Hollywood: Deadwood?

Peter Bart is a true Hollywood insider. He has spent about 20 years as one of Hollywood's top studio executives at Paramount and MGM, and as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

He currently is the editor-in-chief of Variety, Daily Variety, and Daily Variety Gotham Edition.

His new book, Who Killed Hollywood? And Put The Tarnish on Tinseltown suggested that Hollywood studios, top movie executives, and top stars are choosing quantity over quality when it comes to producing films.

"There's a tremendous appetite for film," he told Early Show Anchor Bryant Gumbel, adding, "I think that you're going see this translated to the Internet. The hottest thing at Sundance (Film Festival) right now are shorts (short films). All the Internet companies are buying shorts. After seeing all these three-hour movies, it would be nice to see a 20-minute movie."

Also, he said, the Internet affords young filmmakers an inexpensive, surefire way of having their work seen by a wide audience.

"We saw this with what happened with The Blair Witch Project," Bart noted. "The Internet helps lots of young new filmmakers who have a project but very little money to get it out there."

Hollywood is dead, he explained, in that studios are no longer little companies. "Today," said Bart, "the studios are the toys of multinational corporations, and they're there to supply content for the global distribution machine."

Decisions tend to be made by committees - the marketing guys, the distribution guys, and Bart told Gumbel he can remember when "one or two guys would say, 'I like The Godfather. Let's make it.' Today, you have rooms full of 30 or 40 executives. So things tend to be risk averse."

He added, "There are a lot of real good movies that still come through the system. What concerns me is (the possibility that) corporate Hollywood is going to get safer, and the movies are going get duller."

Of course, newspapers and television networks alike are doing all they can to streamline costs and maximize profits. Why fault the Hollywood guys for basically doing the same thing?

"There's nothing wrong with cutting costs. The studios are cutting back, not only on their staffs and creative executives, but also on the few people still in the contract. The trouble: the studios are becoming like banks and marketing machines."

Isn't the author, to a certain extent, guilty of glorifying the Hollywood of yesterday and remembering it only in the best of terms?

"That is true," conceded Bart. "I was lucky, in that I came along as a studio executive in the late '60s when movies were character-driven, when decisions were filmmaker-driven. If a director came to you and said, 'I have got a passion to make this particular picture,' you'd go with him. It was a much easier era when pictures cost $2 million. The odfather cost $7 million. It was an easier time. I think you can look back on that era with a bit of nostalgia."

Moviegoers plunked down $7.5 billion at the theaters last year. So doesn't that suggest that hollywood is doing something right?

"It suggests that there are a lot of kids who are avid to go out to a theater and see a movie," said Bart. "When they love a movie, they'll go back over and over again. I don't always agree with their choices."