Art for Money's Sake.

• Author: Young, Michael
• Position: Financial influences on the artistic production of motion pictures

Hollywood's uneasy relationship with the almighty dollar

Next time you see a film produced by the contemporary corporate progeny of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, be sure to read the Latin phrase above the roaring lion's head: ars gratia artis--translated as "art for art's sake." This enduring manifestation of Hollywood kitsch--what you can't understand must be classy--is all the more exotic in that MGM always made its films for money's sake. And yet the phrase reveals a peculiar tendency of film executives, both past and present, to inject respectability into their mainly mercenary ventures by claiming artistry and good taste.

Taste and commerce have long had a difficult relationship. No cultural High Mass reveals this better than the annual Academy Awards ceremony, in which a small coterie of Hollywood film people congratulates, mostly, a small coterie of Hollywood film people. Every year one hears the customary moaning that it is the expensive productions that win the awards, while the smaller, independently produced films are left picking up, at best, soon-forgotten nominations.

The implicit assumption is that commerce undermines art, so the pocket-sized films shot on paltry budgets by directors whose names no one can pronounce are good, while ostentatious super-productions are vulgarity incarnate.

Obviously the problem is elsewhere. A mountain of money won't save a badly scripted, indifferently directed film. Nor can hell be quite as well approximated as by that tranquil, intimate oeuvre by the hot new Manhattan-based Mongolian director who refuses to sell out to Hollywood by cutting down his six-hour meditation on yaks to a mere four hours.

Yet as Salman Rushdie suggested recently in The New York Times, a crop of new and popular international films, most notably Ang Lee's "shoestring" $15 million epic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, might take U.S. viewers back to the days when they could "accept subtitled foreign films in the giant cineplexes where the big money is made." Crouching Tiger, which took home an Oscar for best foreign film, has certainly made big money: The film has already grossed well over $100 million in American theaters and is still going strong.

What Rushdie implied was that the public would go for taste. Indeed, but just how the public defines what is tasteful, and through what means, has changed considerably over time. Gone are the days when critics and intellectual gatekeepers had an overpowering influence over the...