In Los Angeles, one generally expects that all movies will open here and usually before other areas of the country. Yet this last weekend, I was eagerly looking forward to seeing the movie, “Bernie,” a dark comedy about murder and manners that had received good reviews from both Roger Ebert and the New Yorker.

Only one theater in West Los Angeles was screening that movie, requiring an hour drive and a difficult street parking situation. The other movie, “Comic-Con IV,” had only come to Los Angeles last month and instead of expanding to other theaters in the area played at one theater in Santa Monica, it has closed.

Someone makes the decisions where movies are shown. A movie like “Comic-Con” would have seemed a natural for geek-dense populations in Pasadena or anime-crazy populations of Torrance.  Someone made a decision.

 

The decision makers I would guess are predominately male and white, which I believe was the point Steven Boone made at our panel discussion on Friday morning. We don’t have numbers, but it’s easy to assume that’s true because of the demographic skew of executives in America.

 

Yet in Los Angeles, the demographics are only 29.4 percent non-Hispanic Whites. Latinos of any race are 48.5 percent of our population and Asians beat out black/African Americans with 11-12 percent compared to 9 percent.

 

Women are a slightly higher percentage of the population at 50.2 percent. As I mentioned, foreign films often skew toward male interests. In terms of Japanese films, that means samurai slash films over home/family dramas. Violent male-centric Asian movies tend to be easier to find than ones that might appeal to families. Perhaps this is partially due to the expectations of our own cultural prejudices and stereotypes of these cultures, the samurai, the geisha or the martial arts movies. But aren’t audiences more sophisticated now than post-World War II?

 

One exception to this  samurai-exotic female-martial arts limited view is animated features where there’s an odd inversion: family-friendly Disney-type features are adopted and distributed by the Disney brand. Other more adult (as in mature and not sexually-oriented) fare is not picked up by major studios. Consider “Summer Wars” that with its computer multi-player gaming premise along with saving the world should have been a natural for what seems to be the primary movie market: 14-20 year old males. Likewise, the darker “Sky Crawlers” also featured a dark meditation on war and never growing up. Both came through Los Angeles with short one-week runs at an art house.

 

For people with broader interests, who want to see a culture in  all its various aspects or who are tired of predictable big blockbuster fare, VoD is the answer to our wishes. We no longer have to re-schedule our lives and drive out of our city to another to see movies that pique our interests.  We don’t even need a TV either.