On Friday, Motion Picture Association of America president and CEO Christopher Dodd took the stage at the National Press Club to talk about his first several years on the job. It was an interesting talk less because of policy issues that Dodd focused on, or that he discussed during the question-and-answer period, but because of the way he talked about movies, and what they’ve come to mean to him as art during his almost two years at the association. In arguing for movies’ unifying role in a politically divided country, and movies and television as key tools of cultural diplomacy, Dodd’s talk raised some fascinating questions for me about how we approach and analyze movies, and what levels of responsibility we want to assign an art form that claims that potential impact.

Dodd admitted that before coming to the MPAA, “As a father of two very young children, 7, now almost 8, and 11, my movie selections were limited.” But as he’s reconnected with the product that his member companies produce, Dodd made an argument that both serves to burnish the reputation of those companies, and potentially exposes them to higher standards than your average producer of widgets.

“They tell stories, stories that help us make sense of our world and ourselves…Consider the focus on racism in To Kill A Mockingbird or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Dodd said. “The best movies ground us in common values and ideals. America’s a big place, as we all know, with red states and blue states…But gathered together in a darkened theater, regardless of our differences, we become, in spite of our differences, one place.”

The ability of movies to achieve that unity or provoke that kind of thought doesn’t mean that all movies have to meet that aspirational standard. But it does suggest that movies that do aim to tackle big ideas deserve to be taken seriously, which means being examined critically. Often, debates over accuracy get dismissed as nit-picking, which if the only question at stake is whether a movie is a literal translation of historical events or not, is potentially fair. But the questions of why and when movies choose to diverge from the historical record is can be rich ones, particularly when those questions happen in the realm of character interpretation, as in the presentation of President Lincoln’s attitudes toward black Americans in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. As a critic who writes about the politics of entertainment, it’s been exciting to see academics, policy reporters, and political commentators enter the debates around Lincoln, Argo, Django Unchained, and Zero Dark Thirty because their desire to play on this turf is a reaffirmation of the idea that gives life to my career, even if I’m not always thrilled about how these arguments have functioned. The battles over how to interpret Zero Dark Thirty , for example, seem to me to have narrowed down to debates about whether the film is an accurate transcription of a murky historical record, rather than exploring the more revealing questions of how the script and directing choices shape the movie’s message about the immorality of torture, and why Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow felt compelled to portray the movie as an unbiased piece of reportage in the first place. That latter choice in particular says as much about the state of our debate about the use of torture as the movie itself.

If we’re going to take film seriously on the grounds that it has a unique power to influence audiences, we need to examine how well it does at getting audiences to do interpretive work—and leaving them space in which to do it—to open themselves up to new ideas, and to inhabit new perspectives. The blunt statements of opinion writing or cable news appearances, or the clear conclusion-drawing of long-form journalism aren’t necessarily the things that serve those goals well in film, where an indirect approach may lead otherwise-resistant audiences to a point they might not have accepted when presented bluntly, and manifestos can make characters seem like strawmen, rather than flesh-and-blood humans.
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Last week, I wrote about four things that network television needed to do to recover its sense of independent identity instead of losing its mojo chasing after cable. I thought of that post again when I saw the trailer for Mockingbird Lane, NBC’s reboot of The Munsters, on which it spent a reported $10 million, and which it is airing as a Halloween special:

Mockingbird Lane looks exactly like the kind of thing that a network shouldn’t be doing: it was probably unsustainably expensive, it was a reboot of a concept no one was dying for, it had a ton of special effects that would have been unsustainable over the long term, it would never have been able to be as frightening or as sexually disturbing as American Horror Story. It’s not yet clear if NBC has given up on turning Mockingbird Lane into a series or if this airing is a test to see what kind of audience would turn out for the show. But it’s probably a good idea not to get into an arms race with cable while you’re still digging yourself out of a ratings hole, and when you don’t have subscription revenue to fall back on.

When the broadcast television season began several weeks ago, one of the things that stood out most from network to networks was the ratings. NBC may have started to claw its way out of the ratings cellar with Revolution, one of the few bona fide hits of fall, but lots of its broadcast counterparts found themselves in trouble. CBS, normally top of the heap, saw two of its new entries, drama Made In Jersey and sitcom Partners, tank out of the gate. Fox renewed two new comedies, The Mindy Project and Ben and Kate, despite the fact that they debuted with half the audience their comedy block anchor, New Girl, started out with a year before. On Twitter, my fellow television critics mused that they’d always thought there was the potential for the bottom to fall out of the broadcast television model, but that they didn’t see it coming so soon. At the same time, cable shows like FX’s Sons of Anarchy were creeping up in the ratings, beating the networks in the core demographic of viewers if not in total viewers. Network television seems to have lost its sense of what it can do better than cable, and to be floundering in developing shows as a result.

But it would be great for network to get its groove back, and not just because it’s one of the few media that can create an ongoing mass cultural phenomenon. As demand grows for alternatives to bundled cable, it’s important for broadcast television to be a vigorous, vibrant alternative to cable networks so it’s in those cable networks’ interests to compete however they can for viewers. And for those of us who love great television, it would be fantastic to see the end of a race to the lowest common denominator, and to see good programming catch on. While there’s no guarantee that doing the right, creative thing will garner network audiences, here are four ideas for how broadcast television can rediscover what makes it unique.

1. Avoid Special Effects Arms Races: Subscription support means that HBO can afford to spend $60 million a season on Game of Thrones, building a complex fictional world that includes castles, dragons, and ice zombies. Network television, especially given declining viewership and correspondingly shrinking ad rates, won’t ever be able to keep up with that kind of investment. So it shouldn’t try, settling for shows that look bad, or that end up blowing their budgets on CGI dinosaurs rather than acting talent. I may not like NBC’s Revolution much, but when it comes to genre, it’s doing the right thing, building a post-apocalyptic society that is dense with forest rather than full of heavily made-up zombies or other magical creatures. Constraints can make for a lot of creativity. Network should accept its limitations, and build smart worlds within them.

2. Shorter Seasons: I’ve written about this repeatedly. But an obsessive focus on producing high numbers of episodes of shows is a great driver of mediocre concepts, and of overextending successful series like How I Met Your Mother. Miniseries and shorter seasons are a great way to attract excellent actors to television, whether it’s Sigourney Weaver in Political Animals, an effort I think was doomed by its time slot or Kevin Bacon, who will arrive on Fox this winter playing an alcoholic FBI agent in The Following. It would also be a way to fit stories to the number of episodes actually needed to tell them, one of the great strengths of British television. And shorter seasons and miniseries would also help solve one of television’s most pernicious scheduling problems: month-long hiatuses on shows that have just begun to hit their stride. The television season is an artificial construction and a not particularly logical one. It’s time to start experimenting with alternatives to it that serve stories and audiences instead.

3. Genuinely Family-Friendly Shows: The success of Downton Abbey is an illustration of a serious gap in the television market: programming that people of all ages can watch, enjoy, and discuss. So much of what’s on television is narrowly targeted or toned by age right now—a show like New Girl wouldn’t even be close to appropriate for a pre-teen audience, but its appeal has a cutoff well inside the target demographic. CBS’s Partners may be an attempt to speak to a younger generation whose friend groups have always included gay couples, but in tone and style, it’s aimed more at older viewers who are still getting used to the idea. Setting aside in-jokes or concepts that are targeted at certain demographics and trying for concepts and tones that are more universal could meet the needs of entire families. The 8 PM hour is considered a dead zone on broadcast television right now, which is too bad. There’s no reason to waste the hour after homework and before a reasonable bed time.

4. Innovate Around Sex And Violence: There’s an odd perception that much of cable television’s edge over broadcast is due to the fact that cable shows can depict sexual and violent situations that would be verboten—or at least risk drawing very heavy fines—on network television. Fox is attempting to chase cable standards with The Following, its extremely violent serial killer show, but across the board, I think that’s a mistake. Too often, cable’s taken its licenses as mandates, and produced sex and violence unmoored from narrative or emotional demands. Network could compete not by courting FCC censure, but by making the leadup to sex sensual and adult, and countering body-of-the-week callousness by making deaths real losses with devastating impact. You don’t have to see a character’s head get bashed in for their death to feel debilitating.

The war isn’t over. But Deadline reports that the Paradise Lost movie that was in the works is dead, at least for now:

The big-budget film Paradise Lost, which was slated to start shooting in January but was pushed till early summer, has been scrapped, I’m told. The epic-sized Alex Proyas-directed film about the battle between good and evil inspired by the John Milton poem was to star Bradley Cooper as Lucifer, Benjamin Walker as the archangel Michael, Diego Boneta playing Adam and Camilla Belle Eve, with a host of other actors lined up for the action epic.

Legendary made the decision after trying to bring the cost of the movie down to $120 million, tops. The producer/financier spent low eight figures to get this far but had never green lit the film and therefore should not be on the hook for pay or play talent deals. It is possible that the film could return down the line, as Best Picture nominee Moneyball, American Gangster and some other pictures have done after being scrapped just short of a production start. But Paradise Lost might be halted for a while, until technological advancements in visual effects bring to a reasonable cost the task of creating a believable depiction of the celestial battles that are at the heart of this film. It was too rich for Legendary’s blood even though the company scoured every way possible to find a way to be grand but disciplined.

Now, obviously that “let’s just wait for better special effects thing” means they fundamentally don’t get Milton’s epic. But anything that staves off the day when Bradley Cooper gives us his smug prepster Satan is good news.

The bridge is yours.

-Crowdsourcing special effects: not just for space Nazis.

-It would be great if we could have more shorter shows on network television.

-30 Rock has reached the stage when it’s just throwing famous people at us.

-Earl Sweatshirt is back.

-I’m deeply torn between wishing we could have a new concept and my love of Jeremy Renner:

James Franco mostly annoys me when he makes headlines these days, but in our ongoing debate for how to properly weight the recognition for Andy Serkis’s Performance Capture work, this is a useful contribution:

Performance Capture is here, like it or not, but it also doesn’t mean that old-fashioned acting will go the way of silent film actors. Performance Capture actually allows actors to work opposite each other in more traditional ways, meaning that the actors get to interact with each other and look into each others eyes. For years computer technology forced actors to act opposite tennis balls if a movie wanted to have CG creatures, but now the process has come full circle so that actors playing CG creatures can perform in practical sets, just like the “human” actors. In acting school I was taught to work off my co-stars, not to act but react and that was how I would achieve unexpected results, not by planning a performance, but by allowing it to arise from the dynamic between actors, and on The Rise of the Planet of the Apes that’s exactly what I was able to do opposite Andy as Caesar.

Now, your ability to coax good performances out of the people you’re working with is a skill that directors are generally recognized for, not actors (though I wonder if folks think about that when they’re casting their Best Supporting votes). But it’s a reminder that the effects folks couldn’t produce Serkis’s performance and the scenes as a whole he’s in without them, just as he couldn’t do what he does without their critically important work. We have to figure out a way to recognize these hybrids. They’re not going away.

We’ve talked about this a bit before, but Andy Serkis makes the case for why he should be eligible for acting awards — which I agree with, I just don’t know that we can nominate him alone:

There is no difference. Acting is acting. Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it’s just another way of recording an actor’s performance. It’s very interesting being in two movies this year that are manifested completely differently but use the same process. The same visual effects company, Weta Digital, produced apes that look entirely real and a palette and a style that honors the source material of Tintin. What Steven was trying to do was to have the best of both worlds, where you can create the look and the feel and the sensibility of Herge [Tintin's cartoonist creator] but have emotionally truthful performances. The technology allows the actors to enter into those worlds…The technology has come to the point where we could shoot Gollum and the Hobbits in the same moment, as we did in Apes. In the original, I’d have to shoot against empty plates that were shot on the day, then repeat the process on the performance-capture stage, sometimes months later. Now we get it in one hit, so it’s much more actor- and director-friendly.

Obviously post-production and effects work exist on a continuum. But there’s a difference between technological alteration without which a performance could not exist, and post-production work that tweaks or modifies a performance or a set but that does not constitute the core of the work. Our current awards categories don’t provide appropriate recognition to the first category of technological and post-production work. I want Serkis to get piles of statues. I just think we have to find a way to acknowledge the interactive nature of the work. The fact that visual effects artists often don’t get properly credited is part and parcel of a system that involves visual effects studios giving up not just credit but profits in order to keep work, even though the industry increasingly relies on their work to satisfy audience expectations.

Maybe if Serkis gets a nomination or an award for a role where his face isn’t actually on-screen, it could trigger a special citation for the visual effects folks who translated his performance. I don’t know that it’s a perfect solution. But I think we need to reconsider the awards categories themselves, not just who fits into them.