resale value. What had started as a middle finger to television quickly became a way to keep it on side.

Confronted by the tube, movies got wider. They got more colourful. They even got louder, with more theatres introducing stereophonic sound.

Television was small. Poxy. Pathetic. Now, movies became the opposite. Studios wanted to show off their shiny new toys. Dramas and intimate romances were out. Big-budget epics and musicals were in.

Through the 1950s and early 1960s, studios released fewer, more expensive films, like Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), which was shot in VistaVision with colour by Technicolor. Billed as “the greatest event in motion picture history,” it made $122 million off a $13 million budget.

Increasingly, movies were a hits business. That delicious, warm, oozy middle of medium-budget programmers - the type of fare that thrived in the Good Old Days - was being spooned out. Blockbusters became the defining studio product.

The middle was up for grabs.

IV. Boobs to the Rescue

American cinema had been in crisis before. Back in the 1930s, the Great Depression had taken a sledgehammer to the industry, forcing it to take desperate measures to stay afloat.

Cue: the double bill. Patrons were now treated to three hours of entertainment: the main feature, an 80-minute ‘B’ feature, plus bells and whistles like news reports, cartoons and trailers. A smart solution. Attendees got more bang for their buck and theatres, thanks to regular intermissions, earned a tidy sum from all the greasy paws at the popcorn stand.

The success of this model caused an explosion in demand for ‘B’ movies to package alongside the main feature. The studios responded by setting up specialised units to churn out cheaper, less prestigious fare with lesser-known actors and shonkier production values.9

By the mid-1950s, this model was on its knees. Since television had strutted onto the scene, and Go Big or Go Home had taken effect, cheap and cheerful B-movies weren’t cool anymore. Even worse: a 1948 antitrust ruling prohibited studios from block booking and owning theatres, robbing them of a guaranteed way to ship this product.10

The appeal of low-budget production disintegrated. Thousands of rural and suburban theatres were left in the lurch. With fewer movies being made, and big-budget films spending longer playing first-run engagements in large urban cinemas, they were thirsty for product that the studios were no longer providing.

Which meant… **OPPORTUNITY**

Television forced studios to cede the low-budget field. Several independent companies and filmmakers emerged to fill the gap. Some were unsuccessful, like Ed Wood, whose attempt to dive into these newly open waters was a critical and commercial bellyflop.

Others were triumphant. None more so than the King of the Bs himself: Roger Corman, who spent his long career churning out low-budget, profitable films.

Recycled sets; cheap rubber suits; a skeletal crew: Corman used every trick in the book to cut costs. For Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954) he operated as producer, grip, driver and director, making $185k from a $12k budget.11

His films weren’t good, but they were quick, cheap and made money: in 1956 and 1957 alone he directed or produced twelve (yes, twelve) movies, all of which turned a profit.

Corman’s partner in crime: American International Pictures (AIP). Founded in 1954, AIP was one of the great success stories of postwar American cinema, grinding out product at an astonishing rate.

Television primed the market for AIP’s emergence. Drive-in theatres exploded from a few hundred in 1947 to over 4,000 by 1957, their carnivalesque atmosphere a welcome diversion from the living-room drudgery of the small screen.12 They proved eager buyers for the high-concept, low-execution and unapologetically titillating style that was fast becoming AIP’s bread and butter.

The new studio’s powerbrokers had realised something. Watching television with the parents was agony for America’s newly empowered youth. While the oldies decayed on the couch, AIP put all its energies into producing movies designed to entice “the gum-chewing, hamburger munching adolescent.”13 Their method: cash in on the lurid material never shown on television: breasts, booze, drugs and blood.

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William Castle was never that interested in breasts, booze or drugs, but he more than made up for it in blood. In 1958, he released Macabre, a vanilla horror film sold on a genius gimmick: Lloyd’s of London insured anyone who saw it for $1,000 against death by fright. It was a triumph. Macabre made $5m on a $100k budget.

A string of marketing coups followed. Electric shocks delivered to the audience (The Tingler, 1959). A glow-in-the-dark skeleton plunging from the ceiling (House on Haunted Hill, 1959). A Fright Break where cowards could claim a refund if they were too scared (Homicidal, 1961). One man’s flair for the dramatic achieved what the smellies couldn’t: lured audiences away from their televisions by eventising the movies.

As indies parked their tanks on the studios’ lawns, foreign countries began to take note.

During Hollywood’s golden era, countries around the globe had been mainlining American product. Now, thanks to Go Big or Go Home, there was less of it.

National cinemas emerged worldwide. In the 1950s, Burma, Pakistan, South Korea and the Philippines produced more films annually than most European countries. Egyptian films blossomed. Hong Kong produced 250 feature films in 1962, more than the US & Britain combined. The French and Italians developed film festivals and export sales organisations to ship their product overseas. By weakening the American movie business, television had exploded cinema as a global artform.14

A reminder of the story so far. Movies go big to fight television. They leave a gap in low-budget production. A new wave of indie filmmakers and companies gladly step in.

But were many of the resulting movies any good? Well… not particularly. 15 There were some highlights, including Roger Corman’s critically acclaimed run of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations. But there was a lot of shlock. Horny 19-year-olds tend to have different aesthetic standards.

Still, who said boobs and monsters can’t be influential. The preoccupations of the 1950s and 1960s indie wave: monsters, space, action and sex, percolated into the mainstream, even as the more salacious edges were sanded off.

By the 1980s, high concept, genre-oriented spectacle had become synonymous with “blockbuster.” “What was Jaws,” asked one executive, “but an old Corman monster-from-the-deep flick—plus about $ 12 million more for production and advertising?”16

Beyond genre, the modern blockbuster model Jaws kickstarted in 1975 was built on the marketing and distribution methods that AIP and others had spent years refining. These included opening in many theatres at once, targeting specialised audiences (backed by ruthless audience testing), a concept-rather-than-script-first development process, summer releases, and relentless television advertising.

Modern Hollywood borrowed more than monsters and marketing from the 1960s independents. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Fisk, James Cameron, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, Sylvester Stallone, Gale Anne Hurd, Bill Paxton, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdonavich, John Sayles, Robert De Niro, Peter Fonda, and dozens others got their starts under Roger Corman, churning out the low-budget, low-risk product that television had opened the market for.

But Corman wasn’t the only talent farm in town…

V. Hatching the Golden Geese

“Remember, men, we are not doing GONE WITH THE WIND!”

So began George Justin’s message to the cast and crew.

“We are doing a very fine, sensitive, beautiful, highly dramatic, VERY LOW BUDGET picture. Let’s get in there and knock off lots of scenes today.”17

It was 1956, and the film was 12 Angry Men. Justin, the production supervisor, had been tasked with keeping the shoestring production on track and under budget.

From conception to talent to execution, the movie would not have happened if it weren’t for television. The story first debuted as a live production on CBS. Now, it was moving to the big leagues. Behind the camera: Sidney Lumet, only 32, who had also cut his teeth on the small screen, rattling off ten rehearsals and two live performances per week for the two shows under his command (You Are There and Danger).

To 12 Angry Men, Lumet brought the no-nonsense production methods he’d sharpened in television: relentless rehearsals, detailed shot diagrams, hand-drawn blueprints and alphabetical setup guides. He completed the film on schedule and under budget.

Discipline. Lumet had it in abundance. But he borrowed more than good planning from the tube. 12 Angry Men’s aesthetic - naturalistic, character-driven, confined and dialogue-heavy – was forged in the relentless production cycles of television.

A wave of small-scale, character-driven dramas shaped by television washed across American screens in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with directors like Delbert Mann (Middle of the Night, 1959), Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker, 1962), John Frankenheimer (Birdman of Alcatraz, 1962 ) and Martin Ritt (Edge of the City, 1957) getting their starts on the small screen.18

The naturalism of television bled into acting styles, too. While the mumbling intensity of the Method had its roots in Stanislavski and Strasberg, it was through intimate, live anthology series like Studio One and Playhouse 90 that it entered the American mainstream, offering opportunities for actors like Paul Newman and James Dean to flex their emotional authenticity.

Television was the incubator for all kinds of golden geese. Hundreds of film actors, directors and below-the-line craftsmen were hatched in the warm comfort of the small screen.

Few professions benefited more than cinematography. In the old days, becoming a cameraman was a painfully incremental process of apprenticeships and obedient adherence to studio hierarchies. Now, thanks to television, the old hierarchies collapsed as demand for new talent skyrocketed.

Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven, Kramer vs. Kramer) churned out newsreels in Cuba and school television in France. Bill Butler (The Conversation, Jaws) helped construct one of the first commercial TV stations (WGN, Chicago). Billy Fraker (Bullitt, Looking for Mr. Goodbar) worked as a loader on the Lone Ranger. Billy Williams (Sunday Bloody Sunday, Gandhi) got his start in commercials. A generation of hungry, inventive young cinematographers was born.19

This young, iconoclastic new wave of talent brought a new set of tricks to the party…

VI. Direct and Dirty

Ah, the Good Old Days.

Once, visual nonfiction had been subject to the whims of the studios, the government, and other large organisations who could afford to wield a camera. Video news was confined to short newsreels planted between theatrical double bills. And the long-form documentary was largely a Morally Appropriate™ informational tool, with confrontational fare never really finding a home on the big screen.

Then came television. Thanks to TV news, cinemas lost interest in newsreels. And the small screen proved a new market for intrepid long-form documentaries. As lightweight, portable 16mm cameras and sync-sound recording emerged, cinema could take to the streets like never before.

The result: Direct Cinema (and its French cousin, the sexier-sounding cinema verité).20 A new visual language emerged: street-level, subjective, and gritty.

In documentaries, this unlocked new perspectives. Narratives could now be retrofitted from hundreds of hours of fly-on-the-wall footage, from the gritty urban reality of Shirley Clarke (The Cool World (1963)), to the behind-the-curtain portrayals of Bob Dylan (Don’t Look Back (1967), D.A Pennebaker) and the Rolling Stones (Gimme Shelter (1970), Maysles Brothers).

But the new aesthetic bled into fiction, too. Street-level perspectives emerged, as filmmakers like John Cassavetes, Arthur Penn and cinematographer Haskell Wexler pierced the romanticism of classical Hollywood with a dirtier documentary aesthetic.

By the late 1960s, the timebombs that television had planted under Hollywood were ready to explode. A wave of young, independent talent, armed with gritty, urban aesthetics and a freshly grounded acting style could target newly empowered youth audiences while the slow-moving and crumbling studio system was left gasping in the wreckage.

When The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider (1969) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) captured audiences across the country, the New Hollywood was born.

In the 1970s, a new canon of American cinema emerged, including The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Dog Day Afternoon, Raging Bull, Badlands, Chinatown, The French Connection and dozens more.21

This was the funhouse mirror inversion of Go Big or Go Home. In the 1950s, studios had responded to television by emphasising scale and moral clarity. Now, the proponents of New Hollywood did the opposite, substituting scale (with some exceptions) for style, sex and moral sophistication.

Gritty realism wasn’t the only way that New Hollywood cinematographers stood out from the small screen.

Zoom lenses were nothing new, but the arrival of televised sports had popularised them. Filmmakers took note. Over the pond, Claude LeLouch’s A Man and a Woman (1966) used long telephoto lenses with wide apertures for a painterly effect.22 Objects outside of focus became beautifully blurry blobs (later known as “bokeh,” which sounds vaguely inappropriate), an effect that television cameras could rarely achieve.

Now, New Hollywood directors and cinematographers like Robert Altman, Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács borrowed this aesthetic for films like McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Deer Hunter and Shampoo.

By the end of the 1970s, the New Hollywood was dead. The Jaws blockbuster model, its roots in the AIP independent scene of the 1950s and 1960s had taken hold.

What had once been a vicious rivalry between television and cinema had long since evolved into an uneasy alliance. With the emergence of VHS in the 1980s, it would blossom into a full on co-dependency.

VII. Movies Bend the Knee

Cash; dollar; skrilla; dough. Television, and the VHS market it enabled, became far too lucrative for the movie industry to resist.

Filmmakers (and the studios breathing down their necks) began to bend the knee. Conscious that their output was going to be consumed on television, they chose to “shoot and protect” their movies: confining key areas of action to a safe area within the frame.23

While these films were shot in widescreen, they sacrificed the format’s potential for safer, more limited compositions that wouldn’t be ruined on the small screen. Singles and over-the-shoulder shots became more popular.

Meanwhile, the concerns of Goldwyn - how could movies keep people interested in an age of television - had never really left. With 1,000 other distractions at home, filmmakers needed to find ways to distract viewers from hanging up the washing or feeding the cat.

The easiest solution was to cut more. More cutting = more stuff happening for our greedy little eyes. Yum yum yum. Average shot lengths plummeted.

While shot lengths plummeted, close-ups were back with a vengeance.

Early concerns about empty space were long gone. Thanks to Sergio Leone and the 1960s, the polarity between extreme facial close-ups and wide shots entered cinematic vernacular.

But the aesthetic appeal of the close-up had a more practical purpose. Close-ups were way easier to parse on smaller screens. “It’s a shame that most films rely so much on tight close-ups all the time,” said one cinematographer in 1995. “The style is really just a result of what producers want for video release.”24

The style that David Bordwell calls “intensified continuity” emerged, defined by fast-cutting, close-ups, a moving camera and polarised lens lengths.

Cinema had once responded to television by becoming more cinematic. Now, it was becoming more televisual.

VIII. The Revolution Was Televised

By the 2000s, the battle of the smellies was ancient history.

Films had become more televisual. Serialised storytelling, pop soundtracks zooming cameras, rapid-cutting, soft focus and complex multipart ensemble narratives were as common on the big screen as they were on MTV.

Meanwhile, television was increasingly cinematic, boasting higher production values, A-grade talent and the type of moral complexity once reserved for the cinema. It had even gone widescreen!

The downsides of modern cinema are well documented. The art of blocking – actors moving in and out the frame, in depth – feels all but lost. After a brief revival in the 1990s, the mature intelligent blockbuster model has been replaced by Corman on steroids. Theatre attendances continue to plummet.

The story isn’t over. The old enemies are once again taking to the battlefield. Once again, reports of cinema’s death are abundant. Television is a greedy little fucker. The uneasy alliance it reached with cinema wasn’t enough. In the last five years it has gone for the jugular. Streaming.

Reports that Netflix will be purchasing Warner Bros. have triggered a fresh wave of handwringing. With box office revenues crumbling and studios consolidating, the It’s So Over crowd is in the ascendance. It’s 1949 all over again.

But if we’ve learned one thing from the last 70 years (and several thousand words), it’s that the effects of streaming are likely to be far more diffuse, unpredictable and diverse than we realise. Television gave us the New Hollywood, direct cinema, independent film, the high-concept blockbuster, the burgeoning of world cinema, widescreen, colour cinematography and a talent-tsunami.

Few who feared that television would kill movies could have predicted these long-term effects; fewer still would try to claim that cinema would be better off without them.

Back in 1949, Samuel Goldwyn had warned that television would lead to a revolution. He was right. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

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