On an autumn afternoon, the Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square offers a vision of the New Europe which would have surprised Jean Monnet. From Helsinki, Madrid, Copenhagen, Athens and Dublin, hundreds of journalists have flown into London to worship at the shrine of The Almighty Mouse. The main event is the Walt Disney Company's latest animated feature, Tarzan, but we're also getting previews of other upcoming Disney products, such as the new Fanta- sia 2000, which goes on release in IMAX cinemas around the world on January 1st, 2000, the eagerly-awaited Toy Story 2, and the computer-generated/live-action mix of Dinosaur. We also get the company homily about Disney's commitment to family values, before a blizzard of information about the company's terrifyingly thorough and all-embracing media operations, from publishing to broadcasting to film-making to theme parks. The presentation is classic dressdown casual, with that sugary Disney touch added in, but the steely message is clear - these people have come for your children, and resistance is futile.
What resistance? There are spontaneous bursts of applause from the audience after the more spectacular clips, polite attentiveness for the less impressive stuff (an awful-looking, new, made-for-TV version of that sickliest-of-sick musicals, Annie, and TV animation shows which look pallid and dull compared with some of the cutting-edge cartoons these days). Bizarrely, one-time surrealist shocker David Lynch is recruited to the cause; his new film, The Straight Story, is cited approvingly as chiming with Disney family values. We're shown a clip from The Straight Story, in which a character tells a homely anecdote about how one twig is easily snapped, but a bundle of twigs is unbreakable. "And that's what family is," the character concludes with satisfaction. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone here that this is the exact etymology of the word "fascism", but hey, we're all on the same side here, aren't we? I said aren't we?
"I was sitting beside some guy who owns a petrol station in Norway, but I couldn't figure out what he was doing there," says one journalist dismissively, reflecting a certain irritation among the press when they realise they've been lumped in with Disney employees and "valued customers" for this particular shindig. With the distinction between film journalists and corporate boosters/junketeers becoming increasingly blurred, the mix makes sense, though.
We live, we are constantly told, in an information era, but we're less often told that most of the information is pap. Nobody has understood this better than the Hollywood studios. More channels, more Internet usage, bigger feature sections in newspapers - all mean that there's more space to fill. What TV scheduler or editor can resist the offer of star interviews, showbiz gossip, extended movie-clips, all pre-packaged and (most importantly) free? If you compare Irish newspapers and television programmes of 15 years ago with today, you'll find that they now appear to have access to the world's biggest movie stars and directors to an extent unimaginable before. This has nothing to do with the hard work of the local media - the studios have devised ever more ingenious ways of spreading the margarine of publicity across the entire continent of Europe. Hence my presence in the Odeon with my European counterparts. But this is pretty low-grade margarine, and it's spread very thinly.
THE grim future is best glimpsed on TV3's "entertainment slots", where Lorraine Keane reads from pre-packaged press releases, accompanied by clips. The shallowness and manipulation apparent in these puff packages is depressing. One of the differences between British and Irish TV is that this kind of junk filler material is restricted in Britain to the satellites or to graveyard slots on terrestrial channels. Here, it's primetime stuff free advertising for the movie industry provided (in the case of The Movie Show) by a socalled public service broadcaster.
Even in the UK, attempts to run movie programmes which do more than slavishly follow the release schedule have run into quicksand. The BBC's Moving Pictures, an intelligent and eclectic magazine programme which refused to play the game, was marginalised and finally dumped a couple of years ago. One of its problems was that it was just too expensive - if its producers wanted to do an item on the history of the crane shot, for example, they had to pay $5,000 per minute "or part thereof" for each clip they used.
The Hollywood majors keep ruthless control over their back catalogues, and these prohibitive costs make it well-nigh impossible to draw on the rich history of the moving image to make a point. In contrast, television is flooded with free-to-air clips for the latest releases, and it's usually possible to see the same few scenes from the same few movies cropping up with numbing regularity across the channels in their week of release. Imagine a situation where John Kelly could only feature new releases by Steps or Westlife on his radio show every week, and had to pay thousands of pounds every time he wanted to play a record that was more than two years old.
Real analysis is replaced by fake "news". Up until the mid-1970s, box office receipts could only be found on the back pages of trade magazines such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Since the arrival of the modern blockbuster, though, the jargon of the exhibition business has become part of the marketing hype. "Opening weekends" and "screen averages", are now commonly mentioned in reviewers' comments. The distributors are only too happy to feed you all those figures when they show a particular movie in a good light. When they don't, and a film has bombed in the US, the strategy is usually a pained what-can-you-expect shrug - the movie was just too sophisticated for those dumb Americans, apparently, but there are great hopes for Europe.
But this familiarity with the nitty-gritty of the movie business doesn't run very deep. Last week saw the final obliteration of Polygram, the most coherent attempt in the 1990s to offer European competition to the American majors. Bought out by Universal, Polygram's distribution arm was shut down last week. Funnily enough, I didn't see Lorraine or Dave mentioning that particular showbiz nugget, although it's going to have more far-reaching effects on the movies we see than any fanciful calculation of The Blair Witch Project's cost-to-profit ratio.
It's easy to sneer at cheap television, but print journalists would have to admit that their situation isn't all that much better. In fact, it may be worse. Programmes such as The Movie Show don't really pretend to be anything other than what they are, but the temptation for the print media is to jazz up the grim reality. One of the better things about the film Notting Hill was its depiction of the interview sausage factory - 20 minutes or so with the object of your attention, who has probably already done 10 or 12 such sessions already that day. It's astonishing that these interviews ever throw up anything surprising - pressure of time militates against straying off the beaten path. If you ask an awkward question, you may find yourself with a sulking star and no quotes; if you don't stick to the subject at hand, all of a sudden your time is up and you find yourself with a tape full of opinions about the Champions' League or London restaurants.
Some journalists are well-known for embellishing such brief and distant encounters. You'd think from their articles they'd spent a few hours with the star or director they're interviewing, chatting over a leisurely meal or sharing a bottle of wine aboard a yacht moored off Cannes during the film festival. Rubbish. They've been processed like meat through the sausage factory. Sometimes, they've just been in a group interview with 10 other journalists or even standing at the back of a crowded conference hall, dutifully scribbling down words of wisdom uttered from the press conference. It's pathetic, really, and it immediately places the journalist in a position of collusion with the entertainment machines from which they're supposed to keep some kind of critical distance. It certainly doesn't offer the possibility of stepping outside the parameters set by the PR strategists. But it fills newspapers - as the Disney PR people in London point out. A couple of hours of group interviews, and you have enough quotes for three or four (bland) features - one on Tarzan itself, perhaps; one on Phil Collins, who does the music for the movie; one on Fantasia 2000, which Roy Disney is promoting. With the increasing supplementisation of newspapers, that's a lot of holes which can be filled in one morning's work.
ONE of the most pernicious misconceptions about Hollywood is that it's run by uneducated vulgarians. The people who run Disney and who produce films such as Tarzan are very, very smart - much smarter than the journalists interviewing them - and the animators are the best in the world. It's hard not to warm to Glen Keane, lead animator on Tarzan, a modest, unassuming chap with a genius for bringing characters to life with a few deceptively simple strokes. His story of how he solved the problem of drawing Tarzan's feet by looking at his own wife's toes is charming - until you realise the same story has already appeared in hundreds of other publications. Back to the sausage factory . . .
Studios love generating these kinds of feature interviews - the etiquette of most newspapers means interviewers avoid offering a critique of the film in advance of the official review, so they're guaranteed coverage which is generally uncritical, at worst neutral, at best fawning. As it happens, Tar- zan is an excellent movie, maintaining Disney's pre-eminence in the animation field. From the clips I've seen, Toy Story 2 also looks terrific, and Fantasia 2000 is an ambitious attempt to recall the glory days of Disney's Golden Age. They're all well worth writing about, as are many other Hollywood movies - there's no place in this writer's book for arthouse superciliousness - but there's less and less point in playing this manipulative PR game.
