Box-Office Theory Sinks With 'Titanic'

What does have resonance for moviegoers in "Deep Impact" are the relationships, and my guess is that this was only apparent when the film was finally seen by paying audiences, just as the way audiences focused on the relationships in "Titanic" only became clear when the film was released. This is why "Deep Impact" has continued to gross better than expected (Entertainment Weekly eventually called it "The Little Event Movie That Could"--only in Hollywood would an $80-million movie be called "little").

Part of the reason that "Titanic" and "Deep Impact" have worked, and worked for female audiences, is that both films take their relationships seriously. David Denby, film critic for New York magazine, wrote an essay that appeared in the New Yorker (April 6) in which he took American movies to task for not giving their audiences emotion. He complained that "even to speak of movie emotion in such terms is now extremely awkward. In so many Hollywood movies nothing much is at stake."

He also criticized the way cynical irony had taken over not only the films but the marketing of the films: "Big movies are now spoofs without a target; they draw on a generalized facetiousness. Corporate irony, which ridicules the very thing that it is selling--and ridicules the act of selling, too--is the deadliest weapon ever leveled against artistic seriousness (including comic seriousness)."

One can see what he is talking about in regard to corporate irony in the quote from the Paramount executive, but it is not surprising that Denby does not mention "Titanic" at all in his essay, because it would invalidate much of what he says, which was true of American films a year ago. The seriousness with which a lot of its audience took "Titanic" changed the game, and "Deep Impact" is the beneficiary of that change.

*

The director of "Deep Impact" was a woman, Mimi Leder. (Full disclosure time: Leder was a student of mine in the Radio-Television-Cinema Department at Los Angeles City College in the early '70s. While I would like to claim we taught her everything she knows, we didn't. The talent, film sense and drive are all hers.) What Leder brings to "Deep Impact" is the seriousness about character that distinguishes her extraordinary Emmy-winning work on "China Beach" and "ER."