Changes in The Major Studios
- 1990: Warner Communications and Time Inc. merged to form Time/Warner at a cost of $14 billion—then later acquired Ted Turner’s Turner Broadcasting System (TBS), including its cable TV stations and its extensive film library.
- 1991: MGM Studios struggled under its new chief Alan Ladd, Jr. (until replaced by Frank Mancuso in 1993).
- Brandon Tartikoff chaired Paramount (until replaced by Sherry Lansing in 1992).
- *** 1994: Disney became the first studio to gross $1 billion at the box office and managed to be the only free-standing studio by the end of the decade.
- 1995: Seagram bought MCA/Universal from Matsushita for $5.7 billion and renamed it Universal Studios.
A Newcomer Studio: DreamWorks
It was significant that the first new Hollywood studio in many decades, DreamWorks (SKG), was formed in October 1994 as the brainchild of director-producer Steven Spielberg, ex-Disney executive producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film producer/music industry giant David Geffen. Their first real hit was also their first film to be nominated for Best Picture – Saving Private Ryan (1998). By decade’s end, DreamWorks had three consecutive Best Picture winners: American Beauty (1999),
…and we MUST take a moment for the truly AWESOME Gladiator (2000)
… and A Beautiful Mind (2001)
Independent Films:
Existing alongside mainstream Hollywood film production is that of the independents. By the end of the decade, most studios had formed independent film divisions that would make films with artistic, edgy, or ‘serious’ social issues or themes, and without major Hollywood stars.
Independent filmmaking had become more mainstream and institutionalized – sharing some of the same concerns and corporate worries that traditional Hollywood studios had always confronted.
Trends in the ’90s: Films with Serious Themes
The trend toward sequels from the previous decade continued, but Hollywood was also attempting to deal with serious themes. Director Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993) was the first big-studio attempt to deal with AIDS, winning for Tom Hanks the first of consecutive Best Actor Oscars.
With seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, Steven Spielberg’s long and serious B/W Holocaust ‘prestige’ epic Schindler’s List (1993) was a significant milestone but also a grim story about an opportunistic German businessman (Liam Neeson) in Poland who ultimately saved over 1,000 Jews from a Holocaust death by employing them as cheap labor.
WATCH/TAKE NOTES OVER: SCHINDLER’S LIST Clip
(ok…a confession…Ralph Fiennes’ awesome performance as the monster Aamon Goeth cracked me up and I kept trying to stifle it…ALL through the movie…and you don’t laugh at this movie…!)
NEW BLACK CINEMA – African American Filmmakers:
And black filmmakers, including John Singleton, Spike Lee, and Mario Van Peebles (among others) were making an impact. Twenty-three-year-old writer/director John Singleton marked his directorial debut with the semi-autobiographical Boyz N The Hood (1991), a powerful film about gang violence in South Central L.A. *** [Singleton’s nominated film brought him the distinction of being the first African American and the youngest person ever nominated for the Best Director Academy Award. At the time of its release, the film was the highest-grossing, black-themed film ever, earning ten times its $6 million budget.] However, the film’s marketing incited some violence and trouble when it opened in various theaters.
WATCH/TAKE NOTES ON: BOYZ N THE HOOD Clip
Action-Thrillers Dominate the ’90s:
There seemed to be a significant shift toward action films in the ’90s – with their requisite speed, kinetic hyper-action, and of course, violence. Most of the biggest and popular films were not dialogue-based and character-driven. Andrew Davis’ The Fugitive (1993)
- THE ROCK and Simon West’s glossy mega-movie Con Air (1997), with action star of the decade Nicolas Cage aboard a federal marshal’s plane with an assortment of vile criminals
WATCH/TAKE NOTES ON:
CLIP: with THE ROCK, Nic Cage another of a succession of hits CON AIR
https://youtu.be/rRKCMVuDT4g
And…the fascinating John Woo/Travolta/Cage mega hit FACE/OFF
Major Blockbusters: Phenomenal Successes
Since the making of Jaws (1975), studio executives were primed toward making blockbusters to meet the bottom line. In the 90s, many of the greatest box-office hits of all time (in the top twenty) were made and marketed with sophisticated publicity and merchandising campaigns:
- Steven Spielberg’s and Universal’s f/x laden Jurassic Park (1993) (based upon Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel) with photo-realistic, computer-generated dinosaurs spliced into live-action sequences, i.e., the car-crunching T-Rex sequence
- the apocalyptic disaster film (“Earth! Take a good look. It could be your last”) from director Roland Emmerich ***Independence Day (1996) – that set a record by grossing $100 million in box-office receipts during its first six days, and won a Best Visual Effects Oscar – mostly for the sequence of the White House exploding
But the biggest box-office ($294 million) and critics favorite – and psychological thriller – was writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) – *** about a 9-year-old boy (Haley Joel Osment) who saw ghosts of dead people (with the memorable tagline “I see dead people”) all around south Philadelphia, and who shared his ghostly experience with child psychologist Bruce Willis. The mysterious film from an unknown director generated much talk over its unexpected twist ending.
Hollywood was relieved (and recouped its costs) when its traditional kind of blockbuster did well in the summer of 1991, evidenced by James Cameron’s expensive sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).– was the first film with a $100 million budget. [Cameron had written and directed the earlier low-budget The Terminator (1984) with modest success. Likewise, he had transformed Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) into a big-budget sequel titled Aliens (1986).]
True Lies (1994) – first movie with a budget to exceed $100 million, and eventually grossed $365 million.] spy whose wife finds out the truth…and that she herself has some skills. Jamie Lee Curtis shines
WATCH/TAKE NOTES On: TRUE LIES Trailer
The Phenomenon of Titanic:
Writer/director James Cameron solidified his reputation as the undisputed king of mega-blockbusters in this decade with his studio-shared (Fox and Paramount) Titanic (1997) (grossing $600 million in the US alone, and $1.8 billion worldwide for the studios). It was the first film with a budget exceeding $200 million. Titanic retold the spectacular, epic-disaster of the 1912 ill-fated, maiden voyage cruise of the R.M.S. Titanic, when it was pierced by an iceberg. The tense scene of the sinking of the ship was created with state-of-the-art digital effects and a life-size version of the ship. In addition, a secondary love story between star-crossed lovers – poor passenger Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and upper-class Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), told in flashback by an older Rose (Gloria Stuart) slowly built to the inevitable conclusion.
WATCH/TAKE NOTES On: “Titanic: Making of Sinking scene”
The melodramatic film was notable for many milestones:
- it became the highest grossing and most successful film of all time (passing the megahit of the past Gone with the Wind (1939))
- its worldwide gross was $1.835 billion, and it was the first movie to gross $1 billion
- it was the most expensive film in Hollywood history estimated at about $200 million
- it tied Ben-Hur (1959) with its eleven Oscar wins
The Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix
Writers-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski’s second feature film (following Bound (1996)) was the ambitious and inventive virtual-reality flick The Matrix (1999). and won four Academy Awards (all in sound, editing, and visual effects technical categories). Slacker hacker Thomas Anderson/Neo (Keanu Reeves) was called as a messianic figure to save the world (of approximately the year 2199) from virtually indestructible Sentient Agents. The blockbuster’s wild popularity was due to its combination of comic-bookish plot, mysticism, and philosophical complexity, computer-enhanced digital effects of its unbelievable action scenes, flying bullet-dodging (“bullet-time”) *** and intriguing virtual worlds in which reality was redefined as a computer simulation. It helped to illustrate what the future would be of futuristic sci-fi action films with slick and smart plots, and jaw-dropping action.
Solid, Significant Films and Directors of the Decade:
Quentin Tarantino wrote the story for Oliver Stone’s controversial study of mass murder*** – Natural Born Killers (1994) – an over-the-top, visceral satire on the desire of the violence-obsessed, exploitative media in America to maximize profits, with stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as Mickey and Mallory – two image-conscious serial killers on a psycho road trip as they are pursued by a sleazy TV reporter (Robert Downey, Jr.). The energetic film precipitated at least eight ‘copycat’ murders and violent incidents by self-professed ‘natural born killers,’ including two Oklahoma teens who watched the film repeatedly and then went on a similar shooting spree. A subsequent multi-million-dollar lawsuit in 1995 against director Stone (and then Time Warner Entertainment), brought by a victim in Louisiana, was finally dismissed in 2001. The film was originally banned from theatrical distribution in Ireland. A 2000 Director’s Cut version brought back more than 150 shots removed from the theatrical version prior to release – severely edited in order to get a R rating instead of an unrated or NC-17 rating. (Really unwatchable, but … )
Watch/Take Notes ON: NATURAL BORN KILLERS Trailer
Maverick Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino:
Violence accompanied a number of films, including those of emerging maverick writer/director Quentin Tarantino, a self-promoting video store clerk who demonstrated his exciting, self-taught, original filmmaking genius (with generous helpings of violence, sex, and profanity) in his first film Reservoir Dogs (1992). The cult hit broke many of the rules of conventional crime films in its tale of a group of color-named criminals whose jewelry heist went awry. It began with a deconstruction of Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin’ and even featured director Tarantino as Mr. Brown.
Tarantino served as co-screenwriter (with Roger Avary) and director of an acclaimed (Best Screenplay-winning) follow-up, low-budget independent film Pulp Fiction (1994). The Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner and seven-time Academy Award nominee was an ultra-violent, intermingling, non-linear trio of criminal life stories intertwined in a sleazy Los Angeles (involving hitmen, a crime boss’ overdosing wife played by Uma Thurman, and a boxer – Bruce Willis) that gave John Travolta a super-star comeback (famed as a hitman for talking about what the French call fast-food Big Macs).
Watch/take notes on: PULP FICTION Trailer
John Lasseter
John Lasseter’s and Pixar’s ***Toy Story (1995) (with the tagline ‘To Eternity – and Beyond!’) was the first feature-length film completely animated by computer – the film and its pioneering digital animation studio Pixar won a Special Achievement Award. It featured cowboy toy Woody (with voice of Tom Hanks) and the futuristic, high-tech Buzz Lightyear (with voice of Tim Allen) and a richly detailed and imaginative world. Its blockbuster sequel was just as remarkable and considered the superior film, Toy Story 2 (1999) – produced by Pixar Animation Studios.
WATCH/TAKE NOTES OVER “A History of CGI Characters”
Adult-Oriented Films:
Filmmaking and production expenses continued to escalate, as well as the violence and sex depicted. In some cases, the returns were enormous. ***Henry and June (1990), based on Anais Nin’s memoirs, was the first film to be released with the NC-17 (No Children Under 17 Admitted) rating (which had replaced the old “X” rating in 1990 without the commercial stigma) for its explicit handling of sex.
Director Paul Verhoeven was successful in the early part of the decade with Total Recall (1990), and the commercially successful investigative thriller Basic Instinct (1992) – the year’s most popular movie. In 1990, scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas had sold his script for the erotic thriller for a record $3 million to Carolco Pictures. The film included gory violence, uncrossed/panty-less legs during a police interrogation, and sleazy, steamy sex scenes between Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone (playing a bi-sexual blonde suspected of murder), and with psychiatrist Jeanne Tripplehorn. (uhm…what can I say about this…in true Noir fashion, Nick thinks he has things under control…he doesn’t)
WATCH/TAKE NOTES ON: BASIC INSTINCT Trailer
Best line: Nick talking to his partner:
“She knows where I live and breathe…she’s coming after me Gus…”