Hollywood Babble On & On #786: Seething Rage & Questions Answered

MY ADVICE FOR HOLLYWOOD

What's up with the Scott Bros.?

First Ridley signs on to do a follow up to Blade Runner, which will be done sometime after his prequel/whatever for Alien called Prometheus, and now, his brother Tony Scott has signed on to commit an act of cinematic blasphemy of unspeakable proportions.

He's agreed to direct a remake of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.

Let's ask original Wild Bunch character Pike Bishop what he thinks...
Well said Mr. Bishop.

Now I know that it's impossible to get Hollywood to pay the slightest attention to new and original ideas, so I'm going to ask them to do something they'll probably find easier.

Take this stiff metal wire brush... careful, it's a little rusty...

Insert brush into asshole.

Scrape until you see blood.

Remove brush.

Rinse with iodine.

Repeat until you stop fucking things up with stupid remake ideas.

While I know it'll probably mean some work for Val Kilmer, can't you come up with something original, instead of pissing on Hollywood's cinematic legacy?

Now onto less enraged business...

A QUESTION!

Edited for length...

Nate Winchester asked...

So in a reply you said:

-Stephanie. In the old days an actor in R. Pattz's position would do a war movie or a Western next to someone like John Wayne. Nowadays they don't want sacrifice top billing, & there doesn't seem to be any John Wayne's available.

Now, I know you (and others - including me) have talked about the lack of "manliness" or "machismo" in Hollywood.

Yet I can't help but think that there's plenty of manly men... on TV.

And I've forgotten my point. I think I was asking why manliness seems to be stuck in a "ghetto" of TV and some genre films? It didn't always use to be thus, right?

It all boils down to speed.

The faster things like movies and TV are made, the more responsive and responsible they are to popular tastes. In TV your product is judged every week, and if you deliver what the audience wants, you can survive that judgment week after week.

A-List movies generally take a long time to make. Sometimes years are spent in development before a single frame of film is shot. In Hollywood, time=money. Since they're investing so much time, and henceforth money, into said projects, they think they need to insure it against failure in some way. One way they're certain of is to win over the youth market by giving them what they think they want, youthful looking people.

Now boyish does not look manly, even if they manage to grow some sort of patchy peach-fuzz, because they look young, immature, and inexperienced, even as they hit their 30s and 40s.

Time=Money also works in the field of TV and smaller budget genre films. Because money and time is tighter on these projects they usually go for actors who are cheaper than the ones in most A-List movies. These actors don't fit in the mold created by Hollywood's juvenile dementia, and are more affordable in both time and money. The irony is that audiences seem to respond to these actors better, because they are more suitable to such action/heroic roles than the usual A-List man-children.

At least that's my theory.

ANOTHER QUESTION?

Blast Hardcheese asked...

Here's a question for you, D.

The world economy is still mired in a slump, at best. Even taking into account the glamor factor, people can't keep throwing money down a rathole forever. And I can't think of anything that screams 'rathole' more than spending $250M on a stupid Western.

When is it going to end? When will the investors who pony up the money finally say 'this is ridiculous' and walk away from the business? Have they already started?

It has started to a degree, but movies are a tempting business. It's glamorous, sexy, high risk, with great potential for reward, traditionally recession proof (though that may change soon) and being a big wheel in it will get you laid at any number of film festivals.

However, the hedge funds and investment houses that finance a lot of Hollywood's movies are taking recent developments into consideration and following one or more of these three plans:

1. They're getting out of the movie business entirely, and moving onto something safer, like mortgage backed securities, or just playing the ponies.

2. They're subtly cracking the whip and forcing the studios they work with to be more responsive to them and their needs.

3. They're forging relationships with smaller/newer distributors and producers, and/or getting into the business of creating their own content, and/or means of distributing said content.

Hope that answers your questions.