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The industry also looked, as it always has, to former successes and past masters. The all-time Top Three hits -- E.T., Star Wars and Home Alone -- had similar story lines: a boy, fatherless or momentarily so, goes on a quest, defends his turf and befriends an older man. It is no surprise that the sires of these films have been the New Hollywood's surest swamis: Spielberg, George Lucas and John Hughes. Home Alone alone stoked the current PG trend. "You could say it helped expose the sheer size of this market," Hughes says modestly. It cost $18 million and grossed $285 million in North America. And box office is just the beginning. Certain G or PG films -- Disney cartoons, for example -- can make zillions more in the video sell-through market.
Hughes wrote Home Alone, he says, "because I didn't like the animated films I was taking my kids to. I'd stand out in the lobby with the other dads saying, 'Jeez, when is this going to let out so I can run to the hardware store?' I felt I should make a film so that someone in my situation -- a father -- could be amused at the same time his kids were."
Well, it worked, this story of a cute blond boy (Macaulay Culkin, the onscreen key to Home Alone's popularity), abandoned by his parents, who triumphantly foils a housebreaking criminal and wins the love of the crusty codger who lives next door. (It worked so well that Hughes Xeroxed the plot for Dennis the Menace.) It worked, Hughes believes, because "successful movies tend to reflect the opposite of American life. The more ugly and violent the streets become, the more people want to escape that reality."
Escape, for grownup moviegoers of a certain age, was when the archetypal cinema couple was Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, making silent-movie love more eloquent than poetry, or Tracy and Hepburn, turning sass into starlight. But that was long ago, when Hollywood was in its swoonily romantic adolescence. Now it is in its second childhood. The moguls have climbed back into their treehouse (NO GIRLS ALLOWED) to initiate their new holy couple: Any Male Star and Any Cute Kid.
"As the baby-boom generation gets older," says Ivan Reitman, who made his rep on R-rated comedies (Meatballs, Stripes) and whose latest hit is the PG- 13, non-kid comedy Dave, "there's a sense of greater maturity and taking more responsibility in the work we do. We have children and families. We worry about different things." And so we tell bedtime fables to our children and ourselves: little-engine-that-could movies that say everybody is exceptional. Maybe that's the kind of emotional cheerleading America needs. Maybe that's what passes for maturity.
Rudin insists that "the family film isn't a new trend. It's everybody catching on to an old trend. Studio executives now are between 35 and 45, and they all have kids between eight and 15. And they have nothing to do on the weekends. Movies reflect the people who make them, or the people who pay to make them. That's why everybody now wants to make Free Willy 14 times."