It was after an evening showing at the now-gone Loew’s Tower East of The Competition, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving as rival concert pianists whose inconvenient romance prickles every passive-aggressive nerve in Dreyfuss’s acting quiver, his character’s male ego in danger of developing a bald spot from too much rubbing. He wants her so bad, but can’t accept that she might out-Rachmaninoff him! For some reason, Pauline Kael hadn’t caught the film when it was screened for critics, and so her review would run late, weeks after its December release. After her sojourn in Hollywood, Pauline had returned to active duty at The New Yorker in June 1980 with a long take on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining that seemed to mimic Kubrick’s Steadicam tracking through the remote snow, followed by a state-of-the-art polemic called “Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers,” in which she took what she had learned at Paramount, shaped it into a plasticine bomb, and set it off. Colonized by conglomerates that knew and cared nothing about movies themselves, studios were now run by executives who hedged their bets by green-lighting package-deal projects whose premise could be boiled down to a sound bite: “The higher the executive, the more cruelly short his attention span.”
