No More Work For Danny Aiello

Yeah, I remember when Hollywood stopped making movies. It wasn’t any great cataclysm or anything, it just kind of happened. I remember that the last movie ever put out in a theater was that Hilary Swank thing, The Reaping. Then after that, there was just nothing. People walked out of that movie with expressionless faces, put their popcorn bags into the trash, and just didn’t really feel like coming back to the cinema. The studios sort of seemed burned out, too, like they’d reached the end of it all being fun, and they simply didn’t produce any more movies. It was as if there was some sort of collective realization that things had kind of bottomed out. We were right on the verge of another summer filled with dumb sequels and such, and no one had the energy anymore. So the movies that were already in production were stopped, and the casts and crews were given Barnes and Noble gift certificates to make up for the lost pay. The multiplexes quietly closed their doors and played out their leases by selling off what concessions they had and opening the theaters up to business meetings, and movie stars started their own media companies or went off to teach acting for the theater, and some of them just plain retired. It was no great loss. There were plenty of other things to do. There was actually a quiet sense that movies had stopped at just the right time, before they reached a level that no one even wanted to think about.

They interviewed a bunch of studio executives a few years later and asked them about the movies being stopped, and they all basically just shrugged and said that people lose interest in things all the time; you get a little more mature and you grow out of things, or at some point one person says they’re too tired to come over and help make a movie, and someone else says Yeah, the vibe isn’t there today, and suddenly it’s been five days and everyone’s been doing other things and the movie’s not getting made, and the next thing you know the whole industry agrees to pack it in. I can understand that. I lost interest in Dungeons and Dragons when I turned twenty-eight. One day I realized that there were other role playing games out there (Vampire: The Masquerade is freaking awesome), and that was pretty much that. You can’t do the same stuff over and over again without eventually getting bored. Human nature.