The cultural impresario is a cultural intermediary who manages the chains of attraction between a performer and an audience for a profit. Cultural impresarios present celebrities in sensationalized terms so as to maximize their attraction. Celetoids are an accessory of this culture. Cultural impre-sarios are central in moulding the public face of celetoids and presenting them as objects of intense, evanescent public preoccupation. In contrast, celebrities represent a more durable form of attraction over the public. As the twentieth century developed, the conduct of their careers tended to take the form of corporate, rather than personal, management.
Consider the Hollywood studio system. It had its roots in the silent film days. But it was overhauled and refined during the 1930s and ’40s by movie moguls such as Irving Thalberg, Louis B. Mayer, David Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn and Jack Warner. The UK developed a weaker version of the system under studio czars that included Sir Alexander Korda and J.
Arthur Rank. The Hollywood system treated the studio as a business corporation and stacked enormous powers in the hands of producers. They were able to hire out contract players to other studios for a fee, block or rewrite scripts, and veto projects selected by stars who were under contract to them. Thalberg, in particular, acquired the reputation for ruthless firm-ness and iron busifirm-ness judgement. F. Scott Fitzgerald based the mogul in his novel The Last Tycoon (1941) on him. The producer regarded his main loyalty as to the corporation. Where necessary he subordinated the inter-ests of the celebrities under his control for the corporation’s benefit. The cultural impresario representing the celebrity was no longer able to deter-mine all elements of the presentation of the public face of the celebrity.
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Already, by the 1930s, the sheer scale and cost of movie production required the form of the corporation to produce, market and distribute the product. The role of cultural impresarios began to change subtly. They moved from being all-purpose showmen, à la Barnum, to being business agents who represented their clients’ interests by contracting them to a studio, leasing them to a rival studio for specific projects or managing specialized public relations exercises, in a word selling them like a commod-ity. The relationship between the agent and the studio producer became pivotal in developing celebrity careers. The studio system lasted until the mid-1960s, and is generally regarded to have been, on balance, a stifling influence on artistic freedom.
The studio system was successfully challenged in the late 1960s by the rise of independent film-makers. However, after a relatively short interreg-num that lasted until the mid-1970s, the revolution of independent films petered out. A new intrusive system of control, the axial principle of which was the relationship between the agent and the corporation, became ascen-dant. Cultural impresarios like the egregious Don Simpson, who produced Flashdance (1983), Beverly Hills Cop 1 and 2 (1984, 1987), Top Gun (1986), Days of Thunder (1990), Crimson Tide (1995), Dangerous Minds (1995) and The Rock (1996), became dominant in determining the narrative, casting, style and even the soundtrack of a film. But they did so in liaison with studios who were ultimately answerable to parent corporations like Disney, Seagram (owners of Universal), Time Warner and Sony.
Simpson is widely credited with inventing the ‘high concept’ in movie production. Others claim that it was invented by either Barry Diller during his term as programming executive at ABC in the early ’70s, or Michael Eisner, currently head of Disney films, during his period at Paramount.
High concept refers to the stripping down of narrative content to a sole, simple idea that will be immediately grasped by audiences in order to galvanize their interest. The script-writer Chip Proser, who was involved in development work for Top Gun, recalled that Simpson’s original
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concept pitch was simplicity itself. ‘It was two guys in leather jackets and sunglasses standing in front of the biggest, fastest, fucking airplane you ever saw in your life’.8The eventual plot of the movie is remarkably faithful to this idea. A stereotypal collection of rival trainee fighter pilots compete, for several weeks of intense aerial combat, to win the coveted ‘Top Gun trophy’, which provides the winner with the plum job of a Top Gun flight instructor. The one-dimensional characters are part of a tapestry in which velocity and hazard really have the starring roles. Indeed, high concept presupposes minimal character development, so as to maximize the physi-cal aspects of the characters, notably their appearance and demeanour.
Music is a short cut to establishing presence, motive and style. For exam-ple, in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980), the Giorgio Moroder /Blondie song ‘Call Me’ is used to illustrate the daily routine of the high-priced gigolo Julian Kay (Richard Gere). The song is used as the backdrop to Julian buying expensive clothes, preening and driving in his Mercedes to meet female clients.
Simpson understood the value of product placement, and constructed his high-concept movies around a soundtrack that included a potential hit.
For example, Glenn Frey’s ‘The Heat is On’ was the hit song from the soundtrack of Beverly Hills Cop; Irene Cara’s ‘What a Feeling’ was the hit for Flashdance; and the Giorgio Moroder/Tom Whitlock song ‘Take My Breath Away’ was a number one hit from Top Gun. Simpson both antici-pated, and was influenced by, the production values of the promotional Pop video and MTV.
Network television has adopted the high concept strategy in the devel-opment of quiz shows like Blind Date, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and The Other Half. Who Wants to be a Millionaire? was developed in Britain. It has been exported worldwide and is generally regarded to be one of the most successful quiz formats of the turn of the century. The entire show revolves around the simple principle that contestants answer a series of questions that might lead to them winning £1 million. Each round of
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tions becomes progressively harder and contestants have the option to ask the studio audience and phone a friend if they are stuck. But these options are fixed, and once they are exhausted, contestants are on their own.
High concept is the apotheosis of the cultural impresario’s art. It reduces aesthetic and narrative content to the lowest economic denomina-tor of the marketplace. The ramifications of a single sensational idea are worked out obsessively, but without any interest in commenting on, or reforming, culture or society. High concept might be defined as mass enter-tainment without reflection.
For example, Armageddon, produced by Don Simpson’s old partner, Jerry Bruckheimer, was the number one box office film of 1998, grossing
$202 million. The plot is pure high concept. A giant meteor is being sucked into the earth’s orbit, and collision will mean the end of the world. Around this simple, but arresting notion is embroidered a story of Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), a maverick explosives expert working in the oil-drilling business. Somewhat implausibly, Stamper and his team are identified as the only munitions experts capable of destroying the meteor. NASA trains them and puts them into outer space, where, after some staged mishaps, Stamper detonates the meteor and saves the world, albeit by sacrificing himself in the process.
What is interesting about Armageddon and high-concept movies in general is their inherent conservatism. The film opens by lampooning Greenpeace, whose members are staging a protest against Stamper’s oil rig. Stamper is a classic Hollywood example of the rugged individualist, one who is only summoned to save the world when government has palpa-bly failed. The rockets that send him and his crew to intercept the meteor are called ‘Freedom’ and ‘Independence’. The subplot between Stamper and his earthbound daughter, played by Liv Tyler, reinforces traditional family values. Stamper’s martyrdom draws his daughter closer to his wayward surrogate son, played by Ben Affleck, who is a young rugged indi-vidualist in Stamper’s mould, and makes their marriage inevitable.
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There was bound to be a reaction against the corporatization of Hollywood. Prima facie, the success of the Blair Witch Project (1999), which returned a huge profit on a small investment, seemed to signal the return to the heyday of the independents. But the difference between 2001 and the 1960s is that the corporations and their studio affiliates are not in crisis.
There is no real sense that corporations have lost touch with popular taste or that they are bankrolling films which, aesthetically and politically, belong to another era. What the independents have done is to point to gaps in the consumer market that Hollywood had not spotted.
Hollywood corporations have responded to the challenge by absorb-ing independents. Disney now owns Miramax, Seagram owns October and Time Warner owns New Line Cinema. Film commentators refer to the rise of ‘Indiewood’, in which the creative, risk-taking values of independent film makers are supported by the wealth and ‘guidance’ of the parent corporation. This is probably not going to be a marriage made in heaven.
The commercial logic of the corporation requires executives to produce a profit in the long run. The independent film-maker is impelled to follow a quite contrary logic, one driven by aesthetic considerations. In cases where there is an irreconcilable division between business and aesthetic logic, the tendency is for business logic to triumph. Thus, the aesthetic values devel-oped in Indiewood are likely to be subordinated to the dictate of the corporate balance sheet. The power that corporations now exercise over film distribution and marketing mean that if independent film-makers break from the corporation and try to flourish autonomously, their films are likely to be confined to the margins of popular culture.
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