finance.” The personal style of agenting
has evolved accordingly. As one agent
explains, in the old days “you were very
interactive.” To close a deal with a pro-
ducer, you would “get up and step in,
you sit in front of them, in the front of
the table, you push a picture over.” The
ethos now, the agent says, is “clinical,
digital, and clean.”
Movie people, Roussel notes, like
to signal their status as insiders by
referring to Hollywood as a “town.” In
the town, everything is personal, every-
thing is business, and everyone knows
her place—or doesn’t, at her own peril.
Since 2008, the system has become un-
sure. As it would; for the first time in
nearly a century, the system is not being
driven by stardom. In the Ovitz era,
star power took on two related senses:
the power of a performer to carry a pic-
ture for moviegoers (think Julia Rob-
erts in “Pretty Woman”) and the power
of a star to get a picture greenlit—to
make a project “real,” as Roussel puts
it, using an amusing term of Holly-
wood art. Both Fritz and Roussel con-
nect the loss of stars’ power to make a
picture real to the shift to I.P. But nei-
ther connects it to the other vanishing
force—the power of a star to carry a
film for a wide audience.
In the thirties, Thalberg’s greatest
star was the suave William Powell, sec-
ond only to Clark Gable, in that de-
cade, among Hollywood’s leading men.
Thalberg didn’t just sell the ideal of the
meritorious swell in the person of Pow-
ell; he aspired to be such a figure him-
self, as did the man in the White House,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The charm,
the imperturbability, and the sheer
human grace that Powell displayed in
“My Man Godfrey” and the “Thin Man”
pictures were qualities as rooted in the
anxious needs of an audience as they
were in the talents of a particular man.
In the eighties, when Americans needed
to see hustlers on the make treated as
demiurges, Tom Cruise was like Mi-
chael Ovitz was like Michael Milken.
The preëminence, during the past
ten years, of the superhero movie has
been accompanied by the loss of the
actor as hero, or heroic type. “Accord-
ing to Marvel’s philosophy,” Ben Fritz
writes, “the characters, not the actors,
were the stars, and pretty much every-
one was expendable.” There was no sep-
arating Powell from Nick Charles, or
Humphrey Bogart from Sam Spade. Is
there any connecting Batman to—fill
in the blank? The quality of film acting
has never been higher, and there is still
a craft in scriptwriting and directing
that makes one regularly bow in awe.
But a minimal standard of human re-
latability is not being met, on a routine
basis, in the medium’s most dominant
genre. People who are nothing like us
rescuing a world that is nothing like
ours is not a recipe for artistic renewal.
Granted, there were limitations in
the old model, some of them severe; it
is hardly incidental that two of the most
popular and interesting movies of the
past year, “Wonder Woman” and “Black
Panther,” made deliberate eforts to ex-
pand the usual demographic of old-fash-
ioned Hollywood heroism, and to push
back against the history of sexism and
racism that it reflects. But the bench-
mark for a good movie was once co-
herence, and this meant more than a
competently executed three-act script.
It meant the unity of story with char-
acter, of character with star persona.
The whole shebang was given life by a
highly improbable marriage between
our narcissism and our idealism. In this
model, the movie theatre was a special
kind of institution, where a primitive
instinct for action and drama came to-gether with a desire to banish our re-
sidual cruelty, if for no other reason than
that it wouldn’t play.
This year, Netflix is set to release
more original movies than Sony, Dis-
ney, and Warner Bros. combined. The
company has taken aim at the primacy
of theatrical release, in an apparent efort
to make online streaming the prevail-
ing distribution model for movies. Even
Sony’s old standbys are now making
movies for Netflix. Adam Sandler signed
a deal with the company in 2014, and
Will Smith made his first Netflix film
last year. Smith has admitted to a sense
of loss. “There’s something about the
big screen that does something to peo-
ple’s minds,” he told an audience at
Comic-Con last July. But the Inter-
net and social media have changed
things, he said, adding, “You almost
can’t make new movie stars anymore,
right?” Cinemas are already in danger
of becoming like the church in the
Philip Larkin poem: half-abandoned
houses of “awkward reverence,” with
an aura that intensifies as fewer and
fewer people go. Over the next few
years, movies may lose altogether the
aspect of public solitude, of being alone
together in a crowd, in the dark, mar-
velling as spectacle devolves upon the
human face. At that point, they’ll just
be more screen time. “Before I get started, who here knows the diference between
an L.L.C., your ass, and a hole in the ground?”••