The Scrapbook has often touted the Conversations with Bill Kristol video series (available free at conversationswithbillkristol.org), but we are especially fond of the latest installment and suspect you will be, too. It’s an extended discussion of movies, TV, and popular culture with this magazine’s longtime movie critic, Commentary editor John Podhoretz. Here’s a small sample to whet the appetite:
Everybody went to movies in the 1970s. And, now, teenage boys go to movies. I mean, the classic Hollywood audience is young males, 30 and under. And that’s why the most reliable form of commercial moviemaking, which has been true of the last decade, is movies derived from comic books, which have this built-in audience not only from comic books themselves, but from previous cinematic and television versions of comic-book characters. . . . The old movies, they had this studio and they had sound stages and they had to keep them busy, and so they made a lot of Westerns—but they cost ten cents and they were made in two weeks. And now these movies cost 300 to 500 million dollars just to get off the drawing board. But they’re not about us. They’re not about people. They’re not about life. They’re about escape.
