Why has the quality of mainstream film and music taken a nosedive since the 70's?

Leandro Clever Sunbonnet wrote: »

And Hollywood is churning out superhero franchises and remakes at a rate of knots for a reason also (anything else too risky).

Hollywood has always done this. When trends kick off and are profitable they run with them. For donkey's years they were rattling out westerns damned near every week. When Lucas was hawking Star Wars around the studios they weren't interested and it hard a hard time getting a green light. Of course when it went into the stratosphere the studios dug up and wheeled out every science fiction script they could find. The first Star Trek flic nearly pipped Star Wars getting made as that was being hawked around the studios at a similar time, but nobody wanted a bar of it and that was hugely popular in TV syndication land, but the studios didn't see an audience for that stuff. Then Star Wars happened and it got the green light and a massively inflated budget. Similar trends where the Swords and Sandals epics of the fifties, where they raided the Classical world of Rome and Greece. And the Biblical epics which also had the Sword and Sandals stuff too. War flics have come and gone too which war depending on the generation. QV the glut of Vietnam flics in the 70's and 80's, the WW2 flics in the 50's 60's and 70's. Pirate films had their run in the sun too.

Remakes? A shed load of them including some what are seen as true classics now. The Maltese Falcon was a remake and only a few years after the original too. The Scarface of the 80's was a remake. Some Like It Hot another. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai was remade as western(cos popular then) into The Magnificent Seven(it also inspired a load of other flics). God knows how many Mutiny on the Bounty's have been shot.

Yermande wrote: »

There are many auteur directors who don't edit their films. It's a relationship I don't really understand and I find it difficult to see where good direction ends and good editing begins. I'm sure there's huge overlap, but then again there are many celebrated editors so it must be a significant creative element in its own right.

Actually the original Star Wars is a good example. The pretty much final cut Lucas showed to the studio and friends was met with a large dose of WTF is this guff George? That's a film that was saved in the cutting room. The ending in particular with the suspense of the Death Star threatening to blow up our hero's base was all in editing, not how it was shot(the back and forth cuts to the special effect monitor screen of the base coming into target range just one example). It can be more subtle too, like in a film such as Jaws. The fake shark prop not working really helped, but so did the editing. Spielberg notes this when he talks about the process and how his editor Verna Fields transformed the film. For a start she cut out as much of the footage of the rubber shark(when it worked) as possible and trimmed shots more vigorously than Speilberg admits he would have. Threw in a load of jarring jump cuts to amp up tensions in the viewers too.