Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See [Paperback]

Rosenbaum is in one of the few film writers in America who has the lucrative position of writing for a major publication, yet still can get away with writing about any kinds of films he wants.. including experimental or independent films which disappear from the screen faster than GIGLI. When you think about it, not even Roger Ebert has that much power- when was the last time you saw him write about an Ernie Gehr film... and he's in the same city that Rosenbaum is! Rosenbaum is of course aware of this privilege and he makes ironic use of that fact by bringing to light the dichotomy of the so-called free press being constrained to cover merely mainstream films.

To be certain, Hollywood surely gets a wagging finger pointed at for not only monopolizing the multiplex screens, but for dumping films like hot potatoes that don't perform well in opening weekends, thereby frustrating the chance for them to be seen by people who would genuinely like to see them. (Remember back in the old days- movies like ERASERHEAD would take years to find an audience? This film wouldn't have a prayer today!) A favourite motif of his is to compare the glut of THE PHANTOM MENACE versus Joe Dante's SMALL SOLDIERS, a much wiser film that disappeared in the ocean of summer blockbusters.

Rosenbaum keenly paints a canvas of this information saturated culture that we live in- where Hollywood and the mass media are not only culprits in how smaller independent films get squeezed out of the marketplace, but they are also victims that cannot stop the monster they've created.

Also, Rosenbaum includes a chapter which reprints his Chicago Reader article that is a rebuttal to the AFI's infamously shallow Top 100 Films of All time list, with his own crawl of 100 titles, ranging from experimental shorts to Hollywood genre pictures that had fallen off the radar. Like the rest of the book, this piece is snarky, darkly humourous and wise.

Rosenbaum also writes about such specialty filmmakers as Hou-Hsiao Hsien or Abbas Kiarostami, whose works were actually picked up for (however marginal) distribution in 1990's. Reading this book a few years after its initial release, one gets another layer of irony in that new works by such world class filmmakers as these are even more harder to see. While Movie Wars documents why things were rotten in the late 1990's, the state of things is even worse now.

One of Rosenbaum's main themes is that Hollywood isn't even "giving the people what they want." The hare-brained garbage the big studios regularly produce is the product of a completely self-contained, self-referential industry that is driven by marketing ("push" in business terminology) far more than it is driven by customer demand (i.e., "pull."). One of my favorite examples is Rosenbaum's discussion of the extraordinary success of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, a massive box office success that many, if not most, people thought was just extraordinarily bad. Rosenbaum goes into great detail about how marketing deals ensured the extraordinary financial success and long movie house runs of this almost complete loser.

In a wonderfully ironic support of Rosenbaum's thesis, try typing "movie wars" into [a bookeseller's] search engine. At least when I tried it (10/20/02), the first roughly 50 books the search engine returns are collateral materials for Star Wars, none of whose titles contain the phrase "movie wars." Hollywood marketing strikes again as thoughtful criticism is, as usual, pushed into obscurity.