The writer of ‘Taxi Driver’ does not mourn for New Hollywood

Paul Schrader is an old dude. Born in 1946, a collaborator with names like Scorsese, Gere and Pacino, you might expect him to be the sort of film director to rage against all that’s been lost as movies have gone from film to digital.

Instead, he calls that talk “revanchist claptrap.”

With regard to our modern social media, he’s quick to complain that it has wrecked his ability to concentrate, but he’s not one to call young people easily distracted. Instead, Schrader describes them as insisting on less passive entertainment.

In short, Schrader doesn’t talk like an old dude. At least he didn’t when he showed up for the latest event in the Made In NY Media Center’s “Future State of Entertainment” series with Mark Schiller.

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Schrader has been in industry news lately over a fight around his latest movie. Journalism fans will know him as the director of the Lindsay Lohan romp that got the epic New York Times treatment (more background on that story on Dumbo’s Longform Podcast).

The conversation between Schrader and Schiller ranged from the writing process to the business of film to cinemas themselves.

Here are a few tech-related points from the discussion:

• Schrader is now working on some sort of web series about night life in New York. He says he thinks everything from a cat video to “Birth of a Nation” is a movie now. Schrader likes working in the web series style, he said. All he has to do is deliver a punch every ten minutes, he says, and it works. It’s not clear how the film will be distributed once it’s done. The schools of thought on what works there is still being sorted out.
• “The mechanism of the three-act drama has become so clanky you can hear the gears turning,” Schrader said.
• Television dramas today are like the work of Charles Dickens in the past, he said. Dickens would write bits and dole them out in print and then get feedback on his stories on the streets of London, which informed future episodes. TV is doing basically the same thing now, he said, revising scripts on the fly based on fan reaction.
• On second screens, he said that networks like you using them because it keeps you watching during commercials. On whether second screens could one day enhance storytelling, he said, “The great mystery of entertainment is audience participation.” It used to be more interactive, in the days of vaudeville and the theater. We’ve gone through decades of passive entertainment, but the plethora of screens could change that. He doesn’t know yet.
• Schrader say he watches movies interactively now. He said that if he watches an old film at home, you can guarantee he’s read three articles about it before the movie is over.
• The business of movies is tough. Of his latest squabble, he said, “Every time they fuck you, you say that will never happen again, but then they find a new way to fuck you.”

Schrader is working on the web series now, but he had a lot to say about the cinema, adding a dig at the dreaded multiplex. “Those ten funeral rooms at the mall? It’s dead,” he said.

At the very least, it was a lousy enough summer that Regal Entertainment is looking at cashing out. He said the cinema needs to give you a reason to leave your house now, because it’s fine to watch most movies at home. That can be the social aspect of some movie theaters or a really daring film that TV would never show (he mentioned the new Gyllenhaal film, “Nightcrawler.”)

Schrader is excited by the prospect of 4DX cinema, though, where the very seats are used to add sensory experience (not unlike what Aldous Huxley called “the feelies” in Brave New World). So far, 4DX has only been adapted to movies after the fact, Schrader said. He wants to make a trip movie with 4DX from scratch. He wants to strap your feet in and let you feel the road.