We agree that Harris's dismissal of comic book movies & animation is, as you say, lazy. And I don't believe in a high art/low art hierarchy either. But what I do believe in, and what I think is being eroded, is a good art/bad art hierarchy; that's a hill I'll die on. There's a longer conversation to have about this, but basically: if you work for a business that produces bad art that just happens to be in "low art" genres, it is very much in your interest to convince people that hatred of bad art is the same as hatred of low art. Because if you believe that, then anyone who tells you a particular instance of low art is shitty is an elitist.

And they've been remarkably successful at this: witness the response to Roger Ebert's Transformers 2 review, and the money Transformers 2 pulled in. And that drives me crazy, and it sounds like it drives Harris crazy enough that he's making category errors, but it doesn't have anything to do with high art vs. low art per se. From here, the conversation could take us off toward a grand unified theory of American anti-intellectualism, and the people who profit from it, and everything else in our culture that feels like populism but definitely isn't. But that doesn't have a lot to do with movies, so let's table it for now, and say, yeah, Harris is kind of a jerk.

And since I've had some time to think this over (and read the quotes from Selznick in this article), I think you're right about your third point as well: studio executives have always been popcorn salesmen, as Dixon Steele would put it. Being risk averse isn't new, the 70s were an anomaly, and in twenty years the only movies from 2010 anyone will know are the great ones. I do think it's funny that you used Barton Fink to illustrate that it's always been this way, because I don't think that movie gets made today. The Coen Brothers directed 10 original features between 1984 and 2003. Since then, they've directed two more original features, but also two remakes and one adaptation of a novel. Their next film is a remake. Don't get me wrong, they're great remakes and adaptations, but still.

And we agree that the most interesting work in drama is being done on television, and the audience is there in that format. I'm not going to get all weepy about the communal experience of going to a theater (I guess I will if pressed) but okay: drama's still there, and TV has an unecessary stigma (although it's not just self-important people in SoCal: remember that HBO's slogan is still "It's not TV. It's HBO"). Of course, Mad Men, a pretty expensive TV show, has a budget of less than $5 million per hour; AMC couldn't produce The Social Network if they wanted to. Not without a theatrical release, anyway.

And here's where we no longer agree. You write that "a theatrical release, and the huge marketing budget that it requires, demands a certain level of spectacle." I think you have it exactly backwards: a certain level of spectacle demandes a huge marketing budget, especialy when the film has nothing else to recommend it. It costs a tremendous amount of money to convince people, even for one weekend, that chicken shit is chicken salad, and that money crowds everything else out of the theaters, because every other movie has to open wide, and there's no way to get the kind of press you need without spending a fortune, and an actor who's just been paid $20 million to be in a film that they knew was shitty might take less to be in a great film... but not much less. It's a positive feedback loop, and it's not just crowding out dramas, it's devouring its own tail.

I saw The Rock a few nights ago; it's coming up in the Criterion Collection. And I'll write about it soon enough, but one of my initial thoughts is that people look at it like it's the opening bell of this round of dumb action movies, but it's actually more like a closing bell. Because Con Air is the next year, but by the time Bay is making Armageddon, the economics are such that you can't make an R-rated spectacle film, not if you want to make your money back. Big spectacle movies are crowding out other big spectacle movies. You couldn't make The Rock today, which is no great loss, But you also couldn't make Alien, or Aliens, or The Terminator or any of the big scifi films of the 1980s (except for the ones with Jedis). You'd have to make them )G-13, and that's new in the last fifteen years. You don't get to make In the Mountains of Madness, the screenplay for which reads like an 80's horror/sci-fi film. I'm not surprised, but I don't like it.

Also, a minor quibble, what would The Terminator or Alien, or EM>Robocop, or The Thing—or Frankenstein, for that matter—be without existential horror? It comes across in a movie, if the filmmaker is talented.