These are some of the questions that theater owners ponder as the thermometer moves south, the kids go back to school and the studios announce their lineups for the last four months of 1997. But the boundaries are less clear-cut than usual.
Autumn is crowded with studio products and offers fewer independent films than last year.
Science fiction, action adventure, sex comedies and high-tech thrillers will far outweigh women's films and literary adaptations. Movies generally get conspicuously bigger and conspicuously dumber between Thanksgiving and New Year's as the teenage population, liberated from school, reoccupies the nation's theaters. But this season, that tendency seems to have reversed itself. But there is also some unusual, not to say quirky, fare amid all the expensive stuff. In fact, if it's anything, December is an unusually director-dense period.