Why are movies in decline?

I must admit that I have been a fan of the idea that Hollywood has just run out of ideas. Their policies of low-balling what they pay writers in the first place (writers are not normally an audience draw like actors or occasionally directors), giving writers no control of the production process in the second place, and then not hiring older writers because the older writers are not expected to write material that the desired younger audiences want to see in the third place all seemed like reasonable reasons to me.

But Mark Leon Goldberg at The American Prospect gave me a new reason to stack on the list above.

Another possible cause of declining viewership -- one not listed in the article -- is that the incredibly popular and rapidly growing celebrity journalism arena is having a negative impact on movies by tansforming actors into "reality TV" stars with fixed identities in the public mind that increasingly clash with their on-screen roles. For example, Scarlett Johansson is a stylish and beautiful young woman who is much photographed on the celebrity circuit. But she looked awful in every promotional picture I saw for The Island. Given that she was not intentionally playing an "ugly" role (like Charlize Theron did in Monster), that created an impression that the movie must be terrible, because what movie that accidentally makes Johansson look bad can be any good? Similarly, the hubbub about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes can't have been good for The War of the Worlds. I doubt I'm the only person in the country who'd planned to see the film until the ambient publicity about Cruise's relationship made him seem suffienctly unappealing that it was no longer desirable to spend several hours looking at him in a theater.

This hits home. I had planned to see "War of the Worlds" until the Tom Cruise with his Scientology garbage and Katie Holmes crap became a topic on TV as apparently part of the promotion of the movie. I now have the movie relegated to the same level as long ago I relegated Elizebeth Taylor's "Cleopatra." I have never seen and will never see Elizabeht Taylor's "Cleopatra." I don't reward that kind of crap with my hard earned money and (more important) my time.

But then, I also walked out of the recently released piece of "Star Wars" garbage because it was a piece of hollywood regurgitation of the profitable past successes connected and mildly updated with a bit of technically superb but totally uninteresting and unentertaining computer special effects. I know computer geeks. I like computer geeks. That still does not give me the patience to sit still for what passes by entertainment created by computer geeks.

Have I mentioned that Hollywood fails today because they don't have any grown up decent writers? Where have all the Gene Roddenberry's gone? He built the original Star Trek series on good science fiction writers, and he understood good writing as entertainment. He also was NOT a graduate of a movie school. Those people produce garbage.

But what do I know? I'm just a single ticket buyer who is rejecting the new modern mass entertainment media. Those are some of my reasons.