ALMOST 90 YEARS AGO, AN ENGLISHWOMAN NAMED ELINOR Glyn wrote a racy best seller called Three Weeks that had it all: Venice! Illicit passion! Making out on a tiger-skin rug! Eventually, inevitably, she was invited to Hollywood to write screenplays and dine out. At some point in her stay the industry entered one of its periods of uncertainty-or perhaps one should say one of its periods of more-than-usual uncertainty-and someone asked Madame Glyn what she thought might happen next. "Whatever will make the most money," she sagaciously replied.
In a sense, that's all you can ever safely say about Hollywood. The problem has always been to discern, in advance, in helpful detail, how to pass Go and (nowadays) collect $200 million domestic, God knows what in the ancillaries. For movie trends-or even individual hits-do not reveal themselves until they are actually thundering down on us. No executive, no agent, certainly no mere movie reviewer usually spots one until it is actually rolling over his toes, sharp pain belatedly signaling where the most money is likely to be found for the next few months-and that the victim has once again been looking for it in all the wrong places.
Sweetly, touchingly, the human soul yearns to believe complicated enterprises like the movie game can rationally be comprehended and managed. So, beginning as far back as Madame Glyn's day, sober and cautious men wearing double-breasted suits and tasteful ties have paid huge bucks to production executives they thought could realize this dream for them. Such men don't read novels. If they did, they would be familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum: "Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads."
Fitzgerald romanticized the business (as he did everything else) and so vastly exaggerated his census of production genius. Another writer, William Goldman, author and fixer of many a screenplay, came closer to the true figure, which is zip. NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING, he wrote, putting his dictum in capital letters in the vain hope that people would pay serious attention to it.
But, of course, they didn't. Because they don't want to. The dream is more alluring: surely somewhere there has to be someone who knows something. If not, why aren't we in cellular phones like all the other sensible people? This year the popular betting is that there are three such someones, that their names are Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen, and that what passes for a millennium--or, anyway, a damned good special-effects version of it--may be at hand.
I don't know. They are smart guys, all of them, but ask yourself this: a year ago, did you know--or even guess--that when the Academy Awards rolled around again the odds-on favorite to sweep a bunch of the big ones would be something called Forrest Gump? Or that its chief competitor would be Pulp Fiction? And what about Four Weddings and a Funeral, also in the running for best picture? Did you imagine that a $4 million romantic comedy, made in England, with no big stars, would turn out to be, dollar-in, dollar-out, the most profitable picture of the year? For that matter, did you think, a year ago, even if you happened to kind of shamefacedly like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, that Jim Carrey would turn out to be the hottest star of the year?