Paul Schrader Wants Better Moviegoers, Says Audiences Don't

The audiences he's referring to are enjoying the Golden Age of Television.

When films like Silence, Blade Runner 2049, Mother! and Widows underperform or even flat out flop, it's hard to argue with him that audiences don't take film seriously.

Although, audiences in the 70's flocked to pay for porn in the cinema and a shit ton of exploitation so I'm not sure they had that much better taste.

Paul Schrader is the screenwriting equivalent of the "old man yells at cloud" headline from The Simpsons. The '70s had a lot of great movies, but there was a lot of shit in them as well, same as any other decade.

He's right, that quote above is very wise and he's lucky anybody is asking a writer - an actual writer for Godsakes! -  anything at all these days.

Do you think that's really true that people laughed when it cut to black because they took themselves too seriously?

Is it that or they didn't respect the film enough to try to understand it, process it or think about it? 

See, I'd say that's not taking it or their movie experience seriously enough - what American film is even serious about religion, God and faith anyway - certainly not many since Last Temptation of Christ (Schrader again). So much so that on this board to even criticize that film we have had to evoke Bergman and Bresson -  who gets held to comparisons like that unless you even try to go into that territory?

So while I agree there's good and bad in every decade, every decade is not the same either. There's a reason the 70s are the high water mark and always will be - because never before or since have artists (writers, directors) had more power than they did then. Those artists pushed the culture - that's what he's saying, he's not weighing the "general" best of each decade exactly.

In 2018 almost no artists pushed the culture, Schrader did, he did an issues film set right now. It's amazingly rare to even try it, much less a faith based film. In general you'll get Blackkklansman or Vice or Chappaquiddick or Buster Scruggs or Roma - we can argue how good those films are but they are not what he did and that's the big problem.

It's like I always say, movies must first be set now - not always, but much more so than they are. Taxi Driver (Schrader again) spoke to you in a different way - it described New York in real time - you could go see it in NYC and then step out into a world that just evoked what you just saw on screen.  That is an exciting conflict that makes for smarter audiences and filmmakers.

 It makes audiences quicker to dismiss things now though because there's comfort in the past, there's illusion in the future and both often give you a story you already know. 3 Billboards had it...............First Reformed had this "here and RIGHT now" element. 

Not much else does right now. 

Well, he's not entirely wrong.

Well, I wasn't alive in the seventies so I can only speak from my own experiences, but I worked in a movie theater for over five years (one in northern Illinois, one in southern California) and was consistently stunned by the consensus taste of my patrons. Flat-out TERRIBLE. Any time an acclaimed genre work came out (that WASN'T a superhero movie), I would encounter complaint-after-complaint about how terrible the movie was and how "critics don't know what they're talking about." "Blade Runner 2049 was SO boring!" "Gravity was so overrated! It was just Sandra Bullock floating in space for two hours!" "Mad Max: Fury Road had no plot!" Any time an arthouse horror film would get released (such as The Babadook, The Witch, It Follows, The Neon Demon, It Comes at Night, and Hereditary), we'd have to deal with over half the audience on opening weekend demanding their money back at the end of the film. "That was so stupid!!" Any time an Oscar contender drama would come out that DIDN'T adhere to the stuffy, mainstream Green Book-style cookie-cutter formula, we'd get complaint after complaint about how weird and/or boring the movie was. Phantom Thread: "What the HELL was that movie about?!" The Wolf of Wall Street: "It was like a porn movie! You should've warned your customers!" The Master, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Carol: "I fell asleep." And god forbid an actual arthouse film like Song to Song or Under the Skin came to our theater. We'd sell maybe twenty tickets throughout the whole two-week screening window, and over half of them would get refunded.

But this is the part that INFURIATED me: by FAR the most common statement I'd hear from guest after guest after guest was this: "Hollywood is out of ideas. All they do is make comic book movies and remakes and sequels these days." And yet every time a comic book movie came out, our theater would be PACKED and the whole crowd would go crazy over how great the movie was. The hypocrisy of their complaints drove me crazy, as if it was HOLLYWOOD to blame for their shitty taste. I'm SO happy I won't have to deal with the new Lion King crowds. Within the same breath these audiences would be complaining about Hollywood being out of ideas, while also proclaiming, "They BETTER not change anything from the original movie I grew up with."

I apologize for the bitterness, but as a huge movie fan, it became utterly disheartening to hear these comments during every shift for five years. So I absolutely, 100% agree with Paul Schrader: the problem with mainstream cinema stems from the audiences, not the filmmakers. The masses only like garbage. Maybe it was that way in the seventies, I don't know. But it's definitely the way it is now.

Star Wars, Jaws and Superman don't really count as franchises, since they were first installments.