You Might Remember Such Movies As

[I remember the 1971 film Good-Time Slim, Uncle Doobie, and the Great 'Frisco Freak-Out, starring Troy McClure. Well, I don't, really. Actually, I couldn't possibly. But I wish I could.]

The Onion's A.V. Club's Summer Movie Fall DVD Preview came out, and cracked me up. But it also reminded me of a thought I've been tossing around occasionally for the past few months.

The old studio system of moviemaking meant that studios were essentially movie factories, or so Mike Mashon (Library of Congress Motion Picture Division Curator) has said. They made lots 'n' lotsa movies, only some of which were any good artistically (and they used the demand for those to foist the bulk of the movies onto the marked – 'You want the good one? You'll have to take the bad ones, too, then' –, rather, it seems to me, like "bundling": the way production companies foist crappy cable channels onto the market as a condition of providing good cable channels [Full disclosure: I have plain ol' rabbit-ears TV, and have since early 2004]).

I have been noticing movie commercials lately, though, for whatever reason; and, of course, there is the general movie-industry malaise associated with declining (or, perhaps more accurately?, the slowing rate of increase of) box-office takes. I saw Blades of Glory on its opening night, and the theater was maybe half full. Evidently, movies are made or broken over their opening weekend, with a few exceptions; after a couple of weeks' run, everyone's attention begins to shift to the next round of releases.

All of which is merely leading up to, I wonder if a factory-production-type business model is what's in the future for the Hollywood movie industry? Not a reëmergence of the studio system, of course, but one in which mainly bread 'n' butter movies are churned out, with a few blockbuster and 'film' movies scattered among them.