Drew McWeeny (known to most as "Moriarty" of AintItCool.com) lets fly at the way bad movies have driven out good:
A Commando reboot? Our karaoke culture is officially out of control - HitFix.com
I survived the '80s, thinking it was one of the most empty periods of pop culture imaginable. Now I'm watching as today's studio culture treats the '80s like this bottomless source of material to revisit, meaning I'm watching a horrible blurry Xerox of a decade that I found nearly intolerable the first time around ... [A]ll of it just stacking up, snow drifts of the same, towering so high that it all blocks out even the possibility of something fresh breaking through.
... when that's the only game being played by the actual studios that run our entire industry, it makes me feel like we are in the final days of this particular paradigm, and I'm genuinely scared that we've burned down this business and we just don't realize it yet.
The comments on the piece boil with the usual spate of "it's always been like this"-isms, which I see less now as having a sense of history and proportion about the movies and more as an admission of having no real counter-argument to begin with. When all else fails, shrug and say there's nothing new under the sun anyway.
Bad movies drive out good ones, for the same reason bad anything drives out the good: it's too easy to be bad. Or, more accurately, too easy to not demand that something be good, and just settle for whatever they pour into your lap. When you have no idea that things can be better, it seems entirely natural to believe what you have is as good as it gets.
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Well said. Sadly, it's much, much easier to gripe and moan and groan about things and sneer at Hollywood. The point you make about their not being much of a counter arguement to begin with is sadly spot on. Take a look at most online forums and all you see are the usual gang of fools constantly complaining about how everything sucks and how everything would be so much better if they did it...but they have no experience whatsoever in filmmaking or storytelling, for that matter.
It's just easier to be a cynical, know it all loudmouth, I guess.
A friend recently told me that, in his words, "It's so much easier to fling the crap at Hollywood, to insult and bash anyone--even top directors--who make films. It's so much easier to be cynical, jerkoff precogs who swear up and down that _any_ new film _must_ be ripped off or is a useless remake of the original. Yet it is incredibly hard for these whining Internet jerks on these message boards to actually try and come up with something on their own and get it out there."
Sure, I'm worried about the spate of remakes too, but the history of Hollywood shows that remakes have always been part of the process, even remakes of well, crappy films. Also, have any of the 'Net gripers ever figured out that the reason why Hollywood might not be turning out original films is because when these films do come out, the same whiners never see them anyway?
Again, great post.
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People constantly single out the problem as being fear, and I agree with that: it's fear of trying something remotely risky, even if the costs are heavily contained. There's no clout in being a company that makes controlled investments that are all profitable (even if only in a marginal way); it's better to shoot for the moon. The problem is when you have the capacity to do nothing but moon shots, there's no room for any other kind of mission.
I think there are signs that the industry is getting its head together here and there, but I'm still far more interested in what's going on outside of Hollywood than inside it.
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Rehashing movie ideas and concepts has been around for a long time, yes, but tell me this: which movies were being remade in the 70s? the 60s? 50s? It's not possible that original scripts have completely dissapeared from hollywood, studios just don't care about them. All this because of the model they created themselves since the late 70s. Movies now cost millions, have to make even more millions and if not then it's a flop and not worth bothering.
The solution is with none other than the people that created this problem: hollywood. But they won't fix it anytime soon, as long as there are comic books, videogames, foreign movies to remake, old tv series and pretty much any old movie to remade they will keep going. It will get to the point where movies are going to be based on commercials, internet memes and so on.
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Hey DragonEye,
You are right about the solution being in Hollywood, but also remember--it is bloody tough to try and produce and market an original film (and even then, there's always some jerk who will pop up and scream that the film isn't original and that it rips off a previous film...
But to your question about which movies were being remade back in the 70's, the 60's and the 50's...well, be careful there. Because there are examples, such as:
--Nosferatu (1979 remake of the 1922 film)
--Dracula (1979 remake of the 1931 film; both based on the original novel by Bram Stoker)
--The Champ (1979 remake of the 1931 film)
--Heaven Can Wait (1978 remake of the 1941 film Here comes Mr. Jordan)
--Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 remake of the 1956 original; both based on the novel by Jack Finney)
--The Wiz (1978 remake of the Wizard of Oz)
--The Time Machine (1978 TV adaptation/remake of original HG Wells novel and 1960 film)
--The Shape of Things to Come (1979 remake of the 1936 film, both based on the novel by H.G. Wells)
--A Star is Born (1976 remake of the 1937 film)
--The Magnificent Seven (1960 American remake/revision of the 1954 film The Seven Samurai)
--Ben Hur (1959...but also a remake/new version of the 1925 film, and both were based on the novel by Lew Wallace)
--The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 remake of the 1934 film...here, Hitchcock is remaking his own film! Man, if he did it today...the Internet flaming would be intense, to say the least.)
--The Ten Commandments (1956 remake of the 1923 film)
And I'm sure you could find more via research.
Again, remakes are really nothing new. But I do agree that a glut of them could, and will, be bad news.
(Then again, 1978 seemed to be a year full of remakes...hmmm....)
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It isn't so much the making of remakes I find troublesome, since (as can be seen here and in many other places) this has happened for a long time. It's the fact that there's scarcely a single project in the works that isn't of this ilk -- that the bad has driven out the good, and almost completely for keeps. That original, director- and writer-sponsored creations are being driven out not even in favor of actor vehicles, but distributor-approved work that they know will fill a given number of inches of shelf space and move X units in Y amount of time. It isn't even the businessmen in the movie industry that call the shots anymore, but the businessmen in the supply chain -- Best Buy, Loews, HBO and Wal-mart.
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That is ultimately the problem--you nailed it. It is becoming harder to find original works in the pipeline. Even if there are some, very little attention is paid to them.
You know, Lucas said something to that effect years ago--that the businessmen, the suits essentially drove the artists out of the studios (in terms of putting films together, approving them, etc), and that what we're seeing now is the end result of that. It is, sadly, more about numbers and demographics rather than just, well, making films for the sake of making films.
There still are those directors who can still push for their personal projects--Spielberg, Cameron, Tarantino, for starters--and not give a hang about what the suits say. There are diamonds in the rough which can be found if one looks for 'em--a recent example being the film THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX. But I have to agree with you on the fact that the bad is steadily driving out the good.
And sadly, while there is talk about what is going on...there seems to be very little talk--or action--about what to do to stop it.
I mean, do we NEED a remake of COMMANDO, a film that, yeah, is dumb, 1980's fun, but it ain't high art.
(It did have some killer one-liners, though....)
Still, one has to be optimistic.
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The irony of Lucas's statement is that he said that at a time (if memory serves) when he was more credibly concerned with the state of film as art than he is now. He just didn't know what to do about it. His defense of multiplex culture was that it meant that many more screens for diversity, when in reality it just means that many more copies of the same crap playing in staggered schedules.
As far as people making movies for their own sake, it's happening -- it's just happening on several levels down from what most people are ever aware of. And because everything is distribution- and pipeline-oriented, it's harder than ever to know where to go to find anything. (...Complex caught my eye and will be getting looked at, as it covers a period of history I'm pretty interested in.)
The one thing I'd most want people to do is just band together, get cameras, and make something that's not intended to be a pipeline product, and find a way to get it to the attention of the audience that matters most for it. This is kind of what I've been doing with my own books, and while I can't claim to be successful in the NY Times bestseller sense, it's drawing an audience, and an audience I can cultivate very closely.
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..And at least you are DOING something by writing your novels. In the cosmic scheme of things, even if it turns out to be a small step, it is taking action.
BAADER-MEINHOFF was quite good, and even more so was the fact that it covered a period of history that I was not familiar with. Reading about the film caused me to look for the book it was based on, and finally getting the domestic release of the film itself.
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Yes, I liked "B-M" (unfortunate abbreviation, that!), and while I was already aware of the history of the period it was fascinating to watch it come to life.
Re: my books - I decided a long time ago it was better to try and create something of my own, however tiny, than just watch everything else go by. Even if it isn't a "success", it's still something.
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