Mark Lawson provokes:
The main reason for this renaissance is that all levels of cinema – from the people who put up the budget to the people who pay for tickets – have become less frightened of intelligence and complexity. In its first decades, the people who made movies tended to come – except for an injection of European intellectuals displaced by Hitler – out of mainstream art forms such as vaudeville and Broadway. Now, a producer, director or actor is likely to have been schooled – and then film-schooled – to high levels, and can rely on a potential audience of similar sophistication.
So the film rights to Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd have been available for 30 years, but only now have Hollywood financiers and movie-goers consider its dark content and musical sophistication a viable proposition for cinema. Complex and unsettling fiction – such as Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain – now attract directors and actors in the way once reserved for populist fiction such as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.
The Dish 