Busfilm

Wealth-creation vs. Zero-Sum

Business is often viewed as a “zero sum game,” in which money into one pocket necessarily comes from another.

Rogue Trader (1999)
Trading Places (1983)

Some questions about business in films

Here are some of the top questions I've gotten from visitors and readers in the couple of months since I first posted my blog and article. I've attempted to respond to all of these points in my article, but I'm sure many will have their own ideas:

1. Are filmmakers really different from other artists? Artists in general might be expected to rebel at the constraints on their creative spirit imposed by markets in general, and capital markets in particular.

2. Are big-budget films likely to be more, or less, anti-capital than smaller, independent films?

3. Has films' attitude toward business changed over time? For example, are films less anti-business now than they use to be as big films increasingly are made by large conglomerates?

How do current films deal with business?

My article and blog range through movie history, in no particular order. I tend not to see movies until they appear on DVD or cable. This means that I'm lagging the most recent trends. What do you, my visitors, think about the current crop of holiday movies? I don't see an obvious trend, except that business doesn't seem to play a very large role. But possibly there are some less obvious examples. For example, Matrix Revolutions (and, for that matter, the whole Matrix series) would seem to be a comment on increasing "corporate" control of our consciousness. What do you think?

Forbes survey

Forbes’ story on “The Ten Greatest Business Movies” and related stories on Forbes.com, says a lot about films’ attitude toward business. The top ten were: Citizen Kane, The Godfather: Part II, It's a WonderfulLife, The Godfather, Network, The Insider, Glengarry Glen Ross, Wall Street, Tin Men, Modern Times. I discuss these films in the latest version of my article.

This film list provides new fodder for my theory. My thesis, again, is that, while films usually portray business in a bad light, they do not really say that business is bad. After all, the films most of us see are produced by big businesses.

More precisely, films are made by people working in these businesses. Filmmakers see themselves as artists, the latest in a long line from cave painters through Michelangelo. Yet, unlike many artists, filmmakers’ art is so costly that films cannot get made without lots of money. Filmmakers must get this money from capitalists, who, in turn, must sell tickets. Because film artists resent their shackles, they often show struggling workers, greedy capitalists, and heroic artists. “Good” businesses are those where the artistic types have the upper hand, and bad businesses are those where the artists have lost.

In other words, films see firms from the cramped perspective of the assembly line or the cubicle. From way out in Hollywood, firms often seem like beehives or rabbit warrens, unfit for human habitation. We don’t see what businesses actually do – create social wealth and meaningful jobs, and provide means for all of our ends, from writing articles to. . . making movies. In fact, businesses couldn’t succeed in the long run if they ignored the needs of their workers and customers.

A companion Forbes article discussing the making of a television movie about Enron suggests that the medium is the message. In other words, films have to approach business as they do to make money. For example, the audience identifies most easily with the underdog, so the Forbes articles says that the Enron movie will tell the story from the perspective of a young worker fresh out of business school – “a rat’s eye view of the Titanic.”

But this can’t be the whole story. Film is a remarkably flexible medium that can tell any story – from the lowly assembly line worker in Modern Times to the rich and powerful Charles Foster Kane. If it can describe the intricacies of the mob customs and practices in the Godfather and many other movies, it can describe the intricacies of doing business. Indeed, many films do this, from salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross and Tin Men, to currency trading in Rogue Trader and securities trading in Wall Street and Boiler Room. Even the package delivery business had its day in Cast Away.

True, it helps to move things along if people are getting killed, but that isn’t essential to a great and popular movie. Of the Forbes top ten business movies, killings are featured only in the two Godfather films. If you want drama, it doesn’t have to be worker vs. boss – it could be a businessman building a business from scratch as in Citizen Kane.

Back to the top ten list and what it reveals. Two deal with the artist’s role as social conscience. In Network, an anchorman breaks out of the capitalist straightjacket the network has him in, while in The Insider the CBS people do not always act so courageously. Six of the ten films deal with oppressed or morally challenged workers – the two just discussed plus Modern Times, Tin Men, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Wall Street.

Although Citizen Kane and the Godfather movies might be seen as the rare films that show what it takes to build a business, they don’t paint a pretty picture. The ingredients don’t include insight and creativity, and the result isn’t a better society. Kane inherits his money and his first newspaper. He builds his fame and greater wealth on dubious yellow journalism, along the way acquiring megalomania, and losing all of his friends. The oppressed worker in his firm, his long-time friend played by Joseph Cotton, gets to make a last stand against his boss by panning Kane’s girlfriend’s opera debut.

In the Godfather movies the formula for success includes murder and, in the case of the family’s brush with the film business, the severed head of a race horse. Most notably, in a move echoed more recently by The Sopranos, these films suggest important parallels between the Corleones’ businesses and the legitimate business they hope to be, except that the mob “firms” are more family-friendly, principled and exciting places to work.

Only It’s a Wonderful Life holds out some real hope for business on screen. Made by Frank Capra, one of Hollywood’s rare Republicans, Wonderful Life is about a socially responsible bank executive who does good for society. But Stewart is good not necessarily as a businessman, but as a person who happens to be a businessman.

Films’ treatment of business has significant social implications. Movies are very influential. They might explain why people are so ready to accept more business regulation whenever anything goes wrong, despite the fact that we know that legislators and regulators are also flawed. After decades of business-unfriendly movies, we assume that business cannot be trusted.

To provide a mechanism for thinking about these issues, I propose an alternative to the Forbes poll – a poll of the most, and least, business friendly movies. FWIW, my nominee for the most business-friendly movie is Other People’s Money. For the least, Glengarry Glen Ross.

My top almost 10 lists

Here's my response to Forbes list of top ten business films: the 8 most business-friendly films, and the 10 least business-friendly, both in alphabetical order. Why only 8 of the former? Couldn't think of any more in that category, and I had to stretch to think of 8. I had plenty in the second camp. The films are discussed in my article, linked in the "about" space on the left panel. Any questions?

Most business friendly

Cast Away
Do the Right Thing
Executive Suite
It's a Wonderful Life
Other People's Money
One Two Three
Solid Gold Cadillac
You've Got Mail

Least business friendly

China Syndrome
Erin Brockovich
Glengarry Glen Ross
The Hudsucker Proxy
The Insider
Quiz Show
Roger and Me
Save the Tiger
Silkwood
Wall Street

Why focus on American films?

Many non-U.S. films deal with the theme I highlight – the relationship between capital and labor. I discuss the French film Wages of Fear (1953) in my paper as a good example of a cold-hearted capitalist, sending workers down a rough mountain road with a truckload of nitroglycerin.

The British film I’m All Right Jack (1959) is one of the most cynical satires on the labor-management relationship ever made in any country. In that film, everybody is bad – from the evil capitalist Tracepurcel (Dennis Price) who plans on a strike to make a killing on an Arab arms deal, to Fred Kite (Peter Sellers), the shop steward who is always more than ready to get a strike going.

But, as I say in the paper: “this article focuses on peculiarly American causes and effects.” Every culture has peculiarities that are reflected in its films. Most importantly, the subject of my paper is the resentment of the artist in a capital-dominated industry.

One would expect at least two types of differences in countries where films are less capital-intensive or government plays a bigger role in funding. Artists who are less bound to the market are less likely to resent its constraints, but more likely to be contemptuous of it. Obviously these factors cut in opposite ways, but I am guessing that the first dominates.

In any event, we see only a subset of films made in other countries. This is not a random sample, but rather films made for the export market. Thus, I do not feel comfortable making generalizations about films from other countries.

Comments?

Film of the day: The Fugitive

I’m going to try to do an occasional (daily?) feature on films about business.

Today’s feature is The Fugitive (1993). I choose this because it shows how unexpectedly the themes in my paper can pop up. [Spoiler] In the film version of the famous TV series, the one-armed man who killed Kimble’s (Harrison Ford’s) wife works for a drug company that sought to cover forged test results in pursuit of obscene profits. There is a scene where the U.S. Marshall pursuing Kimble (Tommy Lee Jones) comments on the obscene profits of drug companies. All of this is so striking because it seems so superfluous to the plot, the dramatic tension, character, or anything else. I would have been surprised to see similar things in the advertising-supported network television show on which the movie was based (or now, for that matter).

Markets and "taste"

God of the machine makes a good observation about the Forbes list and my take on it – that Hollywood sees the “bad” business as producing schlock. This reinforces my point that filmmakers see themselves as artists beleaguered by the capitalists. Godofthemachine also correctly observes that Hollywood misunderstands and underestimates the power of markets to sort the schlock from the quality, so that quality can produce profits after all. So far so good.

But gotm makes another point that I question: “Bad art makes more money than good art, in general because bad taste is more prevalent than good taste, and in the specific case of movies because the audience for them is overwhelmingly young, and the taste of the average adolescent is even worse than that of the average adult. These are depressing facts if you work in the taste business.”

There are two things wrong with this statement, in my view. First, markets are not necessarily antithetical to culture and taste, as Tyler Cowen usefully shows in his In Praise of Commercial Culture. Even filmmakers recognize this, as in the examples gotm cites, Executive Suite, Tucker and Sabrina.

In Executive Suite, the Holden character defeats the short-sighted Frederick March character by arguing that quality does produce profit in the long run, exactly what the filmmakers would like to argue to their moneymen. Tucker was brought down, not by markets, but by government in league with politically powerful competitors. More about Sabrina in a minute.

Second, and more importantly, markets are useful because they give people what they want, even if the elites would prefer to live in a world where the public only gets what they, the elites, want. The William Holden character in Executive Suite was wrong in believing, not that quality sells, but that a world in which schlock also sells is somehow a bad one.

In Holden’s dramatic scene, he easily smashes the cheap “KF” line chair that Frederick March wants to sell. Surely, he argues, the Treadway company would not want to be known for such a product, and its workers would be ashamed to make it. But what’s so wrong with making furniture, or anything else, that people who don’t make a lot of money can buy? I’m struck by this every time I go to Wal-Mart or Las Vegas. The elites, including the filmmakers, may look down at this end of the market, but I see a kind of beauty in markets that can serve a variety of tastes. As did the Humphrey Bogart character in Sabrina when he extolled the beneficial effects of business to his brother, played by William Holden (another love letter to business by Billy Wilder, who in his early life saw what many Americans have not -- just how bad the world was outside the “crass” American culture where elites had all the power).

Do movies bash government?

Kaimi Wenger suggests that films may balance their negative view of business with an equally negative view of government. He mentions Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975); All the President's Men (1976); The Way We Were (1973).

I present the contrary view in my article that the government is the heavy mainly in the post-Watergate era (e.g., All the President’s Men and The Parallax View (1974)), and then often the point seems to be to show the crusading and virtuous artist, usually a journalist, at work. To these we might add the most entertaining of all – Capricorn One (1978) (another crusading journalist film; this time the mission to Mars is a hoax).

Films dealing with government are of many kinds – the U.S. government as the good guy, as in many war and spy films; the right wing as the bad guys (Manchurian Candidate); politicians can’t be trusted (The Candidate (1972)); the government isn’t doing enough to stop evil business (Erin Brockovich); or the government as incompetent (Dr. Strangelove).

The absence of a consistent theme is not surprising, since the government is us, for good or bad. People who work for the government are mostly like us. At least, in a democracy, we select and are responsible for them. The capitalists, on the other hand, are not like us – they’re rich. In the popular view, which ignores capital markets, we have no role in selecting them.

This comparison between the portrayals of business and government is important. An implication of the negative portrayal of business is that government should do something about it. That's acceptable as long as government is viewed as good, or at least benign.

A New Year's message

In the philosophical vein that some of us associate with The New Year, I offer some answers to a couple of burning questions.

First, why does it matter what movies say about business?

Answer:

(1) Capitalism is a major force for good in the world today, liberating people by giving them the means to decide for themselves what they want to do with their lives.

(2) The dark side of capitalism is that it doesn’t work for everybody. But the freedom to win necessarily entails the freedom to lose. Many people don’t understand this.

(3) The great businesses focus on long-term profit maximization, not the betterment of humanity as seen by managers whose sole credential for recognizing same is a b-school course on corporate social responsibility. Many people don’t understand this.

(4) When, year after year, some of our most popular films and non-advertising-supported cable television shows hammer home the message that unalloyed capitalism is bad, this accords with the intuitions of many workers, consumers and even managers, and makes over-regulation of business politically palatable.

(5) Knowledge is power. Recognizing this theme and removing its artistic wrapping reduces its effect. It would be even better, but possibly too much to hope for, if some films presented a different message.

Next question: Why don't I blog about other things?

Answer: Because plenty of other people do, but nobody, as far as I know, is writing about this.

There you have it. Happy New Year!