The other week, journalist Olly Richards published a heartbreaking piece in The Telegraph called “How Kerry Conran saw Hollywood’s future—then got left behind.” It’s worth reading in its entirety, but, in short, it recounts the unorthodox journey of the Conran brothers, Kerry and Kevin, the former a magazine designer and the latter a freelance ad illustrator (neither with any apparent foothold in Hollywood at the time), who set out to make a cost-efficient, feature-length, dieselpunk effects fantasy entirely via blue-screen compositing, a speculative project that ultimately came to the attention of producer Jon Avnet (The Mighty Ducks, Fried Green Tomatoes), who secured the participation of big-screen stars Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law. The resulting film, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), which Kerry wrote and directed (with Kevin serving as costume and production designer), represents a quantum leap in contemporary effects-driven filmmaking, in which immersive, world-building spectacles, once achieved strictly via painstaking practical effects and/or arduous location shooting (think the original Star Wars, with its model spaceships and exotic Tunisian locales) would forevermore be rendered digitally—and economically—from the comfort of a Hollywood studio. In the wake of their cinematic accomplishment, the Conrans were invited to participate in a summit at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in which visionaries the likes of James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Brad Bird, and Robert Rodriguez were in attendance—and professed to be genuine fans of the Conrans’ groundbreaking work (as did J. J. Abrams, per Kevin, on another occasion).
Sky Captain, alas, underperformed, and the Conrans, who by their own admission made no effort to stay in touch with any of the aforementioned filmmakers—“We were in this rarified air for a moment and we never really took advantage in the way maybe smarter people would,” Kevin lamented in the Telegraph piece—soon found themselves left behind as Hollywood moved on to the very World of Tomorrow that the brothers and their ill-fated film had helped pioneer; they haven’t made another studio feature since.
For director Kerry Conran, tomorrow never came
Who knows why, really? The fact that Sky Captain bombed probably didn’t help (and the article offers compelling reasons for why that may have happened and how it could’ve even been avoided with smarter budgeting), but that hasn’t slowed down the careers of the Wachowskis or M. Night Shyamalan, who haven’t appeared to have had any problem securing jobs even after multiple high-profile flops apiece. Bad luck moving forward may have played its part, with the Conrans’ planned John Carter film falling victim to a regime change at Paramount. And that they weren’t shrewder networkers couldn’t have done them any favors—not in a town where people want to work with their “friends” (to the extent that any of us in Hollywood really have genuine friends within the industry); Kevin seems acutely aware of this, admonishing himself as “pretty dumb” for his insular work habits that keep him confined to his studio and altogether unaware of who’s doing what in Hollywood at large.
I don’t think he’s dumb—a self-assessment like that is most likely a defense mechanism—but I do have a hunch as to why the Conrans’ careers flamed-out before they got started, and it goes to that last point about their aversion to hobnobbing. Here’s the salient question Richards’ article doesn’t probe: Why didn’t they network—especially when Hollywood’s elite were coming to them? Much is made in the article of their shared (and evidently congenital) introversion, and I can certainly accept that as a characteristic common to artistic personalities, but is the Conrans’ fate perhaps a cautionary fable about the perils of soaring too high, too soon? Of, ultimately, getting more than you’d bargained for—or ever really wanted in the first place?
Let me elaborate: They didn’t, so far as I can tell from the backstory presented in the profile, toil day and night in the hopes of maybe, just possibly, against all odds achieving Hollywood success. They didn’t come up through the industry trenches, enduring setback after setback in an effort to prove their commercial and creative worth in a dog-eat-dog town. Yes, I acknowledge, per the article, that they spent seven years making a six-minute Sky Captain presentational reel—I don’t belittle the commitment and hard work that takes (and certainly no two paths to success are alike)—but no sooner had they sent it out than a major producer jumped aboard, and Kerry found himself directing his first feature film with no less than Angelina Jolie in a starring role! Few aspiring filmmakers—and any of you out there appreciate what a dramatic understatement this is—are so fortunate. And then George Lucas invites them to a seat at the table with the big boys, and they didn’t seem to know how to capitalize on that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. That’s the real tragedy here—not the box-office failure of a single movie, which, though unfortunate, could still have served as an adequate stepping stone to bigger and better things.
I submit, with full acknowledgment and firsthand understanding of the indiscriminate (and often cruel) vagaries of this business, that someone who’s worked for a career in studio filmmaking—and, more importantly, wanted it—for years and years and years on end would likely not have squandered the uniquely favorable circumstances the Conrans were accorded. I’m not piling on them, by the way—they’ve clearly been ground into the dirt by the heel of Hollywood (as well as imposed no small degree of self-punishment, as any of the quotes attributed to Kevin in the Telegraph article will substantiate)—I’m simply suggesting that there’s a reason why we pay our dues before we find success: It prepares us to deal with that success—and to make the most of it, because we know what we sacrificed to attain it. And it conditions us to deal with failure—the kind that crushed the Conrans. Rejection—and there’s no shortage of it here in Tinseltown—builds character: Those that can’t take it pack their bags (usually after only a year, as I can attest from having waved goodbye to many a colleague who determined that the cost of their show-business dues was more than they were willing to ante up—yet another invaluable takeaway from a conventional, rung-by-rung climb to the top); those that endure may never attain the precise career they’d envisioned, but they gain the self-confidence that comes from sticking it out and earning one’s place in this town. It seems to me the Conrans were caught between worlds: They’d made a big-budget movie with marquee actors—the dream of every aspiring filmmaker out here—but that didn’t make them feel as though they deserved their seat at court. And I’m not suggesting they did or they didn’t; I’m simply noting that they didn’t feel it in their hearts, it would seem—the only place that counts—and, consequently, they let themselves recede rather unceremoniously from view. (They just did so after the release of their first movie, whereas most of us never get that far before throwing in the towel.) No one who’s fought so hard to be seen—and heard—goes so quietly into the night. Failure teaches resilience. To have been unhabituated to that when your first feature flops would, I suspect, reduce one to an emotionally devastated mindset from which it would be hard to recover.
I was 22 years old and right out of college—still living in New York—when I signed with my first literary manager off an action/horror spec I’d written called BONE ORCHARD; I thought I’d “made it”! But, the script didn’t sell, and that management company folded shortly thereafter, leaving me back where I’d started: nowhere. So, I packed up and left New York for Los Angeles—on September 11, 2001 (a story for another time)—and that’s when the real work began: I learned about the politics of networking, and that moxie will get you everywhere in this town; I met people with talent and no hustle, with hustle and no talent; I met bullshitters—so many bullshitters; I met “creatives” without the first idea how to tell a story; I met storytelling masters—and learned from them, long after I thought I’d licked the discipline, how to tell a story. I learned something from all of them, in point of fact—and, most of all, I learned how badly I wanted a writing career. If BONE ORCHARD had sold way back when—and it certainly went out to a far more receptive spec marketplace than the moribund one we’re stuck with today—I’m certain I would have been a one-sale wonder myself: I’d have sold a script to Hollywood without any idea of what it takes to forge a career in Hollywood; I’d have accomplished something without having paid my dues first, and I wouldn’t have known how to handle all that came next. BONE ORCHARD wasn’t a failure; I simply wasn’t ready for success.
And that, if I had to guess, was what undid Kerry and Kevin Conran more than anything else. Their dream was to make an idiosyncratic, handmade movie—the kind of inexpensively produced yet visually arresting digital filmmaking that’s since become routine as the gap between consumer-grade and professional-caliber technologies has closed in the last decade—not establish a career as the next go-to tent-pole technicians. (Hey, I get that: I recently decided—after fifteen years of trying—against pursuing a career writing sequels to reboots of yesteryear’s franchises in favor of working for myself, beholden only to my own creative whims, as a novelist.) Sky Captain, however, became a product of Hollywood, and the Conrans’ careers a casualty of it—of a system they didn’t understand or ultimately long to be a part of; it wasn’t discomfort that kept them from “playing the game,” as the article suggests—it was ultimately disinterest. If the fire to make big-studio films had burned in their bellies—something they might’ve developed (or simply determined they didn’t have) had the road to success been a bit more winding—Sky Captain’s box-office disappointment wouldn’t necessarily have taken them down with it.
Many promising filmmakers, after all, have had inauspicious debuts, and still went on to great careers: take George Lucas (THX 1138), Robert Zemeckis (I Wanna Hold Your Hand), and James Cameron (Piranha II: The Spawning), for instance, all of whom persevered in the face of early professional setbacks to go on to create (multiple) groundbreaking, culturally significant cinematic “worlds of tomorrow”—and even many of those colossal hits had long, perilous roads from visions in their heads to images on the screen. Reflecting on the massive success of Batman (1989) in the documentary Shadows of the Bat: The Cinematic Saga of the Dark Knight, director Tim Burton (who cut his teeth as a Disney animator) observed, “I thought it would make things easier, funny enough—I thought, ‘Well, you know, I’ve had a couple of successes, so it was going to get easier.’ And, so, I learned my lesson from there that it was not—and it would never—become easy to get a film made.” Even the A-list continue to pay their dues, it would seem. If something’s worth it to you, you find a way to see it through.
But you’ve got to be okay with getting your ass kicked a little—and learn to take value from the experience so you might fight a little harder, a little smarter, for the next dream. Because that’s the thing about tomorrow: that it will come is a given—the sunrise is one of the few gifts we can take for granted—but what we make of the day itself is entirely up to us.
I always learn a lot from your posts, Sean, and I either think new thoughts or am reminded of important thoughts that need to be moved forward in my mental space. This post is no exception. However, I found myself mostly thinking about the real people involved and their lives – including the additional tidbits about you and your own life thus far.
I posted recently on my own blog, wondering publicly why we tend to feel the need (or right) to bash or be critical toward those who hold higher-profile jobs than our own. It turned out to be the most controversial post of mine to date, which says something. Regardless of why the Conran brothers failed, haven’t we all failed or missed out on something good due to our own choices or inadequacies at some point?
In addition to providing solid information and thoughts, Sean, you always manage to to so without negativity toward people. Kudos.
I always appreciate, Erik, how much care you put into reading and internalizing the writings of others, and that you always take the time to leave such thoughtful responses.
You know, the older (wiser?) I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize that more often in life than not, we are the ones standing in our own way — that, as you indicated above, our personal shortcomings tend to be our own worst enemies. Yes, we are all victims of circumstance to one degree or another, of course, the unwitting recipients of unfair treatment on occasion (as you yourself recently wrote about so eloquently), and very often we become casualties of our own ignorance; as the old saying goes: “Experience is a tough teacher: It gives the test first and the lesson later.” But, so much of our “bad luck,” it seems to me, is brought on by bad decisions that we might not have made were we self-actualized, ego-centered people. We’re all carrying around baggage that’s weighing us down — that’s holding us back — whether we know it or not.
So, when I look at a case like the Conrans’ (and the Telegraph article makes it very clear they don’t blame anyone but themselves for their misfortune), my heart really breaks for them because it’s so apparent to me how unnecessary their fate was — how their own negative self-image, based on my reading of the facts as they’ve been presented, really did them in. There were avenues they could have pursued, and goodwill from the Hollywood community they could have exploited (and I mean that in the purest sense, you understand) — the kind most aspiring screenwriters/filmmakers would kill for — that could have led to other opportunities had they been willing to put themselves out there a bit, to challenge the limits of their own emotional inhibitions.
Take, for instance, one of the Conrans’ early fans, J. J. Abrams: Here’s a guy that’s considered to be one of the top directors in Hollywood, with his fingers in the Star Trek, Star Wars, and Mission: Impossible franchises(!), but he had his first screenplay produced all the way back in 1990 (a poorly received, long-forgotten Jim Belushi vehicle called Taking Care of Business), and it was really only with M:I-3 in 2006 that he began his ascendancy to the A-list. That’s sixteen years of dues-paying and networking (and that’s not even taking into account the time spent doing all that before he became a produced screenwriter) before the doors really blew open for him. That had to have taken perseverance, and I’ll bet there were days he questioned why he was doing it, and whether he should go on. But, he kept at it, and then one day Tom Cruise came a-knockin’…
So, in this particular case study, my intention wasn’t to ridicule the Conrans’ experience — which I hope (and think) is pretty clear — but rather to take a hard look at why it happened, and to try to zone-in on the takeaway lesson from it. When I read Kevin’s closing quote in the Telegraph piece — “You hope that tomorrow is going to be the day the phone rings” — I felt for the poor bastard because all I could think is that he still doesn’t get it: The phone rang already — when Avnet attached himself as producer to Sky Captain; when Lucas summoned them to the mountaintop; when Abrams expressed interest in meeting with them as colleagues — and they didn’t answer the call. So, not only was their fate unnecessary, as I indicated above, it is now irreversible; Hollywood only extends an olive branch like that once (and that’s if you’re among the astronomically lucky). Bad luck stings for a while, but a missed opportunity is an ache that lasts forever.
I think part of the reason aspiring artists toil for so many years in obscurity is so that they can make their mistakes in a relative degree of privacy — so that we don’t experience our first failures on such a public stage, as the Conrans did. Given that, my advice to any writers out there who find themselves in that position would be to keep at it, network constantly (even and especially when you don’t have it in you to do so), and take consolation in the fact that the missteps you are taking today are preparing you in ways you can’t possibly comprehend for your very own world of tomorrow.
An interesting twist occurred between my having read your post and now. I received a strong endorsement and exciting personal letter from Karen May, Vice President of People Development at Google, who loved my book and invited me to quote her on it anywhere I like, including any reprints of the book. And I thought, “Am I the Conrans? Am I ready?”
I’m ready. Hard work, going for the “impossible,” treating people as just regular people, and engaging in every circumstance possible are slowly but surely accumulating into … well, something here!
And as I ended my initial comment, I absolutely didn’t think you were bashing these guys. I know you feel for them. Thing is, like everyone one of us, they still have a choice. They may not get to choose everything they wish; but waiting around for “the phone to ring” is not a good choice. They do have some cards to play with. I wonder what they will do.
Erik! Fabulous news — congratulations! (And thanks for giving my website the “exclusive scoop”! Haha!)
You made this happen. I’m sure I can’t even fathom the years you’ve spent processing your experiences into wisdom, sharing that wisdom with others (through your mentoring and your book), and making a name — and reputation — for yourself. And then, one day, Karen came to you! Only you can fully appreciate what this means, what you sacrificed to get here, and where tomorrow will lead. Confidence in yourself and your accomplishments is one of those abstractions like “love” and “home”: It is something that’s felt internally that can’t be faked. If you’re feeling it, then it’s genuine — and well-earned. Congratulations again, my friend.
I can’t deny that most “luck” boils down to choices at some point. I talk about choice so much because I really do believe it. Thanks for the atta-boy!
I believe that the reason Sky Captain failed was not because of the effects or the setting or the look of the film or the nostalgia
Sky Captain failed because of a basic storytelling problem
SPOILERS
The problem was the villain. There wasn’t one. Or rather, the villain, Dr. Totenkopf, had died 20 years earlier and his machines were carrying out his plans automatically. Even the assassin was a mindless robot. A movie like Sky Captain needs a great villain, a great hero-villain confrontation, a great climactic scene where the villain gets a much-deserved comeuppance
There was no gloating villain here to take down. And the machines, unlike HAL or the Terminator, did not have their own personalities. Even the final match w/ the robot assassin failed to satisfy, again unlike HAL or the Terminator. I hate to say this, but even the robots in the Transformers movies had more personality
Indiana Jones faced mindless deathtraps built by people long dead, of course. But his biggest confrontations, the finales, were against living opponents
Even if most people couldn’t say exactly why, on a basic level they were unsatisfied. As you yourself have argued from the beginning, no matter how impressive, flashy, or groundbreaking your work is, you still need a good story
I actually saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in theaters when it was released in 2004 (back when I still enjoyed movies!), but haven’t seen it since, and can’t really speak to its narrative merits or deficiencies as I don’t recall much about it, and saw it long before I’d ever studied Beyond Structure or Save the Cat! (Referring quickly to Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, I see Blake Snyder classified it as “Fantasy Whydunit.” I’ll take his word for it, because I can’t even recall what the damn movie was about! It was aesthetically arresting, as I remember…)
I completely trust your analysis, Dave. Based on what I know of them, I suspect the Conrans were the kind of filmmakers who were inherently gifted visualists devoid of any disciplined sense of how to tell a story. (Tim Burton, much as I admire him, is one such director; his movies are always gorgeous to look at, but if he isn’t working from a strong script, he doesn’t have the story sense to recognize that. That’s why his oeuvre is so frustratingly uneven — why for every solid effort, like Edward Scissorhands or Sleepy Hollow, there’s a creative misfire like Planet of the Apes or Alice in Wonderland.)
I don’t doubt shoddy storytelling played a role in the movie’s failure to launch, but let me also suggest this as a possible contributing factor: “Anyone who tried telling stories after 9/11 noticed that the real world became horribly fictional — so all of our fictions seemed to aspire toward realism” (Grant Morrison, “Celluloid Hero,” Rolling Stone 1162 [August 2, 2012]: 43). Sky Captain was produced and released directly following the Trade Center attack and the invasion of Iraq — and the project was probably in the developmental pipeline long before those events occurred — during that period of history when even our most colorful action heroes were getting gritty, grounded makeovers: Pierce Brosnan’s campy James Bond was pushed out for Jason Bourne, which in turn begat Daniel Craig’s interpretation; Joel Schumacher’s campy Batman was reimagined by Christopher Nolan as the Dark Knight. Sky Captain‘s brand of nostalgic fantasy — the merits of the material notwithstanding — was out of place at that particular cultural juncture.
By the end of the aughts — perhaps beaten down by the wars in Afganistan and Iraq, to say nothing of the Great Recession, and maybe even reinvigorated by the election of Barack Obama — we were once again looking to fiction to provide a sunnier sort of escapism, which is how the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been able to flourish. Sometimes movies are just out of step with the zeitgeist. If you look at the kind of successful fantasy films that were being produced for mature audiences at that time — like the back-to-back Matrix sequels in 2003, which were cold and dark and felt pessimistically futuristic, in contrast with Sky Captain‘s romantic dieselpunk aesthetic — they were helping us deal with the anxieties of our burgeoning Digital Age. We weren’t ready to retreat from that into the four-color fantasies of the previous century, because we weren’t yet all that far removed from it. So while Sky Captain‘s script itself was probably the main culprit — though certainly many badly written but expertly marketed movies perform admirably nonetheless at the box office — I think the timing also doomed the movie’s chances, hence the reason it’s receded now from cultural consciousness.
Certainly one might argue that all three factors — the Conrans’ lack of storytelling command, their idiosyncratic (meaning culturally tone-deaf) creative sensibilities, and their antisocial proclivities — conspired to doom their careers. Given all that, it’s actually amazing that they got as far as they did. But, as we were discussing recently in the comments section of “‘Almost’ Doesn’t Count,” they fast-passed into a career they hadn’t earned and didn’t fully appreciate, and the whole thing came tumbling down on them. What can I say: It’s a fickle business.
I’m reading the Raiders of the Lost Ark story-conference document you recommended. Good stuff
Spielberg: There’s no confrontation now with the arch-rival.
Lucas: The confrontation takes place just before that.
They understood the basics
That transcript is a treasure, isn’t it? A scanned PDF started circulating on the Internet about a decade ago — I’ll e-mail it to anyone who wants a copy (just let me know) — but Indie Film Hustle made the entire text available online here.
For reasons I’ve written about elsewhere, George Lucas was my creative role model when I was first developing a passion (and professional inclination) for storytelling. He was an idea factory, and he had such a masterful grasp of mythic structure (long before screenwriting books like Syd Field’s and Robert McKee’s and Blake Snyder’s became their own cottage industry), and, as an impressionable high-school student, I was so taken with the way he could synthesize all his varied interests into a story. (I’ve considered at various intervals perhaps writing a book called Looking for Lucas which would be partly a dissertation on his works, and part personal memoir about my own life and career. Perhaps someday I might.)
The thing you have to understand about Lucas was that he never wanted to be King of the Blockbusters; on the contrary, he’d always envisioned a career in experimental filmmaking for himself. And then he went and created these two blockbuster trilogies: Star Wars and Indiana Jones! And in both cases, after those sagas had “concluded,” he went back and made prequels to them both that were very experimental: Young Indiana Jones flew in the face of all broadcast-television convention by airing its episodes non-sequentially, shooting internationally, having no regular cast or locations, and for the most part its scripts weren’t structured to accommodate the need for rising action and commercial-break cliffhangers. Lucas just didn’t give a shit! And with the Star Wars prequels, he completely fucked with us by starting the trilogy with a cutesy ten-year-old hero… only to close it out by having that same character murder a bunch of children! That was the thing about Lucas: He understood the Campbellian hero’s journey so intuitively that sometimes he espoused it, and sometimes he altogether disowned it. But he knew it — knew it in his bones.
As the Raiders transcript unambiguously illustrates. The climax of the film — the one you cite above, Dell — became somewhat belatedly controversial when The Big Bang Theory suggested in one episode (that I’ve never seen, only heard about secondhand) that Indiana Jones is completely incidental to the plot of Raiders: that had Indy done absolutely nothing — never even been drawn into the events of the story — the Nazis would’ve taken the Ark to their Mediterranean island, opened it, and been Biblically incinerated. Many people I (used to) work with in Hollywood immediately glommed on to this interpretation as evidence that — whaddaya know?! — it’s a deeply flawed screenplay, after all!
However… what that “theory” fails to take into account was that Indy was the only one smart and determined enough to actually find the damn Ark! Without him, it stays hidden in the desert sands for all eternity. So, the hero is in no way incidental to the story.
I kind of admire that Lucas and Spielberg let Raiders end with the Ark “defeating” the Nazis, and not as a result of any direct action undertaken by the hero — that was ballsy. It works in this particular instance because there are several confrontations with the Nazis prior to that (the entire second half of the movie amounts to the Ark going from Indy’s possession to Belloq’s, and vice versa), and also because the decision Indy makes to “look away” goes to his transformational arc. Prior to that moment, he appreciates the historical value of the Ark, but not it’s spiritual power: In the Debate, during the “meeting with his mentor,” Brody cautions him about the Ark’s immense power, but Indy just scoffs and says, “I’m going after a find of incredible historical significance and you’re talking about the bogeyman!” All throughout the story, he is very dismissive of the Ark’s power, but, at the climax, he shows humility before God, and that’s why he is spared and the Nazis die.
Now, if I were to make one minor tweak to the screenplay, I would have set it up somewhere that mortal eyes can’t look upon the contents of the Ark. (Much the same way in the Last Crusade screenplay the tablet Indy translates reads “… to the Temple where the cup that holds the blood of Jesus Christ resides forever.” Indy — and, by extension, the audience — interpreted that to mean the hiding place of the Grail, but we learn in the end that the Grail cannot be physically removed from the Temple — it resides there forever. That was great screenwriting.) There’s actually evidence to suggest Lucas and Spielberg did account for that in a draft of the Raiders screenplay, but it was a detail that got cut (either in a script revision or in the editing of the film itself). Check out this passage from the movie novelization; it’s the scene in which the shaman is translating the headpiece for Indy and Sallah, and Indy is coming dangerously close to eating the poisoned date:
That’s a great moment, because it sets up the information Indy will need at the climax, but, in his arrogance, it nearly flies right over his head. I’m sure it got trimmed (from the script or finished film) because the scene is an info-dump and they probably didn’t want to prolong it, but it’s a detail I wish they’d kept in place. And in Spielberg’s brilliance, we’re getting all that exposition while we’re on the edge of our seat as to whether Indy is going to eat that goddamn date — because we know it’s poisoned even though he doesn’t!
Those guys were just master storytellers, as that transcript testifies. I’ve worked with more managers, agents, producers, and creative execs than I can reasonably recall, and I can’t imagine one of them having the patience to gather the key creative personnel on a project together for an entire week and just talk through the story until they broke the back of it. It’s not like Lucas and Spielberg didn’t have other pressing demands on their time (Lucas was trying to get The Empire Strikes Back up and running), but they had the patience to spend an entire week figuring this thing out — and, in the process, wound up creating a successful, long-running franchise. But it all goes back to that summit — to that disciplined exercise in Some Assembly Required.
>it’s a deeply flawed screenplay, after all!
I’d argue the opposite. It was so exciting that not only do you not care about the flaws, you don’t even notice them. You’re caught up in the action. So caught up that you don’t notice things like that until YEARS later
What more could you want in an action film like that?
Indeed. But folks in Hollywood are so incorrigibly cynical — and so intent on proving (mostly to themselves) how goddamn story-savvy they are — there’s no movie, no matter how culturally well-regarded, we can’t retroactively shit on!
Incidentally, those same people — and this is no jest or exaggeration — spent the week following the Game of Thrones finale scratching their heads and rubbing their chins, trying to figure out how-oh-how could Benioff and Weiss, those superhuman titans of storytelling, have possibly stumbled so badly mere inches from the finish line? What malign curse be-ith cast upon B&W that bereaved them at their moment of certain triumph of their impeccable narrative instincts? Ha! Because to admit that Benioff and Weiss were never the shit, and that GoT was an overhyped house of cards from Day One, would’ve been to call their own sense and sensibilities into question — their own grasp of what constitutes talent (in a writer) and quality (in writing). It’s attitudes like that, Dell — and Hollywood is replete with them — that inspire me to write posts like Some Assembly Required…