American Cinema of the 1990s: Themes and Variations

Introduction: Movies and the 1990s

I N T R O D U C T I O N Movies and the 1990s CHRIS HOLMLUND ■■■■■■■■■■ On the Verge of a New Millennium The World Wide Web. The Internet. Cell phones. Palm pilots. Chat rooms. Spam. Computer viruses. Netscape. E-Bay. Amazon.com. Google. Yahoo. E-mail. Blogs. Webcasts. CD-Rs. Digital cameras. DVDs. Net- flix. Zip drives. Cyber space. iFilm. “See you online.” “The server’s down.” A flood of words and concepts linked to digital technologies changed our lives in the 1990s. A new communications revolution was under way that continues to alter daily life in both developed and developing countries. By 1994, three million people were online; by 1998, one hundred million. At the end of the decade, the number had leapt to almost one billion. Nonetheless, as the 1990s ended, a marked digital divide partitioned the world into those with access to computers and those without. Even in the United States, the richest country in the world, rural areas and the urban poor were underserved. How to assess a decade most of us remember? The movies and the moods of the 1990s depict a period that most Americans experienced as both peaceful and prosperous. Previously unimaginable technological advances in connectivity were promised everywhere we turned. But new dangers also threatened. The mosquito-borne West Nile virus reached American shores. AIDS and tuberculosis became global health threats. Domestic terrorism appeared more widespread, more frequent, and more deadly than ever before. Periodically there were foreign terrorist attacks on buildings and airplanes. Spam clogged our e-mail programs; computer viruses damaged desktop and laptop computers. On the verge of a new millennium , governments, banks, and businesses spent billions backing up the computer systems that now controlled electricity, water delivery, banking, and more—all for fear of a “Y2K” meltdown that never came. Scores of big- and small-budget U.S. films testified to our fascination with, and fear of, these digital revolutions. Who can forget Total Recall 1 (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), You’ve Got Mail (1998), or Being John Malkovich (1999)? Would digital technology replace live actors by resurrecting dead stars? A 1991 Coke ad promised as much: it featured a party that included Louis Armstrong, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, Cary Grant, and Groucho Marx. Would digital technology bring about “the end of cinema as we know it,” as the title of Jon Lewis’s 2000 anthology provocatively suggested? Was cinema—that is, celluloid—dying, as George Lucas famously suggested in 1999 when he declaimed, “I love film, but it’s a 19th century invention” (Romano 37)? ■■■■■■■■■■ The American Movie Industry and Production: From Merger Mania to Online Alternatives The media industries that produce, promote, exhibit, transmit , and showcase movies were profoundly affected by the decade’s technological , political, and economic transformations. This is hardly surprising. After all, the conglomerates they all belonged to had helped to create and promote these changes. Film after film announced media breakthroughs and became marketing milestones. Dick Tracy (1990) was the first 35 mm feature film with a digital sound track. That same year, testifying to the longevity of hit movies, Top Gun (1986) became the first VHS title to ship more than one million copies. Batman Returns (1992) introduced the sixchannel stereo sound system that is now industry standard: Dolby Digital. With computer graphics used for the first time to create “real” animals, Jurassic Park (1993) savored colossal box office success: thanks to global interest and product tie-ins, it grossed $1 billion worldwide. George Lucas’s digitally shot prequel, Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999) inaugurated digital theatrical screenings on four U.S. screens. On a completely different scale, yet also a portent of things to come, was Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick’s low-budget independent horror film The Blair Witch Project (1999). With no stars and no big special effects, but with savvy online promotion and marketing, Blair Witch was the most profitable (in terms of percentage gross) film of all time, reeling in $248 million on a budget of $35,000.1 What’s behind these signposts? Although Blair Witch and other “indie” success stories testify to the increasing importance of economies of scale within the film industry, they were exceptions. The Big Six—Disney, Warner Bros., Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, and Paramount— continued to dominate moviemaking, consolidating and extending their influence both horizontally and vertically throughout the decade. By 1999 2 CHRIS HOLMLUND [18.223...