Ragtime has about the same amount of respect as comics. And in a way they're similar art forms. Ragtime is highly compositional and the emotion in the music is built in whereas in jazz a lot of that emotion comes from the way it's performed.
It seems like the studios are either making giant blockbusters or really super-small indies. And the mid-level films I grew up on like 'Back to the Future' and all those John Hughes movies the studios aren't doing. It's hard to get them on their feet.