Cinema: The New Hollywood: Dead or Alive?

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When a studio executive does get down on his knees, he prays to the young. As Art Murphy, a veteran Variety reporter and the industry's unofficial historian, observes, "People go to the movies—and, even in the coming age of full-service home video, will continue to go—because it gets them out of the house." Frank Price, 50, president of thriving Columbia Pictures (The Blue Lagoon, Stir Crazy), calls movies "a dating phenomenon." Who goes on dates? Who goes to the movies? Overwhelmingly, the young: 76% of all moviegoers are between the ages of twelve and 29. Some are even younger: Popeye made $45 million of its gross from discriminating film lovers under twelve.

These are facts of an industry's life, not its death. Hollywood may be a company town—as Scorsese notes, "Everything is geared to turning out the product"—but United Artists is not Chrysler. This gaggle of statistics can act as balm to the harried film maker's brow, but is unlikely to stanch the malaise. If Hollywood is conducting business as usual, few people seem enthusiastic about the enterprise. Robert Redford, 43, whose directorial debut, Ordinary People, is the odds-on favorite in the Oscar sweepstakes, asserts that the industry's "obsession with demographics has produced mass-market films—and people finally get used to what they're fed." Universal's Tanen, 49, sees today's audience as "young, cynical, smart-ass and jaded." Paramount's Barry Diller, 39, who has the longest tenure of any current top studio boss (six years), shrugs and says, "We are in a relatively uninteresting period. It goes in cycles."

Columbia's Price frets that the studios are "run by the three A's: accountants, attorneys and agents." Stan Kamen, who represents Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand, Michael Cimino and a dozen other heavyweights, and whose William Morris Agency is sent 2,500 scripts a year, counters that "ex-agents are running major studios. They were packagers. They know how these deals are made. Half the Hollywood movies today are packaged or semipackaged by agents." Diller agrees ruefully: "This town is Deal City. Do you know the amount of time spent on deals instead of what the movie is? I hate the whole process."