I had the pleasure of seeing an excellent production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic Theatre in London this evening, and it really was something. Hollywood star and more than that; fantastic actor Kevin Spacey, currently in the press for bagging out reality television, is artistic director at the Old Vic Theatre, and also plays a starring role as Charlie Fox in this two man and one woman show. In this star-studded production, Jeff Goldblum plays Bobby Gould, a Hollywood producer with the power to “green light” projects, with Fox his excitable underling. Both Goldblum and Spacey (the latter particularly so) were excellent, and Laura Michelle Kelly does a great job as well as temporary office worker Karen, sandwiched as she is between two titans of modern cinema.

The relatively short play is a satire of Hollywood, and a commentary on the age-old question of what it is that really makes art good. Is a film good because critics think it is good, or because it makes some kind of intellectual point? Or is it really at the end of the day the numbers of bums on seats that separates good films from great films?

If I have a brief think about the films that mean the most to me, I find that most of them probably do fall into the “publicly acclaimed” category, even if some of them are on the off-beat side of the fence. There probably is something of a consensus out there on what makes a good film, even it if it is a very thin consensus, with people’s tastes presumably collectively covering the entire spectrum. I suppose it goes without saying that a box office hit is not necessarily a great film (refer: Star Wars Episode I), and that many films that would probably be widely considered “great” today were not box office hits in their day (refer: Citizen Kane). I’d be interested if anybody has actually done any research in this area, but I would have to guess that if we plotted box-office takings against “best film of all time” survey results, we would find that box office takings are a decent but not outstanding indicator of whether a film is likely to be great.