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Why the Movies Have Gone Bad By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
Okay, okay, I admit right up front that any list of ten “dark clouds” we face as a nation now in the wake of Hurricane Katrina should very likely not include the question of whether or not we can survive an onslaught of bad entertainment. However, over this past summer I have read a lot of posts in the blogosphere on this subject, all written by people whose closest association with the problem is as a consumer.
As a 25-year resident of Hollyweird, aka Okefenokee West, allow me to present some thoughts about why the movies now suck: 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 of why this happened is “the script sucked.”
Up until the Great Writer’s Strike of 1988, Hollywood ran a “farm system” in which writers were able to work regularly. One could pitch an idea and get hired to write a “development draft” of it, working in what many called “development hell” until it was decided that a “new voice” was needed and another writer would be called in to rewrite the first draft. Creatively, it was something of a demeaning system, but it was entirely possible for a member of the Writers Guild to be able to buy a house “south of the boulevard” in Sherman Oaks and send his children to a private school, having worked in the business ten or fifteen years, all without ever having seen a script he’d written or rewritten turned into a movie.
That was life in “The Show,” the Majors, where one had finally managed to scale the castle walls in the midst of the blinding storm without being washed away and anointed into the Guild where he could practice his craft.
For those in the Minors, otherwise known as the low-budget world, it was possible for a writer to also survive while he learned his craft. He might not live “south of the boulevard,” but it was certainly possible to afford a one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood that didn’t require one to wear body armor when going out to get the car.
The king of all that was Roger Corman. One didn’t 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’t well-paid either, but they, too, got “enough.” 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 his work seen, and was able to “move on up” to The Show. The list of A-List Greats in Hollywood who are graduates of “The Roger Corman Film School” is long and quite prestigious.
Then the Writers Guild “won” 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 “spec” script, and the Great Spec Script Boom began. Soon no one in Hollywood was hiring a writer to work on a project, not when he could wait for the writer to finish it on his own (screenwriters are still mostly “he” more than “she”).
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 “scale minimum” 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.
As most people reading this will know, screenwriting is 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 and less after 1988, the number of writers who could afford to play the game got smaller. If one didn’t have some other source of income, it was unlikely he 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, “Hollywood is the last respectable outlaw profession for upper-class white boys.”)
The result of this discovery is that almost all the young people coming into the business in the past ten to twelve 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 “intern” 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.
The money that used to be paid to writers didn’t disappear. Twenty years ago a mid-level studio executive could nail down about $50,000 a year for his job. Today, kids a few years out of college expect a six-figure income. Before, executives all knew that somewhere along the line they would go “indie-prod” and become a producer. Today, “going indie-prod” 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. Today, I have yet to meet a young writer who comes from an “educated working class” 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 25 years ago, 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!"
Do you really think there is any “creative passion” behind these decisions? When you couple that with would-be writers who don’t 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 “that stinks” to the idea of remaking a bad TV show, you get what we’ve now got.
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 ten years), they can expect to be out. It's a little-known fact, but it takes until one is somewhere in his 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 writers finally have the necessary experience to actually become good, they're gone.
My screenwriting mentor, the late Wendell Mayes, who got started writing movies in 1956 (after eight 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-- a nearly 40-year writing career that saw him write Anatomy of a Murder and Go Tell the Spartans in addition to many others.
No writer currently working in Hollywood today will ever experience such a career. 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’t just make it up as they go along. Everyone else is merely doing a version of "et cetera" to what already exists-- the 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’t hackneyed re-dos of what’s 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. Like I said, the problem is the old one that’s always plagued Hollywood: the script sucks.
Just my two cents on the real reason why you haven’t been going to the movies of late. With that and $3, you can get yourself a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Thomas McKelvey Cleaver has been (and still is) a freelance journalist; he was a staff writer and editor at several publications prior to accidentally becoming a screenwriter 20 years ago. In addition to writing 15 produced movies, he has been a development executive in independent film, and a story editor and supervising producer for three cable TV series. His credits include the cult horror hit The Terror Within (though his only connection with TW II is a credit "based on characters created by..." which he was forced to take). He is currently in development on a World War II script optioned by Greenwich Films, and has recently completed an adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer. Reach Thomas at tom@absolutewrite.com. |
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