HAS THE SUN SET ON THE CINEMA? Shocking field study results
Some interesting and disturbing results from my journalistic investigations. In my work at Yahoo Entertainment, we have for a couple months been hitting actors with e about their pop cultural backgrounds.
One of the questions is: What is the first movie you ever saw?
For people of my generation (X), that’s not a question that you even have to think about. It’s like asking people what date their birthday is on. Growing up watching the same episodes of “Family Affair” over and over on fuzzy rabbit ears reception, suddenly being taken into a dark palace where a huge image soaring above plays out an epic story with production pieces beyond your wildest fantasies was one of the formative experiences of our lives. Mine was Willie Wonka, and you can only imagine after 4 years of F Troop what that was suddenly like. To say my life was changed in a day would not be understating. And so it was for most people I know.
So what has shocked me while conducting this survey, is that when I’ve talked to actors - and mind you, these are people who make their careers on the screen - in their 20’s or below and ask them this question, nearly to a person they can’t remember. Or they don’t understand the question and they think I’m asking: what was the first movie you watched on TV. Their answers in this questionnaire, nearly always end up being that: the first film they remember watching on repeat on DVD. But almost none of them had a clear memory of going to the movie theater for the first time. And this includes from very intelligent, incredibly creative young people I’ve spoken to.
This is of course disturbing for a thousand reasons. But most of all, I remember my time working at a newspaper way back in the mid 00’s when circulation was just taking the first stomach churning lurches as the jets began to fall from the sky. I remember how everyone had their thoughts about how the paper - and all papers - were messing up, and everyone had their answers for how to lure people back. But at the bottom of it, every consideration came back to the fact that at that point two or three generations had come of age without adopting the newspaper habit as part of their daily lives, and having matured without it, it was going to be impossible to convince them it was necessary.
Whether these generations losing the newspaper habit was the fault of the newspapers themselves, just a reflection of the changing ways people consumed information or the growing post-literacy of our times is an interesting topic for debate (I vote for a combination of all three), but the fact remained that once that ship had sailed, newspapers doom was pre-ordained.
So: I put it to you America. Do are dozen or so actors I’ve talked to indicative of a larger trend? And if moviegoing has lost its special place in the imagination, can it survive? Or is that specialness something that people are able to come by later? I have no opinion on “box office slump” reporting, other than generally to support my friend David Poland’s assertions that the articles on this are wildly simplistic and over-hyping a trend. But stil! I worry!
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