{"id":5084,"date":"2005-08-26T13:19:19","date_gmt":"2005-08-26T17:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/5084.html"},"modified":"2005-08-26T13:19:19","modified_gmt":"2005-08-26T17:19:19","slug":"why-the-movies-have-gone-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/why-the-movies-have-gone-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"Why The Movies Have Gone Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver<\/a><\/p>\n

Okay, okay, I admit right up front that any list of ten \u201cdark clouds\u201d we face as a nation should very likely not include the question of whether or not we can survive an onslaught of bad entertainment. However, I have been reading a lot of posts of late in the blogosphere on this subject, all written by people whose closest association with the problem is as a consumer. <\/p>\n

Since I am the only liberal blogger I know who is also one of those who has actually been part of the creation of the product being complained about, and have been around it long enough to have some perspective on the situation – having written 15 movies that got made including one unexpected hit that proves well-known screenwriter William Goldman was right when he said the three rules of Hollywood are \u201cNobody. Knows. Anything.\u201d as well as having worked in the production of a few cable TV series – I think I have more of an informed opinion about this problem than does my friend Garance Franke-Ruta over at Tapped<\/a> despite her piece being as erudite and insightful as all her writing is.<\/p>\n

As a 25-year resident of Hollyweird, aka Okefenokee West, allow me to present some thoughts about why the movies now suck:<\/p>\n

To me, the primary reason the movies have declined is that the studios are no longer independent entities. Their mission is no longer to create movies, but rather to produce “product” as part of the overall bottom line for the mega corporations of which they are now less-and-less-significant parts. The mega-corporatization of Hollywood has resulted in a lot of things changing over the past decade. As is usual with any Hollywood production that fails, the answer to the question why this happened is \u201cthe script sucked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Up until the Great Writer\u2019s Strike of 1988, Hollywood ran a \u201cfarm system\u201d in which writers were able to work regularly. One could pitch an idea and get hired to write a \u201cdevelopment draft\u201d of it, working in what many called \u201cdevelopment hell\u201d until it was decided that a \u201cnew voice\u201d was needed and another writer would be called in to rewrite the first one. Creatively, it was something of a demeaning system, but it was entirely possible for a member of the Writer\u2019s Guild to be able to buy a house \u201csouth of the boulevard\u201d in Sherman Oaks and send their children to a private school, having worked in the business ten or fifteen years, all without ever having seen a script they\u2019d written or rewritten turned into a movie. <\/p>\n

That was life in \u201cThe Show,\u201d the Majors, where one had finally managed to scale the castle walls in the midst of the blinding storm without being washed away and been annointed into the Guild where they could practice their craft. <\/p>\n

For those in the Minors, otherwise known as the low-budget world, it was possible for a writer to also survive while they learned their craft. They might not live \u201csouth of the boulevard,\u201d but it was certainly possible to afford a one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood that didn\u2019t require one to wear body armor when going out to get the car.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The king of all that was Roger Corman. One didn\u2019t make a lot of money working for Roger, but if you did that assignment right, there would be another, and it was possible to live on all that. Those who worked in the company weren\u2019t well-paid either, but they too got \u201cenough.\u201d It used to be a standing joke to drive into the parking lot beneath the building and look at the collection of junkers there. But people were learning their business, and anyone with the talent and drive to get through the door had a chance. One gained experience, got their work seen, and was able to \u201cmove on up\u201d to The Show. The list of A-List Greats in Hollywood who are graduates of \u201cThe Roger Corman Film School\u201d is long and quite prestigious. <\/p>\n

Then the Writer\u2019s Guild \u201cwon\u201d the Great Strike of 1988, after staying out for six months. Within a year, that system no longer existed. People far, far away from the business began to hear of writers getting paid a million dollars for a \u201cspec\u201d script, and the Great Spec Script Boom began. Soon no one in Hollywood was hiring a writer to work on a project, not when they could wait for the writer to finish it on his own (screenwriters are still mostly \u201che\u201d than \u201cshe\u201d). Today, just about no one who was a member of the WGA in 1988 is still active. A very telling bit of information about how things are now is the fact that in 1989, 80 percent of WGA members qualified for health insurance at any given time, meaning they had been paid the equivalent of \u201cscale minimum\u201d for a 30-minute sitcom script in a 12-month period. Today, that percentage is just about reversed, and the marvelous Guild health plan is a shadow of its former self in terms of services provided.<\/p>\n

Allow me to tell you something about screenwriting. It\u2019s like playing the piano – the more you practice, the better you get. Being able to pay the bills with writing allows a writer to take the time to actually get good at it. As the amount of pay got less, the number of writers who could afford to play the game got smaller. If one didn\u2019t have some other source of income, it was unlikely they would stick around long enough to get established. About that time – the early 1990s – the Ivy League discovered Hollywood. (As my friend David Freeman once put it, \u201cHollywood is the last respectable outlaw profession for upper-class white boys.\u201d) <\/p>\n

The result of this discovery is that almost all the young people coming into the business in the past 10-12 years as would-be writers, directors, studio executives, etc., are those from the upper-middle and upper classes who have access to either a trust fund or parental financial support, thus allowing them to \u201cintern\u201d in their chosen field (i.e., work for free). Those whose economic situation requires them to earn a paycheck are thus priced out of the marketplace. I remember seeing the result of this very clearly 10 years ago when I had reason to go over to Corman\u2019s company to take care of some business for my then-employer. I drove into the parking lot, and there were no junkers to be seen. The cars were all mini-Mercedes and Beamers and such.<\/p>\n

The money that used to be paid to writers didn\u2019t disappear. 20 years ago a mid-level studio executive could nail down about $50,000 a year for their job. Today, kids a few years out of college expect a 6-figure income. Before, executives all knew that somewhere along the line they would go \u201cindie-prod\u201d and become a Producer. Today, \u201cgoing indie-prod\u201d is seen as a failure for the upwardly-mobile young corporatists of Hollywood. Actually making movies on their own is no longer seen as an opportunity. <\/p>\n

Today, I have yet to meet a young writer who comes from an \u201ceducated working class\u201d background, as I did. That means there is a much different worldview in the business, and that has everything to do with what gets made. On the one hand you have corporate-minded executives whose idea of a “good story” is to remember back 25 years when they were in kindergarten, how much they liked “The Dukes of Hazzard”, “Bewitched,” etc., etc. “Hey! Let’s make a movie out of them!! They were gooooood!” <\/p>\n

When you couple that with would-be writers who don\u2019t necessarily come from a background where they are going to have had much “life experience” that fits them for telling interesting stories and there is no one to say \u201cthat stinks\u201d to the idea of remaking a bad TV show, you get what we\u2019ve now got. <\/p>\n

Not only that, but if the writers haven’t made a lot of money for the corporations by the time they are 35 (roughly when they have been in the business for around 10 years), they can expect to be out. It’s a little-known fact, but it takes till one is somewhere in their early 40s for an “observer of life” (as Real Writers are) to have observed enough life for things to start making real sense. Suddenly, it becomes easier to write Characters than Caricatures. Thus, just at the time they finally have the necessary experience to actually become good, they’re gone. <\/p>\n

My screenwriting mentor, the late Wendell Mayes, who got started writing movies in 1956 (after 8 years writing live television) when he wrote “The Spirit of St. Louis” for Billy Wilder, finished the last script he ever wrote six weeks before he died in 1995 – nearly a 40-year writing career that saw him write “Anatomy of a Murder” and “Go Tell the Spartans” in addition to many others. No writer in Hollywood today will ever experience such a career.<\/p>\n

The thing everyone likes to forget is that the only people in Hollywood who start with nothing and actually create something are the writers. The director and the actors really don\u2019t just make it up as they go along. Everyone else is merely doing a version of “et cetera” to the existing script. While many bad movies have been made from good scripts, the reverse has never happened. Today, the wherewithal to get good, original scripts that aren\u2019t hackneyed re-dos of what\u2019s gone before is just not there, not when the only people not being paid for their work are the ones who create the work for everyone else.<\/p>\n

Like I said, the problem is the old one that\u2019s always plagued Hollywood: the script sucks. Just my two cents on the real reasons why you haven\u2019t been going to the movies of late. With that and $3, you can get yourself a cup of coffee at Starbucks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver Okay, okay, I admit right up front that any list of ten \u201cdark clouds\u201d we face as a nation should very likely not include the question of whether or not we can survive an onslaught of bad entertainment. However, I have been reading a lot of posts of late […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5084\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}