Social Media has moved political movements, public event awareness, and even budding careers into places unseen faster than ever before, but what is most interesting about social media today is how it allowed the average person to have a say in what’s going on in their culture.  And there is no other place that has exploited that accessibility to an audience better than the entertainment industry.  Whenever you see a movie or a TV show advertised, it often includes a web address listed to entice you the audience to visit their home page and learn more about their product.  That or it will include a “hashtag” phrase that you can link to on Twitter and/or other social media sites to let your friends or the actual  film companies know that you are directly talking about their show.  It’s obviously a marketing ploy by film executives to generate interest and excitement over their new projects, but it also represents an interesting new trend in Hollywood, where interactivity between the filmmakers and the audience is now more closely entwined than ever before.  Social media offers a very direct link to gauge how a large group of people is feeling at the moment, and that has helped the entertainment industry figure out what are the trends that matter to which they can directly market.  Not only that, but social media also motivates large groups of people instantaneously, which is helpful if what you want to market comes out of more of the underground of pop culture, and you need to grow awareness in a quick and cheap way.  But, though films have used social media for a while now as a tool for marketing, it has only been recently that it has actually influenced the actual inceptions of movies.  And naturally, when the Twitterverse inspires the creation of a new film, it’s got to be something that is very much “underground.”

Enter renowned comedy filmmaker Kevin Smith, who’s become noteworthy not just for his canon of flicks, but for being a unique personality both on screen and on social media.  After his film career turned a little rocky in the late 2000’s, bottoming out with his horrible experience directing 2010’s Cop Out, Smith turned his attention away from Hollywood and towards a new passion, which turned out to be his weekly podcast.  What started out as a modest show where Kevin and his buddies could discuss topics freely in humorous, unhinged discussions soon developed into a vast network of multiple shows, and soon Kevin Smith’s “Smodcast” became a launching point for a new phase in Kevin Smith’s career as a filmmaker.  With a wide reaching show like his, he could promote his new projects in ways that he was never able to before, which became helpful when he decided to abandon the traditional route of film marketing to promote his 2011 film Red State.  But, what he soon learned on his podcast was that he was able to generate new ideas for stories and actually go directly to his audience for feedback, knowing that most of his fans were indeed already listening in.  This was something that happened during an episode of his Smodcast called “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” where he and his longtime producer and co-host Scott Mosier discussed a bizarre article they found online, about an ad put into a British newspaper inquiring for a new roommate to help a person with their rent and care-taking.  The catch; the new tenant had to wear a walrus costume at all times.  This of course spurned on Kevin Smith’s imagination and the whole episode of the podcast involved Kevin and Scott playing out that scenario in a hilarious but twisted way.

This was in no way different than most of the many other discussions Kevin and Scott have had on their show, but what made the episode special was the fact that Kevin saw potential in the idea.  Indeed, within the same episode, Kevin Smith wondered if he could actually make the movie that they were dreaming up on the spot.  He knew he had the means and the connections to make it happen, but what he didn’t know was whether or not he should.  So, he asked his audience to go to Twitter and let him know specifically if he should make the movie or not; all they had to do was either tweet #Walrus Yes or #Walrus No.  Not surprisingly, nearly everyone who follows Kevin Smith tweeted in the affirmative, and Smith didn’t hesitate to make good on that promise.  He quickly drafted a script, got the funding and the cast lined up in no time, and within a years time, he had a film ready for the spotlight.  And indeed, every weird thing that Kevin and Scott jokingly dreamed up on the podcast made it to the screen, in every disturbing and hilarious detail.  The final film itself, Tusk (2014) may not be anything groundbreaking on the surface, but the fact that it came from such an unexpected origin is what ultimately makes it groundbreaking.  Had Kevin Smith not put the idea up to a vote on his Twitter page, the movie would never have been made.  This is what makes the existence of Tusk so interesting because it is 100% a film motivated by social media.  It’s not just another film that uses Twitter as means for promotion.  We wanted to see this movie happen, we used social media to make it happen, and now it’s playing nationwide in our local cinemas.  Kevin Smith’s savvy-ness with social media may have given him a fun exercise in film-making, but the means to make it happen may be more groundbreaking than anyone realizes.

Back in the early days of Hollywood, the only way that audiences could influence what came out of the entertainment industry was to speak with their wallets.  If a film was bad, audiences could just ignore it, but after a while, Hollywood found a way to work around this and they used marketing tricks to make even their most inferior products sell well at the box-office.  Trends would come and go with the passing years, but whatever films were being made were still dictated by the aspirations of the directors, the producers, and/or the studios.  The audience never could have a say in what stories they wanted to see; it was merely down to the choices of whatever films were available at the moment.  Thankfully there’s so much variety out there in the film market that anyone could still find something that interests them at their local cinema, so it’s not like audiences have been cheated by this system.  But that prompt to have a say in what films actually get made has been largely been left out of the public’s hand.  Instead, the choices made by Hollywood have been more about guessing what audiences want than actually knowing what they want.  Indeed, even with social media being as widespread as it is now, it’s still difficult to gauge exactly how everyone will react to something.  Back in the early days, the studios would sometimes rely on polls and surveys to see what audiences wanted in their movies, but polling only reaches a handful of people and it’s mainly slanted one way or another depending on how the survey’s were conducted.  Also, Hollywood has made the big mistake of having focus groups and test screenings determine some of the final cuts of films, which again is relying on a very narrow margin of people to influence and compromise someone’s vision.

The reason why Tusk is groundbreaking is because it removed the guessing game part of the equation and puts the idea up to audiences before any movement can be made on the film at all.  Kevin Smith’s fanbase spoke up and indeed said that “we want this to happen,” and the rest was up to Kevin to fulfill.  He didn’t have to test screen the footage to see if it would appeal to a wider audience, or get rebuffed by studio executives who thought the idea was too bizarre to be made.  Here, thanks to the response on Twitter, Kevin Smith had the voice of the audience behind him, telling him directly that this story needed to be told.  Indeed, by letting the audience in on the process at the very beginning, you have this ability to get people behind it early and generate excitement for it before it even sees completion.  It actually works better that way than any kind of marketing, although that certainly helps as well.  And it thankfully let’s audiences know what to expect and not feel like they were duped by the studios into feeling excited for something that didn’t deserve it.  People know what to expect with Tusk, because they’ve been following Kevin Smith’s whole journey with it.  In fact, the whole lead up to the movie’s release, documented through Kevin Smith’s own correspondences on Twitter and his podcast, has helped to generate even more interest in the film.  Though Kevin Smith may have just wanted to connect with his audience for some well intentioned feedback, he may have also started a whole new trend in film marketing that studios may be following in the years ahead.

Though Tusk came about through an already built-in brand that it’s already famous creator has built over the years, it does show how some underground film-making can use social media to help gain exposure for their products.  This is something that has been growing over the last few years and independent film-making is seeing new life today thanks to new forms of crowd-source funding that has also arisen from social media.  Today, websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are allowing filmmakers who have visions that exist outside the norm find the funding they need in order to make it a reality, and it’s all made possible by getting the word out directly to the audience.  The great thing about the crowd-sourcing trend is that it puts the power directly into the hands of audiences to actually make a movie happen.  For most filmmakers, finding the funds is the hardest part of the process, so by going online and soliciting funds from the fans directly, with perks like screen credit attached of course, they are able to bypass the whole process of trying to woo less interested investors.  Though many films like these will be micro-budgeted even with strong fan response, it nevertheless will give the audience a financial say in what they want to see.  Sometimes, when the fan-base is strong enough, a film will get the funding it needs in a big way.  Take for instance the Kickstarter fund set up for the making of a movie based on the series Veronica Mars.  The Veronica Mars movie managed to raise $4 million in a short amount of time, and with that show of goodwill from a dedicated fan-base, the production team wasted no time making the movie a reality.  That’s one example where a film that could never have gotten made the old-fashioned way, due to lack of interest in the industry, suddenly became possible due to the financial support of it’s own fans.

Although there are many benefits to programs like Kickstarter to help fledgling filmmakers get the funding they need or help unique voices be heard outside of the system, there are still drawbacks to audience driven productions.  When filmmakers take to Kickstarter, they need to be sure that they are listening to their audience, and not just using the site as a means for some easy cash.  If audiences are investing in something, it’s because they want to see something very particular, and not just what the filmmaker believes the audience deserves.  Like with more high profile investors, filmmakers have to be beholden to those who invested money into their projects, including taking in creative input that those same investors suggest.  When your film comes from thousands of investors like it would from crowd-sourcing, the same should also apply.  This probably matters little when the movie that is getting funded is bringing an already familiar property to the big screen, like taking the Veronica Mars series and turning it into a film, but when the film is something new, the filmmaker owes it to their audience to include them in on the creative process.  Filmmaker Spike Lee ran into trouble recently when he took to Kickstarter as a way to fund his next film so that he could avoid having to appeal to studio investors.  The complaint from audiences came from the fact that Lee was using crowd-sourcing as little more that means to fund his movie, and that he was still going to do things his way without the input from his fans who invested their money in it.  It could be said that just by funding the movie, the audience would have already spoken out on supporting Spike Lee’s project, but even still, one has to recognize that there’s more to that process than just finding a quick source of money.

Kevin Smith’s Tusk had the benefit of coming from a filmmaker who indeed had the connections and was listening to what his audience had to say.  Though Kevin Smith’s movie may be a small oddity, it nevertheless provides us with an early outlook at how movies may be developed, produced and sold in the future.  Today, audiences now have more say in what kind of movies get made than they ever have had before, and it’s all thanks to the new advances made in social media; and also thanks to people in the media who understand how to use those tools well.  Not only are we getting filmmakers emboldened with new avenues of finding ways to reach their audiences, but the audiences themselves are beginning to also strong-arm the filmmakers into making the movies they’ve always wanted to see.  Even rumors are now influencing film-making decisions, as some people in the media are using places like Twitter to gauge public reaction to potential film ideas before they even exist.  Not long ago, word spread online that Disney was working on a third Father of the Bride movie that was centered on gay marriage.  While this caused an uproar almost immediately, it was revealed later that no plans of any kind were being made by Disney on such a project, but because the feedback on the rumor was so strong, there is actually real development now on that idea that could potentially see the light of day if the curiosity remains out there.  That’s a kind of audience power that has never been seen before, and it will probably spurn on development for movies in the years ahead that may have struggled to get off the ground before.  If there’s an audience out there for it, those movies will be made, and social media has helped to make that link between audiences and filmmakers that much stronger.  Time will tell if it leaves a lasting impact on film production as a whole.  I know for one thing is that something like Tusk could only have become a reality because of this special link.

We’ve all seen it happen before.  Something that you cherished in your youth will end up loosing value as you get older.  Trends change and so do we.  Whether it was some toy we played with or some book we read, our tastes in entertainment evolve over time as we begin to mature and explore new things, and movies are no different.  Perhaps more than most other forms of entertainment, cinema is more prone to the ravages of time and often we see perhaps one or more films become lost to time because of how poorly it has aged.  Sometimes, even entire genres are swallowed up by the passage of time, and are only revived by completely unexpected factors.  But it’s only because most films want to reach the strongest possible audience in their specific time, so these movies end up reflecting the times in which they were made, making their stories more relatable to that contemporary audience.   It’s not always the case though, and sometimes we find movies that can be so easily defined by the era they were made in.  Movies can end up being timeless given the right kind of story or the right kind of vision.  And these are the films that can still entertain decades later, while the films that are dated end up becoming curiosities of their era.  What’s interesting about this is that by looking at all the films that have dated poorly over the years, you can actually learn something of the values of the culture at the time; whether it was the whitewash optimism of the 1950’s, the turbulent psychedelia of the 60’s, the grunginess of the 70’s, the excess of the 80’s, or even the naivete of the 90’s.  Every era has it’s mark and the more closely the movies exploited these time periods, the more likely they were going to be left behind when it was over.  Thus, do we find the movies that truly are timeless as they live on in our memories long after all the others are forgotten.

Trends tend to be the motivating factor behind the movies that get left behind by the passage of time.  Mostly seen in low budget movies from any era, popular fads in the pop culture will end up motivating production studios to quickly cobble together movies geared towards exploiting the fad with little thought put into it.  That’s why you see a lot of movies that give us a glimpse of a long forgotten pop cultural benchmark as well as feature some of the most paper thin plots and terrible acting that anyone has ever seen.  A great example of this was the “beach blanket” movies of the 1960’s, which featured the likes of Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon in the cast and were little else than excuses to film people hanging out on the beach and singing pop tunes of the period, which I guess was a thing 50 years ago.  The beach movies of the 60’s may have hit their mark in their time, but those movies quickly went away once audiences’ tastes began to change, and the psychedelic era began to be exploited by the studios.  Every era follows this same pattern, as new pop culture trends reflect back in the movies being made.  Even trends that did evolve and improve over time are given films that have aged poorly when they run into the problem of having no foresight.  Case in point, the 1990’s movies that tried to explore the new wonder that was the Internet.  Movies like The Net (1995), Hackers (1995), and Johnny Mnemonic (1995) have all unfortunately become products of their time because they didn’t have the foresight to think that the Internet and computers would run on something other than floppy disks and dial-up service.  Indeed, the world changes around us, but celluloid is forever, and when we look back on these movies, we begin to understand how fleeting a fad in our culture can be.

But it’s not only an outdated trend that can hurt a movies reception over the years.  Sometimes it’s the progress in cinematic tools that causes a movie to lose some of it’s luster over time.   Visual Effects have always played a part in film-making, but different advances can make movies in the past feel out of date by comparison.  Stop-motion for example was a popular way for filmmakers to bring to life some of the most memorable monsters the big screen has ever seen.  Animator Ray Harryhausen became a legend in the field because of his ability to make the impossible possible with his imaginative puppetry in films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).  Stop motion was a successful tool all the way up to the 1980’s, helping to even create memorable moments in films like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and Beetlejuice (1988).  But once the CGI animated dinosaurs made their first appearance in Jurassic Park (1993) filmmakers pretty much abandoned the tried and true stop-motion for the wonders of digital manipulation.  It’s usually a huge 180-shift like this that can make a once classic film feel quickly dated.  Even advances in CGI over the years reflect poorly on films made at the very beginning of the era.  The Sean Connery-voiced dragon in Dragonheart (1996) was seen as groundbreaking in it’s day, but when you compare it to the more advanced and photo-realistic Smaug in the Hobbit series, you start to see the artificiality of the original character.  Indeed, CGI as advanced so quickly in the last 20 years, that movies made even a few years ago can feel out of date just because their effects are not up to today’s standards.  It’s any wonder how Jurassic Park has managed to still amaze audiences with it’s effects after all of these years.

Now while many films have succumbed to the changing tastes of audiences over time, there are other movies that unfortunately are asking to be ridiculed for being so dated, and those are the films that naively try to predict the future of society.  These movies are either bold visions of a progressive and homogenized society of the future, or are dystopian cautionary tales.  Either way, each of these movies try to showcase what the future will be with the knowledge that they have with them at the time, and sometimes even the best guesses don’t really pan out so well.  Particularly in the genre of Sci-fi do we see the most films that you can consider as dated.  Many space age movies of the 50’s thought that we would have discovered life on Mars by now, or have colonized the moon.  And remember movies like The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) or the Amazing Colossal Man (1957) where it was believed at the time that exposure to radioactivity could give you mutant powers, instead of cancer.  Sometimes even a dystopian view of the world ends up dating a movie.  Even great dystopian movies like Blade Runner (1982) make the fatal mistake of trying to put a definite date on their futuristic setting.  The fact that we in 2014 are now just 5 years away from the future seen in that movie does not reflect well on how well the film imagined the future.  But then again, Science-fiction is all about letting the imagination go, so it’s one that we can give it a pass on.  But, movies like Logan’s Run (1976) and Rollerball (1975) don’t have that kind of luxury because their visions are so limited.  They’re futuristic visions are only reflexive of the time periods in which they were made, making it seem like they believed that no advances in technology or culture would be made in the intervening year.  This is primarily the reason why so many of these films tend to fall prey to the evolving tastes in cinema.

But, while some films that are a product of their era can age poorly, there are others that inexplicably live on for many years.  This mainly has to due with how well the films are made and how timeless their themes and stories are.  You can see this clearly in the lists made of all of the best films made over time.  The one thing most of them have in common is their rewatchablitity.  Movies like Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Godfather (1972), and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) can be watched over and over again many years removed from the time periods they were made because they did the same things exactly right; they didn’t try to reflect their own time periods and instead tried to remove themselves from the pack and try to be more universal in their appeal.  And most importantly, timeless films like these embody their own unique worlds and exist by their own rules.  A great timeless film doesn’t try to follow trends, nor is it seeking to try to start them either.  There are exceptions though.  The era of wartime propaganda message films in the 1940’s gave us a lot of dated and stilted films that barely are remembered years later; but out of this same pack we got Casablanca (1942), which is still considered one of the most timeless films of it’s era.  And the amazing thing about Casablanca is that it was never meant to be anything more than another product of it’s time.  Sometimes, timeless films just happen and then there are those that end up being discovered.

What is amazing sometimes is the fact that movies that should be dated end up achieving a timeless quality, partly due to the effectiveness of their story.  Another factor however is the nostalgia factor.  Sometimes we are in the mood for a movie that is clearly a product of it’s time and our entertainment values comes from how poorly the film has aged.  That, or we just want to examine how the world was viewed in a time other than our own.  One such movie that became a cult hit due to it’s very definitive vision of it’s time period was the 1982 Disney film Tron.  Tron is a poster child for 80’s cinema, with it’s blocky CGI-based environments, it’s excessive use of back-lit colors, and it’s synthesizer-based soundtrack.  Not to mention the fact that the plot revolves around the world of Arcade games.  And yet, the movie is still beloved all these years later because it feels so uniquely of it’s time.  It even spawned a sequel in 2010 called Tron Legacy, which itself smartly kept the aesthetic of the first movie while still updating the technology behind it.  Other films from specific eras have also withstood the test of time due to the fact that vision behind them is so imaginative that they end up defining themselves, and the era they came from; such as Barbarella (1968) or even Star Wars (1977).  Sometimes, even taking a timeless source material and adapting it for a certain time period helps to make a film resonate many years later.  The 1995 film Clueless is definitely a product of it’s time, and yet it still resonates years later, mainly due to the fact that the story is from a classic source; Jane Austen’s 1815 novella, Emma.  Smartly combining the classic story with a contemporary setting, filmmaker Amy Heckerling was able to make a film that felt timeless in it’s themes, but also be a commentary on the time in which it was made, thereby transcending it’s 90’s aesthetic.

But what usually happens is that we don’t know what’s going to be the definitive movies of an era until that time period has passed us by.  And any attempt we make to proclaim a certain film as the best reflection of our culture at any certain time will fall under scrutiny over time.  Sometimes, a movie takes many years to be considered an all time classic, while others fade into obscurity after a brief time at the top.  This is sometimes reflective in the choices made during Awards season.  What we thought was the standout film in one particular year may end up being forgotten by decades end.  American Beauty (1999) was once considered a daring choice for Best Picture at the Oscars, but now it’s viewed as a forgettable and somewhat naive movie about middle-class malaise.  Considering that there have been so many imitators in the years since American Beauty won, that brave choice now is viewed as the safe bet, especially when you look at all the other groundbreaking films that came out that year that have gone on to become classics; like The Matrix and Fight Club.  Sometimes, it ends up working in a movie’s favor to be the underdog, because then you’re not left with the mark of the era in which you were made; that is as long as you still have that timeless quality about you.  But withstanding the test of time can also be unpredictable.  I’m sure that Robert Zemekis never thought that his small, time-travel comedy called Back to the Future (1985) would become a decade-defining movie, but it ended up doing just that.  Sometimes it’s not the awards that define a classic, but the way it touches an audience, and even the smallest and silliest of movies can end up overshadowing the most prestigious of productions when all is said and done.

That is what ultimately separates the timeless from the dated; the impact that they leave on us.  It is entirely unpredictable how well a film will age over time, but when we benefit from hindsight, we can see the trademark signs of what leads to so many movies becoming forgotten.   But, even still, the very fact that a movie has not aged well doesn’t mean that it can’t still entertain.  Indeed, the most dated of movies are the ones that enjoy the most dedicated of cult followings.  Take for instance the movies of Ed Wood or John Carpenter.  Their movies are very much cemented in their particular eras, and yet movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) and Big Trouble in Little China (1986) can still leave audiences satisfied.  Also, there are films that transcend their eras by taking the aesthetics of the period and working them to their fullest potential.  Stanley Kubrick’s movies in particular should all feel dated, and yet every single one is considered a masterpiece of it’s era, mainly due to the un-compromised vision behind it and the timeless themes, which helps to elevate his films beyond the aesthetic.  After a while, all films will be viewed differently, because cultural tastes are constantly evolving.  Even beloved timeless movies that we proclaim about now may end up being viewed in a different way by future generations.  It’s a challenge for filmmakers, but for film lovers, exploring the past is a fascinating journey into cultural history, because cinema preserves a place in time better than any other art form.  It’s the best kind of historical time capsule and the longer that a movie withstands the test of time, the better it is observed as a landmark of our culture.