Brian Laird on WNYC.

For our last segment today, we'll look forward to the Oscars on Sunday night by talking a little bit about some of the best picture nominees, but also about the thing that Timothy

Chalemay said on CNN the other day about not wanting movie theaters and his genre to go the way

of opera and ballet. Now, some people in the opera and ballet worlds were upset and offended by that

because they took it as a knock against art forms that they still consider vibrant

and meaningful in today's world, right? But that's not the part I want to bring up here, rather

to take his concerns about movies and movie theaters head on. So we're going to play a longer

version of the clip that broke out because I think it's a little

deeper than what made the news. He's responding to Matthew McAnnehy, who said studios are

producing more action scenes because that's what sells in this era of short attention spans.

Shalemay replies in in part, like this.

I've observed like a duo phenomena

where the majority of stuff is getting pushed in that direction.

I think I saw an article about a Netflix sort of production

guideline, not for all movies,

I don't want to speak disparagingly,

but where they want their biggest action set pieces up front. The logic used to be you save your big action set piece for the end of a movie and you save the fireworks for the end, but now they want something up front. I also think there's sort of a reverse thing going on too now. I don't want to speak for people here that are younger than me, where people desire, are desiring things that are more patient and that pull you in. I just saw another

article that says Gen Z is a bigger movie-going audience than a millennial audience, you know?

I feel like a fucking grandpa saying that.

No, but point being, I think, even like Frankenstein, which is like a hugely popular

movie this year, I didn't think that pacing was extraordinarily fast or anything, but it pulled people in, you know, but it does take you having a wave of flag of, hey, this is a serious movie or something. And some people want to be entertaining quickly. I'm really right in the middle, Matthew, because I admire people and I've done it myself to go on a talk show, hey, we, we got to keep movie theaters alive. We got to keep this genre alive. And another part of me feels like, if people want to see it like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, they're going to go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it. And I don't want to be working in ballet or opera or, you know, things where it's like, hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore.

All respect to the ballet and opera people out there.

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