Rick Beato is a musician, songwriter and rock producer with a very popular YouTube channel in which he analyzes popular music in a way that appeals both to amatuers like me as well as aspiring professional musicians.
A large part of the problem with filmmaking is that the industry was taken over by people with Harvard MBA’s in the mid-to-late 90’s. What does a Harvard MBA have to do with filmmaking? I’m still waiting for an answer to that question. MBA programs don’t instruct on scriptwriting, acting, or storytelling, rather simply how to crush the numbers. The industry is loathe to take risks & filmmaking is an inherently risky investment; there’s no guarantee on what will be a hit, there’s no formula that can accurately predict box office success. Hence, the industry tries to insulate itself from losses by churning out Marvel franchise #178 & reboot/rehash/remakes like “Ghostbusters Part VI” or whatever. Creativity is dead in Hollywood which is run anyway by a cabal of man-hating Harridans who bully any men left (see “Iger, Bob”) into line & into toeing the line of groupthink. Like most “elites” in the western world, they despise their native audience & seek to push the leftist narrative rather than storylines. Ergo, standard Hollywood fare has come to resemble the films of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany; pre-approved memes with the assorted bean counting in the casting.
The answer is in independent film & places like Angel Studios. The rot in Hollywood is so deeply ingrained I doubt they can ever come back. Every “awards” show illustrates this point; actors actively crapping on half their potential audience. That’s not a recipe for success.
Yeah it's true, in the 90's a lot of hotshot college grads who, in decades past, would have gone to Wall Street to seek their fortunes started heading west to California where the weather was better, the women were hotter, and the money was just as good. This heralded a great era of Hollywood corporatization which, as you point out, is inherently risk averse and uncreative. We'll see what we will see.
Movie making has also fallen prey to something that I noticed in Science Fiction and Fantasy novels as early as the late 60s. Several of my favorite authors wrote wonderful stand-alone novels began to write second, and third, and fourth, and . . . continuation novels.
And the novels get progressively worse and worse. Face it, most "stories" have only so much useful content. Once you've mined that, the 'tailings' are barely worth using, but since the earlier pieces "sold" well, they kept churning out sequels as long as anyone made any money.
How much better for the reader, or movie goer, if their creativity had worked on something new? We'll never really know what we were cheated out of by those parts of each industry that was way more interested in making money than in art or delivering a satisfying product to the spposed audience.
The churning of stories in the SF&F industry began after the money people noticed that Tolkien's Lord of The Rings (published in the early 1950s) was a huge selling trilogy in the 1960s. What they apparently missed was 1) it was originally written as a single, stand-alone novel, 2) it became a trilogy because the publisher didn't think (and may well have been right) that readers would pay for the huge volume the whole thing would be, and 3) it had a huge amount of story. People read all three to get the entire sweep of the epic.
I think this is verified by the current crappy streaming spin-off. Not enough actual story. Tolkien invented and entire world and civilization, and it still can't carry that many movies or TV streams.
Yeah those novelists are discovering the same problem Disney+ has discovered... once you enslave yourself to the scedhule, you must produce whether creativity strikes or not, and the creative process just doesn't work that way.
Great essay, MFW! I love Rick Beato, particularly his What Makes This Song Great series. (Don't Fear the Reaper with Buck Dharma as his guest). You make an excellent comparison of the loss of bands to solo artists with the loss of studio movie greatness to the rise of streaming. Thanks for cuing me into Beato's video on bands.
Sure thing! Beato has helped me hear things in my favorite songs that I never knew were there... even on songs he has not analyzed. He changes the way you hear music. It's uncanny.
I'm just talkin' here. Can streaming be compared to TV in the old days? Churn out stuff. I suppose it's the chicken or the egg. No movie goers because of poor quality, or poor quality makes fewer movie goers. TV did not kill movies. The old formula just can't work today?
Streaming TV can, yes. And in fact as the financial model fails, the streamers are retruning to an old-fashioned ad supported model, kinda like cable or network TV. On the movie side, I think of it more like the old Direct-To-Video system
Movie studios already own a huge library of movies from the earliest part of the 20th century up to the present. Most have interesting plots and interesting characters, and were successful at the box office when first released.
But most of them were made in an obsolete format, in a somewhat different cultural period, and were made at a time long before computers and cell phones.
Why not take some of these old stories and update them with the changes needed for the modern era? Instead of telephone booths and pay phones, rework the plot around a cell phone - or a lost cell phone. Instead of a character searching old police and newspaper files, the character uses a computer. I know! This isn’t rocket science, nor especially a new idea.
And I’m not suggesting remaking ‘the classics’. I’m just saying that a clever screewriter and a hungry producer could mine their archives for a lot of great stories that could be updated.
In a way, what I’m suggesting is similar to what they did in the 1950s when they took Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, put it in outer space, and called it ‘Forbidden Planet’.
Yeah exploiting the library has been a goal of the studios since forever. I remember back in the day WB was trying to reboot 36 HOURS. But the key is that the title has to have value. People need to know the title and remember it, or else the studio reasons, we might as well just create something new (using old titles carries expenses with it). On the streaming side, I'm seeing a lot of old movies turned into TV shows, presumably because the steamers would prefer to hook you for 8 or 10 hours instead of 2. FATAL ATTRACTION and PRESUMED INNOCENT come to mind.
A large part of the problem with filmmaking is that the industry was taken over by people with Harvard MBA’s in the mid-to-late 90’s. What does a Harvard MBA have to do with filmmaking? I’m still waiting for an answer to that question. MBA programs don’t instruct on scriptwriting, acting, or storytelling, rather simply how to crush the numbers. The industry is loathe to take risks & filmmaking is an inherently risky investment; there’s no guarantee on what will be a hit, there’s no formula that can accurately predict box office success. Hence, the industry tries to insulate itself from losses by churning out Marvel franchise #178 & reboot/rehash/remakes like “Ghostbusters Part VI” or whatever. Creativity is dead in Hollywood which is run anyway by a cabal of man-hating Harridans who bully any men left (see “Iger, Bob”) into line & into toeing the line of groupthink. Like most “elites” in the western world, they despise their native audience & seek to push the leftist narrative rather than storylines. Ergo, standard Hollywood fare has come to resemble the films of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany; pre-approved memes with the assorted bean counting in the casting.
The answer is in independent film & places like Angel Studios. The rot in Hollywood is so deeply ingrained I doubt they can ever come back. Every “awards” show illustrates this point; actors actively crapping on half their potential audience. That’s not a recipe for success.
Yeah it's true, in the 90's a lot of hotshot college grads who, in decades past, would have gone to Wall Street to seek their fortunes started heading west to California where the weather was better, the women were hotter, and the money was just as good. This heralded a great era of Hollywood corporatization which, as you point out, is inherently risk averse and uncreative. We'll see what we will see.
Movie making has also fallen prey to something that I noticed in Science Fiction and Fantasy novels as early as the late 60s. Several of my favorite authors wrote wonderful stand-alone novels began to write second, and third, and fourth, and . . . continuation novels.
And the novels get progressively worse and worse. Face it, most "stories" have only so much useful content. Once you've mined that, the 'tailings' are barely worth using, but since the earlier pieces "sold" well, they kept churning out sequels as long as anyone made any money.
How much better for the reader, or movie goer, if their creativity had worked on something new? We'll never really know what we were cheated out of by those parts of each industry that was way more interested in making money than in art or delivering a satisfying product to the spposed audience.
The churning of stories in the SF&F industry began after the money people noticed that Tolkien's Lord of The Rings (published in the early 1950s) was a huge selling trilogy in the 1960s. What they apparently missed was 1) it was originally written as a single, stand-alone novel, 2) it became a trilogy because the publisher didn't think (and may well have been right) that readers would pay for the huge volume the whole thing would be, and 3) it had a huge amount of story. People read all three to get the entire sweep of the epic.
I think this is verified by the current crappy streaming spin-off. Not enough actual story. Tolkien invented and entire world and civilization, and it still can't carry that many movies or TV streams.
Ah, well.
Indeed. It’s like they’re trying to wring the last drop out of a dishrag.
Yeah those novelists are discovering the same problem Disney+ has discovered... once you enslave yourself to the scedhule, you must produce whether creativity strikes or not, and the creative process just doesn't work that way.
Radio (music) and television (visual arts) are no longer driving cultural influences. Streaming just ain’t cutting it as large, RELIABLE, moneymakers…
Great essay, MFW! I love Rick Beato, particularly his What Makes This Song Great series. (Don't Fear the Reaper with Buck Dharma as his guest). You make an excellent comparison of the loss of bands to solo artists with the loss of studio movie greatness to the rise of streaming. Thanks for cuing me into Beato's video on bands.
Sure thing! Beato has helped me hear things in my favorite songs that I never knew were there... even on songs he has not analyzed. He changes the way you hear music. It's uncanny.
I'm just talkin' here. Can streaming be compared to TV in the old days? Churn out stuff. I suppose it's the chicken or the egg. No movie goers because of poor quality, or poor quality makes fewer movie goers. TV did not kill movies. The old formula just can't work today?
Streaming TV can, yes. And in fact as the financial model fails, the streamers are retruning to an old-fashioned ad supported model, kinda like cable or network TV. On the movie side, I think of it more like the old Direct-To-Video system
Movie studios already own a huge library of movies from the earliest part of the 20th century up to the present. Most have interesting plots and interesting characters, and were successful at the box office when first released.
But most of them were made in an obsolete format, in a somewhat different cultural period, and were made at a time long before computers and cell phones.
Why not take some of these old stories and update them with the changes needed for the modern era? Instead of telephone booths and pay phones, rework the plot around a cell phone - or a lost cell phone. Instead of a character searching old police and newspaper files, the character uses a computer. I know! This isn’t rocket science, nor especially a new idea.
And I’m not suggesting remaking ‘the classics’. I’m just saying that a clever screewriter and a hungry producer could mine their archives for a lot of great stories that could be updated.
In a way, what I’m suggesting is similar to what they did in the 1950s when they took Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, put it in outer space, and called it ‘Forbidden Planet’.
Yeah exploiting the library has been a goal of the studios since forever. I remember back in the day WB was trying to reboot 36 HOURS. But the key is that the title has to have value. People need to know the title and remember it, or else the studio reasons, we might as well just create something new (using old titles carries expenses with it). On the streaming side, I'm seeing a lot of old movies turned into TV shows, presumably because the steamers would prefer to hook you for 8 or 10 hours instead of 2. FATAL ATTRACTION and PRESUMED INNOCENT come to mind.