Bradford Pilcher

1999 was always destined to be a notable year. It was the last year of the second millennium (sort of). The legendary Prince wrote a whole song about it. It was very popular. That it would turn out to be the Best. Movie. Year. Ever. was less predictable.

That heavily punctuated superlative is the title of Brian Raftery’s book, revisiting the year when Keanu said, “Woah.” It was when Matthew Broderick went back to high school and was significantly less cool than Ferris Bueller. 1999 was the year a phantom menace fizzled, but the Blair Witch buzzed.

Before I write another word, let me say this: Raftery’s book is an enjoyable read, especially if you came of age in the cineplexes of the 90s. Its chapters divulge reams of trivia about the making, the marketing, and the reception to some of the best films you’ll ever see.

As an added bonus, he sometimes discusses the earlier works of those films’ directors. This gives the book a scope that covers not just 1999, but all of that decade. The 90s were defined, arguably more than the 60s and 70s, by the renaissance of auteurs flipping low budget debuts into big budget careers.

It was a wonderful period to fall in love with the movies. Raftery’s prose helps you remember a considerable amount of that period, and for that, I recommend his book to you.

Yes, Really the Best. Movie. Year. Ever.

Here is just a brief listing of the films that get whole chapters devoted to them in this book:

It’s a stunning list for a single year in film. That doesn’t even include other films that are mentioned, but don’t get dedicated, chapter-length spotlights. Given all of that artistic output, it’s hard to argue 1999 wasn’t the best creative year in cinema history.

It’s so hard to argue, most people don’t bother. It’s a non-controversial talking point. So much so that outgoing New York Times chief film critic, A.O. Scott, mentioned it during his podcast exit interview.

Box Office. Umm… Pretty Good?

So 1999 was, if not the best movie year ever, certainly one of the best movie years ever. Artistically, certainly. Business-wise, the picture gets a little more complicated.

It wasn’t a bad year at the box office. In total, the domestic gross for that year was $7.34 billion. That was roughly 10% higher than the year before. It capped a decade that saw ticket revenues nearly double in the United States, even after adjusting for inflation.

Emphasis on capped. As in ended. As in the 1990s were a golden time for studio execs and their stock options. Once the third millennium kicked off, things got choppier.

It wasn’t even that theater grosses fell off a cliff in the 2000s. That didn’t happen until a worldwide pandemic sent theatergoers into lock down. But take the 1999 box office total and adjust for inflation into 2019 dollars.

You end up with $13.25 billion, which is a couple billion more than the U.S. box office in 2019. In other words, theatrical ticket sales slowly declined. Despite 3D upcharges. Despite IMAX upcharges. For twenty years.

Measure for actual tickets sold, and you see a more obvious fall off in theater attendance. Twenty years after the best movie year ever, more than 200 million fewer movie tickets were sold in this country. This despite there being more than twice as many films released in 2019 vs. 1999, though there was a slight decline in wide releases.

The Number has a very helpful write-up on all of these trends. They even have pretty line graphs to make the trends obvious, but it boils down to this:

A smaller pie. More slices. Fewer eyeballs per film. The conversation existing mostly in niche alleys.

Missed Opportunities

That sounds like a pretty interesting story. If you’re going to talk about 1999, you can do worse than talking only about how good the movies were. But you could do better.

This was, arguably, the last time the industry achieved perfect balance between its creative output, its cultural influence, and its bottom-line. Unfortunately, Raftery appears generally uninterested in telling that story. The book’s epilogue casually mentions the struggles some films in 1999 had breaking through the noise:

“Remembers [American Movie director, Chris] Smith: ‘Richard Linklater said to me, ‘The problem isn’t that people don’t want to see your film. It’s that there’s such an incredible amount of films right now.’”

Best. Movie. Year. Ever. Epilogue

In the very next sentence, he mentions that DVDs gave Smith’s film a second life in cult status. He does not mention how DVDs gave way to streaming. He doesn’t mention how that flooded every living room and bedroom in America with “such an incredible amount of films.” It makes Linklater’s observation seem quaint.

Look, the last thing I want to do is criticize an author for writing a different book than I would have. As with all criticism, you should judge a work on its own terms. If all I was looking at was the seventeen chapters between the prologue and epilogue, I’d say the book was an enjoyable read, if not particularly ground breaking.

Is There More Here?

But Raftery didn’t just write seventeen chapters. He also wrote a prologue and an epilogue, wherein he tries, not persuasively, to argue for a thematic connection. Then he alludes to, but largely ignores, the obvious angle for putting 1999 in some kind of larger context. It’s maddening.

Aside from being released in the same year, there’s nothing per se that ties these films together. If there was, you’d imagine the book would explore those connections in great detail. It does not.

Nevertheless, the entire prologue is a grasping attempt to explain 1999 as more than what it was: one year, a while back, when there were a whole lot of really good films.

Raftery talks about how films reinvented visual effects and pushed the boundaries of story structure and editing in 1999. Which is true, so far as it goes. It was also true in the years leading up to 1999.

He also talks quite a lot about Y2K. It is a symbol, you see, of the collective anxiety that gripped our society in the late 90s. Now look at all of these films in 1999, how they reflected that anxiety. Or something.

I suspect he had a good anecdote about Brad Pitt and David Fincher’s New Year’s Eve plans burning a whole in his pocket.

In the End

Again, for the last time, I mostly liked this book. I mostly enjoyed reading it. It’s entirely reasonable to focus the story on the films themselves, and to let the story wrap up as the year in its title ended.

Yet I can’t shake the sense that this book was a missed opportunity.

Ditch the half-hearted attempt at connecting disconnected films. Take advantage of the quarter-century of hindsight. Explain a little bit what 1999 meant, the pinnacle of a time when cinema culture was something it’s unlikely to ever be again.

Because it was. Not just the Best. Movie. Year. Ever. It was also the End. Of. An. Era.