Happy Days Are Here Again

Watch TV on PC - 12,000 TV Channels and Movies In 2006, a grim little thriller called "Red Road" won the Cannes jury prize for Advance Party, a collective of Scottish, Danish and Irish production companies. It's not a lot of laughs. The film's main character, traumatized by the loss of her husband and son, spends her nights looking through a CCTV camera, monitoring a feral Glasgow housing project. One reviewer described it as "grainy, rasping and bleak." It stands to reason; Advance Party is the brainchild of Lars von Trier, the Danish filmmaker behind the Dogma 95 manifesto, which advocated a dark, minimalist style using handheld cameras and on-location shooting.

That was then, when money was easier and art was tougher. Now that the entire global economy can be fairly described as grainy, rasping and bleak, Advance Party has established a new set of artistic rules for future projects. This cheap and cheerful manifesto stipulates that no budget should exceed €1.5 million; no script should run longer than 88 pages, or feature more than eight characters; and every film should be shot within an eight-mile radius. The kicker: "stories must make the audience laugh, make them cry and give them an uplifting ending."

It's probably the first time von Trier ("Dogville," "Dancer in the Dark") has ever been linked with the term "uplifting." In the business world, this sort of reassessment is called a flight to safety, when nervous investors run from risky assets to the shelter of dull but stable ones like U.S. Treasury bonds. In the entertainment business, tough times trigger a return to the familiar and the formulaic. Experimental and downbeat are out; proven and inspirational are in."Dog bites man" is the artistic order of the day. "In a recession, the first thing to go is risk," says David Foster, whose Opus 3 Artists manages classical music stars like Marin Alsop, Yefim Bronfman and Yo-Yo Ma. "The hardest thing to do in times like these is tell an audience why they should buy a ticket."

People need an escape from the reality of recession, so they are fleeing to forms of entertainment that represent the biggest break from their experiences: crime novels, over-the-top Broadway musicals, fantasy films, standard sitcoms and perennially popular operas like "Turandot"—anything that promises laughter and forgetting. "The feel-good phenomenon really does exist," says Mark Lawson, a cultural commentator for Britain's BBC. "It's become commonplace these days to criticize any new play or movie by saying, 'Not a lot of laughs in that'."

This phenomenon was clear on Oscar night, Feb. 22, with Hugh Jackman's bouncy turn as host marking a distinct departure from the snarky irony of other recent presenters. The Academy's heaping praise for "Slumdog Millionaire," which won eight Oscars, demonstrated that the only role for adversity in storytelling these days is for it to be triumphantly overcome. Just as alluring are films that avoid adversity altogether; this past Easter weekend set box-office records for the holiday weekend—about $130 million, up 14 percent over Easter weekend 2008—thanks largely to "Hannah Montana: The Movie," based on the aggressively unthreatening TV "zitcom," and "Fast & Furious 4," based on, well, "Fast & Furious" 1, 2 and 3. In addition to "Fast & Furious 4," four other movies have broken the $100 million mark already this year compared with only one by this time last year: "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" ($143.2 million), "Monsters vs. Aliens" ($141 million), the revenge thriller "Taken" ($140 million) and the comic-book spinoff "Watchmen" ($105.9 million). The French new wave this isn't.

Still, even Hollywood doesn't expect to cruise through the recession unscathed. Indeed, Washington used Hollywood's recent record-breaking box-office numbers to strip $246 million in tax breaks from the movie business as part of the economic-stimulus bill. Last week a group of studio executives invaded Washington to complain that Hollywood was being taken for granted. About 19,000 Hollywood jobs have been lost since last year. Indeed, a new study by LEK Consulting says that this recession will produce very few real winners in the entertainment industry—with the likely exception of cable-TV networks, videogame producers and low-cost video renters like Netflix and Redbox. For everyone else, the best-case scenario is that they don't lose too much ground.

At least audiences have something to smile about in the interim. Broadway hit some rocky times last year but now all's swell on the Great White Way—and it's not due to probing new dramas. A bilingual revival of "West Side Story," the great '50s musical that updates the tale of "Romeo and Juliet," is setting box-office records at Broadway's Palace Theater, earning $1.3 million for Easter weekend. "Billy Elliot," based on Stephen Daldry's 2000 film, has been joyfully recouping its investors' money, with its young star dancing his way out of Britain's coal miners' strike during the bad old 1980s. And a revival of "Hair," the classic '60s countercultural celebration, is playing to packed houses down the block. "The Broadway bloodbath is so overrated," says "Hair" producer Jeffrey Richards buoyantly.

London's West End, meanwhile, is a grinning hostage to "revivals of old hits, musicals in new clothes and anything having to do with the Beatles," says Nicholas Kenyon, director of the Barbican, London's music, art and theater complex. Indeed, the West End's current big hit is a borrowed trifle called "Calendar Girls," adapted from a Disney movie about a bunch of spunky dames who get naked to raise money for leukemia research, tee-hee.

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