Sony CEO says 50's filmgoers were stupid

Variety has an article on Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton. He claims 3D movies are here to stay, and this is part of his speech about it:

"If you had shown, for example, someone back in the 1950s an edit where there is a woman crying and there is an image of a gravesite, they would not have understood what we as a modern audience understood, which is that the woman is grieving over someone who has died."

Really? And this guy oversees a company that controls hundreds of classic films. Maybe he should watch some.

Read more: http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...#ixzz13U4Ft8f9

__________________
Family DVD Collection | My Top 100 | My Movie Thoughts | Frank Capra

What an idiot. If anything, movies were more subtle because of the Hays Office. If people kiss and the lights go out and the next scene is the unmarried girl leaving doctor's office with a worried look it meant she was pregnant. That's what my mother told me.

Right. If anything, back in the days of the Production Code everything had to be done more intelligently because it couldn't neccessarily be shown in detail. When the "Walls of Jericho" fall at the end of It Happened One Night, do we really not know what the implication there is? Maybe my 5 year old doesn't, but I'm pretty sure my teenager can figure that one out. That was 1934, and that's in the Sony Library.

Wow! I guess this goes to show that the money men aren't always up on their art. I'm glad that this is the man controlling one of the big six. He's clearly aware that absolutely no one understood the montage theories developed by Eisenstein in the twenties until nearly a century later! Those poor, ignorant movie masses of yesteryear.

__________________

This really bothers/insults me. First of all, if there was ever a dumb filmgoing generation it's this one, certainly not any of the older ones. Secondly, he's using his power as an "important" figure to convey this passive aggressive tone when saying 3D won't die in order to convince the gullible their future is a good thing, making sure Sony keeps making more money that they don't need from higher priced tickets.

"I think 3D has come along at a moment...when we as an audience and a culture can read 3D. We understand how to interpret it visually. And that is very, very important."

You do realize that it's also very, very important not to beat a dead horse, which is what has been happening with 3D for the past year at least. The notion of understanding how to read it I don't think has anything to do with it being THIS generation, but rather it's been shoved down our throats enough to where we know what it's supposed to be used for; however, what it's supposed to be used for has been severed from why it's used.

In short, **** em

3D has been going over better this time because of technological innovations that makes it a better experience, but the studios have been hurting it by using the cheapjack process for converting into 3D movies after they were filmed the normal way. The public is no longer interested in those movies.

So he thinks his parents/granparents were stupid!

I don't see how one infers this man calling audiences stupid from the comments above. He is inferring people weren't as keen on film metaphor back then, and he is right. The average film going audience back then just didn't analyze film on the level we as an audience do today, or at least, my father seems to think so, and he was there.

I will concede the example he uses raises my eyebrow, as I think people certainly would have picked up on that one, no matter what the era. However, lots of folks back then just didn't approach cinematic language the way society at large does today.

__________________

He was basically implying that '50s audiences didn't understand 3-D, so that process died out. But he leaves the entire context of what was happening with television vs. the motion picture at the time. He's trying to say the fact that 3-D seems more appreciated now is that the audiences are more movie savvy. I just don't buy it myself. I know many of my students cannot put two and two together concerning simple film storytelling. They just want T&A and gore. They get that. On the other hand, I have some friends who have seen thousands of movies and they still can't tell me what's going on in a completely straightforward film. That example this guy gave was understood by silent film audiences, and I've been watching lots of silents lately so I can tell.

__________________
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

While I wish society at large did look at films the way you think they do, I cannot begin to believe that with Jackass 3D being number 1 at the box office.

Whilst I think that, overall, today's audiences are more sophisticated about film now than they were in the 50's, the difference today is the target for the films and, therefore, the films that get made. That's probably the main reason that Jackass 3D is the #1 film. There just aren't that many films that are made for an adult audience.

Don't you mean cognitive audience?

Not really. There's not much that's aimed at an adult audience and there's very little that's made for an adult audience that isn't a comedy or rom/com. Less still that really gets a push.

Maybe I should've aimed the point more at the Hollywood mainstream than cinema overall? That said, I still think that's the case.

Touche'

Fair play and all. I guess I shouldn't have said at large, eh?

I think the "mainstream" tag is appropriate here, by the by...

I don't think that is true at all. The difference now you have now film buffs and students who can use cinematic terns to describe a scene. But symbolism was used in mainstream movies back then more than now and the public understood it. Cat People had a monster that was never seen and was a commercial hit. Citizen Kane was full of symbllism and while not a commercal success, no one complained they didn't understand it. The very popular director Ernest Lubitsch used subtlety to be sexually suggestive.

There are two types of movie fans. There are the movie fans that enjoy good movies, will watch black and white films, will read subtitles, and don't care if a movie was made in 1910 or 2010, as long as it's a good movie.

Then there are the movie fans that go to the theater, refuse to watch black and white movies, can't wait for that foreign film to be remade in Hollywood, and think Jackass 3D is a film that "everyone must see" (that's a real quote from another movie forum). Unfortunately, those are the people who buy the tickets.

While I think Sedai is probably right, that there are a greater number of the first type of fans than ever before, thanks to DVD making many, many great films more readily available to watch, Hollywood continues to make movies for the second type, because they're the ones who spend their money on crap.

ironically in the general sense of the word, the average joe or jane today is dumber than in the 50's.

We rely on tech-devices to do what they did the old fashioned way, you know ..

thinking.

__________________
"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.

The thing is if people wouldn't have watched movies in the 50's, it wouldn't have been possible to receive insights in the form of criticisms and hollywood wouldn't be able to produce films that we as audiences want to watch today.

Even when Edison started out, people called him and his work stupid.