Does Steven Spielberg Have a Point? Is He a Hypocrite?
Yeah, we’re wading back into that.
First of all, sorry that there wasn't a newsletter last week. Unfortunately I was quite sick and that derailed me somewhat. I should be getting back to doing one of these every week from now on. Anyway, let’s get to what we’re actually here to talk about...
Steven Spielberg doesn’t like Netflix, apparently. Specifically, in his role as Academy Governor representing the directors’ branch, he doesn’t like the idea of Netflix winning Oscars. His main issue is, per a spokesperson of his, “Steven feels strongly about the difference between the streaming and theatrical situation”. As Spielberg has spent most of his career creating large scale spectacles designed to be seen on the biggest screen possible, it’s not shocking that he’s somewhat tetchy at the thought of film moving permanently into the television or even the mobile device.
The reaction to this has been, for the most part, negative. Selma and A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay was one of the first to speak out, simply stating that she and many other filmmakers “feel differently”. That DuVernay has worked with Netflix both on her documentary 13th and upcoming miniseries When They See Us might be seen by some as evidence that she is not a neutral party in this, that is entirely the point. Netflix has been a company that allowed her, a black woman, to tell stories very specific to experiences of race in America. Netflix certainly presents itself as a space welcoming to storytellers who do not look like, well, Spielberg. On the other hand, the Indiana Jones director can hardly make a case to be seen as a champion of diversity. With a few notable exceptions, the vast majority of his films centre on white men dealing with other white men. When his production company, In his role producing films for others, the directors he has helped have generally been people like Robert Zemeckis, Colin Trevorrow and Michael Bay. On top of this, the film Spielberg apparently fought for at this year’s Academy Awards was Green Book, a fairly classic example of white saviour filmmaking. Whether Netflix is really as strong on diversity as its marketing claims is an open question, but there’s no doubt that Spielberg has done a poor job on this front. This is, by far, the strongest claim against his argument.
There’s another argument against him, though, that needs unpacking. A number of people on twitter essentially put forward this thesis against Spielberg’s claims:
This strikes me as a curious interpretation of Spielberg’s career, but for those of you who don’t have a degree in Film Studies (or spend all day looking at Film Twitter, you know who you are), let’s have a brief history lesson.
Back in the 1950s, the major Hollywood studios weren’t in great shape. A legal case brought against Paramount meant that they were no longer able to own the cinemas themselves in the United States, while the rise of television meant that audiences just weren’t as large as they used to be. A lot of attempts were made for bigger, bolder, flashier films, complete with new technology such as CinemaScope and the first wave of 3D, but people just didn’t seem interested. Enter the ‘60s, and you had an industry with serious problems. What this led to towards the end of the decade, though, was a remarkable era of creativity. The studios (some, such as Warner Bros, under new management) gave a new generation of filmmakers great freedom to make interesting, challenging art, inspired heavily by the French New Wave cinema of the same time. Very much a part of the broader ‘60s counter-culture, works such as The Graduate and The Godfather broke the mould of what a Hollywood film was supposed to be (there are certainly counter arguments to this, pointing toward a much more subtle emergence of a new kind of cinema, but that is a discussion for another day). These films, targeting more specific audiences with more challenging ideas, were all well and good for a time, but spectacle eventually regained control. Spielberg, with his massively successful film about a big shark, opened the door for the new “blockbuster” cinema, while his friend George Lucas blew said door down completely two years later with Star Wars. Thus, Hollywood had a new model for massive profitability, and ran with bigger and more spectacle driven blockbusters, familiar franchises, and all the things that irritate serious film people today and brought us to a world where the biggest film of last year was Avengers: Infinity War.
Big budget blockbusters costing upwards of $150 million, the “tentpole” releases, are the backbone of the major Hollywood studios’ revenue. At the other end of the scale, there is still a relatively solid market for smaller independent films (in production if not distribution) that cost less than $20m. What doesn’t seem to exist so much is the mid-range film. While Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s focused on the middle sized film as the core product it was pushing, at this point, Disney has decided there is more money to be made in funding one Captain Marvel at $150m than three mid-ranged films at $50m each. This is where the defence of Netflix comes in. The streamer, with its business model focused both on quantity and filling holes the traditional Hollywood studios have left empty, is making an avalanche of these. Old Hollywood is back, baby!
The thing is, Spielberg has himself long been critical of the tentpole model. He’s well aware that it’s having a corrosive effect on the kind of art the studios make, and went so far as to claim it is doomed in the long run. “There’s eventually going to be a big meltdown”, Spielberg claimed in 2013. “There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen of these mega-budgeted movies go crashing into the ground and that’s going to change the paradigm again”. These are not the words of someone looking to defend the old guard against the new kid in town. It is true that Spielberg set the Blockbuster Era in motion with Jaws. That said, have you watched Jaws recently? It’s a film about a small town dealing with the threat of a shark. It’s imbued with grounded, clearly defined character stakes. It has ideas in its head about small business capitalism and how the profit motive can challenge the needs and safety of ordinary people. It has no world ending stakes, no sequel set up. Not one studio today would make a tentpole film like that. To suggest that it and Spider-Man: Homecoming are the same type of film is a huge oversimplification. Holding Spielberg responsible for the current blockbuster landscape is to overlook everything that has changed in forty years.
Some would say he’s critical of the state of Hollywood today but ignores the antidote: Netflix. Spielberg, however, and this is the crux of his argument, takes an absolute view of what constitutes cinema. As he put it last year:
“[Netflix] is a challenge to cinema, the same way television in the early 1950s pulled people away from movie theaters … Hollywood’s used to that. We are accustomed to being highly competitive with television. The difference today is that a lot of studios would rather just make branded tentpole guaranteed box-office hits from their inventory … than take chances on smaller films. And those smaller films that studios used to make routinely, are now going to Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix.”
To Spielberg, Netflix can never save cinema because it is something else. A film is that which you see on a big screen. Is this correct? I have no idea. But there is surely something in it. Looking at Spielberg’s canon, The Post, for example, would still work terrifically well if it were a small screen release. But Jurassic Park, meanwhile, would lose its essence. For a filmmaker like him, who has so often sold experiences more than plots, it is understandable that this feels frustrating.
And there can be no denying that Netflix is hurting the theatrical experience. Take my own viewing options, for example. Had Roma been distributed by almost anyone but Netflix, as a high profile release, I am sure that the cinema I generally go to would have had many screenings per day for several weeks. As it was, the nearest showing to me was 50 miles away, on one screen, once a day, for a week. Unless you lived in a major city (and even then, chances were more limited than usual), if you wanted to watch Roma, you had to go to Netflix. To Spielberg, that means it isn’t cinema. Whether he’s right or wrong is something I’ll let you decide, but it’s certainly a case worth considering.