Paul Thomas: Cinema gets bigger, louder and dumber

One thing we can safely say about Peter Jackson's 8000kg gorilla of a movie is that it's bigger than Ben-Hur. Although Ben-Hur had the proverbial cast of thousands, extras come cheap compared to a mountainous ape that can rip limbs off dinosaurs, scale the Empire State Building and reduce an audience to tears.

The old maxim that bigger isn't necessarily better doesn't apply to Hollywood blockbusters. Better is beside the point; size is everything.

This, presumably, is what Jackson's collaborator scriptwriter Philippa Boyens was on about in last weekend's Time Out. "When other directors see this movie," she gushed, "they're going to [expletive] give up."

The early signs are that King Kong will be another triumph for Team Jackson, although my source here is Wellington's daily newspaper, a tireless booster of the Wellywood concept and which covered the New York premiere as if it was the Second Coming.

Still, I think Boyens got a bit carried away. I seriously doubt that Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Woody Allen or the Coen brothers will simply give the game away on the basis that Kong is the last word in film-making.

But her underlying assumption - that the monstrously expensive, special effects-driven, essentially childish blockbuster is what the game's all about - has some validity.

Kong is another step in the transformation of film from an activity in which art and entertainment were awkward bedfellows into a branch of the global entertainment industry, alongside theme parks, casinos and computer games.

There have always been big, loud, dumb movies, but some time in the past 30 years they went from being a branch of cinema to the trunk.

There are various theories for this, ranging from the dawning of the post-literate society to the drug and ego-fuelled excesses of superstar directors who blew a historic opportunity and handed control of the industry back to the suits.

The vastly increased spending power and therefore economic clout of the youth market must surely be a major factor. In our household, the kids go to 10 times as many movies as the adults. If this is the norm then it's little wonder that so many movies are made for a youthful audience.

But it's a chicken-and-egg process: grown-ups don't go to as many movies because there aren't as many grown-up movies.

I was a movie buff in my 20s, which roughly coincided with the 1970s, a time when films such as The Wild Bunch, The Godfather and Raging Bull showed what could be achieved when Hollywood budgets and technical expertise were deployed in worthy causes.

Queen St was movie mile but there were also plenty of suburban cinemas, and the Sunday night double-feature was a sacred part of the weekly routine.

The film festival showcased new work by masters of European cinema, whereas today - understandably, given the spread of Hollywood values and formulae - festival programmes seem to favour exotica and experimentation.

In his book Monster, John Gregory Dunne tells a story that illuminates Hollywood's decline into infantilism.

Dunne and his wife Joan Didion decided to write an action film. They drafted a treatment crammed with what they thought was the requisite amount of mayhem (or "whammies" as they're known in the industry, a term covering anything that involves deafening explosions, spectacular destruction and lavish loss of life) and sent it to director Renny Harlin, whose credits include Die Hard 2.

His feedback went as follows: "First act: better whammies. Second act: whammies mount up. Third act: all whammies."

What most differentiates cinema from other media is money. Movies are expensive, and the greater the cost, the higher the anxiety over their fate at the box office.

That anxiety can lead studios to hedge their bets by stripping the project of elements that might confuse or alienate the audience (usually the most original elements and those that attracted them to it in the first place) and making it as similar as possible to recent hits.

Kong cost $294 million, and many more millions are being spent on marketing and promotion because its backers simply can't afford to let it fail. It's like that law of the business jungle: if you owe the bank $10,000, you've got a problem; if you owe them $10 million, they've got a problem.

This is the Catch 22 logic of the blockbuster: they cost a fortune, so you then have to spend another fortune to ensure they make money.

And as almost anything will sell if you hype it loudly and expensively enough, when the profits start trickling in, the studio bosses pat themselves on the back for having got it right again.

And where the stakes are high, so is the price of failure. A film producer I knew in London remembered going to a Hollywood party at which an abject creature cringed on the fringes, shunned by the sleek and the beautiful.

"Who is that wretch?" he asked.

"Oh, him?" came the reply. "He's the [expletive] who turned down ET."