Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Once you've seen the film industry's workings fromthe inside, you realize that it is a creative nightmare. It becomes difficult to understand how anything of quality-an Alien, a Place in the Sun, a Breaking Away -can be made. As in the Army, the first rule of studio filmmaking is CYA: Cover Your Ass. On any critical decision, it is well to consult at least half a dozen people, so that someone else's butt will go up in that fabled sling if the film drops dead and twenty million dollars goes swirling down the toilet. And if your butt must go up, it then becomes possible to make sure it doesn't go up alone.

There are, of course, filmmakers who either don't know this kind of fear or whose particular visions are so clear and fierce that such fear of failure never becomes a factor in the equation.

Brian De Palma comes to mind, and Francis Coppola (who teetered on the edge of being fired from The Godfather shoot for months, and yet persisted in his own particular vision of the film), Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, Steven Spielberg. * This factor of vision is so real and apparent that even when a director such as Stanley Kubrick makes such a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film as The Shining , it somehow retains a brilliance that is inarguable; it is simply there.

The real danger inherent in studio films is mediocrity. A clinker like Myra Breckinridge has its own horrid fascination-it is like watching slow-motion footage of a head-on collision between a Cadillac and a Lincoln Continental. But what are we to make of films like Nightwing, Capricorn One, Players, or The Cassandra Crossing ? These are not bad films-not the way that Robot Monster or Teenage Monster are bad, certainly-but they are mediocre. They're blah. You leave the theater after one of these films with no taste in your mouth but the popcorn you ate. They are films where, halfway through the second reel, you begin wishing for a cigarette.

As the cost of production balloons up and up, the risks of going for all of it become greater and greater, and even a Roger Maris looked pretty stupid when he was badly fooled, totally overswung the ball, and fell on his ass. The same obtains in films, and I would predict-with some hesitation, because the film industry is such a crazy place-that we will never again see such a colossal risk as the one Coppola took with Apocalypse Now or the one Cimino was allowed to take with Heaven's Gate . If anyone tries, that dry, dusty snapping sound you'll hear coming from the West Coast will be the accountants of every major studio out there snapping the corporate checkbooks closed.

But the indies . . .