No Silver Age for Hollywood

As the stars of the day become disconcertingly younger and younger, and a career may not last even as long as the latest tabloid marriage, the issue of age in Hollywood has become increasingly contentious.

For mature actors and writers looking to express their frustration with what they perceive as an increasingly youthful and dismissive Hollywood executive class, a panel discussion Thursday night at the Skirball Cultural Center presented a perfect opportunity to vent.

“Young and Younger: Age, Image, and the Movies” was the first in a series of events coordinated by AARP The Magazine and the Skirball.

Nearly filling the auditorium was an audience that presented its own interesting demographic twists. With only a smattering of those in attendance appearing to be younger than 35, the majority of the crowd were a fashionable and well-heeled group who seemed to be in their 40s and 50s.

There was also a strong contingent whose age presumably went up from there.

Moderating the discussion was Bernard Weinraub, West Coast correspondent for the New York Times, and participants were Leo Braudy, author of such books as “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History” and a professor at the University of Southern California; actress Tyne Daly; Alexander Payne, director and co-writer of such films as “Election” and “About Schmidt”; and Terry Press, head of marketing for Dreamworks SKG.

Once the evening opened for a question and answer period, it was the older members of the audience who became the most vocal, many revealing themselves to be actors and writers looking to express their frustration.

Weinraub got the session going with a question for Daly, who currently appears on the television show “Judging Amy,” by asking about her career options as “an actress of a certain age.”

“Anything I can imagine,” she replied, “You probably should have a movie star up here because I think it is much harder for women in movies than in television. Movies have always been about an ideal, where television is often about what’s comforting or what people can feel superior to.” She self-deprecatingly added, “I figure I was only asked here because you couldn’t get a movie star.”

Citing the success of films such as “Something’s Gotta Give,” Weinraub posed the question as to why Hollywood studios have not been more eager to make films that appeal to an older segment of the population.

“The ratio of movies that an older audience turns out for every year is relatively small,” responded Press. “An older audience, as opposed to a younger audience, demands the one thing Hollywood cannot seem to manage to turn out a great deal of, which is quality.

“There are certain things about older audiences. One, they are review-sensitive and pay attention to what other people say about movies. Two, they don’t necessarily come the opening weekend, and that’s expensive for the movie business because you have to sustain advertising and marketing over a longer period of time. Keeping it out there is an expensive proposition. And they’re more choosy with how they spend their time than a 14-year-old boy.

“Let’s face it, you get older and you don’t have a lot of time for [junk] and Hollywood puts out a lot of [junk].”

Trying for a second time to steer the conversation toward “Something’s Gotta Give,” Weinraub noted, “In the interest of full disclosure, my wife [Columbia Pictures Chairwoman Amy Pascal] is the studio executive who made that movie, and [writer and director] Nancy Meyers said to me that she took the script around and was told at one studio that nobody wants to see old people making love, though that wasn’t quite the term that was used.”

“ ‘Something’s Gotta Give,’ ” Press contended, “you have to take out of the equation because it’s got Jack Nicholson and that’s a genre unto itself. And to me ... it goes into a sort of fantasy realm. If I lived in that house I would not need Jack Nicholson. I enjoyed the movie, but the idea that both a young doctor and Jack Nicholson loved her, that’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ for middle-aged women.”

Adroitly summing up the discussion, Braudy observed that “We’re really talking about three different things. One is movies with stories about older people. The other is how do older performers get hired and the third is what does an audience want from a story. These are all complicated questions.”

Asked if the television industry’s treatment of older people is any better than the world of feature films, Daly complained that television is preoccupied with particular categories “as if people are only interested in their own stories. People always said ‘Cagney and Lacey’ was for women, but I wanted it to be for everybody. Lifetime Television really [ticks] me off, the idea that something would only be interesting for women.”

Payne agreed. “I have a problem with the thinking that in order to appeal to a certain age group the movie has to be about that same age group. I don’t understand that. Coming of age as a teenager in the 1970s, the greatest movie for kids was ‘The Sting.’ ”

“You were a teenager in the 1970s? That’s depressing,” Weinraub interjected.

Concurring with Payne and Daly, Braudy noted that “the whole point of going to a movie is to get into the heads or skins of other people. But the idea that everything belongs in a little compartment -- is there now no larger culture, just a series of archipelagos of smaller cultures tenuously linked to one another? The wide audience may not exist the way it did in 1946, but have we lost the idea of a common culture?”

Weinraub asked Payne, whose “About Schmidt” starred Nicholson as a man adrift as he enters retirement, about the difficulties of pitching and setting up a film about older people when the Hollywood system currently seems so geared toward younger audiences and story lines.

“All I know is my own experience,” Payne said, “which is I fight to make the movies I want to see. My own philosophy as a youngish Hollywood director is I never care if my movies are hits, but I do want them to make at least $1 profit so I can keep making them.

“And ‘About Schmidt’ took some doing to get made, but it did get made. And fortunately it [grossed] $105 million.” Payne said. “ ‘Election,’ a high school movie, was hard to get made for $8 million.”

At this Press perked up and said, “I just imagine that landing like a spaceship in the middle of Paramount. I couldn’t believe Paramount had made it.” When Weinraub inquired why she felt that way, she continued, “Because it’s really good.”

Following a combination of laughter and surprise from the audience, Press added, “You need to understand something, big studios function like machines and a movie like ‘Election’ comes along and the gears grind. Things stop ratcheting. People say, ‘Oh, studios don’t make movies like this’ and the reality is studios aren’t very good at releasing movies like this.”

She has a point. “Election” grossed $14.9 million in theaters.

Many in the audience seemed to be searching for some answers as to what could be done to battle the perceived ageism of Hollywood, both behind the scenes and on the screen.

“It depends on whether you think popular culture reflects the society or leads the society,” Daly said. “That’s a whole other panel. But in terms of whether or not we can make a social movement to make old people visible, I don’t know.”

As for whether popular culture reflects or influences, “Well, that’s the conundrum,” Braudy said. “And it shifts at different times. Now I think it’s reflective. Is the whole point to see stories about you or to experience other sensibilities? To a certain extent every film has to do a bit of both.”