Well, the crowdfunding question is interesting, because we're in the midst of a campaign on Indiegogo to help fund Orson's last film, The Other Side of the Wind. And anybody who's interested in the history of movies, or in fact, the art of the cinema (to use a pretentious phrase) should be interested in The Other Side of the Wind and helping us get it out there.
I've been trying to get this film completed since Orson died 30 years ago.
And it's been quite an ordeal. We're very close now, to being able to complete it - what happened was Orson shot everything he needed, but he wasn't able to complete the editing, for a variety of reasons.
What we're trying to do with this crowdfunding campaign is to get the final amount of money we need to complete the editing of the film, and to get it out there.
It is distressing to me that the younger generation seems to be totally uninterested in anything that's preceding 1995 or something - 2000. But it's a deeper problem than just lack of interest from younger people. There's no tradition of tradition in America. It's a young country, and frankly, is in many ways, still "the Wild, Wild West."
And unlike France, or England, or Italy, or Spain, there's no tradition of culture. And any civilized person should have a working knowledge of what's preceded the current output in all the arts. I'm afraid we're in a period of decadence - not just in the movies, but in most of the arts. I mean, there are no new novels being written that could possibly compete with the writing of novels that went on in the 19th century, amongst the Russians, or the English, or the Americans.
There's no Mark Twain, or Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy.
So it's not just the movies.
Maybe spectacle is not important to kids? I haven't examined video games. I don't know anything about them. I taught at University of North Carolina School of the Arts for 3 years. And I found that the students were very prejudiced against black & white movies now, which frankly is inane.
The problem, probably, stems from the fact that younger people don't have the opportunity to see the older films on the big screen as they were intended to be seen. And that's part of the problem. Because movies weren't made to be seen on the computer, or on the TV, they were meant to be seen on a big screen with an audience.
So since the older films are increasingly rare to be seen that way, it could be part of the problem with younger peoples' attention span.
QuasiVoat 0 points 3.3 years ago
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