GIVE THEM MOON AND CLOUDLESS SKIES [479]

from "The Simpsons" episode "Barthood", a parody of Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

It isn’t unusual to want Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson to grow up OK when you have been watching them on television for most of your own life. You hope that our real world, both reflected and created by the show, will ultimately be as kind to them as you want it to be for ourselves.

With “The Simpsons” having now run for an astonishing thirty-five years, three years away from eclipsing “Last of the Summer Wine” to become the world’s longest-running sitcom, its status quo means that, while I was younger than Lisa when I first saw the show, I am now older than both her parents. We have grown up with these characters, but they can only grow through lessons learned, fleshing out their backstory.

I fell out of watching “The Simpsons” for some time, returning upon subscribing to Disney+ to find a show that, while not having folded over itself by pandering to its audience’s nostalgia, has become playful with its own history: it began its thirty-sixth season with a “series finale” that stopped questions on how the show would eventually end, having previously broadcast a fake clip show of leaked episodes purportedly too outlandish even for later-period “The Simpsons”, and a “Treehouse of Horror” story created a “Westworld”-like theme park of the moments adopted as internet memes.

The 2022 episode “When Nelson Met Lisa” was when I realised that my favourite episodes of “The Simpsons” depict an imagined future for its characters, seeing what their experiences have made them, regardless of it being a parody of “When Harry Met Sally”. Lisa has been shown to have a crush on Nelson Muntz before, but a series of scenes across the years builds this into a mature, happy and hopeful ending, one you hope will be canonised.

By necessity, the future depicted in “The Simpsons” can’t be set in stone, because that could get in the way of a good story, but there have been elements built up on each other, then knocked down and rebuilt: Bart could become a deadbeat divorced dad, living in a Springfield Elementary converted to makeshift apartments; Lisa is successful, but marries Milhouse; and Maggie, the eternal silent wildcard, becomes the biggest noise in pop music, and the most constant depiction of her future. Thankfully, Bart and Lisa’s future has been depicted more hopefully, with Bart becoming a BMX stunt champion, artist and a repair shop owner, while Lisa will attend Harvard and have the world as her oyster. 

Then again, Bart could also become a Supreme Court judge after missing “The Itchy & Scratchy Movie”, and Lisa could become President of the United States, having inherited “quite a budget crunch from President Trump”, although the episode “Bart to the Future”, broadcast in 2000, would not have known which Trump presidency it would be. 

Predicting the future can be futile, despite the number of times situations and jokes in “The Simpsons” replayed themselves in real life, from predicting the discovery of the Higgs boson to Disney buying 20^thCentury Fox, but imagining the future should be encouraged, except for preparing for when “The Simpsons” eventually ends – I don’t think anyone is truly prepared for that. Perhaps it could then be rebooted with an older Bart, Lisa and Maggie – it happened with "The Flintstones" and “The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show”.

I’VE GOT TO FIND IT, GET ME BEHIND IT [339]

Like “Myra Breckinridge”, a film I have written about three times without its charms ever growing on me [link] [link] [link], “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” is an X-rated film released in June 1970 by 20^th Century Studios, when it was still named 20^th Century-Fox. 

Both films satirise the new Hollywood evolving from the implosion of both the Classical Hollywood era of cinema, and the 1960s in general, both films making good use of their rating, plunging into subject matter, nudity, language and violence brought in from the fringes of the film industry, when mainstream studios need to make money. The films are also closely linked due to their often being paired as a double bill both in cinemas and in subsequent discussions, having been released within a week of each other.

It has been remiss of me not to take “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” into account when considering “Myra Breckinridge”, especially when its reputation has made it much easier to find: my DVD of “Myra Breckinridge” was a lucky eBay purchase of an out-of-print release from 2005, while “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” was a prestige Blu-ray release from Arrow Films, a UK release including extras used by The Criterion Collection.

Watching the film was by turn bewildering, overwhelming and exhausting, perhaps on purpose, as a kind of drug trip. You either remain on edge for every moment for fear of missing something, or you just need to have the film wash over you. All the time, there is a sense of dread hanging over the hedonism throughout, beginning, as the film does, with a shooting inspired by, and reminiscent of, the killing of Sharon Tate, star of the original “Valley of the Dolls”, perhaps the only time a film’s climax is shown in the opening credits.

“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” is successful in its having been made by a confident filmmaker, with rapid editing, and humorous music by Stu Phillips, holding the film together. This is a marked contrast with “Myra Breckinridge”, its use of clips from Classical Hollywood films having turned from a motif to a sticking plaster during the production. Sex and nudity are also used much more freely and naturally, although this is because the maker of “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” was well-versed in their use in cinema.

The film was co-written, produced and directed for 20^th Century-Fox by Russ Meyer, the usually independent maker of small-budgeted sexploitation films like “Supervixens” and “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” Marketed on Meyer’s name, it stars a cast of unknowns, although Charles Napier, Harrison Page and Pam Grier, an extra in a party scene, went on to have long careers. 

The other writer was the film critic Roger Ebert, a frequent collaborator with Meyer who turned out to be best placed to satirise Hollywood. With Meyer having originally been hired to direct a straightforward sequel to 1967’s “Valley of the Dolls”, Ebert and Meyer took only its framework of three women coming to Hollywood to find fame and fortune, but only finding sex, drugs and violence, and stretching it as far “Beyond” it as possible. 

As Ebert wrote for “Film Comment” magazine in 1980, the film was as intended to feel as much of a fictionalised exposé or real people as the original, but without having personally encountered such types, becoming “…an essay on our generic expectations. It’s an anthology of stock situations, characters, clichés and stereotypes, set to music and manipulated to work as exposition and satire at the same time; it’s cause and effect, a wind-up machine to operate emotions.” At the same time, the story was made up as Ebert and Meyer went along, to use existing studio sets, “which makes subsequent analysis a little tricky”, like making Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell, a music originally based on Phil Spector, into a woman in drag by the end, without any indication of this earlier in the film.

“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” was very much a Russ Meyer film with a larger budget, featuring much sex and nudity in line with his films’ recurring use of these to satirise and subvert the conservative attitudes of older generations to them. Having said that, Meyer shot X-rated and R-rated versions of scenes, expecting to need to meet the R rating usually required by a major studio... except that 1970 was the year that the Academy Award for Best Picture was won by an X-rated film, “Midnight Cowboy”. Having received an X rating, which could have been reduced to an R with only a few cuts, Meyer wanted to add in more X-rated versions of scenes to take advantage of having the rating, but the rushing of 20^th Century-Fox to release the film prevented this. Meanwhile, “Myra Breckinridge” received an X for both sex and sex changes, but it was resubmitted in 1978 and changed to R with a few cuts – “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” remains both uncut, and rated X, now NC-17.

What came to mind when watching “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” is how it appears to be about the “degenerates” that are in the background of “Myra Breckinridge” – the people that came in from outside to usurp Classical Hollywood, sweeping it away, and making new types of films more relevant for their time, like “Midnight Cowboy”, “Easy Rider” and “Bonnie & Clyde”. Both “Myra Breckinridge” and “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” are films of their times, but the latter is more successful in reflecting its time, because the former hates it.

WHO CARES WHAT PICTURE YOU SEE [221]

Talking about business when talking about art feels vulgar, but “Hollywood” means both, and its success is measured in box office figures and, perhaps soon, subscribers.

Each media conglomerate – behemoths like Disney; Comcast, owners of Universal Pictures, Sky TV and NBC; AT&T, recent buyers of Warner Bros. and HBO; and ViacomCBS, which includes Paramount Pictures – will soon have their own streaming services, requiring you to opt in to their service to get the shows they make, and the films they own. Netflix are already concentrating on their own productions as a result, saddling themselves with debt in the process. The entry of a phone company, AT&T, into this industry is not unusual, with technology and IT infrastructure companies already running their own services, like Google, Amazon and Apple.

Hollywood is now part of a vertically-integrated media industry, as in one company will now own the entire process from making a film to releasing it, controlling access to it at each stage. Ironically, the Hollywood studios were engaging in this themselves over seventy years ago, to the point where it was outlawed. 

Paramount Pictures is singled out in Classical Hollywood history for this, only because the name of the court case, “United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc,” named the largest studio, but all the main studios were caught up in what became known as the “Paramount Decree,” which separated film studios from the theatre chains they owned. 

Through these chains, the studios were able to engage in practices such as “block booking,” which tied theatres into showing a number of films from one studio for a particular time – this could also be tied into “blind buying,” where the block could be bought without the theatre knowing what the films were. Other short films that made up a programme, like documentaries or cartoons, could be included as part of the block that had to be shown alongside the main features.

Theatre chains and film studios were linked for a number of reasons. Paramount started their own chain, while Warner Bros bought one that gave them a share in a bigger studio, First National, which they also bought. Meanwhile, the Loew’s theatre chain bought one film company to provide them with films, then bought another to increase the quality, then hired a manager for both of them by buying out their company as well – this became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in that order.

As early as 1925, the Loew’s, Paramount and First National chains, and the film studios that made and distributed their films to them, were being described as a “film trust,” the same kind of trust that established Hollywood as the centre of the film industry in  the first place: the enforcement, by the Motion Picture Patents Company, of Thomas Edison’s patents for film cameras led to an exodus of many producers from New York by 1915, when it was deemed to have been illegally restraining the filmmaking trade, particularly in attempting to restrict films to one reel in length (about 11-16 minutes).

Like the “Edison trust,” the theatre practices were broken both by progress, and a court case. The US federal government took Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros, 20^th Century-Fox, RKO (another studio founded by a theatre chain), Universal, Columbia and United Artists to court over the control they exerted as theatre owners, or through block booking their films. The new rules established in 1943, but only enforced after the case reached the Supreme Court in 1948, was that block booking would be limited to five films in each block, with no shorter films included, and studios had to screen films to exhibitors so they knew what they were booking... and the studios had to sell their theatres.

[Warner Bros sold their pre-1950 library to a.a.p. in 1956, for just $21m. 2019 value: $197.3m]

That this happened in 1948 is more crucial, as this was when television started properly entering homes, and the first full schedules of programming appeared on TV networks. Film studios made numerous deals to sell the rights for their films to TV – in some cases, studios like Warner Bros left themselves with no rights to their films prior to 1950, as there was no other way to make money from them at the time. Warner Bros would finally buy those rights back in 1996, after the home video boom, but ahead of online streaming.

Ultimately, the “Paramount decree” made it easier for independent film companies, previously reliant on the bigger studios for exposure, to put films into cinemas. One such company had always believed its films were worth more than what RKO had been paying them, never having sold them away to TV, eventually setting up their own distributor in 1953, named Buena Vista [“good view”] Film Distribution Company, since renamed Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

AND WE’RE SENDING OUR LOVE DOWN THE WELL [33]

Allow yourself to feel incredibly old and terrified for a moment – TWENTY-SEVEN years ago today, the first episode of “The Simpsons” was broadcast on American television. This means there are people who born since the show began, that now have their own children.

In Britain, for those not willing to pay for Sky TV, the BBC began showing “The Simpsons” in November 1996, at just the right time for the teenage me. For years, I dutifully taped every episode I came across, laughing at its subversive humour, marvelling at its feature film-scale storylines, and identifying with its fully rounded characters.

For the record, my favourite episodes of the series came early in its run, like Lisa winning an essay contest and uncovering political corruption in “Mr Lisa Goes to Washington,” the awful musical “Streetcar!” in “A Streetcar Named Marge,” and the disaster movie plot of “Marge versus the Monorail.” There was once a time where no show could do the two things the “The Simpsons” could – anything, and everything.

I also learned about the references “The Simpsons” made to films, books, philiosophy, and American idioms, both in libraries and online, having just got dial-up internet at home. We eventually did get a satellite dish, and the taping, later joined by DVD buying, continued. The show confirmed I should, without exception, always look under the surface of whatever is put in front of me.

And yet, I found myself falling out with “The Simpsons”, feeling I got all I could from it. I had joined it in its ninth season, and left at its seventeenth – it is now on number twenty-eight. I still watch it occasionally, but usually just my favourite episodes. For all the references they gave to other works of creativity, “The Simpsons” also sent me in pursuit of those works – all the homages to “Citizen Kane” cannot be beaten by just watching “Citizen Kane.”

The sitcoms and dramas that are lucky enough to end on their own terms will usually do so once they have finished exploring the world they created. That may be after twelve episodes, in the case of “Fawlty Towers,” or ten years, if you are “Friends.” Recent “Simpsons” storylines, if you look them up, are still good to watch, and exactly the sorts of episodes you expect from the show. However, for me, this is because they are the sorts of plots I had thought they had already done – they are of “The Simpsons,” but they do not add to my idea of what “The Simpsons” is.

“The Simpsons” may only end when it stops making money for 20^th Century Fox, but I hope its makers see the end coming. The only sitcom that comes close in both its longevity and cast of characters, “Last of the Summer Wine,” could also have run forever, until the BBC decided it would not. Thankfully, Roy Clarke, who wrote all 295 episodes, from 1972 to 2010, was aware of the show being ended, allowing him to write the low-key ending that he wanted, but everyone else still complained about. If “The Simpsons” does end, its demise should match the cultural impact it has had on the world – they could try blowing it up.