Film producers around the world know just how firmly the American tentpole juggernaut dominates international exhibition. Historians of Hollywood also know that the biz is cyclic, from Big Studio to Indie and back again.
So any angst about the underlying direction of the American system is pretty intriguing in a year when the summer box office has been the worst since 1997. Kenneth Turan of the LA Times has a long and quasi-academic piece which borrows from mythology to claim that the nimble, foxy Hollywood has turned into the stolid, obsessed one-trick hedgehog.
