Despite everything, it seems I still have a few friends in Tinseltown. A development exec I know, aware of my blog’s polemical crusade against late-twentieth-century nostalgia as well as creatively and morally bankrupt storytelling, recently forwarded several e-mails containing informal pitches (from agented writers) he’d solicited for “reboots” of three classic IPs straight from the Gen X archives. They offer fascinating firsthand insight into the demoralizing vocation of Hollywood screenwriting.
It might surprise those outside the industry to learn only a small fraction of a given screenwriter’s time and effort is spent developing original stories, known as “spec scripts.” Few of those screenplays ever sell (certainly nowadays), and fewer still are produced; mostly, such projects are mere “calling cards”—writing samples designed to establish a scribe’s commercial sensibilities and creative credentials so he or she might be given the opportunity to vie for “open assignments.” In those instances, a prodco controls the film rights to an intellectual property (IP)—a novel, a comic book, an old TV series—and, accordingly, invites such candidates to come in and pitch a take on it.
For instance, my prison break–zombie outbreak mashup Escape from Rikers Island afforded me opportunities to pitch cinematic adaptations of the pseudo-documentary series Ancient Aliens and the Japanese manga MPD-Psycho, as well as a remake of the 1992 action thriller Trespass. If you’re higher up on the food chain—in, say, J. J. Abrams territory—that’s when you might get a shot at a gold-plated franchise like Star Wars or Mission: Impossible.
Because for the most part, Hollywood isn’t looking for new ideas; they have enough branded IPs to keep them in business through infinity and beyond. What they’re looking for are skilled stenographers—writers-for-hire who can take a preexisting property and, juggling input from a thousand different chefs in the kitchen, turn it into a viable script for which a movie studio will be persuaded to invest millions of dollars. That’s the litmus test: Can you take an established IP and from it write a script that will motivate the studio to write a check?
The following proposals provide an insider’s glimpse into that singular development process. With my contact’s express permission, I have reproduced the relevant text from his e-mails verbatim, including all typographical errors and syntactical idiosyncrasies, but excluding the identities of the authors, their representation, the executive, and his production company.
We Are Brady
Whatever happened to..the Brady Bunch?
We see this as an incredibly versatile franchise. In the mid 70’s, it was reinvented as a disco era Variety Show. In the early 80’s, it was reborn again as a “mismatched roommate” sitcom in the vain of Three’s Company and Laverne & Shirley. Then in the early 90’s, it came back as a Thirtysomething esque midlife dramedy. And the success of the recent HGTV reality series A Very Brady Renovation, which featured all six surviving cast members, proves theirs life in the old franchise yet! So what does The Brady Bunch look like in 2021..?
We Are Brady is a generations spanning, time jumping, ELEVATED family drama in the tradition of This Is Us, filling in the decades since the shortlived 1990 revival came to an end. We get a sense of where all six Brady “kids” are now—whose divorced, whose got grandkids, where their living (like This Is Us, we see some still living here in Studio City, while others have relocated to the east coast or wherever). Through extended flashbacks, we start to fill in the missing parts of the narrative from the 90’s, 00’s, and teen’s. The deaths of Mike, Carol, and Alice. The extramarital affairs. The substance abuse. The cancer scares. The financial strains of the 2008 economic collapse. We should probably definitely work in a Covid plotline. No laugh tracks or high jinks—all of this is VERY GROUNDED.
We reestablish Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby and Cindy in the pilot, their spouses and children (first seen in A Very Brady Christmas), now all grown up with problems and plotlines of their own. (Our hope is to have the original adult actors reprise their roles, we can use “de-aging” fx for the flashbacks, like how they did in The Irishman.) Here’s the plot twist we spring in the last scene of the pilot ep: We learn that in 2001, Peter Brady, working in finance on Wall Street, died in the Trade Center attack. No narrative slight of hand, Peter is uncontrovertibly dead. Except, he still appears in all the contemporary sequences, as well as the post 9/11 flashbacks..and all his siblings simply accept he’s alive, despite what we, the viewers, know for a irrefutable fact! So what gives!?
We spend the rest of the first season teasing this mystery out—our “What happened to Jack?” throughline—before the cliffhanger reveal in the finale: The man the Bradys thought was their brother Peter is in fact Arthur Owens, Peter’s doppelgänger from the classic 1974 episode “Two Petes in a Pod”! At some point, Arthur assumed Peter’s identity (since there were no remains to be recovered from the Twin Towers wreckage) and has been secretly living as “Peter Brady” for two decades, unknown to the rest of the family. This game changing revelation will then form the basis for our season 2 story arc: Why did Arthur do this..and the fallout that ensues as his secret is revealed.
Each episode of We Are Brady will have multiple plotlines set in present day, and at least one set in the past, as we dramatize the dynamics of this multigenerational family romantically but REALISTICALLY—this is key, because old school episodic sitcoms like The Brady Bunch don’t have the grounded realism of today’s elevated dramas—keeping viewers hooked with the question of “What happened to Peter?” The series will have all the heartstring tugging and sibling rivalry audiences remember so fondly from the original series, only GROUNDED for modern sensibilities.
Mrs. Voorhees
An elevated psychological horror series in the style of Bates Motel and Ratched, Mrs. Voorhees takes the unkillable Friday the 13th franchise not into the future but where it truly belongs—the distant past—by dramatizing the canonical origin of its first teen-stalking slasher: Jason’s mother!
In 1956, 26-year old Pamela Voorhees hastily flees her ramshackle row house in Camden, New Jersey, covered in blood with her hooded 10-year old son in tow, and drives off into the sweltering midsummer night.
Desperate for work, she arrives at Camp Crystal Lake, where she’s hired as an off-the-books cook—and subjected to the relentless scorn and mockery of the privileged teenage campers (all from Princeton, Upper Saddle River, etc.) Meanwhile, Jason is confined to his cabin, out of sight—and we soon learn why: He’s hydrocephalic. Pamela is pathologically overprotective of him, turning him into a physical and psychological prisoner.
The first season of the series is split into two running narratives in different time frames: Jason’s surreptitious exploration of the campgrounds (and surrounding woodlands) while his mother is at work in the commissary, and the backstory of what led Pamela to flee her blood drenched home in Camden that fateful night. (We’ll also have a Camden detective—think Arbogast in Psycho—tracking Pamela down throughout the season, closing in on Camp Crystal Lake. Perhaps its even his investigation that triggers the “young Pamela” flashbacks, as he gradually pieces together a chronological narrative of her life.)
In the Jason plotline, we’ll definitely have him spying on the campers and counselors—lots of voyeuristic “Jason POV” shots of skinny dipping and sex, in tribute to the original series of movies. We’ll also see him befriended by a crazy old “witch doctor” living alone in the woods—maybe he’s even blind, like the old man in Frankenstein (and possibly a relative of Tina Shepard from The New Blood?)—who teaches Jason how to exercise mind-control over his oppressive mother. (The witch doctor should teach the boy an incantation that sounds like “ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma.” Imagine franchise prequels like Gotham, The Mandalorian, Smallville, or Star Trek: Discovery without an endless trail of Easter eggs for the fan base to ferret out. What would be the point? Same goes for Mrs. Voorhees.)
Meanwhile, we’re learning more about Pamela’s backstory—her rape at fifteen by a hockey player in the Camden shipyards, the birth of Jason in 1946, and her miserable marriage to Elias Voorhees, who grows increasingly more desperate and abusive during Camden’s industrial decline in the 1950’s. We tease this plot out for awhile, building to Pamela’s murder of Elias, dovetailing into the opening scene from the pilot. This whole plotline should be nasty, salacious stuff—like a Rob Zombie movie, the way he brought his sleazy trailer-trash aesthetic to Halloween? That’s how we ground this franchise in psychological realism—by making this a dysfunctional family drama, full of abuse and alcoholism and psychosexual sadism.
Near the end of the 10-episode first season, Jason is discovered by the campers, where he is mercilessly teased and tormented. We build to a climax in which Pamela is set to murder them all… only our Arbogast character shows up at Crystal Lake finally, and Pamela has to abort her plan. Instead, she kills “Arbogast,” and she and Jason have to dispose of the body in the woods. She considers fleeing once again, but with the camp now cleared out for summer, she reasons they can hide out there through winter.
The second season is set during the summer of 1957, during which time Pamela is distracted by keeping herself and Jason safe from authorities investigating the “Arbogast” disappearance. We also meet the teens at camp that summer, learning their backstories (through Lost style contextual flashbacks of their home lives back in Nutley, etc, which will pay off in future seasons) and relationships.
Ultimately, Jason drowns in the lake that summer not because of neglect on the part of the counselors as we’ve always been lead to believe, but because an increasingly paranoid Pamela took her eye off Jason while trying to keep the investigators circling the camp at bay. Between her self-recriminating guilt and compromised psyche (because Jason, remember, experimented with mind-control necromancy in season 1), she proceeds to have a compete psychic break, going on a killing spree at camp—the one alluded to in the original Friday the 13th.
Subsequent seasons of the series gets into proto Patrick Bateman territory, with Pamela reestablishing herself as a patrician widow in Jersey high society, driven by visions of her dead son urging her to kill, much the same as the “mother” hallucinations of Norman Bates, as she tracks down—and murders—the parents of the teens she blames for the death of Jason. Lots of opportunities here for pointed commentary on postwar social mobility/stratification, only with eye-socket stabbings, corkscrew impalements to the throat, and fire axes to the face.
A psychological thriller in the prestige drama format of Bates Motel and Hannibal, this uniquely original take on the Friday the 13th mythos incorporates all the most elevated stylistic trademarks of Ryan Murphy, Rob Zombie and Bret Easton Ellis in service of a franchise prequel that finally answers four decades’ worth of unasked questions about the mysterious backstory of Mrs. Pamela Voorhees.
Power of Grayskull
In almost 20 years of dev meetings, no IP gets brought up “on the couch” more than HE-MAN. How many different drafts & writers have they been through at this point trying to relaunch this franchise as a live action feature???
What your asking, if I’m understanding you right, is why does virtually every script commissioned contain ALL the classic elements of HE-MAN—the power sword, the dual identity, Snake Mountain, even (sometimes) fucken ORKO!!!—in a textbook SAVE THE CAT plot that hits all the classic hero beats, yet here we are, still trying to figure this fucker out.
I watched a bunch of the old shows on Starz this weekend—I hadn’t seen since I was a kid—and I’ll tell you what works and what doesn’t. What works in the CONCEPT—CONAN THE BARBARIAN meets STAR WARS. Brilliant stuff.
What doesn’t—I found the show, I dunno, kind of cartoony? Its corny, with its simplistic good-v-evil stories and those Sesame Street “moral of the story” postscripts. GROAN. So how do you come up with a new take that exploits the concept & expunges the corn?
I looked over a bunch of the rejected pitches & scripts you sent (the Justin Marks draft was particularly instructive) and here’s the lesson I took from all of it. While most of them are considerably more grounded than the old Filmation series, the whole Luke Skywalker/King Conan mythic journey is just lame as fuck. The Geroge Lucas days are over, stop trying to compress this concept into a tidily arced origin saga. Shit even THE MATRIX & BATMAN BEGINS are 20 yrs old at this point, there not the story models you should be using.
Instead, you should be reworking HE-MAN as a prestige cable fantasy like GAME OF THRONES. Something elevated, for adults. Call it POWER OF GRAYSKULL. Stop thinking in terms of the 2 hr feature—moives were dying before covid, and there sure as shit dead as nails now—and start thinking 73 hour movie like Beniof & Weiss in their visionary genius did (the sucky last season notwithstanding). All the elements are right there for the taking. Eternia & Etheria are your Westeros & Essos. King Randor is Ned Stark and Prince Adam is Jon Snow. (Lose Cringer and make Battle Cat instead more of a “direwolf companion,” something serious without the silly “scaredy cat” shit.) Skeletor & Evil-Lyn are Robert Baratheon & Cersei Lannister, and Snake Mountain is King’s Landing. Castle Grayskull in affect becomes the Iron Throne, the seat of power the 2 warring houses are fighting over.
Meanwhile you’ve got Adora off in her own separate seasons-long storyline over in Etheria essentially filling the Daenerys role, forced to marry into the Horde (maybe to Grizzlor?) and discovering her true lineage, magical birthright, etc.. She-Ra was always removed from the main action anyway, in her own little corner of that shared universe, so this makes perfect sense. Maybe she’s even the “Mother of Unicorns” or something? (I dunno, maybe too OTN?)
And the creative mandate should be KEEP IT EDGY. Make Price Adam explicitly gay (or better yet, nonbinary, so it really fucks with his head when the He-Man persona takes over). You’ll need an incest plotline—something sympathetic if not exactly romantic, like Jamie and Cersei—so I suggest Man-At-Arms & Teela (make her his biological daughter.) Reconceptualize “magical helper” Orko as more of a drunkard-philosopher (w/ an appetite for whores) like Tyrian. Ram Man should have a fucked up backstory like the Hound, this guys damaged and DANGEROUS. Go thru the whole rollcall and give them all dark & edgy characteristics.
My point is forget the fucken epic jounry stuff already—downplay the “He-Man” part and make “Masters of the Universe” the dramatic focus—by start thinking how you build this out as a multi plot political intrigue serial about shifting alliances & escalating conflicts between the different dynasties vying for power. Less STORY, in other words, more WORLDBUILDING, so you can keep this thing going indefinitely. The whole mythos is there for the taking, but you gotta get your head out of that old mode of cyclical storytelling—the “hero” on a “quest” and all that Frodo & Sam blah blah bullshit. Its stupid & boring, its the reason you haven’t been able to crack this nut.
Do HE-MAN instead as an ELEVATED ENSEMBLE DRAMA for premium cable, and you can still have all the “toys”—Attak Trak and the Wind Raider and whatever—only now its grounded because the storytelling’s more realistic, cause you’ve got backstabbing & bedhopping & bloodletting in place of cartoon He-Man’s childish “life lessons”. This is an actual quote from one of the eps I watched—“As we’ve just seen, Skeletor went back into the past to make evil things happen. In reality no one can go back into the past, that’s only make-believe. But we can try to learn from the past, from things that have happened to us, and try to apply them toward being better people today.”
What a bunch of infantile horseshit. Get as far from that moralistic, kiddie-pandering crap as possible, and you’ll have a serious, sophisticated version of HE-MAN actually worth watching, that lives up to its dope premise.
Well, there you have it, kids—an inside peek at how the pros do it. In summary: Don’t overburden your pitch with cumbersome details like structural design, thematic subtext, or conceptual originality—and certainly not moral imagination—just remember your governing creative mandate: Keep it grounded.
And, of course, elevated.
Longtime readers of this blog know of my affinity for the straight-faced satire of This Is Spinal Tap and The Colbert Report, so I leave it to you to determine whether any of the preceding pitches are legit.
Hey, Sean! I couldn’t help but notice that this one took a step aside from your political or personal impetus of the last couple years. I totally get it. I think we all have needed some distance from the all-too-political and personal goings-on of late.
I was caught between laughter and disgust as I read these pitches and observations. I believe I even audibly groaned once.
Apparently, people don’t realize that what drew generations past to The Brady Bunch was the fact that it wasn’t “grounded” and “elevated.” In fact, the show-makers were criticized for not having included references to Vietnam, to which they replied that the show wasn’t about realism and “more Vietnam,” but about being able to escape from such things if even for just a while. We liked the show for its lightness and “corn,” not in spite of it.
Look at what they’ve tried to do in reviving the Muppets in recent times: thinly veiled attempts to make it The Office, including break-ups and other dating relationship themes involving Kermit and MIss Piggy, including adult humor and the like. And they keep flopping. Why? Because we didn’t love the physical representations of the puppets; we loved what they represented—which is everything the modern remakes, in their attempt to be “elevated,” are not.
And in these cases and more, we could actually never love them these wonders of entertainment the way we did when they first aired, because the time in which we first experienced them can never be relived or replicated, any more than we could ever re-experience the fullness of a first kiss or the discovery that, in fact, yes, all insects have six legs. We feel these things in a particular way because of when they came to us and who we were at that time. You’ve talked much about this here on your blog.
I think A Very Brady Renovation was successful (to whatever degree it was) not because of reviving the old “characters and story”—or much of any story at all—but out of some sense of connection to the real people who brought us joy back then. We’ve aged and lived and struggled along with those real people, and so I think a lot of viewers watched out of appreciation and affinity for those real people, more so than even any sense of curiosity or nostalgia (though that existed, to be sure). But it was a short series with a definitive end. It would not have flown as… “they’ve all grown up and lived through cancer, and Peter died in 9/11 but has been replace by a doppelgänger.” (This is one of the places I laughed andgroaned; how on earth is that dubbed “grounded”—that siblings don’t notice that their lifelong brother has been replaced with a stand-in? It’s a “muppetational” premise—and not in a good way.)
We’ve all seen plenty of proof that the masses will accept and believe “whatever”… when it is all they’re being fed. I still believe that, where entertainment is concerned, people would still realize they crave originality and that they’d support it—if it were offered. While I understand that the movie industry is an industry and, as such, that its primary goal is to make money, I think that’s partly an excuse for laziness. No, not every “creative script with a new idea” will be the makings for something good. But continually reaching back into the same old bag of tricks (and thereby not rewarding creativity) serves only to demoralize those who might be so inclined. And so the cycle continues.
Couldn’t agree more with the Muppet commentary. They caught lightning in a bottle, and then they killed it dead.
Hear, hear, Cathleen. The Muppets is a case study in a Gen X nostalgic revival of a beloved IP reconfigured to conform not only to contemporary narrative sensibilities, but to satisfy the adult demand for realism in our fiction:
It’s the difference between being childish and childlike, something Erik wrote about in a wonderful series of posts called “big kids.”
Erik! Happy New Year!
Last year, the blog did get overtly political — I was drawing creative energy and inspiration from the world around me — but I think I at least always managed to keep the politics relevant to the theme of storytelling. (“What Comes Next” is an exemplar of this.) Because I was so pleased with the quality of the posts in 2020, I recently conducted a “brand analysis” to identify and articulate the blog’s defining characteristics. My old screenwriting mentor, David Freeman, does brand consulting, and he teaches that all brands can be boiled down to three or four key traits. And the four governing traits I landed on were these:
– Narrative Craft
– Socially Conscious Storytelling
– Toxic Nostalgia
– Personal Essays
Accordingly, I created a Start Here page, a sort of best-of-the-blog digest with links to all my essential posts. And it isn’t merely a primer for new readers; it’s a reminder to me — a mission statement — what this blog is and should always be about.
Consequently, though, I struggle now with the question of What next? What can I do that’s interesting and different? It’s hard because some months I don’t feel like I have anything interesting or original to say — that I’m just hitting the same old points even I’m bored witless with! And that was where “Grounded and Elevated” came from. I saw it as a stylistic departure from the polemical and political essays of 2020, but I felt its messaging was very much on brand.
Grounded and elevated are industry buzzwords that are not only meaningless but flagrantly contradictory (how can something be both grounded and elevated?). “Grounded” is code for realistic, and “elevated” means for adults. But what it all really means is creatively and morally bankrupt. Because exploiting themes like 9/11 and the economic collapse and spousal abuse and gender identity and rape and violence and incest doesn’t per se make a story deep. And there’s been this very misguided attempt in recent years to take simple stories (often but not always ones originally intended for young audiences) and impose dark themes on them — for reasons I addressed in “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30″ — that I find deeply troubling.
For instance: Did you see FX’s remake of A Christmas Carol with Guy Pearce, which was billed as “a spine-tinging immersion into Scrooge’s dark night of the soul”? It’s appalling. It opens with a boy pissing on Jacob Marley’s grave — the urine seeps down to Marley’s corpse and magically “awakens” him — and, believe it or not, the movie only gets uglier and more cynical from there.
In other words: Knight defended his “dark and gloomy” interpretation as being true to the spirit of the times in which Dickens wrote the novella, and reflective of Dickens’ true creative intentions, had he not be restricted by Victorian bowdlerization.
Except… A Christmas Carol opens with this explicit preface to the reader: “I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.”
So, fuck you, Steven Knight — and fuck your nasty little lump of Christmas coal. You know shit about Dickens or Christmas.
I am in no way saying we shouldn’t use fiction to explore life’s unpleasant realities — children’s literature, like the stories of Maurice Sendak and E. B. White, is often the most effective vehicle for such themes — but that’s not what most of these “reimaginings” are. No, they’re abject attempts to make stories that were unambiguously intended for the wide-eyed children of an analog era work for disillusioned adults in the Digital Age. And often they do it by not only exploiting dark themes, but also current trends — much the way The Muppets (from 2015) was indeed fashioned after The Office and 30 Rock.
It’s an ethos of cynical nostalgia — of aching for the comforts of yesteryear (be it The Muppet Show, The Brady Bunch, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe) but nonetheless demanding those stories be neutered of the very innocence they represent. (Such is the reason we took Millennial favorite Harley Quinn from Batman: The Animated Series and warped her into a sexual-assault victim–turned–onanistic man-child fantasy.) Rather than looking at the stories we loved in childhood and acknowledging we’ve outgrown them, we’re instead trying to make them work for an audience (and, often, an era) they were never meant for.
Anyway, pal, I so appreciate your insights and engagement. Like I said: This post was a little experimental, so it’s nice to see it’s getting a receptive response. Not every attempt at creative experimentation is successful, as you said, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth attempting. If you can’t try and fail on a blog, what’s the point of it?
Hope you’re well. Here’s to good things in ’21!
SPC
>pitch cinematic adaptations of the pseudo-documentary series Ancient Aliens and the Japanese manga MPD-Psycho
This is when I suspected this was a joke. Not that you wouldn’t have opportunities. But that you would try to pitch something, especially something base off of someone else’s ideas
Please, please, PLEASE let the Brady one be a joke!
I could actually see “Mrs. Voorhees” working, similar to “Bates Motel”
>Beniof & Weiss in their visionary genius
I knew the He-Man one is a joke just from that line
And for this you SHOULD be grounded! For a couple of weeks, at least
Haha! I recall one time Michael McKean saying that the distributors of This Is Spinal Tap were concerned that audiences weren’t going to understand it was all a joke, and McKean reflected, “We thought we’d left more than a few clues the whole thing was a goof…” But I guess at the time, Spinal Tap was a fairly unique instance of metafictional performance art — outside of Andy Kaufman, no one had really attempted that kind of immersive satirical blending of fiction and reality — so it was cause for hand-wringing at the studio.
About a decade ago, when it looked like my screenwriting career was poised to break open, I actually was invited to pitch on a number of projects, including Ancient Aliens and MPD-Psycho — that’s for real! It takes at least a week to prepare one of those pitches (Terry Rossio explains how they’re done here), between reviewing the materials (in those cases, watching the docuseries or reading the comic) and then crafting and practicing your pitch. It’s a ton of work, and of course you don’t get paid a cent for it — because you’re only vying for the job at that point.
The Ancient Aliens pitch to Legendary was a particularly instructive experience — one of those lessons learned the hard way — because the morning of the meeting, I was asked by the producers (through my representation) if I could deliver the presentation telephonically. Not knowing any better, I agreed, and the pitch was a disaster: I couldn’t read the producers’ faces, or gauge the energy of the room, so the whole thing fell flat. After that, I swore off any pitches that weren’t in person, even if it meant calling them off at the last minute, after I’d invested days (or weeks) of work.
But even if you get those jobs, it’s then months upon months of drafts, then notes, then more drafts, then more notes… until typically the producer loses interest in the project and you’re left wondering where the last six or twelve months of your life went. And it’s not like you can use any of the material you developed, because it wasn’t yours to begin with. An exec once pitched me a great idea about a Secret Service agent who was tasked with protecting a child that may or may not be the antichrist. The prodco had this broad concept they knew was cool but they couldn’t break the back of it. I basically went in and pitched them a take on it — In the Line of Fire meets The Omen — that they got really excited about (as did I), but the project never went anywhere. And I can’t use any of that material because it’s all proprietary. You do enough jobs like that, and eventually you realize: I’m putting all this time and creative energy into these projects that always seem to die on the vine, why don’t I just start doing my own thing? You know? As the great John Carpenter once said:
So, though I wish I’d known then what I know now, I suppose I never would’ve known it in the first place had I not endured those experiences! As the old saying goes: Life is a tough teacher — it gives the test first, and the lesson later.
Happy New Year, Dell. Looking forward to many great conversations in the year to come…
SPC
As I said before, the pitch is why I could never work in Hollywood. And is there a strong connection between being able to pitch well and being able to write well?
And it seems like the whole purpose of the pitch is because the execs are to lazy even to skim through a screenplay, and want just to sit and be entertained
Seriously, it can’t save time. A quick skim has got to be faster than a full pitch session. And it can’t be to get to know the writer. The exec who makes the decision there isn’t going to be working w/ the writer, is he?
It’s just laziness. And a powerplay, forcing the writer to dance for the exec’s entertainment
Or maybe this is just sour grapes because, as I said, I know I would not be able to make an in-person pitch
And is there a strong connection between being able to pitch well and being able to write well?
Great question, Dell! The answer is no.
Pitching is all about winning over a room. The screenwriter that scores a coveted assignment isn’t necessarily (and I would even argue is hardly ever) the most talented scribe, merely the most cocksure. See, a producer with the rights to an IP like Masters of the Universe knows he’s got a great thing, he just doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s looking for someone to come into that room and tell him what to do with it. You’re not pitching a story; you’re pitching a vision.
It’s not, in that way, completely dissimilar from what an effective politician does. As a candidate (both in 2016 and 2020), Trump never pitched a single policy; rather, he pitched a dire scenario (American carnage), and a charismatic hero (himself) with a visceral solution (Make America Great Again). He pitched a vision of a renewed white patriarchy that resonated so profoundly with an unimaginative electorate, in 2016 he got the job (and in 2020, he incited an insurrection). Was he the best candidate for the job? Absolutely fucking not! But he “won over the room,” despite not having a script once he had the job.
Nine times out of ten, that’s how it works in Hollywood: Win over the room, and you get the job. You’re selling yourself, and a vision. That’s it. I know a lot of untalented but charismatic writers who get tons of work — because they’re good in a room. Few if any of their drafts ever get greenlighted, but that doesn’t seem to matter, because they know how to charm an audience of development execs.
(Doug Richardson, screenwriter of Die Hard 2, shared his experience vying for the assignment to write Red Tails in a blog post titled “Dogfights and Rewrites with George Lucas” that illustrates my point better than I ever could.)
You have to walk into that room and (genuinely) act like you just laid a golden egg, and most screenwriters are far too diffident to do that. We’re introverts, who’ve been conditioned to habitually apologize for our own existence. Sadly, arrogance goes a long way in this town.
To that end, the gladiatorial practice of having writers come in and do a whole song-and-dance routine — Please like me! Please hire me! — is 100% about preserving the Hollywood power structure, and making sure writers know they are at the bottom rung of that totem pole. I’d heard that as a young man — in film school and elsewhere — but I don’t think I really believed it, because how do you not value the people coming up with the ideas and giving them structure in a screenplay?! But it’s absolutely the case, and never more so than today, with studios all-in on branded IPs; now more than ever, the screenwriter is nothing more than a stenographer. And that’s great if you’re one of the dozen scribes the studios trust — Abrams, Skip Woods, Zak Penn, James Vanderbilt, Kurtzman and Orci — but it doesn’t leave a lot of oxygen in the room for the rest of us.
And even if you get the chance to pitch for a big project like He-Man, those projects can get mired in development hell — as Jeff explains below — because getting all the powers-that-be to agree on a creative direction for a brand that valuable is all but impossible. That’s why when you look at a movie like The Force Awakens and you’re like, “All that time, talent, and money… and this is the story they settled on?”, it’s because the studio had an IP they knew was valuable, but they didn’t know what to do with it; they were desperate for someone to tell them what to do with it. And in waltzed J. J. Abrams with his big swinging cock to say, “Here’s how you do it.” And they were so relieved to have someone confident at the helm, they trusted him with the keys to the franchise. (I assure you none of the execs at Disney ever read a draft of that screenplay; at best they perused the coverage — perhaps.)
Sometimes that approach even works, creatively speaking. Nolan certainly rescued the Batman franchise not by “pitching a take,” but by confidently telling Warners what to do with its most valuable asset. So they said, “Yeah, go do that!” The Rocky franchise had been conclusively (and satisfactorily) resolved when Ryan Coogler had an idea about the bastard son of Apollo Creed, and I would argue those two Creed movies are as good as the original Rocky. Nolan and Coogler had the goods — they actually delivered on the visions they pitched — but I promise you they walked into those pitch meetings with the balls-of-brass confidence that comes with having laid a golden egg.
But The Dark Knight and Creed are the exceptions, not the rule, and screenwriting is a miserable fucking business even under the best of circumstances. There are no screenwriters that are happy with their careers. Keep in mind: Nolan and Coogler are directors, too, which puts them in a different — more venerated — category than, say, a Doug Richardson. People that earn their living exclusively as screenwriters have nothing positive to say about their work or careers; it’s just not a vocation any creative soul should aspire to per se. (Rossio makes a compelling case for why you should skip the screenplay and write your idea as a novel instead under the Own Your IP subheading of this post.)
That post also mentions something I’ve said before
If you really want to make a movie, just make a movie
Youtube, Vimeo, and TikTok are full of people who’ve done it. For your first few efforts, you probably don’t need anything more than your script, your phone, and yourself. You can build more elaborate productions as you gain skill and experience (and hopefully followers). Sarah Cooper and Keatsdidit are among the many who found success w/ low production values but immense talent
Your production won’t match a Marvel movie, but you’ll have control that would make any Hollywood director, screenwriter, actor, etc., weep w/ envy
You’ll have budgetary challenges, but Sean and I have talked before about how those sorts of challenges can IMPROVE your story
If a movie is beyond you at the moment, try a fiction podcast. Welcome to Night Vale is my personal favorite, but there are plenty of others. Again, total control
The only real danger is that someone in Hollywood might notice you and offer you millions of dollars to direct one of their movies
But that’s a risk you gotta take
Hear, hear, Dell!
I suspect that if I were ten years younger, I wouldn’t have even pursued traditional Hollywood screenwriting; instead, I would’ve embraced the tools of the Digital Age and aspired to be an unconventional content creator (and innovator) the way so many young folks are today. The son of one of my climate colleagues, Jesse Orrall, is an amazingly innovative young filmmaker who recently made this captivating experimental video called “I prerecorded myself in video meetings for a week (and nobody knew).” Jesse knows how to create content that exploits the tools of the Digital Age — videos that both speak to and critique the very ethos of that era! As an Xer, raised in an analog world but now consigned to a Digital Age to which I don’t (and will never) fully belong, my brain does not work like Jesse’s. I could never create content that avant-garde and contemporarily relevant. My head, like most Xers, remains firmly planted in the old (outmoded) model of Campbellian narrativity and prose essays.
To that last point, my brother-in-law recently turned me on to a New York–based filmmaker by the name of Patrick (H) Willems, who produces these really fascinating, deep-dive video essays that cover much the same ground as I do here on the blog: His “What’s the Point of R-Rated Superheroes?” echoes concerns raised in “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30″; in “The 90s Dark Universe,” he talks about the Universal Monsters revival I studied in “It’s Alive!”; in “Learning to Appreciate Joel Schumacher’s Batman,” he suggests, much as I did in “The Lost Boys of the Bronx,” that Batman Forever isn’t nearly as bad as its reputation; I’ve never written about The Mask of Zorro, but I often cite it when I teach screenwriting, and I echo every word of praise for it Willems expresses in “Patrick Explains THE MASK OF ZORRO (And Why It’s Great)”; he’s even frequently sounded the alarm on our culture of cinematic nostalgia, much the same as I have in “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse” and elsewhere, and his “How Austin Powers Predicted the Future of Cinema” is a fascinating look at how that trilogy went deeper down the rabbit hole of cultural backward-gazing with each new installment.
And I’m forced to admit: His video essays, though many make the same points as my blog posts, are a hell of a lot more entertaining! That’s how people receive information these days — not by way of long-form deep-dive prose essays! But Willems is about a decade younger than me, and he’s allowed his creativity to be liberated by the digital tools at his disposal, whereas I have limited myself by my comfortable reliance on analog practices. I write the kind of novels and long-form essays that I enjoy reading… but that just isn’t how most people opt to consume their media these days. The older I get, the more of a relic I feel.
That said, Jesse Orrall and Patrick Willems represent the kind of ambitious, innovative, digitally savvy content creators that are out there, using the tools at hand — platforms like Nebula — to get their messages heard in a crowded media landscape. Sure, the J. J. Abramses of the world have the biggest platform to tell the most culturally pervasive stories… but both the message (20th-century narratives) and the medium (theatrical blockbusters) are the fading vestiges of a generation willfully blind to the signs of the times. For all his power, Abrams isn’t the hopeful voice of the future of filmmaking, but rather the defiant wail of its past. My advice? Don’t aspire to what he does; dream bigger than that.
Sean, Sean, Sean! Wow. These pitches took me back. You perfectly recapped the process of modern screenwriting, but it’s so much worse now than when we were pitching. I can’t tell you how many times I pitched on some random IP in hopes of getting a work-for-hire job. And, yes, I did pitch on He-Man back in 2010. It was a helluva nut to crack back then—my approach was high fantasy ie Lord of the Rings—but this pitch you have here makes me sick.
My wife and I have been rewatching the original He-Man series, and you know what is most enjoyable? How it teaches the viewer (kids) such real, valuable lessons. The same thing the writer pitching utterly shits on. I’m an unapologetic fanboy, but in no way would I want to see this “adult” GoT take on He-Man. Strip away all the goofball charm and toss in some incest? Seriously?!
You know what the funny thing is, Jeff? As a young film student, I never aspired to do work-for-hire jobs — I never even thought that was a thing. (This was in the early ’90s, during the spec-script boom and well before the studios went all-in on branded IPs to the permanent exclusion of original material.) I pursued screenwriting because I wanted to write the kinds of cinematic stories that had inspired me — Back to the Future and Escape from New York and The Lost Boys. Ya know — original stuff. I naïvely thought those opportunities were out there in Hollywood…
But, like you, I wrote a few specs that got some heat, and I found myself pulled into the machine: I was out there taking pitch meetings, all in the hope of getting some work-for-hire job I didn’t even, in my hidden heart, really want. I had no desire to write a remake of Trespass or do Ancient Aliens, but I’d reached rarified air — I was a repped writer in Hollywood — and I was told this is how it’s done. And I spent the next couple of years chasing jobs I didn’t get, writing projects that never got made, and submitting to the wisdom of “authorities” (like managers and agents) who could never quite manage to close a deal. Honestly: What for?
Which is why when I see young people at the corner Starbucks hammering out their screenplays, all I can think is, Why? Best-case scenario, you’ll wind up just like us: out there pitching without pay for soul-crushing corporate projects you never wanted to write in the first place! I mean, the successful members of our generation just wound up serving the nostalgia- and superhero-industrial complexes. God, hang me now.
I actually do recall your pitching a take on He-Man. (Was Alex Litvak the producer on the project back then?) I don’t think I’d met you yet, but it was a pretty big deal that you were pitching that project, because at the time there was this feverish desire to do a He-Man movie. As I understand it, Kevin Smith is now producing a “direct sequel” to the old Filmation series that will premiere on Netflix this year; it’s categorized as “adult animation,” which sounds about right. I doubt we’ll be “lucky” enough to get any incest, but a Jay and Silent Bob cameo seems inevitable, and their dated stoner humor is about just as welcome…
It definitely felt like a big deal when I was pitching on He-Man. I approached it as a dual origin story for He-Man and Skeletor, mirrored ascent and descent. Check out the final summary of my pitch document:
“This is a coming of age story about a prince who shirked his responsibilities out of fear and doubt. When leadership is thrust upon Adam, he doesn’t rise to the occasion and instead gives up the power to his manipulative uncle. As a result, Keldor betrays the kingdom and Adam. With his lands overtaken, and Keldor’s lust for power threatening all of Eternia, Adam must embrace the very destiny he rejected. His odyssey forces him to experience what it means to lead, to be a master of the universe and worthy of all the power that entails.”
The problem was always having this huge world to play in but boiling everything down to a core concept that was easy to explain. A mythic journey seemed to be the best approach, one that saw Adam earning the power behind the sword. Of course, He-Man would be a hugely expensive film. Trying to get so many people to agree on the story ultimately proved impossible, at least for me.
Thanks for sharing that, Jeff! It’s fascinating to get those firsthand insights into the development process of a big IP like that.
The take on He-Man you contrived is certainly a sensible one. The cartoon never really explored the psychological complexities of dual identity: Prince Adam was a well-adjusted son of privilege who then transformed at will into… the all-powerful superhero He-Man! Not much of an emotional tug-of-war there. But there are ways to explore the theme of duality with depth and resonance while keeping things kid-friendly, as demonstrated by Superman: The Movie and your He-Man pitch.
I think whereas once the challenge of trying to pitch on a sprawling IP like Masters of the Universe was trying to boil down all the elements to find a focused and cohesive narrative, now the reverse seems to be true: Prodcos are less concerned with telling a contained story than they are with launching a sustainable multimedia franchise. I recall reading many years ago that as they were shooting The Fugitive (with an incomplete script), there was a lot of debate amongst the production team about whether they should resolve the story or leave things open-ended for a subsequent movie. And it was Harrison Ford that finally made the decision with three words: “Fuck the sequel.”
If only that were the case today. As I said in my reply to Cathleen below, the creative mandate these days is one of worldbuilding, not storytelling. In explaining the business strategy of the DCEU, Walter Hamada, the president of DC Films, recently said this:
In an atmosphere like that, how does a screenwriter go into the office of a development executive and pitch a movie with a clear and conclusive story arc? It was hard enough to write a good screenplay when all you had to worry about was that script, but now you have to take into account how this installment is serving the grander multimedia initiative. Every product in the franchise has to drive the audience to the next offering; it’s all a massive marketing campaign now. It makes the days of those crass Happy Meal tie-ins seem benign by comparison.
Such was the point I made in “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse” — that fanboys thought their arcane interests were legitimized when the geek subculture went mainstream, when superheroes and sci-fi went from niche hobby to pop-cultural monopoly, but they were really just commodified: “geek” shifted from a stigmatized social category to a lucrative economic one. To be a superfan of something like Star Wars or the MCU is like being, in a way, a Scientologist: All that’s required for membership is a billion-year commitment and an open wallet.
And I think that as we go further down this road of valuing worldbuilding over storytelling, fewer and fewer writers — particularly those who’ve come of age in the era of the mega-franchise — will see the difference between the two entities. That’s why I look at those would-be screenwriters at Starbucks, pecking away at their screenplays, and all I can think is, “Are you writing a movie? Something with a beginning, middle, and end? Something with an arc?” Because I look around at all the open-ended movie franchises and television shows (and the distinction between the two is becoming more diffuse by the year), and I don’t see any (successful) models for how to do that anymore. And you and I had the misfortune of trying to make a go at a screenwriting career during that nebulous transitional period between the old model of conventional (if still commercial) storytelling and the postnarrative strategic-marketing initiative that is the mega-franchise, which is an altogether different beast. I think that is the entertainment industry now and moving forward. I don’t think we’re ever going back to a more contained mode of cinematic storytelling.
I am not that kind of writer (no discipline) but this was a fascinating read. Loved the intro about you–” [your blog’s] polemical crusade against late-twentieth-century nostalgia”
Thanks, Jacqui — for taking the time to read the post and comment on it!
As far as my blog’s polemical crusade goes, you’ll note I recently added a Start Here tab, which provides links to my best posts in four subcategories: Narrative Craft, Socially Conscious Storytelling, Toxic Nostalgia, and Personal Essays. These are the pieces I feel best represent my writerly sensibilities and the blog’s identity. I figured I’d start the new year with a new best-of directory!
Wishing you health and creativity for the year ahead…
Sean
Hmmm. Your posts are always so dense, Sean, and I mean that in a good way. There’s always a lot to unpack.
I don’t have an intelligent comment, really, other than to be glad I write books instead of screenplays. Ideally, they should almost be the same thing.
I liked the Brady Bunch as a kid. Never saw a need to revisit it as an adult. Bringing in divorces and assorted other bad things reminds me of that horrible second movie in the recent Star Wars debacle, where we were treated to Luke being a dick. All it does is trash what everyone loved about the original. And then they step back and expect us to like the thing.
Can’t comment on the others because I didn’t watch them.
But as a writer of novels I can say this: world building is a spice, rather than a food group. More world building might work for games, or fanboys, but it’s no substitute for story. Tolkien, who was the absolute master of world building, never sacrificed it for story.
Even before Covid, it was a struggle to go to the movies. The whole recycling intellectual property thing just wasn’t working for me. I think the last thing I saw that I liked, series-wise, was the latest Jumanji. Someone should really point out to whoever decides these things that this is a way to use existing world building without destroying the original story. And they told an interesting original one of their own.
Eventually, they’ll figure it out, right? After all, money is a powerful motivator.
Despite your caveat, Cathleen, it turns out you had quite an intelligent comment to offer! Your contribution is greatly appreciated!
One of the deeply sad lessons Gen X is learning — or perhaps not learning — as we rifle through our toy box for childhood favorites to resurrect is that you can’t really go home again. This is perfectly emblemized by the characterization of Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi: a cynical, disillusioned shell of his former self who’s not merely retreated from the world around him, but has disavowed any responsibility to it; rather than trying in earnest to fix his mistakes, he’s cravenly run from them. He isn’t even a man who’s failed, really, but rather someone who never even bothered to try — and who is openly hostile to the idealism of the successive generation, unwilling to entertain its optimism or to mentor the would-be protégée who espouses it.
Jesus, if that isn’t Gen X in a nutshell, I don’t know what is. And I think what Xers hate about The Last Jedi and Luke’s portrayal in it — with full acknowledgment that it’s a subpar piece of storytelling in every respect — is that it shows us an unflattering reflection of ourselves. Luke in The Last Jedi is us.
And I absolutely second your comment about worldbuilding being the spice, not the meal itself. But for reasons I’ve covered ad infinitum on this blog — most recently in the Power of Grayskull “proposal” above — worldbuilding has long since replaced storytelling as the very point of movies and scripted television. We don’t take meaning from our popular fictions any longer; rather, one can only make meaning out of the vast “universes” of Star Wars, Westworld, Marvel, and DC Comics once all the “Easter eggs” have been unpacked (a circuitous task, akin to painting the Golden Gate Bridge, that by purposeful design can never be completed). Unlike closed-ended storytelling, open-ended worldbuilding keeps the dutiful superfan perennially obligated to purchase each new product in the franchise.
For those reasons, I’m much happier as a novelist than I ever was as a screenwriter, beholden in my creative endeavors only to my own values and imagination. On that note, I encourage everyone to check out Cathleen’s new work of fantasy fiction: Snow White and the Civil War.
Thanks, as always, Cathleen, for bringing your spirit of conversation and creativity to my blog. Best of health and productivity in ’21!
Sean
I love getting your take on what’s happening in the film industry, Sean. I’m pure consumer. About 5% of what I watch (what the husband clicks on) captures my attention enough to stop playing Panda Pop and put down my phone. To me, it’s a sorry state of affairs when Panda Pop is more entertaining than Netflix or Prime. I haven’t actually gone to a theater since Avatar was released (13 years! Yikes).
I’m tired of rehashes, spin offs, repeat plots ad nauseum. I don’t even need to watch or listen to know what’s happening (thus I can play Sudoku at the same time). Brady Bunch? Honestly, I just don’t care. More and more and more and more and more superheroes? GAK. I sound so cranky! Lol.
I love the tantalizing vision of originality, of compelling characters and plots, of beautiful scores and cinematography, of stories that make me mark my calendar for the next episode. I’m not in a hurry either. I’ll sit still for great world-building and genuine characters that draw me in and hook me. I’ll even pay to watch them!
Thanks for the visit, Diana!
As I said to dellstories above — and I hope “Grounded and Elevated” itself makes incontrovertibly manifest — the endless Gen X–era reboots are indictive of an appalling lack of creative and moral imagination. And I suspect much of the reason audiences are increasingly more engaged by Panda Pop! than the average Hollywood blockbuster or latest Netflix offering — most folks today seem to watch TV with one eye only, peering merely occasionally over the upper edge of their iPhone — is because they sense that dearth of imagination, even if they can’t exactly put their finger on it. If you’re not addicted to the dopamine hit of pattern recognition — of spotting all the franchise Easter eggs in the endless Star Wars and Star Trek installments — today’s “multimedia initiatives” don’t have much to offer you.
I suspect, though, as these mega-franchises continue to narrowly cater to (aging) superfans at the expense of cultivating new viewers — read “Ben Affleck Will Return as Batman in The Flash“ and “Managing Movie Superheroes Is About to Get a Lot More Complicated” for more on that subject — that fanboy-centric business model will implode much the way the comic-book industry itself did when it pursued the same short-sighted strategy in the 1990s. Speaking for myself, when I saw the handwriting on the wall, I knew it was time to make my escape from L.A. As both a screenwriter and story lover, I find the current state of affairs in Hollywood a deeply dispiriting one. These days, I just write the kinds of stories I would like to read, and take satisfaction in that.
And, of course, I occasionally indulge the satisfying urge to poke Hollywood in the eye, hence this essay!
SPC
>Managing Movie Superheroes Is About to Get a Lot More Complicated
Actual quote: If you thought there was a glut of superheroes before, just wait.
And it says that like it’s a good thing
That’s precisely the thing about that New York Times article I find so troubling, Dell: that the journalist who wrote it issues no concerns or criticisms about the very deliberate (even openly cynical) marketing strategy DC Films is employing! Hell, I’m willing to bet Brooks Barnes is a fanboy himself — one of the many who was so overjoyed to have his arcane interests “legitimized” by the superhero-industrial complex he didn’t even realize (or, worse, didn’t care) that he was buying into an open-ended subscription service that would keep him on the hook forevermore.
I recently read a fascinating book by NPR culture critic Glen Weldon called The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, which posits that one can’t fully appreciate the the mainstreaming of nerd culture without understanding how it directly relates to Batman above all other nerdy obsessions. It’s a meticulously researched book that is objectively critical of the subculture — including many of its less-flattering characteristics (which were given steroidal augmentation in the Digital Age) — without ever being subjectively reproachful of it; Weldon leaves it up to the reader to render judgment. (You can read my full review on Goodreads.)
But while Weldon, a proudly self-identified nerd, certainly calls out the toxicity of nerd culture, he doesn’t necessarily put it in the context of a larger cultural critique — he doesn’t question whether we should still be consuming Batman stories, with their problematic, status quo–affirming values and corporate mandate to move merch. (Weldon himself warmly references the retro 1960s Batmobile toy that sits on a shelf in his office — that he stood in line at SDCC to purchase.)
Such are the questions I’ve explored in posts like “This Counts, That Does Not” and “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse.” I’ve tried to understand why we’re so addicted to the exercises in Easter egg–hunting our “shared cinematic universes” provide. I thought it was merely owed to a nostalgia for simpler times, and the vicarious pleasure of making sense of a fictive worlds when our own overwhelming reality — complicated by the coronavirus pandemic and climate change — seems impossible to wrap our heads around. I still think there’s great truth in that, but it was the announcement last summer that Michael Keaton would be reprising the role of Batman alongside Ben Affleck in the upcoming Flash movie — which prompted nonsensical online debates as to whether this means the Burton films are now “canon” — that refined my understanding of the phenomenon:
The way in-universe cross-references work — a.k.a “Easter eggs” — is that they reward the superfan with a dopamine hit from pattern recognition. They in effect say, “You get this special coded message that casual viewers will miss because you’re a true fan.” And the only way to keep one’s coveted superfan status is to buy and study each new offering in the franchise. That’s why Marvel has been so successful — because they’ve created a cohesive universe where everything “adds up.” It’s satisfying — even chemically gratifying — to cross-check the finer points of the MCU’s sprawling continuity.
DC’s spaghetti-slinging “extended universe,” though? Not so much. So, they said, “Fuck it — we’re a multiverse. Everything counts — every iteration of Batman is equally legit, whether it’s Affleck or Keaton, whether it’s the sixties show or the turn-of-the-millennium Birds of Prey bomb. It all counts.”
Now those old movies and shows are no longer “retconned” interpretations (“your daddy’s Batman”), but are active assets that can be repackaged and resold in the latest Ultra HD-4K-3D steelcase Blu-ray boxed sets (or whatever the latest must-have standard is). Think you’re a fan? Not if you haven’t seen every version of Batman ever produced. And don’t forget to pick up the new SDCC exclusive set of multiverse action figures, featuring all-new sculpts of the Adam West, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, and Robert Pattinson Batmans together!
And now Marvel’s getting into the act, incorporating Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Men into the new Tom Holland movie! A few weeks ago, some pop-culture blogger tweeted about how this will train audiences to accept Hugh Jackman showing up as Wolverine in the MCU. Alas, he’s absolutely right. To maintain your superfan status — to get that dopamine hit you’ve become addicted to — you’ll have to watch more and more and more and more. Don’t have Disney+? Good luck following the MCU meta-narrative without it.
Jesus H. Christ, how much of our time, money, and attention — the only three forms of currency we have — are we going to be required invest in these ever-expanding mega-franchises? We can choose at any time to say, “You know what? This ‘diversion’ is taking up too much of my bandwidth. Other than that dopamine hit of recognizing Alexander Knox in Crisis on Infinite Earths (a flagrant bit of fan service that in no way affected the plot), I’m really not getting any value from this shit that’s worth the time, money, and attention I’m pouring into it. I’m out.”
It’s just such an empty, meaningless thrill. I wish more people would see that geek interests haven’t been legitimized at all — merely commodified. “Geek” shifted from a stigmatized social category to a lucrative economic one. The “multiverse” media initiative is all just a calculated capitalistic mindfuck, designed to keep us buying a product that’s worthless at best… and morally/socially corrosive at worst. The more I’ve examined this issue, the more strongly I feel about my position. Superheroes aren’t a hobby anymore — they’re an addiction. And the corporations keep innovating new ways to keep us on the hook. I guess that makes me the Bill W. of this movement!
>You get this special coded message that casual viewers will miss because you’re a true fan
You mean like QAnon and Trump’s tweets?
100%. Corporate mega-franchises and QAnon exploit the same human impulse — pattern detection — to draw adherents deeper down their respective rabbit holes:
Through right-wing news outlets and social media, QAnon creates a vast (fictional) conspiracy that only its most committed zealots can see; through coordinated “multimedia initiatives,” Marvel and DC and Star Wars, etc., create vast (fictional) “continuities” whose intricacies can only be appreciated by their most devoted patrons — the ones who’ve seen every movie (repeatedly), watched every show, and catalogued every Easter egg on Reddit.
Obviously, unlike QAnon, Marvel and DC don’t have an insurrectionist agenda, but they do have a robust capitalist agenda: They want us to keep buying. I think that’s why we’re seeing both companies now embrace the “multiverse” construct: For DC, it allows them to bring together the more celebrated iterations of their franchises (like the Burton Batman films and the Arrowverse) with some of the less successful ventures (much of the so-called “DCEU”); for Marvel, it not only offers them a credible way to incorporate into the MCU previously unrelated versions of Spider-Man and Wolverine, but it turns its entire “shared universe” into a game of three-dimensional chess — thereby requiring the devoted superfan to invest yet more time and money into “figuring it all out.”
The multiverse gambit not only “legitimizes” every iteration of every superhero ever — making them all active assets (whereas only two summers ago, my 13-year-old nephew assured me watching the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films was a waste of time since they no longer “count”) — but it provides a next-level challenge to the dutiful superfan toward maintaining his coherent Theory of Everything. This becomes a drain on not merely one or two but all three forms of our currency: our money, our time, and our attention. Entertainment used to request our intermittent audience; now it demands our habitual obedience. That’s what I find so disturbing about these rapacious mega-franchises that the fanboys are so beside themselves over.
And as we’re chasing fan theories into the ever-expanding multiverse, who’s overseeing this reality — as domestic extremism and climate change threaten to destabilize democracy and civilization itself? I’m all for hobbies — we can’t think about existential matters all the time, after all — but mega-franchises increasingly offer not a respite from reality but a retreat from it. We’re addicted to the (pointless) pattern recognition and sense-making of our fictional universes at the expense of our actual universe. The Walter Hamadas and Kevin Feiges of the world are playing us, and we’re too hooked on their product to realize it — or to care. To my view, superfans have fallen for the same sort of subscription strategies that have turned our once-favorite uncles into far-right conspiracy theorists addicted to Fox-fueled outrage.
You got me thinking this morning, Dell! Thank you. I may have to develop this into a blog post of its own…
Well done! Would you be so kind as to guest blog post for my site? if you’re so inclined, here’s a link to general guidelines: https://wp.me/p6OZAy-1eQ
Thanks so kindly, da-AL! I appreciate the invitation to guest-post on Happiness between Tails and will absolutely take you up on it in the weeks ahead — for sure!
I’m all in on The Bradys. You know I can’t pass up a good doppelgänger!
Spoiler alert: In season three, we learn that Arthur Owens is actually an interdimensional traveler from Earth-2 of the Bradyverse.
Just came across this about the He-Man and She-Ra reboots:
Quote:
It is I N S U F F E R A B L E that some newer comics and reboots are so much more aggressive, that they’ll have Skeletor and He-Man roaring and screaming and threatening each other with murder and it’s presented like that’s how they were “meant” to be. No it isn’t! Authentic He-Man wishes Skeletor would calm down and join him for arts and crafts! Netflix She-Ra actually does capture She-Ra’s original personality pretty well and was not at all the softened or watered down series its detractors say it is. if anything Netflix She-Ra was still slightly edgier and darker than 80′s She-Ra!
I have heard that the CG Netflix He-Man is cute and silly again because it’s aimed at kids, which is great. I haven’t really gotten into it but these franchises should always be for kids and they should always be nice. They were created to be nice!!!!!!! Fabulous Secret Powers isn’t funny because it twists who He-Man is but because it is EXACTLY who He-Man is!! You don’t GET it! Kevin Smith doesn’t get it! Most of the people complaining about Kevin Smith’s reboot don’t even get it either!!! NOBODY still complaining about the she-ra reboot gets it!!!
https://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/675774428207005696/bogleech-whenever-someone-says-as-praise-or-as
Yes to all of this, Dell. Thanks for sharing! When you consider that He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was a state-sanctioned toy commercial — for reasons chronicled here, and corroborated by no less than Two and a Half Men creator Chuck Lorre here — it becomes undeniably apparent that Lou Scheimer, et al., keenly understood who their program’s intended audience was. So, whether they kept the show’s tone appropriately “gentle and nonviolent” out of a genuine sense of social responsibility, or simply because they didn’t want to invoke the ire of parents who might then openly rebel against precisely the capitalistic mode of “advertainment” He-Man represented (and arguably pioneered), the fact remains that virtues like forgiveness, tolerance, and compassion are baked into the program’s DNA.
Any of the latter-day brand extensions of He-Man are intended to play, deliberately and exclusively, to a nostalgic, middle-aged viewership — as no less than Kevin Smith openly admits — and, accordingly, have to be brought in line with the storytelling expectations of jaded adults. Or as Smith himself put it: “They give you something that you feel like looks like your childhood. But when you go back and compare it to your childhood, it’s way better. And that’s what we did here.”
Right — that’s the same sure-thing formula we applied to superheroes: Rather than handing them over to the next generation of children, we proprietarily dragged them with us into adulthood. Smith, manchild king of the Gen X fanboys, didn’t even initially understand why he of all people was being courted by Mattel to reboot the He-Man property:
Masters of the Universe: Revelation represents the worst of all worlds: It panders to a Peter Pan yearning for analog-age innocence while at the same time corrupting/perverting the juvenile source material its exploiting for that very nostalgic hit.
Though I can’t recall on which post, Dell, I’m pretty sure you and I have discussed The Transformers on this blog — how unrelated toylines from Japan were repackaged under the banner of a single brand here in the United States, and how a patently absurd and utterly illogical narrative was created to support that brand in a syndicated daily cartoon and licensed comic-book tie-in published by Marvel. And we talked, if I recall, about how a bunch of nine-year-old boys in 1985 weren’t going to scrutinize the dubious logic of that half-assed narrative, which is why it worked for its intended purposes (hawking toys to kids), but that the minute you bring that concept into the realm of the live-action blockbuster and try to sell it to mainstream adult audiences, its utter lack of narrative integrity becomes undeniable. Which, of course, didn’t stop legions of grown adults from flocking to those Michael Bay movies in a bid to see their childhood daydreams brought to life and projected onto the big screen…
I recently re-watched the animated Transformers: The Movie from 1986 for the first time since I was a kid. All I really remembered about it was that Optimus Prime dies, that Megatron becomes Galvatron, and that Hot Rod assumes the mantle of Rodimus Prime. And Unicron — a planet-sized Transformer certainly made an impression on my ten-year-old imagination. But that’s all.
Even knowing in advance it was toyetic nonsense, I was nonetheless utterly unprepared for how appalling and cynical The Transformers: The Movie is. One cannot argue with a straight face that movie has any creative value whatsoever, beloved by my generation though it may be. It’s a mind-numbingly cacophonous 90-minute commercial, its “story” nothing more than a corporately dictated mandate to retire the old toyline and introduce a new one. That’s it. And from that mandate, an utterly (if entirely unsurprisingly) incoherent screenplay was produced. It’s so transparently cynical it takes your breath away! While they may vary in quality, at least other animated features of the era — The Secret of NIMH and All Dogs Go to Heaven and An American Tail — were genuinely interested in telling a coherent story, in crafting an authentic emotional experience with a moral. Transformers, by contrast, is just fucking despicable.
And yet I have friends my age — guys I grew up with — whose “mancaves” are tabernacles to the Transformers, filled with Blu-ray steelbooks and expensive “Generation 1” reissues and the like. This is what I meant when I said recently that my generation elevated pulp fiction to essential literature. Shit, I loved both He-Man and Transformers in the 1980s, too, and G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero was like crack to me (it was all I could do to get my hands on the latest issue of the Larry Hama–scripted comic book), but I cannot look at any of that stuff with adult eyes and pretend it has any artistic merit whatsoever. Christ, even story consultant Flint Dille issued this telling comment on the Blu-ray documentary ‘Til All Are One:
I’ve explored that phenomenon in a number of posts on this blog, as you’re well aware, Dell, because I think Gen X’s exaltation of pulp ephemera to Western literary canon is a deeply lamentable thing that has had devastating cultural consequences. It’s indisputably consigned us to a Reagan-era time capsule, and it’s absolutely retarded the culture: To quote a passage from that article you found some weeks back, Dell, “there is something about this accumulated slippage of quality, and the emotions and ideas presented to us, that reflects something cheaper in the culture. We have been awash in remakes of nerd shit for nearly all of the 21st century, and the loop between past and present grows tighter.” And I say as someone who grew up on all this “nerd shit” and, once upon a time, loved it, too, that we need to let this stuff go. Not reboot it or update it or revisit it in any way — just leave it behind.
In “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30,” I wrote about how that particular moment marked the point when geek pastimes achieved mainstream acceptability, and how it’s all come at too steep a cost. As Ed Norton said a few years ago, “Moviegoers are so used to getting fed the equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup that they can’t taste anymore.” He’s right: We can no longer distinguish quality from crap. And while there is a place and a purpose for crap (I still love dipshit ’80s staples like Teen Wolf and Weekend at Bernie’s and License to Drive, for instance), making crap “edgy and grimdark” — or, if you like, grounded and elevated — doesn’t improve the quality of it. All it does is attenuate any value those franchises might’ve had as reminders of our own innocence.