OPINION:
In the summer of 1977, nearly everyone in the country was seeing “Star Wars” or “Smokey and the Bandit” — starring Burt Reynolds at the height of his fame in movie theaters. There were even a handful of people watching then second-run “Rocky.” To wrap up the year, “Saturday Night Fever” opened in December.
It was a good time to be alive in the United States.
It is difficult to remember a time in America when the national conversation included unforced and pervasive mentions of hit movies, but old-timers will tell you that it used to happen pretty much every summer.
When Hollywood was still interested in making cash, the studios used to make a few movies each year that appealed to a broad swath of America. Despite Hollywood’s disapproval of middle-class and middle-brow tastes, that they managed to make two very different movies — “Star Wars” and “Smokey and the Bandit” — into summertime hits is a testament to the skills they had in 1977.
At some point, however, Hollywood decided that it didn’t really want to be the center of American cultural life and stopped making movies that people wanted to see. When was the last time you had more than one conversation about a movie you had just seen in a theater?
This summer, we have had to endure the crash landing of the Indiana Jones franchise (80-year-olds apparently have trouble being action heroes). Now we are suffering through the media blitz associated with “Barbie,” which will no doubt be forgotten by Columbus Day.
The simple reality is that the creative energy in the United States has migrated from a desiccated Los Angeles to the tech and video gaming worlds in the San Francisco Bay Area and to a lesser extent in places like Seattle and Austin, Texas.
These things happen. Creativity atrophies in places from time to time. Before Hollywood came along, New York — and more specifically Broadway — was the undisputed creative capital of the United States. For decades, New York theater produced movie storylines and nationally popular songs.
In the 1970s, however, Broadway decided to become a weird little unimportant ghetto that occasionally launched revivals of once-popular plays to pay the bills.
Apart from “Hamilton” and maybe “Chicago” and their songs, it would be difficult for most Americans to identify a play or song that has emerged from Broadway in the last 50 years.
This all seems relevant to the recent and ongoing strike of writers in Hollywood. You can forgive us for not being aware that there still are writers in Hollywood. Most of what they offer on television and in the movies is warmed-over reruns of previously interesting creative ideas — like the serialization of Marvel Comics or the “Star Wars” or James Bond franchises.
How many remakes and reruns can people watch?
The writers worry about the intrusion of artificial intelligence into their profession. Fair enough. But the best way to avoid that is to have something to offer, something to say, and to be able to say it in an interesting way, and maybe, just maybe, check whatever hostility you might harbor toward your customers.
The Oscar for best movie of 1977? “Annie Hall,” an annoying bit of cinema mercifully forgotten by all but the most devoted Diane Keaton fans.
“Star Wars” was shut out in the major categories and given a somewhat embarrassing “special achievement” award, which one assumes means that it made so much money that it could not be ignored. “Smokey and the Bandit” received nothing.
That’s Hollywood, folks.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House. He can be reached at mike@mwrstrat.com.
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