The Cineaste's Lament.

Here’s an intriguing story from today’s editions of The New York Times.

In short, interest in collegiate film programs is at a high and graduates are pouring out of film schools at the University of Southern California and New York University.

There’s just one problem: Thanks to declining film revenues, there’s not nearly enough jobs for these young graduates. And that means competition for jobs is positively cutthroat.

Here’s the germane part of the story. I’ll follow it up with some thoughts of my own.

“As home-entertainment revenue declined in the last five years, studios reduced spending on scripts from new writers, cut junior staff positions and severely curtailed deals with producers who once provided entry-level positions for film school graduates. Yet applications to university film, television and digital media programs surged in the last few years as students sought refuge from the weak economy in graduate schools and some colleges opened new programs.

‘Working as an assistant for six years is not unheard of,’ Mr. Dahm said. He estimated that perhaps a quarter of the two dozen graduates in his class had lined up assistant jobs; about as many, like himself, are still looking for similar work, he said, while the rest are writing screenplays or otherwise preparing projects that might open a path into the business.”

This ought to tell you everything you need to know about the state of contemporary filmmaking.

As I sit here writing this piece, three of the movies in the past weekend’s box office top 10 are major summer franchises based on super-hero comic books and a line of children’s toys; two more are sequels; one apes the summer blockbusters of years gone by; three are vehicles are for major stars and there’s one unexpected hit about a guy who meets the ghosts of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris.

Compare that to a decade ago at the same time when the Uma Thurman-starrer “Cats and Dogs,” sat atop a Top 10 list that also included the farcical “Scary Movie Two;” “Artificial Intelligence;” “Doctor Doolittle 2;” “The Fast and the Furious (which has had its sixth iteration recently greenlighted);” “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” and the first installment in the endless “Shrek” series.

I’m hardly arguing that the above list represents some kind of unrecapturable Golden Age of contemporary cinema. But reading the list over, one at least gets the sense that the studios were trying.

With moviegoers abandoning the multiplexes for Netflix, cable productions and pay-per-view, and with movies costing more to make than ever, it’s probably in Hollywood’s best interest to play it safe, to make movies that are guaranteed to appeal to the widest possible audience and make good on the staggering amount of cash that’s put into them.

It is called show BUSINESS, after all.

On the other hand, this creative conservatism also means that the age when a young video store clerk could break into the business with a hyper-violent action flick about a half-dozen guys in black suits are long-gone.

And forget about the early days of Hollywood, when there was so much demand for content that such established literary figures as Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley could head west and pick up a lucrative writing gig to see them through until that next novel or collection of poems was published.

Compare that to Hollywood, 2011 which saw 4,800 aspiring filmmakers apply for fewer than 300 available spots at USC’s Douglas Fairbanks School, the NYT reported.

There’s interest. But not enough spots. And those who are lucky enough to enroll and graduate will be locked in a savage race for the handful of jobs that will be open to them when they graduate.

Now, more than every, young and original voices are exactly what’s needed in Hollywood. They’re desperately needed to pump some energy and creativity into an industry that’s suffering from the worst period of artistic stagnation I can remember in more than 30 years of moviegoing.

What gives me hope is that these young filmmakers are part of the same generation reared on Facebook and YouTube. And that means they’re used to dealing with alternative distribution channels that sidestep the monoliths.

So that means that the next Scorcese or Spielberg won’t be directing for United Artists or Paramount.

Instead, they’ll be taking their work directly to their audiences, one whose needs and wants they understand because they’ve taken the time to build relationships through social media and other methods. And I hope that also means they’ll be willing to take the creative risks necessary to keep this medium flourishing and healthy.