lucrative time for Hollywood?
Heather Donahue in ‘The Blair Witch Project’
(Moviestore/Shutterstock)These young filmmakers seemed to take the tense tone of the time – a nervousness rooted in the Y2K scare,
but intensified by events like the Columbine massacre in April 1999 – and infuse it into their movies. The
Matrix was a techno-dystopian nightmare that worried, as the internet began to enter people’s homes, what
happens when humanity becomes “plugged in” to digital devices. Fight Club was a fable about how
someone could completely disassociate from themselves in an increasingly consumerist society. The Sixth
Sense was about a man whose reality unravels, while no amount of technology could save the doomed film
students in The Blair Witch Project. The movies of 1999 seemed to be glancing at the way society was
heading as it entered a new age, balancing anxiety and excitement on a knife edge.
Was it just a coincidence these films all arrived in the same year, exploring similar themes? “The pragmatic
part of me that understands the industry is like, of course it’s a coincidence,” says Raftery. “The Matrix was
written in the mid-Nineties. But the part of me that loves art, and loves the way ideas take hold and believes
in the zeitgeist as a weird cultural guiding force, when you have that many artists dialled into the same
frequency of unease, it can’t just be a coincidence.”
Another idea explored in Raftery’s book is the possibility that the rise of internet fandoms, a totally new
phenomenon, helped elevate the sense of these films being huge cultural moments with massive hype
around them. “The mid to late Nineties was the beginning of what we have now: constant fan uprisings and
this insane desire to scrutinise every moment” of a movie, the author explains, nodding to sites like Ain’t It
Cool News – one of the original film blogs, which was growing in notoriety and influence as 1999 came
around. “Whether it was the hysteria around Blair Witch or people complaining about Jar-Jar Binks, I think
it added one more layer to the themes these movies were trafficking in.”
These were American movies about explicitly American social mores and desires. “The international market
was still only just starting to get going so most movies were made with only an English-speaking market in
mind,” recalls Fritz. “They weren’t thinking about China or Russia or Latin America at all so movies were
more culturally specific.” In today’s less lucrative movie-making landscape, filmmakers need to bear in
mind how their movie might perform in other territories, to ensure a best-possible worldwide box office.
Back then, though, there was enough money to be made from US audiences alone that films like American
Pie, also released in 1999, could drill deep into experiences that perhaps wouldn’t translate in Asian
markets.
It’s incredibly unlikely now that we would have a year where we see 20 or 30 interesting original films get a