Tinseltown Follies.(Hollywood producers mull over what audience wants)(Brief Article)

An actor friend of mine tells the following story: he was working as a lunch-shift bartender at a swank Beverly Hills restaurant. The customers were all talking about a terrible plane crash that occurred earlier that morning. A well-known agent overheard two customers talking about the crash. "How many people died?" he asked. They told him that the death count was somewhere between 300 and 400. He winced. "Oh, man, how awful," he said. "So was there anybody on the plane?"

He didn't mean anyone anyone. He meant anyone in show business anyone. In Hollywood, you see, "people" doesn't mean what it means to everyone else. Out here, "people" means "people you know in the business." What everyone else calls "people," we call "customers." And right now, the entire town is trying to figure out what the customer wants, or, as we put it to each other over steamed vegetable lunches and nonfat soy lattes, "What do they want?"

Since September 11, people out here have been frantically trying to read the national mood. Each Monday morning, the weekend box-office receipts are scoured for signs of the national direction. Why did Disney's "Monsters, Inc." do so well? Are they into monsters, now? Why did "The Last Castle" bomb? Are they not into military drama? And each day, as the Nielsen Overnights come humming through the town's fax machines, people (well, people people, not customers people) gather around, trying to figure out whether the success of the WB's new show "Smallville," a teen action-drama about the young Superman, means America wants more heroes, or whether they don't much like any of the new comedies because they have their minds on weightier matters.

The gas that makes this town go is money, and money comes in cascades only when you know what the customer wants and can get it to him before anyone else does. That's the chief irony of this most ironic business: only those with the common touch can afford to live like kings. Steven Spielberg is so tuned in to the sensibilities of ordinary Americans that he no longer needs to be around them. Ever. Hollywood, though, has a chaotic and haphazard way of stumbling right into the national mood. Of our six key genres--action-suspense, romantic drama, comedy, romantic comedy, thriller and plain old drama--one of them has to fit the national mood, and only the first, the action picture, really seems out of the mix for a while. If there's one thing we all learned on September 11, it's that big exploding things aren't thrilling.

But it takes a few months to get a picture into production, and ...