GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: When Hollywood Did It Right: Die Hard.

Recently we saw an entertainment news story which suggested that Disney was trying to figure out how to get young men back into theaters to see Disney movies again. Well, it seems to me that the best way to do that would be to get more John McClanes on Disney’s movie screens and a lot less of whatever it is Disney has been producing for the last 20 years.

Besides being one of the greatest, most quintessential American action movies ever made, one which spawned its own genre (for years Hollywood execs sold movies by saying “it’s Die Hard in a (fill in the blank)), “Die Hard” reveals an important way in which the current theatrical movie model is hopelessly broken.

Much like “Lethal Weapon” (the subject of last week’s essay), “Die Hard” was a relatively inexpensive contained action “programmer” which caught lightning in a bottle and became a cultural juggernaut, spawning multiple sequels, launching Bruce Willis into the pantheon of our biggest movie stars, and adding multiple one-liners (“Yippee-Kai-Yay-Motherfucker!”) to the speech patterns of every day Americans.

But movies like these were more than just a low-risk way for the studios to make a little money, they were an opportunity to introduce promising young stars to the moviegoing audience. Like Mel Gibson and Danny Glover before “Lethal Weapon”, the average American movie fan had no idea who Bruce Willis was before “Die Hard” introduced him. The death of the studio “programmer” has meant the disappearance of this young star farm system as well. And this has been a critical cause of the total breakdown of Hollywood’s once formidable movie star factory.

Exit question: “The bottom line is that Hollywood needs to be asking itself a very important question… are there no movies because there are no stars? Or are there no stars because there are no movies?”