The Hollywood Movie Remake Racket

As those claqueurs and courtiers of Hollywood who may be collectively spoken as the entertainment press never fail to remind those who would criticize the tendency of the U.S. film industry to remakes these days, remakes have always been part of the industry's history. What these worthies do not rush to similarly remind them is that remakes were more easily justified in an earlier, different Hollywood. After all, in the studio system's early days the bosses thought of films not as works of art, or even "intellectual property," with all the possibility of lasting value, artistic or commercial, implied in that, but disposable commodities they frequently gave little thought to preserving, as ephemeral as a single performance of a play that might have a long run--perhaps the more plausibly in as there was such a vast output of films at high speed and low cost, and the art and the business were so much in flux. The rise of the talkie made silent films nearly unsalable, and the advent of the Motion Picture Production Code (i.e. "the Hays Code") meant that many pre-Code movies no longer met the requirements of censors a very short time after they were made. And so it was plausible to remake a silent film as a talkie, and a no longer "suitable" pre-Code film as a Code-compliant film to have a version that could be safely screened before the public. Indeed, in a time when the face of a star on the poster was a key selling point (often, a very large part of all the ticket-buyer knew about a movie), and stars flickered out fast, there was a case for remaking a movie from ten years ago with new stars--extending the play analogy, it seemed like merely recasting a play--with all this that much more the case in as the public did not have such easy access to the old versions. (Thus did we end up with three film adaptations of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon in a decade--with the third of them, the one helmed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, the only one even genuine old movie-lovers are likely to have seen.) Later, the advent of widescreen formats like Cinemascope and Panavision, and color, made it plausible to remake spectacles like the historical epics of the black-and-white era to give them the visual benefit of those technologies (especially where, as with a Ben-Hur, the old version happened to be silent), all as the final fall of the Code in the late '60s opened the door to remaking movies that previously could only appear on the screen in bowdlerized form because of the extreme restrictions regarding the treatment of matters such as the law, sexuality and race. (Thus did the studios, post-Code, remake such noir classics as The Big Sleep and The Postman Always Rings Twice, two adaptations of classic crime novels where central elements could not be put on the screen because of such restrictions. The remakes, which did take advantage of the relaxed censorship, were not great artistic or commercial successes, but the point is that there was a case for the endeavor.)

All of this ceased to be plausible a long time ago, as there have been no innovations in film as fundamental as sound, or even color, or changes in standards so important as the rise and fall of the Code, while in a post-star milieu the idea that an old film will be made commercially viable by simply reshooting the old thing with new actors is not persuasive--with all this that much more the case with older films increasingly accessible in the age of multiplying cable channels, home video, and eventually streaming. This does not, I think, rule out any and all remakes. One can always argue for a remake if they think it will bring something new to the screen--for instance, by providing the kind of more faithful or otherwise more satisfactory adaptation that prior efforts failed to yield (as could be argued for when thinking of those old noir classics). Certainly I would regard a remake of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (previously filmed twice, by Josef von Sternberg and George Stevens, neither wholly satisfactorily) would be a valid idea. At the other end of the artistic spectrum I would think a new Conan the Barbarian film that was really faithful to Robert Howard's writing would also fit the bill (because, much as I share many others' fondness for the 1982 John Milius film, faithful it wasn't). But in the main that is not what we have been getting, the pattern instead one of crass cash grabs driven by the desire to exploit the name recognition of past hits, with wokeness at times served up as an excuse. (Like so much else of what people laughed at in the 1990s the old In Living Color sketch satirizing Ted Turner's "colorized classics" is no longer parody and satire, but conventional wisdom.) Most of these cash grabs fail--deservedly--but in a Hollywood where ego is colossal and brains are in short supply as simple-minded strategies for keeping the revenue coming fail they are holding on to the idea for dear life all the same.