I Have a Bone to Pick—Where's the Meat in Movies and Cinema?

A few weeks ago, I joined a couple of friends to celebrate Rex Reed’s birthday.

Never met the man before, though I have been reading him on and off for over 40 years. Most recently it’s been off since most of the press outlets that were platforms for his often curmudgeonly comments have largely disappeared and, in fact, gone the way of the movies he most loves.

In person, Rex is an affably charming Southern gentleman and the evening with him was nothing short of delightful.

But I’ll share the bone I have to pick here with Rex. In the 43 film reviews he did last year, I could not count one from among the 30 or so I released. Given his mostly sour reviews of some of the films that most impressed me, I guess this was a lucky break.

At dinner Rex regaled us with delicious anecdotes from Hollywood’s glory years. At times he was a fly on the wall, other times a fly in the ointment (of some very sensitive-skinned stars). But his recurrent theme when looking at what is on screen today was to bemoan the lost art of cinematic storytelling. I’ve made my position clear about that in an earlier Substack post and didn’t interrupt his addicting narrative to argue my perspective.

So he’s old school, and bravo for that, even if for him the meat of the movies is still in an aging locker called Hollywood. But we’re at the stage in the short history of film where something’s seriously amiss.

Where’s the real meat in what we differentiate as “movies” and “cinema” today?

About 60 years ago, C.P. Snow threw down a dualistic gauntlet, alerting as he saw it of a great cultural divide. He bifurcated society into “two cultures:” the humanities and the sciences. The former was made up largely of literary intellectuals and latter technocratic scientists. The more modestly positioned humanities represented cultural preservation and a moral base of profound, historic artistic values while the sciences were championed by brilliantly progressive touting with near arrogance a triumphant march into an ever-improving future. They did not communicate effectively with one another, barely speaking the same language. Snow, trained as a scientist but vocationally a writer, felt he was uniquely positioned to view and comment on this divide. His own analysis was sometimes disputed as superficial, but intensely and extensively discussed by leading thinkers on both sides of the chasm. Whatever the flaws in his binary thinking, he touched a sensitive cultural nerve. The “Two Cultures” discourse has metastasized into other frames of reference. It’s a bifocal lens through which I as a distributor look at today’s world of film consumption.

So my dinner with Rex made me ponder the cultures of “movies” and “cinema” as two tastes in film, like different cuts of meat. But what’s closest to the bone: popular entertainment or artistic engagement? Fattening fun or soul nourishment? Emotional immersion or intellectual stimulation?

As an “arthouse” film distributor I’m squarely in the world of cinema. In fact, when I read the trades about the “movie business,” I often think I’m in an alternate universe. Studio box office disappointments that exceed my biggest successes by a factor of 10, if not 100, daze me, as do production and marketing costs of a single movie that may be several times what my company spends to release a year’s worth of films. Compared to companies making the trade headlines, we, and most other “arthouse” distributors, are like another culture, proudly collating and curating shreds of cinema’s meat or bone discarded by bigger movie-meal-making machines.

And yet, we play our films in hundreds of cities, reaching thin but hungry audiences seeking something nourishing and worthy of their time…and, let it be said, a good time. But the majority of our releases barely seep into media consciousness, except for the happy few that each year ascend to prestigious festival berths or rack up awards and nominations of key halo conferring organizations or events. But even these don’t significantly come to the attention of mainstream movie media the likes of which Rex Reed would keep score for.

We can spin out dichotomies about movies vs cinema until we’re blue in the face: entertainment vs art, narrative vs experimental, tabloid titillation vs political activism, studio vs indie (or Non-De), traditional distribution vs DIY solutions, passionate fan communities vs gargantuan franchise audiences, and so on.

So what’s the ultimate fate of these two cultures? Will there be some smackdown clash where one contender becomes king and redefines the culture for both? Or will they both wither as economic forces and diminishing audiences constrain the potential of each, relegating film culture a niche episode in history?

My takeaway from my dinner with Rex is that the meat and the bones of both movies and cinema, with all their cultural polarities, is already going through the grinder. The fragmentation of audiences, a process accelerated through proliferating and disintermediating new channels of access to “content,” is dissolving all outmoded categories and polarities. And it’s spawning hordes of new creator-consumers. The exploding “creator economy” is erasing distinctions between viewer and maker, participant and audience, niche and tribe, , mechanically reproduced screen media and participatory, immersive personal experience. YouTube may ultimately eat the lunch of Netflix. And we haven’t even touched on the ultimate meat butcher: AI.

As I left the dinner with Rex, I took comfort from his meaty nostalgic reminiscences about the movies. And I realized that as much as I wanted to gnaw more on the bones of cinema, what I was hungriest to taste was the essence of each…will creator content become their marrow? Will movies and cinema become merely the polished edges of creator content?

I’m in Paris now, it’s dinner time, and I’m heading to a favorite bistro for os a moelle. I have a feeling my metaphors for movies and cinema will taste even better as I scrape the bones and reward my musings with the delectable marrow. A restaurant review may follow.