When we entered the year 2020, global box office was at it’s peak.  Carried by major franchises like Marvel and Star Wars as well as a flurry of rising markets in places like China, global box office receipts hit a total of $42 billion in 2019.  And the movie theater business was thriving as a result.  The only thing at the time that theaters had to worry about was the rise of streaming, which was about to explode into the new year.  Netflix had dominated the market through the decade, but both Disney+ and Apple TV+ made their big launch in the Fall 2019 season, and HBO Max, Peacock and Paramount+ were gearing up for theirs in the months ahead.  Indeed, were things to remain the same in 2020 it was very likely that Hollywood was going to see yet another big year of generated revenue off of multiple modes of entertainment.  Unfortunately, history had other plans, not just for the movie business, but for everyone and everything.  There were news stories of a novel coronavirus starting to rapidly spread across China in the latter months of 2019, and while medical professionals were raising alarms about what they were seeing, it remained business as usual through the start of 2020 here in America.  The new year rang in without incident.  We had a Super Bowl and an Oscars ceremony that were exciting but normal.  And at the box office, the most noteworthy thing to happen was the surprising turnaround success of the Sonic the Hedgehog (2020).  But, the news of the virus spreading began to go from the back page to the front page, and suddenly the fear of the virus coming to our shores no longer seemed remote, but certain.  Eventually, all quarantines failed and the Covid-19 virus strain had reached North America and soon after it would be a global pandemic, the likes that our world hadn’t seen in over 100 years.  People suddenly growing ill and even dying was horrible enough, but the necessary step we had to take after in order to stop a bad situation from getting even worse would themselves have a harsh effect on everyone.  No one was spared from the fallout of this new pandemic reality, including the movies.

On March 16, 2020, it was announced that the three biggest movie theater chains in North America would be closing all of their location, and independent theaters followed suit, bringing all of cinema to a complete standstill, something that it had never experienced before.  The last time a global pandemic happened that reached all corners of the Earth, it was in 1918 with the influenza pandemic, also commonly referred to as the Spanish Flu.  Movie at that time were still in their infancy; a novelty that had yet to reach every town in America.  The incubation rooms of movie theaters just didn’t exist in those days, so Hollywood and the theatrical industry just never had to think about such a event happening that would affect their business in such a profound way.  It’s kind of astounding to think of the passage of time it was in between these two monumental pandemic events, that the whole of cinema history from D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation (1915) to the aforementioned Sonic the Hedgehog happened in between them.  All the movies of Charlie Chaplain, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Billy Wilder, William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Quentin Tarantino, were seen in between these pandemics.  And also how much the movie experience changed within those 100 years, going from small screening rooms to giant movie palaces to the the multiplexes we see today.  The movie business had seen it all, except a global threat that brought all life to a standstill.  But, the movie theaters had no choice.  In order to prevent our medical system from being overwhelmed by this rapidly spreading virus, all businesses had to conform to the recommended guidelines set by the CDC, which said the best way to mitigate the spread was social distancing and wearing of masks.  This left virtually all non-essential businesses unable to function as is, especially movie theaters and other entertainment venues that compact a lot of people into a confined space.  In the months ahead, there would be flexibility with these guidelines in less populated areas, but considering that the hot spots for the virus were in densely populated centers like Los Angeles and New York, the very markets that the movie business was reliant upon, it became very clear that this pandemic was not going to go away so quickly.

To give you a sense of the impact that living through a pandemic had on a movie lover’s experience, I’m going to share my own personal journey through this uncertain time.  I live in one of those big city markets (Los Angeles to be exact) and March 2020 was a pretty surreal time.  It wasn’t just the movie theaters that shut down, but all production in general.  Los Angeles is the entertainment capital of the world, with many residents here reliant on there being an active industry continuing to make more movies.  But, those studio lots also were emptied of non-essential workers, and the industry quickly had to adapt to a new “work at home” normal.  For me, as an avid movie goer, I had to adapt to one of my favorite past times now being unavailable for an unknown amount of time.  It would be five whole months before I would see the inside of a movie theater again, and it wasn’t even my local theater either.  Just to show how much I value being in a movie theater, I drove 120 south to San Diego just so I could watch Christopher Nolan’s Tenet in the brief window that movie theaters were allowed to re-open in parts of California, with San Diego being the closest one.  Eventually, closer theaters would re-open in Ventura and Orange County, but anything in a short driving distance remained closed for an entire year; finally re-opening in March 2021.  But, even with those restrictions in place, I still went out of my way to get as close to having the theatrical experience as I could.  One of the things that saw a surprising revival in the midst of the pandemic was the Drive-In experience.  Two such drive-in theaters still existed in my area, the Vineland Drive-In in the City of Industry and the now demolished Mission Tiki Drive-In in Montclair.  They may have been further out than my local theaters, but they were always open every night, and I managed to make my way to these places at least once a month through the pandemic period.  For the sake of my sanity during that time, these places were life savers because they filled that need to see movie on the big screen.

But if there was anything to also fill that void, it was streaming.  I already had a Netflix account long before the pandemic, but I was fairly new to Disney+, HBO Max and Apple TV+ as I became an early subscriber to those services.  Little did I know that they were going to be the sole outlet for Hollywood movies for quite a while before theaters re-opened.  While I still went out of my way to see a movie first on the big screen, there were other movies that I had no other choice but to watch them at home.  A lot of studios had to offload their 2020 releases onto streaming platforms, while the bigger films were pushed further back on the calendar.  Streamers were the beneficiaries, but such a drastic measure would have downstream repercussions, especially when it came to compensation for actors and filmmakers who had theatrical percentages written into their contracts.  But, with box office so depressed by the pandemic, movies either had to wait a bit longer for their release, or go straight to streaming, and a lot of movies ended up in the latter column.  Apple TV+ for instance landed the Tom Hanks war flick Greyhound (2020), while Disney made the controversial choice of releasing their Pixar film Soul (2020) on Disney+.  There was also the Premium VOD model where movies were made available to rent at a premium price on platforms like Amazon, Apple, and Vudu, which is how Dreamworks chose to release their sequel Trolls World Tour (2020).  Studios were desperate for any revenue they could get and the streamers could leverage that by getting them to agree to shorter theatrical windows.  Nevertheless, the number of movies that could get released, either through streaming, theatrical, or a combination of the two was limited.  Hollywood was just uncertain about what the future was going to be for their industry.  The pandemic would pass in time, but what would be left of the theater industry?  Was streaming indeed the future of exhibition and movie theaters obsolete?  Just like all the rest of us waiting on the vaccine to help speed up a recovery, the movie theater industry was just taking things one day at a time.  Movie production finally started again, but under a new normal of constant testing and safety protocols, which led to lengthy productions and bloated budgets.  But, as time passed, things would clarify itself as the pandemic finally passed.

The outbreak of Covid-19 was a shock to the system for every aspect of life; one that we hopefully won’t have to repeat in our lifetimes.  Going into 2021, after a year of masking and social distancing, we were finally able to start the recovery once the vaccine became widely available.  Movie theaters took a while to recover, however.  Even with movie theaters in the major markets of Los Angeles and New York allowed to operate again, there were still social distancing measures put in place.  People had to sit with empty seats on either side for the first couple months.  And even in that situation, the choices of movies was still fairly light.  All the blockbuster films were still being held back until later in the year, so what we were getting in early 2021 were low risk movies that the industry was comfortable with playing in half full theaters.  But, there were some movies that managed to shine through.  Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) managed to be the first post-pandemic movie to cross the $100 million mark, even with a hybrid streaming/theatrical release.  A Quiet Place: Part II also became the first movie since March 2020 to have an opening weekend above $30 million.  But, even as blockbusters started to return to the market, it was still evident that the pandemic took it’s toll on the theatrical industry.  Between 2020 and now, it is estimated that nearly 3,000 screens have been lost due to the after effects of the pandemic across the country.  Small, independent cinemas were hit the most by the lockdowns, and the big chains barely scraped by.  AMC, the largest chain, may have fallen into bankruptcy by now had meme stocks not come to their rescue.  But even five years out, some theater doors remain shuttered and a few of them lost forever.  One of the crown jewels in Los Angeles’ collection of movie theaters, the Arclight Hollywood (home of the Cinerama Dome) still sits empty to this day, with it’s door boarded up like an abandoned home.  In terms of returning back to the heyday of the theatrical market of the 2010’s, it would be impossible given the fact that there were just fewer venues in general to host these movies now.

But, the last five years have also shown us that the theatrical market is not on it’s way out either.  If anything, the theatrical model has proven to be surprisingly resilient in the face of cataclysmic change.  One of the surprising signs emerged during the Holidays of 2021.  Right before Christmas, Marvel and Sony put out their film Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), their highly anticipated sequel that not only performed as well as the other films in the series, but also broke records, even in the midst of some lingering Covid protocols.  Movie theaters by this time had been loosening their social distancing standards so that they could finally fill all the seats in an auditorium, but masking was still enforced.  None of this stopped people from seeing No Way Home, and the film went on to have a #2 all-time opening weekend of $260 million and an eventual worldwide total of $1.9 billion.  It defied all protocols and showed that a movie could indeed perform like it used to before Covid.  But, it wouldn’t be the case with every movie.  Apart from Spider-Man, there weren’t a whole lot of movies that played to sold out crowds.  But, the right kinds of movies would come in the years that followed, including Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Barbie (2023), Oppenheimer (2023), Inside Out 2 (2024), and Wicked (2024).  What these movies showed more than anything is that there are just some films that can only play on a big screen to be fully appreciated, and it was motivating the studios to reconsider their decisions in what movies they wanted to focus on.  A lot of films that were once green lit as a big draw for streaming were now being looked at as a possible theatrical release instead.  The recent success of Moana 2 (2024) is an especially good example of the trends shifting back in theatrical’s favor.  Had Disney moved forward with their Disney+ Moana project, then they would’ve missed out on a billion dollar worldwide gross; a cash flow that they can now benefit from that they otherwise would not have seen from streaming.

And the streaming market has also changed dramatically in the last five years after Covid.  In the immediate months of the lockdown, streaming was the only game in town, and it saw a rapid growth as people were now stuck in their homes with no other outlet than to watch whatever was on TV.  It was a strange confluence of events with the global pandemic happening just as the streaming wars was about to ramp up.  And in that time, we saw some bold moves made by the studios to bring more eyes to their platforms.  Some of those moves, however, would prove to foolish in the long run.  Warner Brothers’ decision to release their entire 2021 schedule on HBO Max day and date alongside theatrical in a program called “Project Popcorn” proved to be a disaster, because it clearly diminished box office while bringing only a scant few subscribers to their platform.  That failed experiment is largely the reason it’s called Warner Brothers Discovery now.  Disney’s decision to release three Pixar movies in a row on Disney+ without a theatrical release also proved to be a foolish move because it diminished the once valuable Pixar brand and caused them to underperform once they finally put the beloved studio’s movies in theaters with Lightyear (2022) and Elemental (2023).  It wouldn’t be until Inside Out 2’s record performance that Pixar finally found their way back after their parent company neglected them.  But what the streaming wars also showed us is that a crowded market also has drawbacks of it’s own.  While there were good things to watch on all the platforms, the total cost of having to subscribe to all of them proved to be too much for a lot of people whose wallets were hurt by the pandemic and the inflation that followed it.  Churn has been the worst enemy of streaming platforms, as people are choosing to subscribe only when they see one particular show or movie they like, and then they cancel immediately afterwards.  The viewership numbers were just not justifying the enormous costs the studios were putting into creating exclusive content, and that led to a bunch of the Hollywood studios starting to reign things back in and playing it more safe.  Ironically, all of these potential Netflix killers failed to do just that, as Netflix still remains the top performer in the market, though even they felt a bit of the contraction in the market post-pandemic too.  One important thing that Hollywood also took away as a lesson is that box office returns are a better way to gauge the success of their movies, because it’s a definitive sum that tells you how much a single project is worth in the market, as opposed to the lump sum of a streaming subscription that’s spread across the entire catalog.

Now that it’s been five years since the initial beginning of the lockdown, I can tell you that I still have terrible memories of that experience, but I also memories of the bright moments that helped me get through it all.  Had my desire to see movies on the big screen not been so key to my happiness in that time period, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to go out to the Drive-In theaters in my area.  Sadly, their revival during the pandemic was short lived.  The Mission Tiki in Montclair has since been leveled and turned into a housing development for the city, while the Vineland Drive-In is only open for special events and the occasional summer program while mostly operating as a swap meet during the day.  During the pandemic, I may have watched 20 or more movies between the two of these venues, so I am eternally grateful for what they gave me in that lost year and I’ll miss that part of the experience for sure.  Even though the lockdowns lasted the longest in my area compared with every other part of the country, we were lucky to not see many closures in the wake of the pandemic.  All of my local theaters managed to re-open, with some of them being salvaged by new ownership.  Sadly, the Arclight Hollywood is still in limbo, and despite some promises made by the property owners to eventually get it up and running again, the theater still sits empty with their screens still dark five years later.  In terms of the theatrical experience itself, it does feel like things are back to normal, except when it comes to the choices in movie itself.  Hollywood still is suffering from a post-pandemic identity crises as it tries to figure out what’s worthy of theatrical and what’s worthy of streaming.  This unfortunately is leaving the movie theaters themselves with a slim selection of movies to put in their theaters.  It’s either a choice between low risk indies or increasingly hollow blockbuster films based on established IP.  The mid-level movie is all but gone from the multiplex, and that’s making the range between the movies all the more greater.  Movies either need to break the bank, or be so small that they don’t risk losing money.  It was said that it would take a few years for the theatrical market to make a full turnaround, and I believe the last few turbulent years have proven that.  But, movie theaters still endure, which is astonishing given the near apocalypse that they faced during Covid.  The movies faced a test they were never prepared for with the pandemic, and though there were casualties along the way, somehow we found a way to get us close to normal again.  I feel closer to the theatrical experience even more now after having my local theaters closed for a full year.  Hopefully it will remain with us for quite a while longer, and that cinema itself will be able to find that happy medium between what belongs on the bog screen and what does not.

One of the most audacious movies to come out las year was the new film from Brady Corbet called The Brutalist (2024).  Starring Adrian Brody as an immigrant Holocaust survivor and architect, the movie tells the story of one man’s experience striving for the American dream by way of gaining favor with a wealthy benefactor who wants him to build a megastructure using the titular architectural style.  The movie is a complex character study about the faults lying within the pursuit of the American Dream and what toll it takes on the artist, but that’s not what makes the movie audacious.  The film is a staggering 3 and a half hours in length, which is not uncommon for a period set drama, but for this particular film, the director incorporated some long dormant Hollywood traditions that help to make the film feel even more monumental.  Baked into the film’s runtime itself is a 15 minute long Intermission, and the movie even opens with the announced Overture.  These elements are not used very often today in movies, but those who watch classic films from the 1950’s and 60’s will instantly know what they are.  They are throwbacks to a style of film exhibition known as the Roadshow format.  The use of the Roadshow format is certainly intentional on Brady Corbet’s part, since the whole movie is a throwback to a different time period, one in which this kind of movie experience existed.  In addition, to filming the movie in the classic and rarely used Vistavision format, the movie revitalizes the Roadshow style of presentation, even if it’s not quite the full Roadshow experience as it plays in local multiplexes.  But, why is the Roadshow such a novelty today compared to the Golden Era of cinema when it was used very frequently.  The answer reveals a lot about the way cinema itself has evolved over time, and it shows that even movies like The Brutalist will not bring it back to it’s full glory ever again.

The cinematic experience was much different 60 years ago than it is today.  From it’s early days and up through the post-War years, going to the movies literally meant “going to the movies” in the plural sense.  You paid a ticket at the box office, and then the cinema would be open to you for the remainder of the program that day.  That’s why people would just come and go throughout the day.  Unless there was a sell-out, audiences had free reign to choose what they would choose to watch that day.  In many cases, the availability of movies depended on how many theaters there were in town, and for some small communities that sometimes meant only one.  So, theaters practiced would run multiple films on the same bill, with one movie being the main attraction, while another smaller movie would be scheduled right after that.  This is where the terms “B-Movie” and “Double Feature” that still exist in movie lingo today come from.  In between the films, there were other short programming to fill the time, including news reels, animated cartoons, movie trailers, and various other shorts.  The heyday of the studio system stuck with this format for a long time, but as movies got more ambitious and lengthy, the industry was looking to a different kind of way to exhibit their films in a way that spotlighted the cinematic experience as something special.  What helped to inspire them was a form of entertainment that Hollywood had over the years been supplanting; which was live theater.  Shows performed on the Broadway stage, or in opera halls across the country used intermissions to break the performances into different acts, giving both the performers and the audiences a break.  Operas, musicals, and stage dramas by this time were considered prestigious forms of entertainment compared to the more provincial entertainment that cinema provided to the masses.  So, Hollywood looked to what the theater community was doing to create their own kind of prestige cinematic experience.

The Roadshow movie experience was meant to create a unique experience that emulated the feeling of attending the opera or any other high brow form of entertainment, but within the confines of a movie theater.  Roadshow films were often presented in a limited fashion, playing at only the most elite theaters in town, and at a premium ticket price.  To emulate the experience like you were going to the theater for a stage performance, the movie would open without trailers or any accompanying shorts attached.  Instead, the speakers would play a specifically orchestrated Overture before the film started; mostly with the screen blank, unless a specific preshow artwork was meant to draw the eye.  Then, depending on which theater you were at, the curtains would be drawn back as the studio logo was projected on the screen and the movie would play through.  If the film was longer that the average movie, there would be an intermission that would break the film into two acts, giving the audience time to either hit the bathrooms or to get more snacks at the concessions.  And at the film’s conclusion, once the words “The End” fades out the curtains close and another track of Exit Music would serenade the audience as they left their seats and walked out.  In whole, it made watching the movies that much more special.  The movie being projected on the big screen would be the same, but aura would be different.  To make the experience even more worthy of a premium ticket price, special souvenir programs would be handed out to you by an usher as you entered, just like you would receive at the theater.  It was a lucrative way to add an extra bit of revenue for the film, and also to help generate extra buzz and prestige around a movie before it was released to the wider market.  But, you couldn’t just do this with any kind of movie.  The films that would receive the Roadshow treatment had to be worthy of such a classy style of presentation.

What set the trend for the modern Hollywood Roadshow was the release of producer David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind (1939).  While Gone With the Wind was not the first film to use the Roadshow format for it’s release, it was definitely the one that set the trend for all the movies that came after.  Selznick’s gargantuan Civil War epic really could not have been released in any other way.  At a staggering four hours in length, the longest studio film ever made up to that time and for several years after, Gone With the Wind had to be presented in a Roadshow format no matter where it played.  The Roadshow fit well into Selznick’s zeal for showmanship, and the demand was there for a premium movie experience with the film.  After premiering in Atlanta in 1939, the movie sold out in every large market it was presented, shattering every conceivable box office record, and this was even before receiving a wide release after it’s Roadshow run.  But, while the Roadshow proved to be a valuable source of revenue for some films, the success of Wind was still something that Hollywood found difficult to replicate.  That was until the 1950’s, when the advent of widescreen helped to make cinema feel like a prestigious experience again.  This revitalized the Roadshow format for a new generation, as big screen sword and sandal epics like The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959) benefitted from the larger than life experience that the format offered.  The Roadshow experienced offered something that you couldn’t get from watching television alone in your living room.  It made going to a movie palace feel as enriching as going to an opera or concert hall.  And the experience wasn’t just made for biblical stories either.  Historical dramas like How the West Was Won (1960), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965) also adopted the Roadshow format for their prestige releases.  But the Roadshow’s rise in success throughout the widescreen boom would face a different challenge as viewership patterns changed.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) fundamentally changed the way people went to the movies, as it’s shocking first act twist made people realize that they had to watch a movie from beginning to end, and not just casually dive in like movie goers would do in the past.  The way movies were released changed accordingly; movie trailers would still play prior to a movie’s start, but double features along with accompanying shorts and newsreels were a thing of the past.  One ticket meant one movie, and the appetite for lengthy 3 hour plus Roadshow features dried up.  Cinemas wanted more showtimes, which meant leaner movies without all the bells and whistles of the Roadshow, including Intermissions.  The ballooning budgets of the Hollywood epics, which used to be justified because of the Roadshow’s premium ticket prices, also became a problem.  The end seemed near for the Roadshow format as a means of theatrical release, especially after 20th Century Fox’s colossally expensive Cleopatra (1963) nearly drove the studio into bankruptcy.  But an unexpected reprieve came for the Roadshow format with the remarkable success of movie musicals in the 1960’s.  Fox was able to recover from their financial woes with the monumental box office of The Sound of Music (1965), becoming the biggest money maker in Hollywood since Gone With the Wind.  Disney and Warner Brothers likewise saw great fortune in their releases of Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady around the same time in 1964.  But what the movie musical also did was use the Roadshow format to perfection.  It harkened back to what inspired the Roadshow in the first place, which was musical theater.  The musicals even had their Intermissions already baked into the show itself, making it easy for Hollywood to know where to put them in their film adaptations.  For a time, this worked out well, and the Roadshow format would survive a bit longer.  But, it unfortunately would be short lived.  The success of Sound of Music and My Fair Lady made Hollywood mistakenly believe that there was a widespread appetite for these prestige Roadshow musicals that actually wasn’t there, and the resulting glut of Roadshow movies in the back end of the 1960’s spelled disaster for the format as a whole.

While Hollywood was rapidly changing, with counter culture films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) becoming all the rage, the Roadshow format was representing all that was wrong with the industry at the time.  Big budget musicals that were trying to emulate the success of The Sound of Music were continuing to fail at the box office.  These included musicals like Doctor Doolittle (1967), Camelot (1967) and Hello, Dolly (1969), the latter of which almost wiped out all of the profits that 20th Century Fox had recovered with their Sound of Music success.  Going into the 1970’s, Hollywood was weary of using the Roadshow release format to generate buzz for their tentpole films.  A couple movies of the era did cautiously try to use it, like Patton (1970) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971), but when the big epic of the era, The Godfather (1972), released to great success without using any of the Roadshow features, it all but killed the format.  Hollywood still put out 3 hour plus epics in the decades that followed, but they would run like a regular movie would without an overture or intermission.  This includes some major prestige films that went on to awards season success, like Schindler’s List (1993) and Titanic (1997).  Neither film has any of the same features of Roadshow epics despite sharing their epic lengths.  The rise of the Hollywood blockbuster also changed the movie going experience as well.  With higher demand for blockbuster franchise films like Star Wars (1977), Back to the Future (1985) and many other crowd pleasers, the multiplex supplanted the movie palace as the primary destinations for movie goers.  Hard to replicate the same prestigious experience on the same level of attending a musical or opera when it’s in a small dark box of a room next to many others just like it.  After being the pinnacle of Hollywood prestige at it’s best, the Roadshow was reduced to being a relic of the past.

But the memory of the Roadshow format managed to survive through an unexpected avenue; home theater.  As Hollywood began going through their archives to find movies to release in the rising home entertainment market, they found these longer versions of films that were made in the Roadshow format that they could put out on video as a collector’s edition.  Spotlighted as the “Roadshow Edition,” these home video releases gave cinephiles the oppurtunity to see these movies in their original format, complete with the Overtures, Intermissions, and Exit Music included.  It was like rediscovering all of these movies again, seeing the way that they were originally meant to be seen instead of the truncated versions that were either re-released in multiplex theaters or aired on television.  It renewed an interest in the film enthusiast community towards the bygone era of the Roadshow.  Movies like Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Ten Commandments would subsequently be given restorations that re-incorporated the entire Roadshow format into their home video releases, and those same restorations would likewise be used in all future theatrical exhibitions as well.  The same went for all of the movie musicals released over this same period.  In some cases, the people who worked on the restorations would include graphic art for the Overtures and Exit Music, as modern audiences are not as familiar with these features and would probably be confused why they are included in the presentation.  While Hollywood hasn’t fully reembraced the Roadshow format completely as a part of their film releases, it’s at least worthwhile that the memory of it is being preserved with the restorations of these older films.  It’s probably a good thing that the Roadshow format is not used for every epic length movie; hard to imagine it being used on something like Avengers: Endgame (2019) or Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).  It’s a special kind of format to be used on certain kinds of movies; ones where the use of Intermissions to break the film into two acts is essential to the experience.

Which brings us back to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.  Corbet could’ve released his film without the trappings of a Roadshow style presentation, but he included them in his movie because of the way it evoke the era that the movie takes place.  It’s a film that has the feel of an old school epic, while still being fairly modern in it’s sensibilities.  The Overture and Intermission are integral features of the experience and not a necessity of the presentation because of it’s colossal length; though I’m sure audiences are pleased to finally have a long movie with a bathroom break.  It’s all the more astounding that Corbet was able to make a movie that felt like an old Hollywood epic on a miniscule $10 million budget.  My belief is that using the Roadshow format features helps to reinforce that evocation of grandeur, even with the movie being small and intimate in true scale.  And while Corbet is getting a lot of attention for his expert use of the format, he’s also not the only one that has attempted to revive the Roadshow style in recent years.  Quentin Tarantino famously put out his film The Hateful Eight (2015) in a Roadshow style version that played in select theaters nationwide.  It included the same Overture and Intermission features you would find in Roadshow movies, which Tarantino specifically paying  homage to, especially with regards to the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone that released in the format.  In select screenings, you would even receive a souvenir program, just like they used to give out in the old Roadshow days.  And while both The Hateful Eight and The Brutalist both are loving recreations of the format, they are unlikely to make the format reach the heights that it once held within the industry.  The way people go to the movies these days has changed too much to support such a format now.  We’re even seeing epic productions like Dune and Wicked choosing to release as two separate films a year apart rather than a single two act Roadshow style film, and it’s working pretty well for Hollywood that way.  Could there still be Roadshow style releases in the future; probably, and with any luck more frequently thanks to The Brutalist’s success.  But it’s future will still likely be that of a novelty rather than the norm.  And that in a way is what’s best for the format.  The Roadshow was the pinnacle of Hollywood prestige and the rarer the treasure the better.  With the industry recognizing the special quality it brings to making the art of film feel as important as that of the high arts of theater and opera, it’s a good thing that it stands as the high water mark of cinema at it’s peak.

One thing that people like to see at the Oscars is an underdog story.  There are plenty of instances of a movie or a performer that unexpectedly defies the odds and pulls off an upset win.  Think Olivia Colman winning over the heavily favored Glenn Close in the 2019 awards ceremony, or Moonlight (2016) pulling off the upset of the century by beating La La Land (2016), with it’s record tying number of 14 nominations, in the Best Picture race.  The reason why people love these wins is because it’s sometimes offers a moment of spontaneous surprise in a show that can often be a tad too predictable, especially when you are following the momentums of the race closely.  But there are wins in past years that didn’t come as pleasant surprises, but instead left many people scratching their heads.  We tend to forget that the Oscars is more or less another race based on internal politics within the industry, and that sometimes the winner is not always the popular choice but rather the one who’s campaign strategy was the most well executed.  There are movies that are liked well enough for a nomination, but feel out of place if they actually win the award, especially if there are better movies in the same race.  And these movies tend to be cursed after winning the top award as they are looked at as being undeserving of the award they won due to the fact that the movies they beat have had longer staying power over the years; some even achieving all-time classic status.  Think How Green Was My Valley (1941) beating Citizen Kane (1941), or Ordinary People (1980) beating Raging Bull (1980).  But it’s also worth noting that the backlash against these movies may be bit too harsh, solely due to the fact that they fall short by comparison to their more famous competitors.  A movie may still be good even if it was undeserving of the Best Picture honor it snagged away from better movies.  It’s happened numerous times throughout Oscars’ long history, but perhaps the most severe backlash was leveled at the winner of the 2006 Academy Awards ceremony: 2005’s Crash.

Crash came out in the early summer of 2005 to mostly positive reviews.  It was the feature directorial debut of longtime TV writer Paul Haggis who only a year prior had been nominated for his screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby (2004).  Crash was an ambitious exploration of race relations in the city of Los Angeles, told through interconnected vignettes of characters both black and white, rich and poor, criminal and law enforcement, etc.  It was also blessed with an all-star ensemble that included future Oscar-winners like Sandra Bullock and Brendan Fraser, as well as rising stars such as Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Thandiwe Newton, and Michael Pena.  The movie has thought provoking moments here and there, but as a collective whole it kind of misses the mark of the message it’s trying to impart on the audience.  Generally, people were pleased with the movie, but it came as a bit of a shocker that it managed to earn a Best Picture nomination.  That’s where people thought it’s meteoric rise would end.  The favored movie of that evening was destined to be the groundbreaking tragic queer romance movie Brokeback Mountain (2005), which had received the most nominations of the season and was racking up wins across the board before Oscar night came.  Crash did pick up a Screen Actors’ Guild win for it’s impressive ensemble, but Brokeback Mountain had won the Golden Globe, the PGA, DGA and WGA honors leading up to the ceremony; all major bell-weathers.  On the night of the Oscars, Brokeback was winning the bulk of the preamble awards that Best Picture winners usually take away, such as Original Score, Cinematography, and Adapted Screenplay.  Paul Haggis came away with an Original Screenplay win, which many saw as Crash’s consolation for the night.  With director Ang Lee’s expected Best Director win for Brokeback, the final award seemed all but certain.  And then Jack Nicholson who was presenting the Best Picture award that evening delivered a shockwave across the Dolby Theater and the entire Hollywood industry when he opened the envelope and announced Crash as the winner.  It was definitely a surprise win to everyone, and as we would see, it was also not a popular one either.

Brokeback Mountain’s nomination was seen as a profound statement of support for the LGBTQ+ community when it was up for Best Picture.  This deconstruction of the American Western that featured a romance between two closeted gay men came out in a time when the rights of queer people were under assault.  The Bush Administration that was in power at the time were pushing hard for a Constitutional Amendment that defined marriage as being between two people of opposite genders.  This would have enshrined into the founding document of this nation a discriminatory ban on same sex relationships.  Attitudes towards gay marriage would thankfully change in the following decade, but in the 2000’s, it was still a hotly contested issue, and the Queer community was facing intense opposition to their right to marry.  That’s why Brokeback Mountain was seen as such an important movie for it’s time, because it was a sympathetic portrayal of a queer relationship made and promoted by a major film studio (Universal, under their Focus Features banner) that openly condemned the persecution that the community had been facing (and sadly still does to this day).  Hollywood, despite some faults, has mostly been a place that champions marginalized groups and this was the time to shed a light on the LGBTQ community and give them the much needed mainstream exposure that they had been lacking for so long.  But sadly, despite winning quite a few awards, Brokeback Mountain came up short of the top award of the night.  How could this destined to be sure thing, a profound statement of support from Hollywood towards the Queer community, fall short to a movie like Crash which didn’t have a lot to say about prejudice that hadn’t already been said plenty of times before.

One reason why Crash came away with the upset is because of the social make-up of the Academy itself.  Hollywood is for the most part, and always has been, a progressively liberal majority industry.  It is also a very insulated community as well.  While social progressiveness is something that many in Hollywood value, they also absorb politics in a way that fits within their Cosmopolitan lifestyles as well.  That’s why members of the Academy responds to movies that appeal to their sense of personal experience, which in some ways may ignorant of causes and issues that fall outside of their inner circle.  In this case, it might have been what pushed Crash over the top at the Academy Awards.  Queer themes in mainstream movies were still a bit of a novelty in Hollywood, while at the same time, racial politics still hit close to home.  This was of course the city that saw the riots erupt after the beating of Rodney King, as well as the O.J. Simpson trial that also stirred up racial discussions across the country.  Paul Haggis’ contemplative feature about collisions of racial tensions within the City of Angels just rang more true to the Academy than Gay Cowboys.  It doesn’t mean that the bulk of the Academy didn’t support the rights of the LGBTQ community; though the true intentions behind most individual voting is unclear.  In many ways, Brokeback Mountain may have been the victim of it’s own historic status.  Queer cinema was still niche, and gay rights was only just starting to gain traction in America.  Academy voters may have felt that supporting such a movie for Best Picture was going to be too much of a statement against the establishment at the time, and they didn’t want that backlash to come down on them.

But by doing this, the Academy only created a different kind of backlash.  People rightly viewed Hollywood’s timidity towards supporting gay rights fully as an insult to the community, and over time as the right to marry thankfully became more of a mainstream position, this decision on the Academy’s part has appeared more and more out of touch.  But, is Crash deserving of all the scorn that it has received in the 19 years after it’s Best Picture win.  The complaint about the movie that feels most apt is that it is tone deaf about the subject it is covering.  It’s very clear that this is a story about racial tensions in America told from the perspective of a middle aged white guy.  Haggis has good intentions with his writing, but not a lot of nuance when it comes to tackling racism from multiple sides.  It probably would have helped if was writing scenes with a collaborator from one of the marginalized communities depicted in the film.  There are a lot of far fetched scenarios in the movie that undermine the message that it’s trying to deliver.  One involves Terrence Howard’s character taking the police on in a wild high speed chase with him ultimately trying to egg them on to use force against him, and yet he still walks away free and unharmed.  Another scene has two black men played by Ludacris and Larenz Tate discussing the hypocrisy of racial profiling right before they carjack someone.  Haggis’ screenplay are filled with these far fetched scenarios that get spiced up with platitudes about the sad state of racism in America, and in the end it just make the whole movie feel hollow and disingenuous.  Its like Haggis believes that he’s delivering something profound to the world, but the wild swings only make his attempts at it feel less impactful, and it just shows him to be an outsider looking in without any actual real world insight.

Are there positives about the movie.  Sure there are.  The performances by the cast in particular really help to elevate the film.  Of special note is Don Cheadle, who gives the movie it’s most subtle and assured performance, as the character that’s closest to being the central figure.  This film would come out immediately after his breakout Oscar-nominated role in Hotel Rwanda (2004), and it helped to cement him as one of the most reliably solid actors in the business, helping to lead him to a great franchise role in the MCU as the hero War Machine (ironically taking over the role from his Crash co-star Terrence Howard).  Thandiwe Newton also delivers a strong performance as  woman who deals with two different levels of discriminations in the movie, both as a woman and as a woman of color.  But the standout performance in the movie surprisingly belongs to Matt Dillon in a role that in other less capable hands could have become an insultingly tone deaf character to include in a movie about race.  In the film, Dillon plays a racist cop who also commits a sexual assault on one of the minority “suspects” he chooses to pull over (played by Newton).  But, later in the film, he saves the same woman from a car wreck in a harrowing rescue scene, showing that he has the capacity within him to be a hero at the right moment.  This is one of the more far fetched elements of the movie, and people point to this character as one of the major problems with Haggis’ tackling of racial tensions in the movie by trying to go out of his way to depict the racist cop with an eye towards sympathy.  And yet, Dillon’s performance nearly makes it work, because he manages to ground the character in a nuanced way.  He doesn’t go over the top with the character, especially with the racism, and it makes the character far more complex than he probably reads on the page.  Naturally, this nuanced performance helped Matt Dillon to be the sole nominated actor for this film, and it’s still one of the actor’s best.  Given the level of strong performances from a pretty stacked all-star cast, it’s no surprise the film was awarded the Ensemble prize at the SAG awards.  And given that the largest voting block of the Academy is the Actors’ Branch, this likely was another key towards the film’s upset victory.

The years haven’t been kind to the movie since it won Best Picture.  Cries of homophobia plagued the Academy, but the movie Crash itself doesn’t represent any contradiction to LGBTQ rights.  It’s its own message movie that unfortunately gave the wrong message at the wrong time.  But as flawed as it is, it’s nowhere the worst Best Picture winner of all time.  There’s even a more egregiously tone deaf movie about race that took the Best Picture prize more recently with the film Green Book (2018).  Crash gets away a lot more with it’s shallow depiction of racial issues, because it’s ultimately harmless fiction.  Green Book on the other hand whitewashes the story of real people to make it look like the white character was more tolerant than he was in real life.  While Green Book’s depiction of racial issues may be more ethically dubious, it still is reflective of the same faults that Crash has, in that it’s coming from a one-sided, white male perspective that doesn’t have the nuanced insight of people who actually face real racism everyday.  The movies may mean well, but it also is observing the issue from the perspective of people who are least likely to face the actual repercussions of racial injustice.  The same critique could also be leveled at Brokeback Mountain too, because that film was written, directed and starring cisgender straight people who don’t have first hand knowledge about the gay experience.  However, there was a deeper sense of empathy felt in Brokeback Mountain that helped the movie feel genuinely truthful about the persecution that it’s queer characters faced.  Crash by comparison is heavy handed and unsubtle, and it undermines it’s message in the long run.  The backlash it faced may be a bit harsh, but it’s also understandable.

In the end, Crash’s sole noteworthy accomplishment is that it pulled off one of the biggest Oscar night upsets.  But, it came at a price, because now it is viewed as an unworthy recipient of that award.  While I wouldn’t disagree that Crash is not exactly the best choice for Hollywood’s top honor, I also wouldn’t say it deserved the severe backlash it received either.  It’s naïve, but ultimately harmless, and in some moments actually elevates to being better than just okay.  Divorced from the Oscars, I think the movie would’ve garnered a better reputation over the years.  Like so many movies before at the Oscars,  it is over-shadowed by the runner-up, which has eclipsed it many times in popularity and importance.  The Oscars are a snapshot in time, and Crash’s win is an interesting look back at a time when the crossroads of gay rights and racial politics intersected in our pop culture and spurred on a renewed conversation about the necessity of cinema to shed light on injustice in this world.  Brokeback Mountain may have benefitted from it’s runner-up status, as it shifted focus more onto the issues of the LGBTQ community as Hollywood was trying to make amends for passing them over at the Oscars.  Queer representation only grew stronger in the decade since, and in 2017, it was a queer themed film called Moonlight that pulled off the upset, and over a self-indulgent movie about Hollywood that the Oscar voters tend to prize more than others.  Crash on the other hand is remembered more as an infamous misstep by the Academy.  But it’s not a horrendous movie by any means, and it certainly is less insulting about racial issues than Green Book is.  You see these movies that rise up with momentum at just the right time, and then are forgotten to time quickly thereafter, with only the Best Picture win to give them any note of worth.  Crash is definitely that kind of movie, only the backlash it faced was stronger than most others.  20 years after it’s release, it’s still a movie that carries a lot of baggage with it.  But, let’s not forget that it won the Best Picture race in a fair fight.  It should be noted that it was widely praised in it’s day; critic Roger Ebert even named it his Top Movie of the 2005 that year.  Time has a funny way of changing perspective on things, and in the years since Crash beat Brokeback Mountain at the Oscars, I’m happier that attitudes have shifted more towards gay rights and less towards lip-service gestures towards race relations in America.

In the earliest days of 2025, the City of Los Angeles was struck by a long feared tragedy that has devastated the community.  Two massive fires broke out in the townships of Pacific Palisades and Altadena, both of which grew to enormous size and ferocity due to a wind storm event that was strong even by the standards of the yearly Santa Ana winds that the area normally experiences.  As a resident of the City of Angels myself, I can attest to the intensity of these winds on the night of January 7th.  But I was lucky to be in a part of the city that was spared the worst of the destruction; the only impact I felt was power being out in my neighborhood for a couple of days.  Pacific Palisades and Altadena were not so lucky.  Both communities saw near total destruction, with over a thousand structures burned to the ground; mostly homes and a few structures of historic importance to the city.  And the impact on the people who lived there is immeasurable.  It affected many ranges of residents, from the affluent who resided in beach side mansions in the Palisades to middle and working class citizens living in the foothills of Altadena.  It is estimated this will be one of the costliest disasters ever in the United States, with so many properties reduced to smoldering ruins; a fact that will also be consequential for the entirety of Los Angeles, the state of California, and the United States for many years beyond.  As the fires dissipate, the next important thing to do next is to decide how we rebuild.  Many things will need to be done, especially in deciding the infrastructure needed to help prevent something like this from happening again, especially with climate change making weather events more extreme, like the wind storm that fanned the flames in the first place.  But also, the question is also being put forward about how quickly we should be moving on in the wake of such a tragedy.

The thing about the fire happening in a community such as the Pacific Palisades is that many of the victims involved who lost their homes in the inferno are also professionals in the movie industry.  Movie stars, producers, writers, directors and agents were all among the people who called the Palisades home, and they of course were overwhelmingly affected by this disaster.  Of course, the scale of the loss varies.  For some, the fire in the Palisades may have taken away one of many residences that some of the most affluent owned.  But for others, they lost everything in the fire; an entire livelihood gone up in smoke.  And those residents will have to see their lives put into an upheaval, as they will be displaced for a while, which could affect their work in the business.  The hope is that many of them will be covered by insurance, but with home insurers pulling out of the state because of the increased threats of wildfires, it’s not a certainty that everyone will get reimbursed.  Because of all the disruption to the livelihoods of professionals in the business, there has been a significant slowdown of productions going on in the City of Los Angeles, which has already seen a downturn in film shoots post-pandemic.  Of course it would be a bad thing to pressure the people who lost their homes to quickly get back to work.  It’s going to take time for people to adjust, and the humane thing is to give them the time they need.  But, there’s also the fact that this is a city dependent on the film industry to help boost other businesses that make up the life blood of the community.  The unfortunate thing is that this tragedy has occurred at one of the worst possible times for the Hollywood community, which is Awards season.  At a time when the industry is gearing up to put on the show of the year.

This has led to the belief from some that Awards season should be either indefinitely postponed or outright cancelled in response to the tragic fires.  Some events have indeed been cancelled out of respect to the people who lost their homes, though these have been some of the less high profile ones.  It’s another question whether something as big as the Oscars should also be cancelled, but it’s something people within the industry have been floating out there.  One of the reasons people want to see the Oscars cancelled is because many of the voting body of the Academy were among those who lost their homes in the fires, and it is believed that putting the pressure on them to spend this time casting their votes for this year’s race would be in bad taste.  Now, not all voting members may feel that way, including ones directly involved in the tragedy, but it is something that certainly can’t be dismissed either.  For now, the Oscars are still scheduled for March 2nd of this year, but the voting deadline was extended an extra week to accommodate those affected by the fires.  The Oscar nominations came out this week as promised but later than planned, so it looks like things are full steam ahead, but there are considerations being made about the ceremony itself.  Some believe that it will also be in bad taste to have the usual glitz and glamour showcase that the Oscars usually are in the wake of the tragedy.  Plans are now calling for a toned down show that may also be turned into a fundraiser to help those in need.  One of the big changes already discussed is the elimination of extravagant stage performances for the Best Song nominees, which is a shame given that two of the best such performances have happened in the last two Oscars, with “Naatu Naatu” from RRR (2022) and “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie (2023).  We’ll have to see whether or not it’s a strategy that works, but it’s also a situation that the Oscars have been through before.

There’s something inspirationally resilient about the Oscars; the fact that it’s an institution that still stands even through significant moments of upheaval in our nation’s history.  From it’s inception in 1927, the show kept being put on every year without fail, all the way through the Depression and also through World War II.  Even the Olympics can say that.  Of course, during the War, the industry had to deal with many of their professionals putting their lives on hold to serve overseas, so to put on the Oscars each year, the ceremony evolved into something else, which became a way to promote the war effort and in a familiar plan to what we are seeing right now, used to fund raise by selling war bonds.  The Post-War years saw the Oscars return to it’s usual glitz and glamour for the next half century, but a national tragedy would cause another adjustment for the pageantry of the show.  The 9/11 attacks made Hollywood reconsider their plans for the ceremony in the show the following year.  The show opened with a solemn reminder of the tragedy, with Tom Cruise delivering an opening address stressing the importance of using art to deal with trauma, and the show included many tributes to the city of New York that suffered the horrific attack.  It was a ceremony about solidarity for a broken nation, though sadly it would be short lived as the War on Terror that followed would divide us once again.  The Oscars also saw a major disruption again with the Covid-19 pandemic.  Though the ceremony of 2021 was still put on, it was done so in a smaller venue (Los Angeles’ Union Station) with fewer guests spaced further apart in accordance with socially distancing.  It was also held a full two months later than originally planned, mid-way through the month of April.  And yet with all the barriers in place, the Oscars still managed to not skip a single year.

The one big difference this year is that the tragedy of the LA fires is that they hit much closer to home.  World War II and even the 9/11 attacks were certainly felt by the industry, but the city itself remained unharmed and people still went about their lives.  The fires on the other hand have left many within the industry directly affected, and that has put the city itself into a tough place.  A significant portion of the movie industry are not ready to just pivot into awards season mode.  It’s easy for many to dismiss the Palisades fire victims because many of them were disproportionately wealthy, but that’s not the case for the most part.  There were middle to lower class victims of the fires too.  One of the housing developments lost in the fire was a mobile home park just off of the Pacific Coast Highway that borders the Palisades community, and many of those residents were not among the rich and famous.  Also, the loss of so many homes in the area affects a lot of the downstream industries that serviced the Palisades, like landscaping workers, housekeepers, and assistants who served the residents of the community.  It’s those downstream services that are now feeling the effects of the fires that ravaged this community.  They have seen a significant clientele desolated, and it’s affecting their bottom line because there is nothing in place to compensate for that usually reliable income.  The same goes for Altadena, which is even more desolated by this tragedy.  Not only did Altadena lose a great many homes in their residential areas, but also the town center with it’s collection of mom and pop stores and businesses got lost in the fire.  It’s a scar on that community that may never be healed, as a whole chunk of their history is now gone.  The famous faces you see on the news are only a small part of the tragedy, and even those who didn’t lose their homes in the fire are going to be feeling the after effects for a while as so much business in this town was tied into these communities.

But there is the argument that putting things on hold out of sympathy would be making the situation even worse.  So much of the industry is tied into awards season, and cancelling the show would do more bad than good.  A lot of below the line workers look forward every year to staging the Oscars.  These include stagehands, lighting technicians, camera technicians, security details, caterers and photographers.  And that’s just for the show itself.  In the weeks leading up to the ceremony, you have tailor and dressmakers across the city prepping things to wear for all the people who will be attending the ceremony, as well as publicists and marketing teams working hard to push their clients’ films towards Awards season wins.  For all these below the line workers, the Awards season is essential to their yearly income.  They can count on the Oscars to be presented every year without a hitch, and they plan all of their activity that year around this certainty.  Suddenly cancelling the Oscars would either mean money would go to waste on products already spent with no chance of recouping, or budgets would have to be cut in the back half of the year to account for the shortfall that occurred because of no ceremony being held.  It would be especially disruptive for boutique businesses that are trying to advance in the competitive Hollywood industry.  Hollywood isn’t just a movie making business, but an industry that supports many other disciplines in the creative arts.  And awards season is one of the primary engines of what keeps the industry going.  It may not have a major downstream effect if something like a luncheon or a press event gets cancelled due to a tragedy, but cancelling something as vital as the Oscars would definitely be a disruption.

Going into this awards season, the considerations for the victims of the fires should certainly be met, but also the idea that the awards should be cancelled for the sake of good taste is also a bad idea.  I believe that the plan to scale things back a bit is not a terrible idea.  You definitely don’t want to put on the air of disrespect by pretending that nothing had happened.  I think you are definitely going to see a lot of praise for first responders who helped put out the fires, with some of them maybe being invited onstage at the ceremony itself for a round of applause.  The call for the show to be a fundraiser for charity is also a good thing, as it allows for anyone watching the show to contribute towards helping those in need.  What Hollywood definitely needs to do is to walk that fine line of honoring itself and also not making the tragedy something that is self-serving for themselves.  The people in that room wearing extravagant suits and dresses will be doing alright.  The show just needs to put a spotlight on those who were most affected by the fires.  And at the same time, also show that Hollywood is still as vibrant as it’s always been; that they are ready for making the future a lot better.  Like tragedies before, with 9/11 and Covid, the resilience of the movies and the Oscars has helped the world to heal before and it can happen again.  While we acknowledge the human cost of this tragedy, we should also celebrate the films that we love that help us move forward.  That’s what this awards season in particular should do.  Make us remember why a place like Hollywood is so important to our culture and why it’s important to recognize and support the ones who keep it moving, especially those whose work remains largely unseen by the general public.

A lot of lessons are going to be learned from these devastating fires.  It definitely shows how much we are at the mercy of climate change, and that incidents like this sadly will become more common.  We definitely need to take climate seriously and build up infrastructure to deal with it’s changes.  Fire stations also need to be funded much better than they are and firefighters, who do so much thankless work every single day, should be paid much better as well.  There also needs to be accountability over how we rebuild from this disaster, as insurance fraud is rampant and many people are not getting compensated the way they should in the wake of devastating tragedies.  Also, the price gouging that landlords are putting on renters all across the city in the wake of this disaster needs to end.  Hollywood is just one industry within the City of Los Angeles that is feeling the residual effects of this disaster, and the long term repercussions will be around for decades.  Who knows what kind of effect the inhalation of smoke from these fires may have on the health of Angelinos in the years ahead.  It’s going to be a long recovery period, one that may be even worse because of the shenanigans going on in Washington, but that’s a rant that I’d rather not get into.  The one thing that I wish I can pass on to my readers is that you continue to show support for those who suffered in this tragedy by not just giving what you can to charity, but also to keep supporting the movies that the victims of the fires had a hand in making.  The continued success of movies and TV shows made in Hollywood will help ensure that many of those who lost their livelihoods in the fire will have a chance to rebuild with continued employment in a vibrant and thriving industry.   It’s not just the wealthy movie stars that need help, it’s all the below the line workers who are dependent on the industry not missing a beat that are very much need of support.  Like a phoenix from the ashes, Hollywood will thrive again, and that’s why it’s important for events like the Oscars to still move forward.