Cinema: The New Hollywood: Dead or Alive?

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Robert Benton, 48, the writer-director of last year's Oscar winner and surprise box-office smash Kramer vs. Kramer, agrees that the challenge is to work on small budgets (Kramer cost $6.6 million). "The cost of movies is astronomical now," he says, "and that's dangerous. It makes it difficult to take creative risks. If it continues, fewer pictures will get made. With stakes so high, directors can't afford to fail. I just don't know how Hollywood will bounce back. The person who comes up with the answer has my nomination for the Nobel Prize."

To predict Hollywood's future, it helps to be both Cassandra and John the Baptist. Most of the major directors see a timid few years ahead, followed by the explosion of technological liberation. Benton hopes "Coppola is right: that the software revolution will increase the demand for material and change the structure of film making." Redford is convinced that "with the cable market opening up, we need a larger supply of film makers, a wider range of options." To this end, he has established the Sundance Institute of Film and Video in Provo Canyon, Utah, which holds its first session this June. Says Redford: "I'm hoping that our program will help people realize you don't have to go into the mainstream in order to survive."

Already film makers are leaving Hollywood, at least geographically, to survive and thrive. George Lucas presides over a contingent of resourceful directors in the San Francisco area. And New York, which lost its production-center supremacy to California 65 years ago, is again nourishing film makers. Benton, Brian De Palma and Woody Allen all live and work in New York. And if Ordinary People cops the top Oscar, it will be the seventh consecutive Best Picture directed by a man who grew up or lives in New York.

But the New Hollywood need not be New York, or Marin County, or any where. The art industry is a state of mind — a gorgeous hallucination dreamed by a few inventive writers, ambitious directors, daring producers and caring studio bosses. It is a dream that can still seize the world's imagination on a screen. And it is not a new dream. In 1919, when D.W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks deserted the studios to form United Artists, one executive declared: "The lunatics have taken charge of the asylum." That wasn't — and isn't — a bad thing. To make films, it helps to be cost-conscious. But to make a difference, you've got to be a little movie-mad.

— By Richard Corliss.

Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles