Summer films attract older audiences

Press, 8 October 1987, Page 20

Summer films attract older audiences

BOB STRAUSS

A dozen years ago, Steven Spielberg’s "Jaws” took a massive bite out of summer . box-office revenues, establishing a new studio mind-set that deemed it unsafe for anyone with active brain cells to enter a movie-theatre between Memorial Day and Labour Day weekends.

Summertime, conventional Hollywood wisdom had it, was escapism time, when the core audience of 18- to 24-year-olds were out of school and willing to see anything, repeatedly, as long as it didn’t require them to think. Grosses of SIOO-million-plus .on films about star warriors and adventurers named after Midwestern states did little to change the moguls* minds. Older people, starving for a morsel of onscreen intelligence, simply had to stay hungry until autumn, which, the studios were convinced, was the only time to release “prestige" product — that is, thoughtful, well-acted pictures that might garner a few Oscar nominations but weren’t going to make a lot of money. In September 1987, however, mature audiences might already be stuffed. This summer, probably one of the most profitable in film Industry history, was won by movies with noticeable adult appeal. “The Untouchables,”

“The Witches of Eastwick,” “Roxanne,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “la Bamba” and "Stakeout” — all big money-makers that exhibited strong staying power in the most competitive release season in memory — may not have been rigorous intellectual exercises, but they were all literate, artfully made pictures that focused on decidedly grown-up concerns about morality, love, truth and death. 1 Collectively they kicked the stuffing out of most of the summer's kid stuff. Supposedly sure-fire warm-weather fare involving cuddly Spielberg creatures and beachside debauchery either never found an audience or lost whatever it could muster within 10 days of release. And the escapist flicks that did perform well featured strong, previously taboo, grown-up elements: “RoboCop” . laced its comic book shenanigans with blistering social satire and poignant metaphors about modern man’s loss of Identity; In "The Living Daylights,” Timothy Dalton offered a much more mature (albeit younger) James Bond alternative to the nonsensical Roger Moore; and “Dragnet” played on its built-in camp appeal for teen-age moviegoers’ parents, who grew up laughing at Jack Webb’s hopelessly square television series of the 19605.