Movies for Older Folk

What's this? Hollywood is finally catching on that a lot of would-be-moviegoers are 50, 60 and even 70 who, so far, have few movies they want to see.

Hollywood Awakens to the Geriatric Deomographic.

But where does that leave truly older audiences, fossils over 50 or 60 or even 70? To Hollywood these have been the perennially invisible men and women. Yet change is afoot. Some filmmakers and smaller distributors have discovered a secret society of mature moviegoers, and they have decided that this audience may actually be worth courting.
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Richard D. Zanuck, a veteran producer who is now 71, learned some lessons about the senior market 17 years ago when he and his wife, Lili Fini Zanuck, produced "Driving Miss Daisy" with Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. No one wanted to finance it, but the movie went on to earn more than $100 million and won the Academy Award as best picture of 1989.

"After the movie succeeded," Mr. Zanuck recalled, "one executive told me that 'Driving Miss Daisy' was a 'nonrecurring phenomenon.' Millions of people went to the theater to see it. Why is that nonrecurring?"