I felt like that in 1989 when I saw Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

My friends and I had been weaned on Monty Python, we could recite long passages from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we worshiped both Time Bandits and Brazil. So we had some idea of what to expect from a new Terry Gilliam film: visual surrealism, distrust of authority, antipathy to soulless reason, and a skewed sense of humor, among (many) other things. Pure chocolate-covered chaos covered in shiny tinfoil and encased in a neat plastic wrapper.

But Baron Munchausen was something else altogether. Imagine if someone tried to film Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King – without the benefit of CGI. It’s that grand of a scale. Gilliam gives us real armored elephants, ornately carved cannons, and hundreds upon hundreds of fully costumed soldiers engaging in mock battle. He gives us baroque, lovingly crafted setpieces and clockwork monsters that look like Muppets. He gives us cameos from Sting and Robin Williams, not to mention a stark naked Uma Thurman. There’s a story within a story within a story, with allusions to everything from Greek mythology to 1001 Nights.

My friends and I watched Munchausen with jaws dropped. Some Hollywood assholes had paid tens and tens of millions of dollars to make this movie. It was, at the time, one of the most expensive films ever made. And here we sat, on a Saturday afternoon, the day after opening — in Southern California, no less, the movie capital of the world — and there were less than 20 people in the audience.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Someone had screwed up, and screwed up big time. I mean, of course if you’re running a Hollywood movie studio, you don’t give a mad genius like Terry Gilliam a blank check and virtually no adult supervision. Of course you don’t bet that an 126-minute postmodern retelling of an obscure 18th century German novel starring some British Shakespearean actor nobody’s ever heard of is going to do boffo box office.

Yet someone did. And we, a bunch of 16- and 17-year-old kids, got to reap the benefits. We left the theater giddy, feeling like we had come away from the vending machine with two candy bars for the price of one.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen became one of those Hollywood object lessons in bad producing. The Wikipedia article for the movie tells me that the film cost $46.63 million to make (twice the original budget) and only brought in around $8 million in return. If I’m reading this box office chart from the week of May 12, 1989 correctly, the movie actually debuted at #21 in the weekend’s box office. It debuted on 117 screens nationwide. Contrast that to The Return of Swamp Thing, a B-movie from Miramax with a budget of probably a few hundred thousand, which debuted the same weekend on 123 screens.

So Baron Munchausen pretty much stank up the box office. And it hasn’t really even become a huge cult hit on video either, despite what Wikipedia says. It’s not one of those films like The Princess Bride or Blade Runner that went on from modest beginnings to become an enormous word-of-mouth success. This film isn’t widely discussed and admired the way that Gilliam films like Time Bandits and Brazil still are. I seriously doubt the movie made back any significant fraction of its original budget on VHS or DVD, even when factoring in inflation.

Yet given all that, Sony decided to suddenly give Munchausen the royal 20th anniversary treatment. I bought the film on Blu-Ray last night and loved the heck out of it once again (despite the fact that the Blu-Ray player crashed halfway through and took about 10 minutes to reboot). It’s just as chaotic, just as funny, and just as barbed as I had remembered. It’s much more postmodern than I had remembered too. Like the work of John Barth, the film spends most of its 126 minutes smashing through the fourth wall, even if you don’t always realize the film’s doing it. By giving us a tale within a tale within a tale, Gilliam refuses to stick within the bounds of story — in fact, he boldly and gleefully tells us that no such bounds exist.

The real treat of the new Munchausen disc isn’t the 1080p transfer or the Dolby TrueHD sound — because, let’s face it, few movies from 1989 are really going to benefit all that much from a high-tech makeover. No, the real treat is the documentary, “The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen,” which details for the first time all of the studio infighting and bickering and financial malfeasance that went on behind the scenes.

These making-of DVD documentaries have become Hollywood’s version of reality TV. I find them fascinating to watch, because they basically show Hollywood cannibalizing itself. In 1989, Terry Gilliam was simply a wizard and who knew how the hell he did it. But today, Hollywood no longer just sells you the spectacle — now you watch the spectacle and you watch the spectacle-makers dissecting their own spectacle-making.

What makes the Munchausen documentary so fascinating is how all the players involved let loose on one another in a big circle jerk of blame. Gilliam relates production disaster after production disaster; Eric Idle goes off on how Hollywood is full of evil shits (his words) and that’s why he doesn’t work there anymore; Robin Williams talks about how he took over the role of King of the Moon from Sean Connery (!) as a favor, and how his managers insisted he not be credited lest the sleazy producers behind Munchausen plaster Williams’ image all over everything and sully his reputation.

Everyone involved points the finger at the producer, this German guy named Thomas Schuhly, in the kind of vicious language you generally don’t see in your standard DVD documentary puff piece. Schuhly, for his part, disclaims all responsibility and blames Gilliam’s people for unprofessionalism and anti-German bias. (The documentary filmmakers give Schuhly his say, but it’s clear where their bias lies. At one point in the Schuhly interview, you can hear what sounds like someone letting out a rather loud fart in the background. Nobody bothered to edit it out in post-production, which speaks volumes.)

But only Gilliam seems to be keenly aware of the irony of the whole thing. A bunch of stodgy Hollywood accountant types arguing over who’s at fault for letting this delusional (albeit brilliant) filmmaker go off and make such a movie… when the movie itself is about a delusional (albeit brilliant) adventurer who goes off to fight the Turks over the protests of a bunch of stodgy bureaucratic accountant types.

Life really has become a Philip K. Dick novel, hasn’t it?

This speaks less to my amazing prophetic powers than the rote predictability of the Oscars themselves. They’re growing less and less relevant, and it’s only a matter of time before they become so irrelevant that people stop paying attention. I give the Oscars fifteen more years.

In fact, in case you’ve missed this decade altogether, it’s no secret that the entire Hollywood movie industry is dying. Why? Actually, the reasons are well-documented in any number of places, but I’ll repeat them here because I’m just that way.

1. High definition television and DVDs. The obvious scapegoats. The movie theater chains made a huge tactical mistake in the ’80s and ’90s by putting an emphasis on building lots of multiplexes with smaller screens. The end result is that I’ve got a high-def TV and Surround Sound setup in my basement that rivals many of these lower end venues. It’s certainly good enough for your garden variety comedy/drama, and does a damn fine job on the mega-blockbusters too.
2. Actors’ and directors’ exorbitant salaries. It’s an interesting phenomenon that now Hollywood’s profits are teetering, the A-list stars are commanding higher prices than ever. Why? Well, the less certain you are of making back your investment on a film, the more you’re willing to spend to make sure you can get that return. Ben Stiller might not bring in nearly as large a crowd as, say, Robin Williams did back in the day, but at least he’s still bringing in a crowd.
3. Hollywood regulation. Robert Rodriguez wanted to give artist Frank Miller co-directing credit for his (brilliant, bloody) Sin City. The Director’s Guild of America wouldn’t let him. So, figured Rodriguez, who the fuck needs to be part of the Director’s Guild of America? He quit. It’s this kind of rigid bullshit that causes A-listers like George Lucas, Peter Jackson, and James Cameron to snub the system and work outside it. Look for more defectors from the Hollywood unions as their relevance plummets.
4. A globalized workforce. Similarly, who wants to deal with expensive union workers in Hollywood when you can hire some non-union worker in Fargo, or Tallahassee, or Mexico City for that matter? The spotlight creative jobs in Hollywood will stay local (for a while, at least), but filmmakers will discover that you can outsource almost everything else. Why pay x for postproduction in Hollywood when you can get the same quality for 10% of x in Bollywood?
5. Lack of edge. More multiplexes + higher salaries + union costs = more expensive films. What happens to movie studios when they need to get more and more butts in the seats to make back their investment? The same thing that happens to U.S. Presidential candidates once they make it through the primary season — they go scurrying for the middle. The studios and the movie chains start falling back on “sure bets” — sequels, popular franchises, formulaic comedies with bankable stars. Quality (which was never all that high to begin with) dips precipitously.
6. Moore’s Law (i.e. more powerful computers). Films that once required a film lab, a team of special effects gurus, and a roomful of dedicated Silicon Graphics workstations are becoming the province of some dude with a $500 camcorder and a Mac. There’s only so much gee-whiz spectacle and panache you can fit into a 90-minute film, and Moore’s Law says that desktop computers will be hitting that threshold in a few years.
7. New methods of distribution. In the old world, the only way to get your movie seen was to worm your way into the slippery network of nationwide movie chains, most of which won’t screen small, independently produced films. Festivals like Sundance made some headway in the ’90s opening film up to the smaller fish, but again it’s computer technology that’s made the difference in distribution. Why put up with the hassle of going through the traditional channels to distribute your movie when you can distribute it on the Internet via BitTorrent or YouTube, or just sell the DVD on your website?
8. New methods of marketing. Just like you couldn’t get your film seen in the olden days without studio distribution, you couldn’t get your film heard about without studio marketing money and big media tie-ins too. That’s going away. Good-bye, massive Burger King promotions — hello MySpace guerrilla marketing.
9. An unreasonable obsession with piracy that keeps the studios from trying new technologies. The MPAA has been gearing up its anti-piracy machinery in preparation for a similar onslaught that the music industry experienced. And like with the RIAA and the music biz, the studios will never win by threatening to sue the pants off their audience.

So what does a dying Hollywood movie studio industry mean for the movies themselves? Well, just because the movie industry we’ve grown up with for the past hundred years is dying doesn’t mean the movies are going away. You might be watching less of them at a cramped, overpriced, greasy theater next to the mall and watching more at home. You’ll see increasing market segmentation, more international faces, and the death of the Big, Loud, Summer Blockbuster That Pleases Everybody. You’ll see talents outside Southern California given a chance to bloom. You’ll see Hollywood itself change from the film industry’s Mecca to its mausoleum, kind of like Detroit and the auto industry.

How can Hollywood possibly reverse these trends? A few ideas:

• Interactivity. Exactly how this would work I’m not certain. Perhaps a system where you can vote for the outcome of the film in progress, a la “American Idol.” The crowd wants our protagonist to get the girl in the end? He gets the girl. They’d rather kill off the miserable fucker? He dies. (The big hurdle here is that such interactivity is likely to be expensive and much easier accomplished at home anyway.)
• Elimination of the theater release window. Hollywood is clinging desperately to the idea that major films should be given an exclusive window of opportunity to lure viewers into the theaters. Here’s a better idea — give away copies of the DVD with a ticket to the film. I guarantee if you don’t have to make that choice between paying $12 a ticket for a film you only see once, and waiting six months to pay $15 for a film you can view over and over again, you’ll spend more time in the theaters.
• Serials. We’ve gotten used to the idea that every film should be an “event.” Why not take the long-term view and build an audience gradually over time with serials that release new episodes, say, three or four times a year? Keep the production costs low and give discounts for those who buy tickets to the whole run of the series.
• One word: IMAX. You’re unlikely to be able to achieve the experience of watching an IMAX film at home until we’ve got the whole immersive virtual environment thing down, and who knows when that will be. So start putting some serious money into building IMAX theaters and financing IMAX films. I’m unclear exactly how the business model for an IMAX theater works or who owns IMAX in the first place, but Hollywood needs more IMAX theaters next to the mall and fewer multiplexes.

And if the movies do crash and burn, you could always stay home and read a book. Just a suggestion.

It’s the kind of first paragraph that makes your jaw hit the floor with an audible clunk, a paragraph that sends the more timid browser at Waldenbooks scurrying out the door in a hurry:

Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar’s own figuring, hardly human at all. His was the largest penis ever seen on a white man in that prison or any of the others in which Lamar had spent so much of his adult life. It was a monster, a snake, a ropey, veiny thing that hardly looked at all like what it was but rather like some form of rubber tubing.

It’s also the first paragraph of Dirty White Boys, the sixth novel from Stephen Hunter. Yes, that Stephen Hunter, the curmudgeonly Baltimore Sun film critic whose off-beat reviews adorn the paper’s pages every week. The Stephen Hunter whose very name causes movie screening patrons to flee from the conspicuously taped-off row of seats.

But there are more sides to Hunter than meets the eye. In addition to being Mobtown’s best-known film fanatic, Hunter is also one of the publishing industry’s best-kept secrets, a thriller writer who has sold two million novels and quietly earned a reputation as a gritty, adrenaline-inducing storyteller. Random House shelled out big bucks for Dirty White Boys in the hopes that the bloody Fugitive-esque thriller will propel Hunter to the ranks of a Tom Clancy or a Robert Ludlum.

And, irony of ironies, Hollywood is interested.

“It puts me in a very awkward position,” Hunter admitted in an interview last month. “Hollywood is not built to make good work. If good work does happen, it’s not only an act of integrity and professionalism, it’s an act of genuine heroism. Every step of the way, people are saying ‘you can’t do this’ and ‘you can’t do that.’ You’re dealing with a bunch of assholes who want nothing more than to see their thumbprints on the product.”

Dirty White Boys: A Discussion of Family Values

So how good is the book that’s earned stellar advance reviews and caught the interest of some of Hollywood’s hottest properties?

On the surface, Dirty White Boys tells a tale that’s seen a thousand incarnations on the big screen over the past decade: depraved badass Lamar Pye escapes from prison, and cool trooper Bud Pewtie makes it his mission to track him down. We have a prison catfight, a shootout at a tattoo parlor in the dead of night, the inevitable one-on-one brawl to the finish.

But talk about timing. Not only does Dirty White Boys appeal to the same audiences that are flocking to see The Fugitive and Speed and all of their big screen clones, it also features at its core a discussion of family values that would seem at home on the floor of the Republican-controlled House or Senate.

“From the outside, the Pewtie family looks like a paradigm of middle class American virtue and Bud looks like an ideal father figure, while the Pye clan looks like this troglodyte group of sub-human mutants,” says Hunter. “But as the book goes along you start to understand that in some odd way, Lamar Pye is a better exemplar of ‘family values’ than Bud Pewtie is.”

This role reversal is the central irony of Dirty White Boys. Model citizen Bud regularly betrays his family by sneaking into bed with his partner’s wife Holly, while sadistic killer Lamar stays unflinchingly loyal to the gang of misfits who have helped him escape from prison and avoid the law. The Pewties live a life of bored disinterest and stony silences at dinnertime, while Lamar and his three cohorts stand firm together in the face of a massive police manhunt.

So when all the action culminates with a showdown in the woods, there’s more than just two lives at stake. “It has a real mystic quality, like two high priests fighting to be the head of a cult of manhood,” says Hunter.

Despite the apparent sermonizing, Hunter claims that what he’s after isn’t a rehash of Dan Quayleisms, but simply a sense of empathy and believability.

“It’s an acknowledgement of a fact of life, that even the most sacred and profane monsters like Pye have human needs,” he says. “In fact, it’s their human needs that make them compelling figures. Lamar would not be an interesting character if he was a sheer force of violence and evil. People wouldn’t care about him. The book as a mechanism wouldn’t work — meaning that it wouldn’t be publishable — if he wasn’t interesting in a variety of other ways.

“Lamar Pye is prison-trained and psychopathic, but still he’s extremely intelligent. He’s got a tactical mind, he’s good at figuring things out. But as I continued writing the book, I understood that that wasn’t enough. I began to wonder where he came from, what created him. I began to look for provisional graces in him.”

Thus Dirty White Boys messes with our conceptions of good and evil by making us feel the occasional pang of sympathy for a man who will taunt and then murder a truck driver simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Thwarting Expectations

Hunter likes thwarting readers’ expectations. His last novel, Point of Impact, performed a similar trick by choosing as its hero the most unlikely protagonist possible: a reclusive gun nut living in backwoods Arkansas. Persuaded by a shadowy military group to help thwart a presidential assassin, former Vietnam sharpshooter Bob Lee Swagger unwittingly ends up becoming the assassin’s fall guy — and the most hunted man in America. After all, reasons the too-quick-to-crucify media, who would believe that there’s a clandestine conspiracy behind an assassination attempt on the president when you’ve got a gun-crazy Vietnam vet on the loose?

“It’s probably the only book in history that has gotten rave reviews from both the New York Times Book Review and the Green Berets,” Hunter quips.

Besides lodging Hunter on the national bestseller lists, Point of Impact brought out another side of the film critic most Baltimoreans know little about: his passion for guns, which he both collects and shoots regularly. Whereas most authors would be content to write “he pulled out his gun,” Hunter often pays more attention to his descriptions of firearms than to his descriptions of people, as in this passage from Impact:

[The gun] had a heavy varmint barrel which almost neutralized vibration when he fired, though Bob had since replaced the original barrel with a stainless steel one from Hart, which he’d then finished with Teflon so the whole piece had the appearance of old pewter. The barrel, action and even the screws were bedded in Devcon aluminum into a black fiberglas and Kevlar stock. The screws were torqued through aluminum pilars, tightened to sixty pounds.

Got that?

Hunter’s passion for firearms doesn’t stop him from maintaining a liberal ideology, however, a contradiction that he seems to relish. “It sounds unbelievable, but it’s true,” he says. “I grew up to worship Adlai Stevenson and the progressive tendencies in the Democratic Party, and to some extent I still do…. I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said that the mark of a great mind is that you can embrace two opposing philosophies.”

“You Have to Go with Your Strengths”

So despite the affinity for packing heat Hunter’s characters share with their creator, the stoic John Wayne types that populate his fiction are largely creations based on a very different mindset than his own. “As a novelist, there are certain types I can bring to life, and there are certain types I can’t,” he says. “If you’re going to write a novel and be enmeshed in one project for years, you have to go with your strengths.

“I suppose if you commit long sections of prose to words on paper, just by the natural law of psychological osmosis you bleed certain portions of your psyche into your characters. But I don’t consciously model anyone on myself. The books aren’t about me and about how darned wonderful and sensitive and underappreciated I am. They’re rigorous exercises in disciplined imagination in which I figure out what someone else’s life would be like.”

Occasionally, however, Hunter’s imagination falls short of the mark and becomes prey to many of the thriller clichés that typically dog male-oriented fiction. One is a tendency to slip into hokey ultra-macho mode. “I got man’s work to do!” yells Pewtie to his lover Holly at one point in Dirty White Boys. Point of Impact‘s Bob Lee Swagger has a similar Marlboro moment when contemplating the dangers of leaving the seclusion of his Arkansas home for the outside world: “He’d have no part of that, no thank you. No women, no liquor, never again. Only rifles and duty.”

Certainly if Hunter patterned his novels after his own life, there would be fewer grim loners stalking through the fields with high-powered rifles and more family men sitting at their desks typing. Aside from two years in the Army, Hunter has been plugging quietly away at the Sun for over twenty years, both as book review editor and (since 1982) as film critic.

It was during his stint as book review editor that Hunter published his first novel, The Master Sniper (1980), a thriller which brought him “more money than I thought existed in the world at the time.” Eager to expand on his success, however, Hunter instead fell into a sophomore slump with his next two works, The Second Saladin (1982) (“Talk about timing — that was a book about the Kurds ten years too early”) and The Spanish Gambit (1985) (“I was trying to be the young George Orwell”).

By that point, a despondent Hunter realized that he had squandered whatever momentum the success of The Master Sniper had given him in the publishing world. Careerwise, another mediocre book from either the critical or commercial perspective would be the kiss of death. It was then that inspiration hit in the form of a mountain and a book about tunnel warfare in Vietnam. “Suddenly, in a quarter of a nanosecond I had every single detail of The Day Before Midnight,” says Hunter.

From the Bestseller List to Premiere Magazine

This sudden flash of inspiration single-handedly resuscitated Hunter’s career as a novelist. Midnight, a taut, believable thriller about a battle to recapture a mountain nuclear missile silo, has over 800,000 copies in print. (One of the Special Forces teams attempts to penetrate into the missile silo through a series of underground tunnels; thus the Vietnam influence.) From there came the equally successful Point of Impact, the new novel Dirty White Boys, and now the calling cards from Hollywood.

Still, it’s a long way from the bestseller list to the cover of Premiere magazine. Hunter has sold all three of his last books to Hollywood and has yet to see a single minute on celluloid. The film version of the Cold War-oriented Day Before Midnight died a sudden death with the falling of the Berlin Wall, while Point of Impact has been stalled at the scripting stage.

“I actually left the Sun at one point to take a leave of absence to work on those scripts, which is why they’re so fucked up,” admits Hunter candidly. “I’ve discovered that as a screenwriter, I’m not exactly Robert Bolt.”

Dirty White Boys, however, caught the attention of director Joseph Ruben (Sleeping With the Enemy, The Good Son), and 20th Century Fox quickly snatched film rights for him. “Dirty White Boys is in very good shape,” Hunter says enthusiastically. “The script is very, very professional — they got about 80% of the book.”

Still, treatment for the screen has involved more than a few changes, many of which Hunter takes with a resigned sigh. The character of Ruta Beth, the twisted serial killer fanatic that takes Lamar’s gang in, has been significantly changed: “In my book, she’s sort of a mutant, a real unattractive woman with a dark secret,” says Hunter. “In the film, she’s a chick.”

But who can better appreciate the concessions one has to make to attain big studio attention than a film critic that’s always been cynical about Tinseltown? “I have to admire the screenwriters’ professionalism because they know what it takes to get a movie made,” he says. “I don’t.”

Even if Hunter never makes it onto the big screen, he’s still hoping to have a lasting impact on Hollywood in a different way: through a book-length anthology of his movie reviews forthcoming from Baltimore-based Bancroft Press.

“I have to say that I’ve really given my adulthood to the Sun,” he said. “It would satisfy me immensely to see a physical object called a book come out of all of that.”