A Very Scary Scenario

I know what happened last summer. And I know why.

I know why “Scary Movie” was the season’s most unexpected hit, and why “Titan A.E.” landed with a thud so intense it may have cost Bill Mechanic, Fox’s highly respected studio chief, his job. I’ve known why for years, since an afternoon in 1975 when I went to a Washington triplex to see a matinee of “Benji.”

For those with conveniently short memories, “Benji” (still playing though it had come out the year before) was a cute dog movie that was successful enough to eventually spawn three sequels. In front of me in the theater lobby was a kindly grandmother looking forward to taking her 6- or 7-year-old grandson to this paragon of childhood cinema. Only the kid didn’t want to go.

“I wanna see the shark,” he said, loudly and insistently, pulling his embarrassed and resistant elder toward the theater where, yes, the super-popular “Jaws” was playing. Left to their own devices, I realized then, youthful audience members not only don’t want to see what adults think they should, they almost perversely gravitate toward precisely what adults think they should under no circumstances be exposed to.

As children like that little boy grow up into the powerful teenage and early-20s audience, that drive to search out and patronize the transgressive wherever it’s found gets stronger and stronger. The Oxford English Dictionary defines transgressive as “overstepping the bounds, especially of social acceptability, passage beyond limits or boundaries.” It’s a natural coming-of-age impulse, and it drives a lot of what finds its way onto movie screens during the summer season and, not to put too fine a point on it, every season of the year.

Of course, transgressive art is not an exclusively teenage phenomenon. Some of the now-acknowledged classics of modern culture, from James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” to Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and Luis Bun~uel and Salvador Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou,” started out as seriously over the line themselves.

But when the transgressive sensibility is translated into terms young people will understand and pay money to experience, a lot of nuance, sensitivity and sophistication get tossed aside as so much excess baggage. The problem for transgression for teens is that it is almost stridently one-dimensional, its gotcha sensibility focused obsessively on the kind of scatological, sexual and bodily function material that have fascinated kids and pained adults for what seems like most of recorded time.

So it mattered not that “Titan A.E.,” though hardly a complete success, was an eye-catching and involving animated feature that boasted distinctive visual wonders. It’s the kind of film teenage boys might actually enjoy if they went to see it, but it was about as transgressive as “Benji,” and that core audience could smell its innate squareness and conscientiously stayed away. (It would be ironic if “Titan’s” expensive failure did in fact lead to Mechanic’s exit from Fox, because he championed the pumped-up transgressive “Fight Club,” a film whose middling record at the box office showed that even over-the-line material can be undone by tedious philosophizing and smug pretension.)

While “Titan A.E.” floundered, “Scary Movie” flourished. And how. It’s $42.3-million-plus opening was the highest grossing debut for both an R-rated film and one directed by an African American. It was the quickest to reach the $100-million mark of any film in the history of Miramax (whose Dimension Films subsidiary released it), and though it’s still earning, at $140 million-plus, it’s made more money than any film the company’s had. More than “Shakespeare in Love,” more than “The English Patient,” more than “Good Will Hunting,” more even than that transgressive pioneer, “Pulp Fiction.”

In its defense, “Scary Movie,” directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans and partially written by his brothers Shawn and Marlon (who co-star as well), does have a good sense of humor capable of creating genuinely funny moments. But the film’s success can’t be chalked up to its clever parodies of everything from “Potemkin” and “Titanic” to “The Blair Witch Project” and “The Usual Suspects.” Not in today’s market, anyway.

More likely a box-office booster is “Scary Movie’s” nonstop barrage of jokes about flatulence, oral sex, ejaculation, pubic hair and more, culminating in a visual set piece involving a large, erect penis. While that used to be enough to get a film declared obscene and hauled before the Supreme Court, today’s MPAA, blissfully asleep at the wheel as always, can’t even be bothered to give it more than an R rating.

Both “Scary Movie” and the Eddie Murphy-starring “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps,” whose PG-13 rating for a film with an anal rape subplot is yet another example of MPAA ineptitude and malfeasance, underline the way comedy has become the unashamed front line in the teenage search for the out of bounds.

“Scary” director Wayans candidly admits that “you have to measure your starting point where the last guy left off,” while “Klumps” director Peter Segal insists that “with comedy, you’re always trying to push the envelope.” (Personally, I thought with comedy you’re always trying to be funny, but I guess that’s just me.) As a result of this trend, as Variety editor in chief Peter Bart accurately wrote, “suddenly, early gross-out entries like ‘Animal House’ seem like ‘Mary Poppins.’ . . . Today, there’s growing evidence that the fart jokes are driving out legitimate comedy.”

As anyone who’s been paying attention to the world of popular culture can attest, this yearning for the forbidden, expressed not only in comedies, but in excessive, torture-heavy items like the Jennifer Lopez-starring “The Cell,” is all around us.

One recent New York Times article on the vogue for novels about bleak, dysfunctional situations in the young adult world was headlined “Tales of Raw Misery for Ages 12 and Up,” while the Los Angeles Times Magazine ran a cover story headlined “Snorkeling in the Cesspool: A Search for the Bottom in the Rising Tide of Vulgarity.” A recent cover story in Entertainment Weekly went even further: “Are There No Limits?” it headlined. “Film, Raunch, Violence & Hate Rule Pop Culture--Has Showbiz Finally Gone Too Far?”

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The trend is more of a problem in film, however, because it’s the only place where the juvenile, lusting-for-excess taste of a younger audience drives what should be an adult medium. An entire industry is being willingly held hostage not to what America wants or the world wants, but to what teenage boys, far and away the most reliable, most sheep-like segment of the audience, have proved they are willing to pay for.

Who else but teenage and early-20s boys, with parentally provided disposable income eating a hole in their pockets, gave “X-Men” an amazing $54.5-million opening weekend? In fact, if you look at the five top-grossing films of the summer of 2000--”Mission: Impossible 2,” “Gladiator,” “The Perfect Storm,” “Scary Movie” and “X-Men,”--each dovetails perfectly with the taste of what the Hollywood Reporter accurately called “the young backbone of the business.”

Given how grindingly greed-driven the multinational corporations that own the studios tend to be, and given as well that adults are always going to be more selective about what they see than teenagers, movies that cater to young people and their frequently immature sensibility are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. (Unless, as is regrettable but increasingly likely, the powers of the extreme right get enough clout to force the drunk-on-grosses studios to do what they don’t have the fortitude to do themselves.) So the question becomes, are there any points of light in this scenario? If there is no going back to Winnie-the-Pooh, what can studios use as a model for material that can satisfy teens as well as adults? The answer is hidden in plain sight: Harry Potter.

Despite the occasional shortsighted carping from people who should know better, the Harry Potter books are the most deservedly popular literary phenomenon in memory. Their success is not the triumph of marketing cynics want us to believe, but a result of, among other things, author J.K. Rowling’s crucial ability to do what the recent spate of one-dimensional transgressive films can’t even imagine, and that is give good and evil equal weight in storytelling. As with Darth Vader in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, the ever-darkening character of Voldemort in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” is unashamedly terrifying enough to add integrity and power to his surroundings. Which is a good thing all around.

Unfortunately, not only is it unclear whether Hollywood can benefit from Harry Potter’s lesson, it’s not even a sure thing that Warner Bros. will be able to make the Potter books into the kinds of evenly balanced films they should be. While the writing assignment has gone to the excellent Steve Kloves, the director picked Chris Columbus. To quote Stephen King, who knows a bit about storytelling and the supernatural, Columbus is “a filmmaker of no demonstrable ingenuity; one doubts if the director of ‘The Goonies,’ one of the loudest, dumbest and most shriekingly annoying children’s movies ever made, is up to bringing Rowling’s scatty wit and vibrant imagination to the screen.”

So how did he get the job? “In the end it was [Warner Bros. studio chief] Alan Horn’s decision, and it was a very corporate one,” an inside source told Premiere magazine’s Gregg Kilday. “He got out a tally sheet and figured out who’d made the most $100-million movies.”

Clearly, there are more ways to pander to a youthful audience than hiring a David Fincher clone to make your film, and trying to insure “Pokemon”-type grosses by having a marshmallow director for “Harry Potter” does not guarantee a good picture any more than a more transgressive choice would have.

In the end, one is reminded of an anecdote told by director Barry Levinson about some time spent living in Britain. “I’d see stories every day headlined ‘Pound too weak against the dollar,’ ” he related. “Then I picked up the paper and it said, ‘Pound too strong against the dollar.’ What happened to the day when the pound was just right against the dollar?” What indeed.