New book argues indie went mainstream during Hollywood’s ‘last hurrah’

From a layman’s perspective, it always seems like Hollywood is going through some sort of change.

Right now, it’s a battle over AI. But there are often strikes and mergers and other big technological shifts that shake up entertainment. It can be hard to really pin down patterns or eras — unless you’re an expert.

Thomas Schatz is just that sort of expert. He’s a professor emeritus in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at UT Austin and he’s just published a new book about what he calls the Hollywood’s last golden age.

It’s called “Power Surge: Conglomerate Hollywood and the Studio System’s Last Hurrah.” 

He joined the Standard to talk about his new book. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: You’ve written several books and are really considered an expert on the studio era. Your book, “The Genius of the System,” took us from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Here, you focus on much more recent Hollywood history: 1989 to 2004. Why? 

Thomas Schatz: This “conglomerate era,” as I call it, began in 1989 with the Time Warner and Sony/Columbia mergers. Another Japanese company that would eventually become Panasonic bought Universal in 1990.

The ensuing 15 or so years just saw a series of merger and acquisitions. It saw all of the big studios, all of TV networks, almost all of cable networks, changing hands and realigning. 

It eventually culminates in 2004 with NBCUniversal, and at that point, six companies owned all the major studios, all the TV networks, most of the cable networks, and that controlled publishing and other industries as well. But film and television was the secret to their considerable success during that era. 

Well this was an era of huge blockbusters, but you write about how indie went mainstream. How did Hollywood balance those two very different types of films? 

It was one of the real amazing peculiarities of that period. It was, in many ways, quite accidental.

1989 was the year of [Tim] Burton’s “Batman” and I think of that as the first really modern blockbuster because Time Warner controlled the, as they say, IP — the intellectual property. They owned DC, they owned Batman. 

Tim Burton was really a work-for-hire director for hire on that film, and it was up against a lot of big,  heavily synergized pictures that summer. It blew them all away, mainly because it was the year of Time Warner and that larger company was able to control the marketplace on a global scale and also spin off lots and lots of merchandise and other things.

That film did a billion dollars in its first year of release, which at that time was a huge deal. 

That was a game-changer. But at the same time, that same year in 1989, was the year of “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “Do the Right Thing,” Michael Moore’s first movie, “Roger & Me”… It was a very sudden arrival of the so-called indie movement and indie players like [Steven] Soderbergh and others and it continued for the next couple of years with all kinds of films. 

The big breakthrough developments on the indie side of things were the launch of Sony Pictures Classics in 1992, and a much bigger deal was Disney buying Miramax in 1993. That really enabled Miramax to grow from just a distribution company to a producer of films.

The first film they produced with Disney money was — amazingly enough, this was something that they were able to do without permission from Disney, because they were set up autonomously — but it was “Pulp Fiction.”

It’s also worth mentioning that just before the Miramax-Disney deal, Miramax picked up “The Piano,” the Jane Campion film, and they had a lot more money to spend on distribution and that was one of the first films that was accused of buying Oscars. Harvey Weinstein spent enormous amounts of money marketing that movie very successfully.

Within a couple of years, all of the big guys had indie divisions and a couple of them had several indie divisions. By 1999, that was kind of a big year for what I tend to refer to as “studio-indie hybrid films like “Fight Club” that were big studio movies but they were really indie-leaning in terms of talent. 

It’s also worth mentioning that kind of the peak of the conglomerate era, for me, in many ways, was in 2003/2004, in terms of what was happening with big blockbusters. In 2003 was the last of the Peter Jackson “Lord of the Rings” films, which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and it won 11 Academy Awards.

So you mentioned that peak in 2004. What happened just after that that marked a turning point for Hollywood? 

Several things happen. One is that the independent impulse begins to wane, particularly in terms of the mainstream studio support. The key factors were really from the conglomerate — the owner’s perspective was the growth of the international marketplace, the foreign box office money. 

Through the late ’90s and early aughts, foreign revenues were about even with domestic revenues. In 2004, it suddenly changes very dramatically: The foreign revenues surged 50% higher than domestic. By 2009, they doubled domestic. By 2019, right before the pandemic, they were close to tripling the domestic revenues. 

What’s happening is the foreign market is going crazy and foreign audiences love blockbuster movies. You’ve got a new generation of executives who simply couldn’t rationalize making risky, indie-style movies. The indie market just simply is pushed back to the margins and Hollywood is concentrating just on these big-budget blockbusters. 

Well, if your books are an indicator, Hollywood can be cyclical. Are you hopeful about its future? 

What’s happening now, for anyone that’s paying any attention, it’s hard to miss. The old studios are either consolidating or being swallowed up. We’re going through another conglomeration era, but it’s one that is being dominated by something other than media companies, depending on how you look at companies like Amazon and Netflix and so on. 

The only company that’s really managed to survive on its own terms during the streaming era is Disney. Disney is competitive with Netflix. The two of them are really dominating, in many ways, the industry. We’re now just waiting for the Paramount-Warner merger to be completed and Disney’s already bought Fox.

This really was the studio system’s last hurrah. Unfortunately, there are periods where commerce just pushes art out of the way, or pushes it further to the margins, and we’ve been in that mode for about a decade at least.

What’s happening with streaming and what’s happened with… One of the things that we’re maybe only vaguely aware of is the extent to which Disney and other companies, HBO and Disney — HBO is owned by Warner, of course — is beginning to blur the boundaries between feature films and TV series. 

I think we’re going through a period of significant transformation, one that that I think people are are generally aware of. This period so-called “quality television” that we’ve gone through is an interesting kind of variation on the indie movement of 20 or 30 years ago.

One way or another, art doesn’t prevail, but it persists. I think we’re seeing that now with streaming as well as theatrical filmmaking.

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