As spring dawns on most of the United States, the weather in Los
Angeles doesn’t really change. Thankfully, we have Hollywood
to mimic the seasons for us.
It actually seems perfectly appropriate. The city is already
dominated by the entertainment industry, so why shouldn’t it
control the weather, too?
Naturally, I don’t mean to imply that we live in a
“Truman Show” sort of city with Ed Harris watching us
from the sky, but as time passes, the trends in Hollywood releases
mark the seasons more than the weather does. And whether planned or
not, each Hollywood season parallels its real-weather
substitute.
Summer: With kids out of school and hot, muggy weather filling
most of the country, Hollywood studios release action-packed films
that are usually filled with explosions, fire and other
temperature-raising apparatuses. As most people know, summer films
are focused more on entertainment than they are on natural beauty.
What better season to entertain than the one most closely
associated with “vacation?”
Summer is also the season with the longest days, and so it
promotes the lightest fare. But as the days begin to shorten and
the kids go back to school, Hollywood films undergo a similar
transition, leaving the light-hearted summer for a more pensive
autumn.
Fall: The most beautiful season of the year usually gets the
most beautiful movies. As most of the country views picturesque
images of leaves falling off trees, Hollywood gears up for Oscar
season, releasing and promoting its own version of beauty, like
last fall’s “Lost in Translation” and
“Mystic River.”
Movies released during the fall are the ones studios have the
most faith in come awards season, and the months leading up to
winter show a glimmer of life before everything starts to
hibernate.
Winter: While winter in Los Angeles usually means the
temperature at night dips into the high 50s, movie releases more
than make up for the dreary feeling in the air. The early months of
the year, sandwiched between the deadline for and presentation of
the Oscars, usually contain some of the worst movies ever made.
Just think of this winter’s batch, which included “The
Big Bounce” and “Eurotrip.”
Like the dark, monotonous season to which it corresponds,
Hollywood’s winter is simply something to survive. And
it’s easy to forget the big picture and get bogged down
comparing winter movies to other winter movies (I have friends who
actually insist that “Eurotrip” was good.) But like
every season, winter must eventually end, usually at the hands of a
groundhog film that reminds audiences that movies can, and will,
get better.
Spring: This year, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind” was released on March 19 ““ just a day before the
official first day of spring and a symbolic first sprout coming up
through old snow. As the weather gets nicer across the country, so
do the movies across Los Angeles, as they slowly melt away all
memory of the previous season’s releases.
The yearly rebirth of the movies also acts as a training ground
for the upcoming summer’s Hollywood action spectacles. This
spring’s “Starsky & Hutch” and
“Hellboy” may not have survived against bigger summer
fare like “Shrek 2,” but coming after the
winter’s dreck, the bigger budget is a welcome
development.
The seasonal nature of both the weather and Hollywood make them
prime partners, especially when Los Angeles has too little of one
and too much of the other. And like the occasional late heat wave
or winter release of “Kill Bill: Volume 1,” such
patterns are always subject to exception. Still, it always somehow
evens out, whatever the weather, cloudy or blue.
Tracer far prefers movie seasons to real ones. E-mail him at
jtracer@media.ucla.edu.