Another factor is that the structure is considered very important in films. The whole three act thing is pretty crucial for a “good” screenplay. I don’t think most novels have that same kind of tinkering to bring them in line with some kind of external structure. So they end up trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and subplots get cut, and characters get thrown around, and stuff gets moved for no apparent reason.
I was just coming to start a thread on this. They’re doing another movie version of Cheaper by the Dozen. Now it’s been a while since I saw the Clifton Webb one on TV, but I remember it being at least semifaithful to the book. They at least kept the characters’ names the same, and the parents were still efficiency experts.
In this new one with Steve Martin, he's playing a football coach, and the family isn't even the Gilbreths. So basically the only resemblence between this movie and the book is that they're both about a family with twelve children. I'm not even totally sure why you'd have to pay royalties for that...
-Lil
I haven’t seen LXG yet, but I’m very familiar with LOEG, the source comic.
LXG was written by a better-than-average comic-book writer (James Robinson, who wrote such gems as STARMAN and Leave It to Chance)and directed by the adapter of BLADE, so I don’t think there’s a problem with lack of respect for the source material. Alan Moore’s comic-book scripts tend to be incredibly dense (More than one collaborator has described them as “artist-proof”). Scaling any of his 6-12 issue stories down for a two-hour movie involves gutting about 80% of everything you enjoyed about the source material. Also, everything that works well in a comic book doesn’t necessarily work well on the screen and vice versa.
I once tried to adapt FRANKENSTEIN for a stage play for my local community theater group. It can’t be done. My hat is off to anyone who writes an entertaining adaptation.
Directors also often have the clout to call for a rewrite, and to pick who does the rewrite (usually not the original screenwriter!). I guess they like having the script brought more into line with their own artistic vision, which may have little to do with the artistic vision of the first screenwriter…or the author of the souce material.
That must be one big reason why a lot of people want to write and direct – it greatly reduces the risk that someone else is going to be send in to completely rewrite their script.
INDEPENDENT THOUGHT ALERT! … INDEPENDENT THOUGHT ALERT! … INDEPENDENT THOUGHT ALERT!
To which I would add The Shining. I don’t know why that movie was so popular. It was massively inferior to the book. In all fairness, King’s made-for-TV version had problems of its own (pacing, lack of editing; King is indeed no director), but the book as written would make an incredible movie. Kubrick’s version is worse than if no one had ever made it into a movie. It detracts from and insults the book. More people should read it. It’s his best work.
You know the scene in Gone With the Wind where Rhett comes around collecting jewelry for The Cause, and Melanie tearfully parts with her wedding ring (“It may help mah husband moah – AWF – my finguh”), which impresses the hell out of Rhett, which causes Scarlett to say “Heah. You can have mine too.” [clink]? Well, in the book, Scarlett volunteered her ring first.
Every now and then Hollywood actually makes a change for the better.
I pretty much lost faith in scripts around the time of “Last of the Mohicans” and “Rob Roy”, when we were introduced to the first of a series of Improbable Bad Guys so throroughly eeevil, so totally vile, so utterly without any human qualities, that it was impossible to feel the slightest atom of triumph when IBG got it in the neck–it was like watching a box of shredded wheat get its comeuppance. Please, fellas, I know it’s, you know, expensive to have real live actors in your scripts, but can’t you make the rapist, the torture fiend, the pointless incompetent who gets his thrills by tormenting the virtuous hero, and the walking environmental disaster who sets fire to the hamlet of honest villagers at least two different people?
I listened to the interview/commentary by Mel Brooks on the ‘Blazing Saddles’ DVD yesterday. He was telling the story about how it was made into a movie and what probems they had. His record as a filmmaker at that point wasn’t very impressive: ‘The Producers’ and ‘12 chairs’. today, we see ‘The Producers’ as a classic, but it bombed at the box office.
However, Brooks had managed to get final cut into his contract, which is strange, given his record.
Anyways, the movie got made and for the first screening, there are twelve Warner execs in one of those tiny theatres. After viewing the movie, the whole theatres is silent for almost ten minutes and then they start talking about how they probably won’t release it. It’s to ‘narrow’, to ‘edgy’ ASF. There is also some fear about the more controversial aspects of the movie. The whole production was $2,5M, and they didn’t want to"chase good money after bad", i.e. the costs of promotion, making prints ASF.
The next day, Brooks and the producer arranged a screening for about 300 people. They went around the Warner lot and invited secretaries, janitors ASF. The theatre was in an uproar and word got back to the execs who decided to do a minimal release (NY, Chicago, LA). But one of the big guys had a meeting with Brooks, ordering the following out:
- No fart scene.
- No hitting the horse
- Take out the word ‘nigger’ throughout the movie.
But Brooks had final cut, so it didn’t happen.
The summer of '74, WB didn’t have a bidg summer movie lined up, so they decided to put out 300 prints of Blazing Saddles, and the rest is of course history.
BTW, Brooks hate seeing the movie on broadcast TV, since it’s edited down to dumbness.
quote:Originally posted by Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor
… 2)The director rarely has complete creative control. Producers, assistant producers, stdio execs, their assistants, ad men, & somebody named Norm ( ) all have the privilige of adding their “creative input”. Even if they do not possess any creativity.
Ummm…dude? I don’t do that anymore. In case you haven’t noticed.:rolleyes:
I can claim no knowledge of moviemaking greater than Cervaise’s. (Because he’s my brother and he could probably still whale the tar out of me.)
Still, my opinion of this phenomenon is that Hollywood’s definition of “good movie” has little or nothing to do with that of the intelligent viewing public. To a movie studio, a good movie makes money. A great movie makes a lot of money. A bad movie fails to break even. The quality of the content doesn’t enter into this equation as long as they can get the ticket sales.
Movies have increasingly gone to the blockbuster format. Instead of releasing a lot of smaller films, as in the 1970s, we now get a smaller number of You Must See This Movie Right Now! films. And we get the Everybody Else Is Seeing This Movie, You Don’t Want To Be Left Out, Do You? movies. And we get the Explosions And Breasts III: What More Could You Ask For? pictures.
This means Hollywood is banking more on each film to be a commercial (profitable) success. Before it was possible to cross-collateralize the cost of four small breakeven pictures against the cost of one modest success, but no longer. Now they all have to profit, or heads will roll. There’s no room for sentiment in big business. (He’s right you know.) So despite the fact that they don’t really know how, Hollywood moguls are trying to guarantee their films make money so they don’t lose their jobs. When something comes out that they don’t know how to market, they let it slide by: nobody wants to take the blame for a high-priced bomb. And since Star Wars showed how much cashola there was to be made in merchandising, nobody wants to take the blame for setting free the fatted calf.
Rob Reiner’s commentary on The Princess Bride DVD, acknowledged as a good movie and faithful to the spirit of the book, admits as much. The studio wanted to know if Bride was a swashbuckler, a satire, a comedy, or a romance – as if it couldn’t be all of them at once. As a result, Hollywood did a poor job of marketing it and the film fizzled in the theater. In his words, as he demanded appropriate marketing support from the studio, “don’t let this movie turn into another Wizard of Oz.” (Of course, now Hollywood showboats Wizard, almost as if they knew all along that it was going to be an epic film of the ages. Short memories they have, huh? Well – it makes money now so they’re pimping it now.)
Sure, if it puts money in the bank and it gets an Oscar, that’s just bragging rights. It’s the cream, it’s all gravy. But what do they do with the Oscar-winning picture that flops at the box office? Right, they slap “Best Picture 2049!” on the cover and re-market it as The Film Everybody’s Talking About Except You, You Ignorant Philistine, So Go Out And Buy Three Copies Today, You Can Watch One And Use The Others As Feet For The Sofa. (Sorry, Cervaise. I really do have feet for your sofa, honest.)
And as long as people continue to go see the crap that gets released, Hollywood isn’t going to learn anything. I’ve mentioned this before on the boards: from Titanic, Hollywood learned we’ll pay record amounts of money to watch a long historical disaster film with a nailed-in romance and melodrama, so they gave us Pearl Harbor. The wrong lesson, learned from the right film.
What they’ll learn from the Lord of the Rings, I don’t know.
FISH
Fish, I believe you’ve nailed it right there. Pauline Kael once made an interesting comment (she was reviewing “High Tide”, a Judy Davis vehicle I have yet to see, despite her high recommendation and my ill-concealed lust for anything Judy Davis does). She said she kep’ runnin’ into these idealistic film students who swore that, when they got to the corner office, they were gonna make these serious, small-scale, heartfelt movies with no 'splosions and no nudity. “I kept telling them to chase that dream,” Kael said, “without pointing out that those are precisely the types of films most difficult to make.”
Another film critic, responding to the charge that Hollywood never makes anything but “Clouds of Orange Flame and Nipplemania: The Sequel”, pointed out that people who demand storylines pitched above the level of sophistication of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon rarely go to the movies: the audiences are teenagers, divorced 'rents taking their kids out on their visitation weekends, and people who are dating. Since a movie costs a lot less than a day at the water park, and it’s possible to smooch without detection in a darkened theater, people put up with less than scintillating cinema.
I have to agree with them; I go to maybe three movies in a theater a year, and that’s in a whoppingly ambitious year. Would I go to more if they were more in line with my tastes? Well, now I’m out of the habit.
I’m afraid of what they’ll learn from LoTR. The interesting thing is that a lot of these blockbusters were created by one man (as it is most often a man) with a vision. Lucas had a vision for the first SW. Cameron had a vision for Titanic. And Jackson had a vision for LoTR. In many ways, those three were all risky projects. I read an interview with Matt Groening, where he said that had The Simpson’s been subjected to a focus group, it would never have gone on the air.
What Fish says is true. But let’s not forget The William Morris Agency and their likes:
Agent: “Hi, this is Joe Slimeball with Rippemoff agencies. Whitenheader has just told me he’s game for a new movie this year. He can be on location during March, and get the stuff on the soundstage done in April. Then he’s gonna spend time with his kids. Do you have something for him?”
Studio Exec: "Well, there are some scripts that we’re looking at right now. But you know, we own the franchise for * Dominator. How would he feel about doing a third installment? I know he’s getting older, but we can fix a lot of the stunts with CGI these days, and the kids think it looks cool."*
**Agent: **"Do you have a script for this?
*Exec: Nah. But we can probably have some writers come in and pitch ideas and ahve a treatment ready for Arthur in two weeks.
Agent:"Rememeber, Artie won’t play a villain. It worked in the first movie, but with the image he’s marketing now, and with his political agenda, you have to make him heroic, otherwise, he won’t do it. Who are you thinking about for directing?"
Exec: * Does it matter? Will find someone who’ll do what we tell him to do.
Agent: “Of course. Well, If you have a treatment for me to look at, we’ll do lunch and talk about the details in the contract. What percentage of the gross Artie gets. What tie-ins there are for merchandising and what marketing budget you figure on. Come prepared. This just might be the thing we’re looking for.”
Fish, I could hardly agree with you more. I was discussing (ranting about) a similar issue last night, and as I put it then “The people calling the shots in Hollywood do not care about Giving the People What They Want, and they certainly don’t care about Giving the People a Quality Film. They care about Giving the People What They Will Tolerate Enough to Spend Money On.”
I’m sure the cast and crew of most films hope that the final result will be good, if not a timeless cinema classic, but from the business end it doesn’t matter if the movie is any good or not. It doesn’t even matter much whether the audience finds it at all enjoyable if advance promotion can win a big opening weekend. In fact, this appears to be the new standard business model. Studios don’t have to care whether their major movies have “legs” if they can manage a blockbuster opening.
I recall reading an article claiming that the trend toward big megaloplexes with 30 screens and huge auditoriums with stadium seating were partially to blame for this trend. It’s rare nowadays that a blockbuster movie is truly “sold out” on its opening weekend – if you can’t get into the 8:00 show, there’s an 8:15, 8:30, 8:45 and 9:00 showing. If you want to see the film when it opens, you’re pretty much guaranteed a seat. Thus word of mouth counts a lot less than it used to, since everyone basically sees the new flick within a week of its opening. Thus “legs” are less important for a film to make back its initial investment; pre-opening hype determines success or failure, not the quality of the film itself.