“Hollywood has always been a cage… a cage to catch our dreams.” – John Huston

The sagacious Huston may have been right, once, but if recent reports are to be believed, and there is no reason to doubt them, the finances of the major Hollywood studios are in freefall. Battered by both the rise of digital, and thus the manner in which people are choosing to consume entertainment, and a quickening drought in funding, production is predicted to fall by more a third over the coming year. In response to the broader global economic meltdown banks have withdrawn much of their investment in the West Coast industry ($12bn from a total of $18bn has been made unavailable) and the ascent of Internet piracy, and even the legitimate but far less profitable download and video-on-demand sectors, is ripping the DVD market asunder. Foreign language films, too, are chipping away at the assumed finality of the Hollywood hegemony as more and more moviegoers around the world discover the beauty of the dream-making available on their own shores.

Only last week Francis Ford Coppola, a man who has long railed against the homogeneity of western film production and has, broadly, pushed back against the conformity of the studio system, declared, “cinema as we know it is falling apart.” And he is right. To a degree. Cinema as we know it is, if not quite falling apart, then shifting inexorably. It is true, much of the classical romance that we once associated with the movies, whether we go in search of “mindless entertainment” or artistic truth – the full-scale visual magnificence, the warm sonorous envelope, the whole visceral experience – is being lost to an ever-shrinking and peculiarly isolated world of instant downloads and entertainment-on-demand. And yet there is something strangely cyclical about reports of cinema’s demise.

Forty years ago, as the major studios faltered in the slipstream of the 1948 Hollywood Antitrust Case, big-budget follies such as Hello Dolly, Raintree County and The Sound of Music and, no small irony here, the sudden, mass availability and appeal of that most domestic of entertainment mediums, television, a similar cry rang out. Hollywood was on the precipice of inevitable collapse.

Much has been written about the emergence of the New Hollywood and the post-Classical class of the sixties and seventies, but there is much to be said. About how the spirited, ambitious movie-upstarts who, in daring to look to Europe for their inspiration, to the works of de Sica or Truffaut, or even further east to the great Satyajit Ray, rather than to the behemoths of Los Angeles, such as Mankiewicz, Cukor and co., created an entirely new cinematic language in America. How, from the vestiges of the anachronistic studio system, so out of time with the intoxicating sixties counterculture, emerged an exhilarating explosion of cerebral creative energy, fertile and ambitious and predicated on rebellion, sex, gender, freedom, politics and so much more, the likes of which had been unseen in Hollywood since the arrival of sound. How only with the decline of established modes of production and consumption films as diverse and audacious as Midnight Cowboy, Harold And Maude, Mean Streets or The Conversation, films we are still talking about today,  could enter into the wider consciousness.

So, we know from experience that, to nurture the extraordinary, studios must be bold. That they must learn from Scorsese, Pakula, Malick (and again from Soderburgh, Jarmusch and co. in the early nineties.) Creativity and talent are out there. And people do want to watch it, hear it and be part of it. The best directors, actors and writers just need the platform on which to express themselves. It is redundant, and crassly self-indulgent for studios, producers and the omnipresent bean counters to bemoan falling audiences and the dearth of funding if they are not prepared to nurture the brightest talent with whatever financial power they do have, however enfeebled. Or if, when times are good, they only deign to throw their weight behind the derivative, nihilistic nonsense that appeals only to our basest instincts, or box office-busting franchises that only serve to line the coffers. If, in hard times, they continue to behave in such a discriminatory fashion they will get the audience they deserve: one that has lost any hope in the power of cinema to transform, one that simply doesn’t care for its capacity to release the imagination, one that, ultimately, will drift away. One that is, now, slumped, dull-eyed and soporific, watching illegal downloads of Jason Statham abominations on ten-inch computer screens. Or worse, Vin Diesel.

This is not snobbery or intellectual affectation but a rally. People really are smarter and more passionate than the major studios give them credit for. The willful dumbing-down of culture, and its opiate effect, is something that everyone from politicians to brands to TV executives are guilty of. But create something astonishing, something drenched in wonder and people, and then the funding, will flood back.