Getting out of the house with two children under age 2 at home is a similar challenge to escaping from another planet. Thus of course the only appropriate movie to see during our afternoon of freedom was The Martian. The filmmakers seemed to have gone to some trouble to achieve technical accuracy, yet the demographics of NASA were very different from the reality disclosed by this Popular Mechanics article: “less than 20 percent of NASA’s employees are under the age of 40.” Virtually everyone in the movie, including folks with desk jobs in Mission Control, seemed to be young and good-looking.
Readers: Why is it commercially unbearable for an older person doing a tech job to appear on-screen, even in a minor or background/non-speaking role?
There also had to be good roles for blacks and women. No gays, but then no one had a sex life.
It’s ok to discriminate against the ugly. The true discrimination people should worry about.
Because young people are more likely to fall for the scam of getting paid less (or even nothing), because “Exposure!”?
I was under the impression that past ‘a certain age’ most people in the acting business are quietly sold off to the glue factory, thus filling a room with ‘old actors’ is impossible, unless one wants to use all the highly paid big names — something that most budgets would not allow.
One point: the movie allegedly takes place in 2035, so many of those currently-under-40 NASA folks will probably have retired by that point.
For my $0.02, I might expect as more people retire, a more ‘realistic’ view would have many of the people on screen be support staff contractors rather than NASA employees themselves. Or perhaps as NASA gets more people retiring, they’ll work harder to hire new employees right out of college, which might give you the demographics you see in the movie (astronauts and tech staff seem to be mid-20s to mid-40s, at least per a quick look at IMDB).
NASA publishes their age distributions, and the peak sure is moving right. See the Age Distribution link at https://wicn.nssc.nasa.gov/wicn_cubes.html
“At 4:17 on the afternoon of July 20, 1969, the average age of the men listening anxiously in mission control as Neil Armstrong fought to land the lunar module before running out of fuel was just 26 years old. Kranz has described himself as the old guy in the room. He was 35 that day.” from http://amyshirateitel.com/2012/08/11/apollos-youthful-glow/
The average age of moviegoers is around 30, so this might have something to do with it. Also, I think people of any age prefer to see young attractive people on the screen. If you ever see a movie of a non-fiction event, 9 times out of 10 (or maybe more) the actor playing the real world character (especially if he is a hero and not a bad guy) is better looking than the actual person.
The part where they bring in all the people who worked on Pathfinder was cute. Those guys should’ve all been 80+ by the time the movie takes place.
My grandfather worked on the Patriot Missile (i.e. SAM-D) in the ’60s; my father worked on the Patriot Missile in the ’70s; I worked on the Patriot Missile in the ’80s; and my nephew currently works on the Patriot Missile. The Patriot Missile has put bread on my family’s table for fifty years.
Simple. The federal retirement system that started in 1984 is very portable. Anyone with any competence/experience leaves well before 40 now for private industry and much better pay (at least in the technical specialties). Under 40 is all the government will have by 2035 (probably by 2025).
Of course the real people running the place will be the highly paid and older ( > 40 yr old) Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, etc. consultants. RG
Maybe the movie is trying to recapture the era of the Apollo missions when the average age was 28?
Haha, it is a true sign of aging when everyone appears too young. Matt Damon is 45
Movies make most of their money from the 15-25 age group, so that’s where the actors are. They’re still spending money on date night & the current generation of 20 year olds is more likely to pay for a Netflix stream directly to their phone than cobble together all the bits required to download a pirated copy to a PC.
People! Occasional ticket buyers! Focus(“please”). It’s the movies you’re talking about, in your eggheady circles otherwise known as cinematographic vehicles for mass suspension of disbelief (and now perhaps also as parent-supervised sit-down parking facilities for tots with entertainment, but that’s a Discussion To Die For Another Day).
Moreover, these are Hollywood movies, instances of artificial subspecies of the film genus. That largely means they were created in a place that’s obsessed with the making of… no, not the movies, but money. First, last and foremost; and the ones they make there are just the product enabling a myriad of revenue streams—or not, as the case may be. These movies also are made in that most democratic of American places, where any and every dentist or dermatologist (among those not yet sucked dry by however-you-call-it-alimony), can become a movie producer overnight [partial disclosure: I am an associate one, too, all on the strength of once lending out some props to be filmed; listed in the end roll, imdb, the works]. All that’s usually required is to cough up a non-negligible sum of money on the table for some production… how else do you think the once Lady Di’s paramour Dodi Fayeed could have become one?
Of that follows that the way movies get to be made really defies description… no, not the technical sides which are quite straightforward, but their metaphysical dimensions—why something is there like that or not there—which never are.
In 1983, the screenwriter William Goldman summed it all up quite beautifully, and it still stands: Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one. [“Adventures in the Screen Trade”].
So, the answer to Phil’s question (stripped of leading, and paraphrased for clarity) “why were none of the minor/ background/ non-speaking tech-job roles in The Martian film played by older actors” can but be “no reason other than the casting director’s preferences for, and/or instructions from the management, that, as the projected, known in advance by their demographics, ticket buyers want to see themselves, only young faces on the silver screen, make that their wish come true.” Or something equally simple and/or convoluted. Remember Robert Duvall’s Charlie don’t surf! moment in “Apocalypse Now?” Well, Hollywood is trying to tell you “old people don’t watch movies,” with the same degree of certainty.
When applied to just a single “family rated” movie, such an answer really can not be considered valid. Yet the question deserves to be asked, but then preferably in some context where ages of the on-screen, and real-life characters’ could be tallied and compared. Like, say, for the most mature engineer & test-pilot-dense film that I know of, “From the Earth to the Moon” TV series. Then of course, given that it’s being sold in bulk to networks and not to “demographic” moviegoers, episodic TV lives under somewhat different, economically less stressful conditions—as they do not have to take as much notice of what warring studio suits upstairs want to impose on the show-runner’s and the film director(s)’ artistic vision.