SEEING A SILVER LINING FOR THE MOVIES OF 1987

By JACK MATHEWS

Dec. 31, 1986 12 AM PT

It is at the risk of being deemed either a fool or a Pollyanna that one looks ahead and finds hopeful signs for a better run of movies coming out of Hollywood. But as we tear the last page out of what I think has been one of the worst calendar years in the history of American movies, those signs are there.

The evidence seems unmistakable that the studios, fueled by their own inherent needs for profit, are finally breaking out of the me-tooism that has guided their production decisions ever since George Lucas and Steven Spielberg popped in from the funny pages to deliver profits previously unimagined.

The $100-million milestone went the way of the 7-foot-high jump in the minds of studio heads, who set their sights higher and higher.

You only have to look at a few of the movies that slipped through the thicket of commercial caution this year to realize that something strange and potentially wonderful is going on. David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” may be perverse--nah, it is perverse--but it is an original piece of work, not “Jaws IV” or “Friday the 13th, Part VII.”

Perhaps it is part of the convulsion that Hollywood is undergoing that Dino De Laurentiis’ new studio is responsible for “Blue Velvet” and “Tai Pan,” for “Crimes of the Heart” and “King Kong Lives.” You can’t shake an addiction with a single shiver. Maybe they all have to lose $20 million on bloated spectacles targeted for mass audiences before they can appreciate the $5 million to be made from carefully nurtured originals.

After a blitzkrieg of moronic revisionist action-as-war movies, featuring the high-kicking Chuck Norris and the indestructible Sylvester Stallone, what a pleasure it was to have been turned away from a theater in Westwood last weekend because there were no tickets left for a Saturday matinee of Oliver Stone’s “Platoon.”

There has not been a more difficult movie to sit through than “Platoon” in years (no, not even “Blue Velvet”), and only people absolutely set on absorbing truth would subject themselves to its unrelentingly vivid and dehumanizing images of the Vietnam War.

It is a movie that cannot, on any level, be enjoyed--only withstood. Yet, in its limited early release, it has played to only full houses, and box-office analysts are already saying that Orion Pictures made a mistake in not giving the film a wider play over the holidays.

Some mistake! Give Orion credit for distributing the movie and Hemdale Film Corp. for financing it at all. In 10 years, nobody else would. While we’re at it, credit Orion for Jonathon Demme’s “Something Wild,” a comedy with malaise and the best movie nobody saw this year. It is going to take some time to arouse anesthetized audiences used to the natterings of Chevy Chase and John Hughes. The most hopeful signpost from 1986 was Columbia’s hiring of producer David Puttnam as its chairman and chief executive officer, and of Puttnam’s subsequent appointment of David Picker--one of the key players in the good years of the old United Artists--as head of production for Columbia.

Puttnam may not be able to overcome the scourge of agentry, or the packaging of talent that is the agent’s corrosive legacy, but it is reasonable to expect him to try.

The two studios that may be the most interesting to watch in 1987 are Columbia and Universal. Both have new leaders, but where Columbia has gone with a film maker of proven intellectual tastes, Universal has gone with a lawyer (Tom Pollock) whose main asset appears to be his personal relationships with major producers, directors and stars.

If good movies emerge from both, all the better. But for those who believe quality begins with the material rather than the deal, the sign points toward Columbia.

Will 1987 see stabilized managements at the studios? It is hard to be optimistic--coming off of a year where about half of the studios traded in their chief executives. But we’ll take the plunge and say yes. Who knows what demons flap about in the egosphere of Hollywood, but from down here on the ground, most of the studios seem to have found solid leadership.

Alan Ladd Jr. is in charge of the new MGM that will hopefully rise from the rubble left by the Ted Turner buy-out and sell-off. Without the big budgets that used to pour seductively through the spigots into the Ladd Co. at Warner Bros., Ladd can get back to making movies rather than spectacles, and it says here that he has one of the best story senses in the business.

Warner Bros. has been chugging along with the same management, successfully mixing commercial and thematically risky films, for several years.

Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg have given Walt Disney Studios an almost instant mainstream commercial credibility and have done it largely with directors (Paul Mazursky and Martin Scorsese) better known as stylists than safe box-office bets.

Paramount skipped a yearlong beat when it simultaneously lost Eisner and Barry Diller (to 20th Century Fox), but who’s sorry now? Frank Mancuso Jr. and Ned Tanen have just seen the studio through a year where it will likely end up with five of the Top 10-grossing movies.

There are other reasons for moviegoer optimism. The competition among studios to buy up theater chains, along with the jump in construction of new theaters and the imminence of 30-frame-per-second filming and projection (there’s even a long-shot possibility of films being made in 60-frame-per-second Showscan) all add up to better presentation.

Now, if someone can just figure out how to get people to shut up while they watch the movies. . . .