Won’t Get Fooled Again: “The Last Jedi” Incites a Fan Rebellion against Disney’s “Star Wars” Empire

45 Comments

1. 

   writerlady

   January 29, 2018 at 8:06 am

   Hahah Absolutely. I love how you talked about execs “wanting’ the next Goonies. Hollywood often seems fueled by a wish to recreate something that cannot be reproduced just to capitalize off of a train that lost steam long ago, but young kids haven’t seen it all yet so they don’t care. I decided to stop talking about Star Wars altogether and pretend that this popular wave of remakes and rehashes doesn’t exist. That’s probably how my parents felt when they remade The Blob and The Fly.

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     Sean P Carlin (Post author)

     January 29, 2018 at 12:31 pm

     Hey, Jess!

     Something I’ve talked about at (nauseating) length on this blog is how Gen X, the current superintendents of Hollywood, don’t seem to (care to) grasp the difference between inspiration and imitation. George Lucas was inspired by the Flash Gordon serials of his youth to create a space opera of his own, Star Wars, which he structured based on his studies of The Hidden Fortress and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Dan Aykroyd took inspiration from the old Bob Hope ghost comedies of the ’40s, filtered them through the lens of his Second City experiences, and reconsidered them in the light of all the intense research that was conducted into the field of parapsychology in the ’70s, and from that Ghostbusters emerged. Both of those Baby Boomers took their experiences, their interests, and their influences to create these wonderful, culturally defining pieces of entertainment they gave to the world, particularly the children of that time: Generation X.

     And then Gen X — of which both J. J. Abrams (born 1966) and Rian Johnson (1973) belong — grew up, and instead of taking inspiration from its influences, just remade all those films wholesale. Here’s a new Star Wars! Here’s a new Ghostbusters! Here’s a new Halloween! Hollywood became a glorified fan-fiction factory. And though Gen X may find it comforting to retreat to the toy box of its bygone youth, it’s a very selfish, culturally retarding practice we’ve instituted. We’re not fulfilling our responsibility to give the next generation their own heroes, their own stories, their own fantasies — we’re just recycling ours ad infinitum. And kids are fine with it, as you point out, because it’s all new to them. But we need to take a hard look in the mirror and be honest with ourselves: We’re not really making these movies for them; we’re making them for us — and, as The Last Jedi demonstrates, to vastly diminishing returns.

     As for pretending the new Star Wars never happened, I wholeheartedly endorse that philosophy. That’s something I wrote about in an essay called “This Counts, That Does Not”: “Canonicity” — whatever the fuck that means — is something each of us determine for ourselves. There are no “official” stories, or retconned stories, or stories that have been banished to “legacy” or “alternate universe” status. That’s all meaningless bullshit, whether we’re talking about Star Wars or the superheroes of DC and Marvel or any story with more than one iteration. The only stories in an ongoing series that “count” are the ones that have meaning to you.

     And whatever you may have imagined for Luke Skywalker — and Han and Leia, for that matter — after the closing credits of Return of the Jedi is equally legitimate as what Abrams and Johnson conceived. Hell, once you recognize that their visions don’t even harmonize — talk about taking this new trilogy in completely incompatible directions! — you have free and full license to elevate your vision to “canonical” status, too. Just because Johnson got Hamill to star in his post–Return of the Jedi fantasy doesn’t somehow lend it more legitimacy than yours or mine.

     That is, I think, what George Lucas intended when he closed the curtain on Luke’s saga in 1983: Where the character went from that point forward was entirely up to each of us, individually. That was the gift Star Wars gave us: to inspire our imaginations as Lucas’ had been inspired; to say, These are the kinds of worlds and stories you’ll find on your own hero’s journey. He wanted us, I suspect, to each undertake that journey for ourselves, and not endlessly retrace the path he forged. In that sense, The Last Jedi is a complete bastardization of everything I believe he intended to accomplish with his franchise. Regardless, his legacy is secure. Can second-rate copycats Abrams and Johnson really say the same?

     Thanks for joining the convo, Jess! Have a productive week!

     Sean

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       dellstories

       January 29, 2018 at 3:04 pm

       >Working screenwriters find themselves committed to what’s known in the industry as “general meetings.”

       A basic reason why I can’t be a screenwriter. My social anxiety. I do not do well dealing w/ strangers, particularly under pressure. Too bad, because my personal style works well for screenplay format, and I love the big blockbuster “high-concept” stories (the kind they used to make before the “warmed-over second helpings” age)

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         Sean P Carlin (Post author)

         January 29, 2018 at 4:01 pm

         Hey, Dell! Happy New Year!

         The most successful screenwriters in Hollywood are seldom the most talented, I’ve found. Rather, it’s the writers who are “great in a room” — who are personable and charismatic — that find success, time and again. That’s because they don’t sell their work, they sell themselves. They walk into a room with complete confidence in themselves and their abilities — and trust me when I tell you that 90% of the time that confidence is offensively unjustified — and people in this town want to work with writers who have poise and confidence. (It’s an attractive quality in friends and lovers, too, not just colleagues. And in Tinseltown, it’s way more valuable than raw talent.) More often than not, producers and executives who control the rights to an IP know they have something cool… they just don’t know what to do with it. That’s why they need you, the writer — to come in and tell them what to do with this thing they own. Sell them on a vision. If you can do that, you’ll get the fuckin’ job. (Give it up to Rian Johnson: He sold Disney/Lucasfilm on his vision for Episode VIII.)

         On that note, I’ve seen a lot of promising writers suffer from quick career flameouts because they don’t project total confidence in themselves or their ideas. And I get that: Writers are by nature introverted and often diffident, especially if they’re inexperienced. But one of the great benefits of taking general meetings — what they sometimes call a “couch tour,” because you go around to every prodco in town and sit on the couch in the lobby as you wait for the exec you’re there to see — is that you develop the required social skills in short order. You learn to walk into a room, look the exec in the eye, find common ground with him quickly, and pitch your ideas like you just laid a golden egg. It forces writers out of their shells. (And in some cases it doesn’t, and those guys never, alas, establish a career.)

         I don’t think it’s always the worst thing in the world to throw yourself into a situation, particularly a social one, in which you are less than fully comfortable or even prepared. It’s how we grow; it’s how we cultivate new skills. And that particular skill set is, to be sure, a great sales tool, because it’s important for all writers to remember that they aren’t selling their wares so much as selling themselves. That’s the point of a blog, even: Through this forum, you learn more about me — my biography, my personality, my creative sensibilities — and then at some point when you see a book on the shelf with my name on it, you go, “That guy’s pretty cool. I feel like I know him, even. I’ll check out his work.” You know what I’m saying? One way or the other, we’re always selling ourselves, be it to a reader, a prospective employer, a first date, etc.

         And that doesn’t have to be a cynical ploy: We can present an honest portrayal of ourselves, both in person and online. It’s just a matter of saying with self-confidence, This is who I am. And then people can take that or leave it at their pleasure. But if you know who you are, and you’re confident in your work and your abilities, there ain’t no better feeling in the world. I spent the whole of my thirties getting to that place!

         Thanks for reading and commenting, Dell. Wishing you a very productive 2018! Would love to see your own high-concept stories published or produced at some point, bud! Keep me posted…

         Sean

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       dellstories

       January 29, 2018 at 3:11 pm

       Lucas WANTED to make a Flash Gordon movie. He couldn’t get the rights for a reasonable price, so he had to make his own version

       http://herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/star-wars-was-born-a-long-time-ago-but-not-all-that-far-far-away-in-1972-filmmakers-george-lucas-and-gary-kurtz-wer/ :

       For (Gary) Kurtz the popular notion that “Star Wars” was always planned as a multi-film epic is laughable. He says that he and Lucas, both USC film school grads who met through mutual friend Francis Ford Coppola in the late 1960s, first sought to do a simple adaptation of “Flash Gordon,” the comic-strip hero who had been featured in movie serials that both filmmakers found charming.

       “We tried to buy the rights to ‘Flash Gordon’ from King Features but the deal would have been prohibitive,” Kurtz said. “They wanted too much money, too much control, so starting over and creating from scratch was the answer.”

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         Sean P Carlin (Post author)

         January 29, 2018 at 7:12 pm

         I studied Lucas’ career while still in high school during the early ’90s, because I really admired what a visionary artist and forward-thinking businessman he was, and I’ve read all the different (and often conflicting) accounts of the genesis of Star Wars. At this point, there are so many contradictory versions — from Lucas’ mouth alone! — it’s sometimes hard to suss out truth from legend.

         That said, it seems Flash Gordon did in fact inspire the project, even if it was a failed attempt to acquire the rights that led to Lucas develop his own thing. (But hey — limitations inspire creativity!) There are, that I know of, four completely distinct drafts of what was then “The Star Wars” — Lucas conducted at least three page-one rewrites before he landed on the iteration of the story that ultimately became what we now know as Episode IV — A New Hope, tearing down what he had and rebuilding it from scratch, each new draft both incorporating and expunging elements from the last. If you’ve ever read through the different drafts — and I recommend it as an invaluable academic exercise — it immediately becomes apparent that Lucas envisioned this massive, sprawling universe rich in idiosyncratic detail (much of which got repurposed in the sequels and then later the prequels), but he was struggling to give it narrative cohesion.

         Eventually, he took all these exotic worlds and creatures he’d created and poured them into a tried-and-true mould: the monomyth. He reduced all his crazy ideas down to a very basic Golden Fleece plot, inspired in part by The Hidden Fortress, and put all his effort into telling one standalone story really well. And it worked: The familiarity of the hero’s journey grounded all the fantastical elements, so groundbreaking at the time, in a very relatable, digestible structure.

         As for how much veracity to lend Kurtz’s dispute that Star Wars was envisioned from the outset as a multipart epic, I think that depends, as Obi-Wan himself might counsel, on one’s point of view. Did Lucas have the three stories preconceived, let alone the scripts written, for what became A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi? Of course not. All of that developed over time, movie by movie — as it should’ve! As Lucas saw what worked in one movie, presumably he was able to tailor the next one to play to those strengths, and to find the overarching narrative as he went along. That’s the way series television and comic books had always worked, after all; what was so innovative about what he did was bringing that “chapter-play” approach to feature-length filmmaking, which — though commonplace now — had never really been done before outside the B-movie serials of the 1930s (to which Star Wars owes a creative debt).

         It’s also worth remembering, one of his other influences was Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle. Because before Lucas, “trilogies” weren’t a thing in popular cinema (that was only popularized much later with Back to the Future and The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean, etc.). There were sequels, sure, but no one at that point had set out to tell a finite, overarching story over a defined number of movies; you made one movie, and maybe if that worked you made a sequel, like The Godfather or The French Connection, or the way the James Bond films were produced. (Even Lord of the Rings is an accidental trilogy, artificially split into three volumes by the publisher. Same with the so-called Man with No Name series, which the American distributor packaged as a trilogy despite the fact that there’s plenty of evidence — in context of the movies themselves — to suggest such a direct connection was never Leone’s intention.)

         And though, no, I don’t think Lucas had the twists and turns of the entire trilogy mapped out when he set out to make Star Wars, I suspect he had an intuitive sense that if he could get the first movie to work, his ideas could be expanded into a cohesive series (like the 13-epsiode Flash Gordon serial from 1936, only on a much bigger, more ambitious scale), and just as he’d looked to Campbell to give A New Hope a narrative template, he then took a cue from Tolkien as to how he might pattern a closed-ended multipart epic. And doing it as a trilogy makes a kind of sense, because it’s got that logical, three-act elegance to it: beginning, middle, end. And that’s ultimately the shape the classic Star Wars trilogy took: an unlikely hero rises (IV); he’s trained by mentors and tempted by adversaries (V); he achieves apotheosis and vanquishes the nemesis (VI).

         But before Lucas could build all that out, the first one had to work in its own right, which is why it’s the most self-contained of all the Star Wars movies, so much so that A New Hope falls under a different Save the Cat! genre than the other five Lucas-helmed movies: He kept his ideas focused through a conventional Golden Fleece paradigm, then got a little more experimental by switching to Superhero for V, VI, I, II, and III. He wisely tempered his ambitions on the first one in order to get it made, and to make it work as a coherent story in and of itself, and only then he felt empowered to open up the sprawling universe he’d created — to admittedly mixed creative success, but that’s neither here nor there.

         But if Lucas didn’t have a proper plan when he started, at least he had a notion of how it might all cohere — a singular vision — which is more than I can say for this sequel trilogy. What’s crazy is that Lucas was finding his way in the dark when he made the first trilogy — certainly when he produced A New Hope and even Empire Strikes Back (of which you should read the failed Leigh Brackett draft if you can find a PDF online) — whereas Kathleen Kennedy and company have a proven template to work with, and yet somehow they’ve cocked it all up. Lucas, whose legacy has taken a beating over the last fifteen years, is looking more and more like an audacious visionary with each successive Star Wars film. No, not all of his forays into the fictional galaxy he created were artistically successful, but I think audiences are gaining a finer appreciation of just how hard it is, even for the creator himself, to pull off a satisfying Star Wars movie. He made it look so effortless the first time around, and if the later movies have given us anything, it’s a more enlightened perspective on just how much effort — and risk — went into making those masterpieces. It may never be repeated, certainly with respect to this particular franchise.

         Thanks again, Dell. So grateful for your contributions to the conversation!

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           dellstories

           January 30, 2018 at 1:43 pm

           >But before Lucas could build all that out, the first one had to work in its own right

           I would say, “tell that to the Hollywood execs, because they don’t seem to know that,” but I know you’ve tried
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           Sean P Carlin (Post author)

           January 30, 2018 at 2:15 pm

           Haha! Indeed. The thing you have to understand about Hollywood is that almost everyone here — directors, producers, execs, agents — are themselves failed writers. Everyone came to this town to tell their own stories, but few had the talent and determination to succeed at that. So what they’ve done instead is create a hierarchy in which the screenwriter sits at the bottom of the totem pole, forced to take his marching orders from directors and producers and execs and agents — they very people that, ya know, failed at screenwriting (what Lucas himself calls the creative industrial complex). It’s as backwards and dysfunctional an industry as I can imagine — one desperate for systemic restructuring — but that’s why I got out.
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       Michael Wilk

       February 21, 2018 at 10:56 am

       Maybe it’s because I was born in the later years of Generation X, or more likely, that I was born to pre-baby-boomer parents, but I grew up with Universal Monsters and Hammer Horror and 70s exploitation flicks and yes, Star Trek and Star Wars and then the 80s movies, that for better or for worse came to influence my childhood. But I never let my sense of nostalgia get the better or adhering to basic concepts of storytelling (I went to film school and took screenwriting and am in the early stages of adapting a Superman story for the big screen to try and pitch to Warner Bros.). Maybe because my screenwriting professor came up in the 1990s getting his screenplays turned into movies, but he learned the more traditional method of storytelling wherein you need a sympathetic protagonist and good plot with well written and fleshed out characters. I’ve read Syd Field and Blake Snyder and I paid attention to what they had to teach.

       Clearly, Abrams and Johnson think they’re too cool for the craft of storytelling. As I pointed out below in my first comment, no one was willing to be an adult and tell these bozos that they don’t know how to tell a story. No one was willing to hurt their feelings with the truth, so they opted instead to coddle them with lies about how awesome they are. Well, we now see the results of that coddling, and cinema is much worse for it. What’s worse is that it’s not just them. There’s a disturbing trend that began long before we Gen-Xers took over the scene, from Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay to Alex Kurtzman and Ronald Moore, where the baby-boomers decided once they came of age that it was better to sell out and tell audience what to want rather than listen to us and find out, and you can’t pin all that on us Gen-Xers.

       As to the responses now being given to criticism of ‘The Last Jedi’, ‘Ghostbusters’, CBS’ ‘STD’, ect., are best broken down by Dirk Benedict. A lot of what he wrote smacks of embittered chauvinism complaining because his sort of toxic msculinity is no longer acceptable, but he did make a couple of good points that are worth quoting, that apply to today’s pitiful excuse for cinema:

       http://www.dirkbenedictcentral.com/home/articles-readarticle.php?nid=5

       “Show Business has been morphing for many decades
       now and has finally become Biz Business. The creative artists have
       lost and the Suits have won. Suits. Administrators. Technocrats.
       Metro-sexual money-men (and women) who create formulas to guarantee
       profit margins. Because movies and television shows are not made to
       enlighten or even entertain but simply to make money. They will tell
       you it is (still) about story and character but all it is really
       about is efficiency. About The Formula. Because Harvard Business
       School Technocrats run Hollywood and what Technocrats know is what
       must be removed from all business is Risk. And I tell you life, real
       life, is all about risk. I tell you that without risk you have no
       creativity, no art. I tell you that without risk you have Remakes.
       You have Charlie’s Angels, The Saint, Mission Impossible, The A-Team
       (coming soon) Battlestar Galactica. All risk-free brand names,
       franchises. ”

       And here’s the part about responses to criticism:

       “And if you don’t enjoy the show, or the hamburger and coke, it’s not
       the fault of those re-imaginative technocrats that brought them to
       you. It is your fault. You and your individual instincts, tastes,
       judgement. Your refusal to let go of the memory of the show that once
       was. You just don’t know what is good for you. But stay tuned. After
       another 13 episodes (and millions of dollar of marketing), you will
       see the light. You, your instincts, your judgement, are wrong.
       McDonald’s is the best hamburger on the planet, Coca-Cola the best
       drink.”

       That’s the wisdom hidden among the chauvinistic bile. Yes, one can agree with some parts of a commentary and disagree with the rest. So please don’t assume I’m endorsing all of Dirk Benedict’s ranting. But the good points he made are still good, and they’re true. These days it’s all about making money, and the “hippies” who sold out and are now wearing the suits are saying they know better than we do what we want, and to shut up and stop questioning them. They don’t even care if we like it anymore. They only care about the money, and never mind that they’re actually wasting it because as long as they can claim a profit, however small, they’ll keep rationalizing doing the same tired retreads missing the things that made the originals so beloved in the first place.

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         Sean P Carlin (Post author)

         February 22, 2018 at 6:55 pm

         I suspect, Michael, you and I are very close in age, as I’m a late-ranging Gen Xer, as well, with pre–Baby Boomer parents. As such, we draw from many of the same influences, including Star Wars, Star Trek, classic horror, and the fantasy-driven spectacles of the eighties. I am also an exponent of the methodologies of Blake Snyder, something I’ve written about extensively elsewhere on this blog. The initial point of this blog, in fact, was to extol the virtues of craft, though, as it has developed over the past four years, the site has sometimes served as a vehicle for more personal anecdotes and observational pieces.

         With regard to your comment about Abrams and Johnson, please see my response to Erik‘s comment directly below this thread on the collapse of narrative. I suspect part of the reason why both Abrams and Johnson are running into trouble with Star Wars is that they’re imposing the demands of incompatible story models on one another: In many respects, they are taking a very postmodern approach to their storytelling — in which elements are introduced yet seldom correlate or pay off (as was the case with Abrams’ Lost) — which is clashing, in this instance, with the audience’s expectations of a tightly plotted, old-fashioned hero’s journey, à la the Joseph Campbell schema (later reworked by Blake Snyder into his “beat sheet”), the kind Lucas used to pattern both A New Hope and then later the entire classic-era trilogy.

         “Postnarrativity” is a complex subject that I won’t recap here; if you’re interested in learning more, see the comment below and/or read my post titled “Journey’s End.” That said, I certainly think the comingling of different narrative models with correspondingly different structural patterns and conventions goes to exactly what you identify: a misapplication of craft on the part of both Abrams and Johnson. (And I’m willing to bet David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, showrunners of the postnarrative behemoth Game of Thrones, will run into similar issues when they try their hand at writing for Star Wars.)

         As for Dirk Benedict (man, I loved The A-Team as a kid!), I completely concur that one can agree with aspects of a discourse without subscribing to it in toto. To that end, I don’t take issue with the passage you’ve cited, because it’s perfectly in sync with my own critiques of our nostalgia-addicted culture. But… are the studios to blame for that, or are they just a scapegoat — like blaming your dealer for your drug habit?

         Look, I have no love for movie studios or producers (I even got off a snarky comment about creative execs in the first paragraph under the NEVER SAY DIE subheading of this post), but I don’t entirely fault them for adhering to a business model — much as I may oppose the model itself — in which they seek to minimize risk and maximize profit potential by capitalizing on (read: remaking and sequelizing) proven, beloved brands. That’s the technocratic mindset that Benedict identifies — the “creative industrial complex,” as Lucas calls it. It’s a very real thing in an industry that requires systemic restructuring, to be sure, but are the studios creating the problem of a nostalgia-driven culture or merely fulfilling their prime directive of supplying product for which there is tremendous consumer demand?

         Demand, then, by whom? By Generation X. On the one hand, we’ve got an audience of grown adults who’ve coopted children’s characters and stubbornly refused to cede them to the next generation, and on the other we have the Gen X filmmakers — which very much includes Xers like Michael Bay (born 1965), Alex Kurtzman (1973), and Ronald D. Moore (1964) — who are only too happy to indulge Hollywood’s nostalgia-for-profit agenda. A corporation — which all the studios are now — is going to act like a corporation and put its bottom line first; can we really fault it for that? (Again: I am no fan of corporate capitalism.) I think the much harder question to face is this one: Why have we, the current custodians of popular culture, allowed our various entertainment platforms to now function almost exclusively as paeans to our childhood idols, be it the Skywalkers or the Transformers or the superheroes of DC and Marvel comics? It’s easy to blame a movie studio — and they are not, I’ll stipulate, altogether blameless — but it is a bit like blaming one’s dealer. The addiction, after all, lies within.

         And one of the things I tried to drive home in this post, particularly the conclusion, is that for those of us who’ve been waiting for thirty-five years to see Luke, Han, and Leia in action again — whether it was for the sentimental thrill of reuniting with our childhood heroes or a vain longing to recapture a feeling of youthful innocence — that ain’t happenin’ now. Luke, Han, and Carrie Fisher are all dead, so any hope of seeing them on one last adventure together in now irreversibly dashed. And that sucks. (Again: What were the brain trusts at Lucasfilm thinking? They had the original troika, and then failed to put them in any storylines together! Who thought that was a good idea…?)

         But… the good news is this: We are now finally free to let go of Star Wars. We don’t have to keep retuning to this franchise with Pavlovian fealty, because the thing we wanted so desperately from it is never coming — we will never get that new Luke/Leia/Han adventure we’d hoped for. So why not use this opportunity, bitter though it may very well be, to extricate ourselves from an unhealthy relationship with a forty-year-old franchise that we’ve thus far allowed to seduce and disappoint us time and again? In their staggering ineptitude, Abrams and Johnson may’ve very well (albeit inadvertently) done our culture — and our generation — a much-needed favor.

         I wish you luck, Michael, on your Superman pitch to Warners. I’m planning on posting an in-depth analysis of Richard Donner’s two-part Superman saga in June to celebrate the character’s eightieth anniversary. I certainly hope you’ll weigh in on that when it’s published…

         Sean

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           Michael Wilk

           February 22, 2018 at 8:27 pm

           Thanks for responding! It seems to me the biggest problems with trying to revive old movies and TV shows have nothing to do with nostalgia. Many of the classic era films we’ve come to love, such as The Maltese Falcon, were remakes of other movies, or more precisely, different adaptations of books and stage plays that were done and redone until something stood out and settled into public consciousness.

           No, the problems, as I see them, are that, first, none of the clowns currently pulling in the big bucks to adapt Transformers, Star Trek, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, and so on, really even like the material they’re adapting. Not only that, they have nothing but complete and utter contempt for anyone who is a fan of those movies and TV shows, and so you have Jar Jar Abrams complaining to Jon Stewart that he thought the original Star Trek was too cerebral—keep in mind that this is a show best described as ‘Wagon Train to the stars’—and so the implication is that he felt compelled to dumb it down to his level in order for it to be something he could enjoy. Johnson just hates fans and wanted nothing more than to give us a great big middle finger for daring to expect answers to mysteries that had been set up.

           Second, the trend of never-ending “narratives” has to do with the consequence of adapting all these properties, which, in my opinion, is that because of its risk aversion Hollywood will not take on something new unless it has no other choice, so in order to maintain profitability for its present franchises, they have to be kept going for as long as possible, because once it ends definitively, what else if left that hasn’t already been redone recently? So it becomes a sort of trap of Hollywood’s own making. Just look at South Park. It’s practically the only thing keeping Comedy Central operating, so the network refuses to let it end after almost twenty years even though it arguably ran out of steam a long time ago. Likewise with The Simpsons.

           And then, as I’ve mentioned before, no one was willing to be the adult in the room and tell these guys they can’t write or direct for shit (pardon my profanity). They probably thought they were tool cool to pay attention in screenwriting class, so they probably skipped it and because the nominal adults just had to be cowards, they somehow managed to coast on by and get hired because hey, who cares that the writing is shit as long as the movie turns a profit?

           But as we saw with Batman vs Superman and Justice League, and with Ghost in the Shell, Ghostbusters, and The Mummy, that can only go so far before audiences begin to say enough is enough, and I think as we go into the next five or so years it’s going to become a lot more difficult to justify all these reboots, sequels, prequels, and never-ending series. I’ve been of the opinion for some time now that we’re long overdue for another Hollywood Renaissance. It may be that the crowd-funding platforms can be utilized by independent film-makers who want to do something original and well written and produced, but struggle to get studio backing, thus doing an end-run around those institutions.
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           Sean P Carlin (Post author)

           February 25, 2018 at 3:38 pm

           Michael,

           I always reply to anyone who takes the time to read and comment on one of these pieces! The next essay, which posts this week, is very much a direct response to folks like yourself who’ve taken the initiative to engage me so thoughtfully in conversation on these issues, a gesture I very much value and appreciate.

           Yes, unlike, say, The Maltese Falcon (1941), which was the second remake in the span of a decade(!) of a film itself adapted from a novel, the filmmakers of today’s popular entertainments often have questionable knowledge of or proper reverence for the material they’re remaking. Perhaps the most egregious example is, as you pointed out, J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek, which owes more to Star Wars than it ever did to Roddenberry. As I discussed in my analysis of all thirteen Star Trek feature films, a good Trek story always imparted a profound philosophical insight into human nature, something utterly lacking in the big-budget cosplay of the recent three entries. I think they are pretty disgraceful movies — big and dumb and about nothing — that shit all over Trek the way The Last Jedi did to Star Wars.

           It should tell us something that Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville is much closer in tone, spirit, and intent to Star Trek (particularly The Next Generation) than Star Trek: Discovery, which is yet another cynical, open-ended, postnarrative soap opera — it’s desperate to be Game of Thrones in outer space — that doesn’t do anything whatsoever (at least based on what I’ve sampled) that we haven’t already seen in countless other iterations of Trek. Contrast that with The Orville, which embraces Roddenberry’s utopian ideals and tells a single, closed-ended story per episode — with a point. With a takeaway. With — dare I say it? — a moral. Good for MacFarlane for daring to be square. Who would’ve imagined that old-fashioned, optimistic storytelling would one day be subversive?

           To echo your sentiment: We can certainly continue to keep reliable (but creatively depleted) brands like Star Trek and The Simpsons on life support, but we do so at the expense of our own cultural growth and diversity. As Watchmen scribe Alan Moore so eloquently put it:

           “I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times” (Pádraig Ó Méalóid AKA Slovobooks; “Last Alan Moore Interview?,” blog entry by Pádraig Ó Méalóid, January 9, 2014, https://slovobooks.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/last-alan-moore-interview/).

           So, in that sense, the public rebuke of the DCEU and Ghostbusters and now The Mummy and The Last Jedi gives me hope that maybe we’re finally aching for new stories, relevant and sufficient to the times we are living in. There’s no shortage of creative filmmaking out there — I recently professed my love for Anna Biller’s absolutely glorious and creatively daring The Love Witch — we just have to decide as a culture that the Skywalkers and the Super Friends and the Enterprise all had their day, and now it’s time for something else. Maybe we’re getting there. I’ll very much look forward to chatting with you about this in the months and years ahead…

           Keep the faith, man. And stay outspoken and creative!

           Sean
2. 

   Erik

   January 29, 2018 at 10:26 am

   I didn’t see The Last Jedi, simply because I’m not a band-wagoner who goes to see much on opening night or anywhere close, unless it just so happens that that’s a night I have free. But your entire discussion here caused me to hearken back to your posts on the relatively recent introduction of “post-narrative” writing and it’s growing presence as a replacement for traditional, plot-driven story arcs. I wonder if these new producers are a product of this post-narrative thinking and approach, deeming it of primary value to drop people into “the world,” without much thought to character development or plot fulfillment. In that context, “milking the sea cows” would make sense: it’s a lingering and unique visit to a place in “the world” and therefore has value, despite it’s detachment from character or plot.

   I’m not defending it. I’m just able to think about possibilities in a new context, thanks to other ideas you’ve presented here on your blog since I became acquainted with it and you.

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   • 

     Sean P Carlin (Post author)

     January 29, 2018 at 2:39 pm

     You’re 100% correct, young Padawan! The collapse of narrative — our collective sense of linearity, our very trust in the institution of storytelling itself — that Rushkoff identified in Present Shock is very much a factor as to why The Last Jedi feels like such a radical aesthetic departure from conventional Star Wars. That is something I didn’t address in the post itself, which was already running long, because it would’ve led the essay down a path somewhat tangential (though not altogether unrelated) to the thesis, but let’s discuss it here.

     The Aristotelian story arc — Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” — is broken; it no longer reflects the way we see the world in our Digital Age. Explains Rushkoff:

     “Right now, there aren’t really any [traditional stories] because we’ve woken up from 2,000 years of it. We were fools. We don’t want to be fooled again in that way, so when the narrative gets broken, whether it’s by 9/11, or the Internet, or the collapse of the economy, we look back and say, ‘Those great narratives of the 20th century, most of them were lies.’ Yeah, Martin Luther King Jr. was cool and I guess Gandhi was cool, but most of these things, like Nazism and communism and capitalism, and all of the ‘isms,’ were all really manipulative stories. Advertisers abused the stories so much that we don’t want to surrender our trust to anyone. We don’t trust the storytellers anymore, except in very few circumstances. Even our movies are all about time travel and moving backward because we don’t want to just go down that single path.”

     He also says:

     “When we do [consume stories], much of it is this ongoing odyssey format, like Game of Thrones, or a fantasy role-playing video game. You’re no longer watching the protagonist: Now you are the protagonist, making a series of choices in a story that gets more open rather than more closed as it goes along. There is no ending.”

     That’s important to understand, because it explains the narrative schizophrenia that’s bedeviling Star Wars at present. I doubt Rian Johnson is consciously aware of this (unless by some chance he’s read Rushkoff), but The Last Jedi is very much a story caught between eras: The series has Joseph Campbell in its DNA — Baby Boomer Lucas consciously, as he’s stated publicly on numerous occasions, created a conventional single-protagonist hero’s journey when he wrote it — yet Gen-Xer Johnson (unconsciously?) felt compelled to “modernize” the storytelling, presenting a fractured “postnarrative” sequence of events in which elements seldom correlate or pay off, they just happen or exist as part of this sprawling galaxy.

     So, you had Abrams raise all these questions in The Force Awakens — Rey’s parentage, Snoke’s origin — for which, let’s face it, he didn’t really have answers. (Let’s not forget that Abrams created the quintessential piece of 21st-century postnarrative fiction Lost, which was all about leading us down a rabbit hole of compounding questions for which there were never any answers, so shame on us for not catching wise to his tricks at this point.) And then Johnson, running with the ball Abrams passed him, simply disregarded all of that with the stroke of his hand. Not merely ignored it, mind you — dismissed it as nothing… and then told the audience (through the dialogue of certain characters) that it was foolish to have even expected any of that to pay off! That’s what (rightfully) pissed fans off — that they’d been teed-up for answers and then told they were assholes for having wasted two years expecting them.

     But let’s be clear: That sort of worldview the essence of postnarrativity. It’s not about providing answers, or satisfying resolutions, or giving us a story arc that follows the linear journey — and emotional transformation — of a single protagonist. Rather, it’s simply about presenting a hyperlinked narrative that grows more open as it goes along, and never culminates in a moment of catharsis, because there are no endings in an ever-on Digital Age. So the questions these kinds of stories raise, Rushkoff explains, “are the questions of our time: What is this about? What is it for? Why am I here? When you no longer have these great, overarching narratives, like the one where you’ll go to college and get a job and then retire, it’s almost like we’re in that plateau of middle age, where we say, ‘Now what?'”

     Thusly, postnarrativity has emerged as a viable form of fiction because the prescriptive hero’s journey was no longer helping people contextualize their place in a nonlinear, digital world; there’s nothing, therefore, inherently wrong with presentist literature. And perhaps, as you suggest above, Johnson unconsciously recognizes that audiences respond to a different mode of storytelling in our new millennium, and he is simply trying to accommodate that.

     The trouble I think he’s run into, however, is that a postnarrative approach is at odds with the way Star Wars — a forty-year-old relic of another era — was designed. It’s like a xenograft: They’re trying to transplant organs from one species to another… and finding that the host is rejecting the foreign tissue. And that was a concern I expressed in private conversations I had with colleagues when Disney launched their version of Star Wars, based on the “cinematic universe” model they’d successfully pioneered via Marvel; I thought they might be fiddling with story mechanics they didn’t fully understand. I was pooh-poohed at the time for the suggestion… but it seems as though it might be coming to bear, if the angered response to The Last Jedi is any indication.

     If this franchise is going to have a viable future, it either needs to scratch this last movie and commit to being an old-fashioned hero’s journey, or, conversely, use The Last Jedi as a starting point for a new postnarrative Star Wars which is all about open-ended world exploration in which we don’t see this galaxy through the eyes of a surrogate (like Anakin or Luke or Rey), but rather, as Rushkoff says, we are the protagonist making a series of choices within that fictional realm. It’s got to be one or the other, though; if they try to walk the line they will doom this enterprise to failure.

     But in order to do that, they would need someone to spearhead the franchise with both an institutionalized understanding of Star Wars as well as a command of the differing (and incompatible) modes of narrative and make a choice to adhere to one or the other, versus what they’re doing now, which is imposing 21st-century sensibilities on a 20th-century creation. If they understood this stuff, perhaps they could get the ship back on course. But Hollywood being Hollywood, I am far from optimistic.

     Anyway, pal, thank you for bringing this subject up, because it was worth discussing as a supplement to the main point. I think it also serves to illustrate just how complex story mechanics can be, and why true mastery of craft — something I’ve long-advocated via this blog — is a pretty uncommon thing, even amongst the custodians of our popular fictions.

     Sean

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       Erik

       January 29, 2018 at 4:06 pm

       I often find myself wishing I could be the proverbial fly on the wall and hear the actual conversations people had going into a venture—to know for certain. But I guess, then, where would the fun and the conversation be?

       I myself don’t have any desire to linger in a world for the sake of the world. I want to fall in love with characters and miss them—not the world or the movie itself—when the reel stops.

       Reply
       • 

         Sean P Carlin (Post author)

         January 30, 2018 at 11:40 am

         You know, people talk themselves into bad ideas all the time — that certainly isn’t exclusive to Hollywood. What complicates Hollywood, of course, is that you have big egos, and Big Money, not to mention creative matters are inherently subjective, which takes all the science out of decision-making. And you apply all those tricky X-factors to a culturally beloved franchise — to say nothing of billion-dollar corporate asset — like Star Wars, which everyone has a strong opinion about, and it’s almost a foregone conclusion that what you end up with is a Frankenstein’s monster of incompatible components. The original Star Wars worked because it was the singular vision of a single artist who wrangled the right talent, and pushed the movie through when no one else believed in it. It took one determined guy — George Lucas — to get that made. That took vision, and it took grit.

         Now, however, these movies are made in boardrooms, by people without vision who arrogantly think they’ve purchased a “magic formula” for commercial storytelling. But as I said to Dell in the comment above, Lucas figured these movies out through trial and error, drawing from personal influences as diverse as Flash Gordon and The Hidden Fortress and The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Lord of the Rings, producing many unsuccessful (and jettisoned) drafts, before finally conjuring the very unique alchemy that ultimately resonated the world over. And that’s a trick that’s never really been repeated since the original trilogy, and audiences — who’d hoped Disney would “redeem” the franchise in the wake of Lucas’s prequels — are finally starting to recognize that maybe Star Wars was merely a product of the right filmmaker with the right story at the right moment in our cultural history, all cohering to create something special — something that transcended logic and formula — never to be reproduced, it turns out, in quite the same way.

         As for The Last Jedi specifically, I’ve heard (and who knows how true any of this is?) that Disney CEO Bob Iger was sold on Johnson’s vision from Day One — he was a big supporter of where Johnson saw the series heading — and when the guy at the top of the food chain has put his muscle behind a particular filmmaker and project, who’s gonna speak up and say, “Is all of this really a good idea?” But perhaps there will be consequences; it’s very possible the brand’s been damaged. God knows, Last Jedi has left a bad taste in the mouth of a lot of fans — quite rightfully — and word on the street is that Disney is already preparing for this May’s Solo: A Star Wars Story to bomb. Who knows — perhaps Star Wars will be remembered, over the long haul, as a cautionary tale about the perils of hubris?

         To address your last comment, I’ll turn to Rushkoff again:

         “There’s still room for traditional stories. It’s just that we have to almost consciously reintegrate those stories and understand that they’re just one way of seeing the world. … But I do think that as we get a little bit more comfortable, or maybe as we get uncomfortable in a purely digital world, we will start to ache again for these more prescriptive narratives and, hopefully, turn to trustworthy storytellers to do it.”

         Reply
3. 

   Carlos Tello de Meneses

   January 29, 2018 at 11:58 am

   It’s been a while, Sean, but I loved your take on the whole thing. Independently from any storytelling shortcomings and/or virtues Last Jedi might have, the whole discussion about what this movie (and movies like it) should do has left a sour taste on my mouth. A lot of entitlement, a lot of frustration towards this movies that aren’t really about the movies themselves, but about what they represent. Like you said, tears in the rain. Trying to recapture what we felt the first time we fell in love with movies (hell, this is a usual problem in relationships as well, misguided expectations) is a recipe for dissappointment. I remember reading (a rather cynical take, but no less accurate) David Mamet’s thoughts on the issue on “The Three Uses of the Knife” a couple of years ago and feeling this queasiness ’cause I knew he was right about many things. After watching the Return of the King when I was 14 (the movie that set me on the path of becoming a storyteller) I remember spending some years trying to recapture that feeling. 99% of the time I was dissappointed, 99% I was thinking: “I wish I were watching LotR again”. What I was actually wishing , like you said, was “watching it again for the first time”. An impossibilty. I eventually realized what I was doing and I managed to reset my expectations. Back then I thought about it as if I were trying to lose my virginity again everytime I had sex (which, life being life, it isn’t such a big deal either).

   At its worst, this feeling of trying to “recapture the magic” is, I fear, arrested development. It’s a trap, a prison. I have mostly moved on from superhero storytelling, but when I do enjoy something in the genre, I do it, I want to believe, genuinely. Not as something I lost that I regained, but as something new, and interestingly enough, as something I’ve always had. Last year I watched this anime called “My hero academia”. For me, it captures what supehero storytelling should and can do. I loved it not because it made me feel like a kid again, I loved it because it ignited the stuff that these stories set afire when I was a kid. But it was a new fire, with new lumber.

   What many producers can’t realize is that It’s impossible to set new fires from ashes, which is what most franchise storytelling is trying to do. They should let us all, audiences and writers alike, go into the forest looking for new trees.

   Cheers,

   Carlos Tello de Meneses

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     Sean P Carlin (Post author)

     January 30, 2018 at 1:55 pm

     Carlos! So nice to hear from you! Happy New Year! Hope you’ve been healthy and productive.

     Everything you’ve said here… very well-stated, my friend. I concur with all of it. I particularly loved this sentiment: “It’s impossible to set new fires from ashes, which is what most franchise storytelling is trying to do.” Too true.

     The longing to recapture the innocence and wonders — the magic — of youth existed long before Generation X turned ’80s nostalgia into a billion-dollar industry. Boomers yearned for 1950s Americana (many of them still do, an altogether different matter), which was reflected in the popular culture of the 1970s with the likes of Happy Days and Grease and Lucas’ own American Graffiti.

     Thornton Wilder’s Our Town concludes, quite poignantly, with Emily, now in the afterlife, opting (against better advice) to relive the day of her twelfth birthday, before succumbing to overbearing heartache at the experience. Wilder understood that every moment should be cherished as it happens, because it doesn’t come around again. To truly live in a moment is to understand — and appreciate — that it’s ephemeral, it’s fluid; one can no more pluck it out of the ether and preserve it than one could a snowflake, or a rainbow. These wonders are of a moment, beautiful because they’re fleeting, limited, rarefied. If these were things that could be saved to our iPhones and relived on demand, they wouldn’t be special or even worth preserving.

     But the thing is, modern technology has allowed us to store those moments indefinitely, through photography, and now video (ever see someone watch a live concert through the screen on their phone?); even recorded art — music and movies — help “freeze” the liquidity of a moment for us: A pop song has the special power to take us back to the time it was a Top 40 hit (the reason why people cherish their prom songs); a movie is a snapshot of precisely what we were feeling when we first saw it, how it moved us and made us see the world from a new perspective. That’s the sort of experience that can make an indelible impression on us, just like losing one’s virginity, and it’s tempting to periodically refer to those digital reminders in the hopes of recapturing the magic of the particular instant they captured.

     And I was discussing this very thing with Wendy Weir over on her blog, Greater Than Gravity, the other day: that while modern technology supplements our faulty memories, it has also given us this very unnatural opportunity to live in a perpetual yesterday, to be frozen at a point in time like a mosquito in amber. Maybe total recall isn’t always a good thing; maybe there’s a reason human beings are programmed to forget. Forgetting, after all, is what allows wounds to heal, so we can go about the business of living — moment to moment; each one, like snowflakes, different from the next.

     Speaking for myself, I certainly cherish the special cinematic experiences of my own youth, like the first time I saw Return of the Jedi, and Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Those moments, to quote Blade Runner again, are lost in time now. They exist only in my heart and mind, and I have even found that revisiting those films can diminish, rather than quicken, the special feeling they once evoked. Sometimes, rather than serving as audiovisual simulations that can be revisited ad infinitum, those movies are best kept merely as abstract reminders of my lost innocence. Because a DVD can be replayed, but one’s childhood cannot. Innocence slips away.

     And yet here’s what I got in return: Experience. Wisdom. Skill. And now I get to take all those things and create stories of my own — snapshots of this moment in time. That gives me a thrill that Star Wars and Back to the Future, much as I love them, never could. So what I do is this: I remember the special feelings those stories stirred in me, and try to let that be the spirit that guides me in the creation of my own work. That’s how those movies — and the experiences of seeing them for the first time — continue to pay dividends: not as totems of another time but rather as creative and emotional apogees to strive for. As influence, and inspiration.

     So my advice to you would be this: Don’t lose touch with what you felt the first time you saw The Return of the King. Because that fourteen-year-old isn’t you anymore; instead, he is now your target audience. Just worry about impressing him, your fourteen-year-old self, and you’ll have created plenty of new magic to go around. We needn’t lose touch with the child within, merely redefine our relationship with him: He’s a companion on our journey, a reminder of the way station — childhood — we’ve left behind.

     Stay in touch, pal!

     Sean

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       Carlos Tello de Meneses

       February 3, 2018 at 5:05 pm

       Hey, Sean!

       Happy New Year to you too!

       I’m happy to read we agree on many things regarding this topic. I mean, trying to make someone else feel what I felt the first time I watched RotK is the whole reason I became a storyteller. Ray Bradbury used to write that we shouldn’t lose sight of the stories that shaped us in our youth because they’re one of the main bulding blocks of who we are not just as writers, but as people. That doesn’t mean longing for the days gone, but what they mean for the days moving forward and for the people we hope to inspire.

       Carlos

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         Sean P Carlin (Post author)

         February 4, 2018 at 1:51 pm

         Great insight from Bradbury! That’s what Lucas did, and that’s what I try to do in my own work: take my creative influences and recast them in my own image — make them reflect the world as I see it. Both Star Wars and Willow owe a great debt to Tolkien, for starters, but they ultimately serve Lucas’ worldview. Lucas never lost touch with what he felt when he watched those old Republic serials, and he merged that visceral thrill with scholarly interests he developed later, like mythopoeia and anthropology, and from that mélange, respectively, Star Wars and Indiana Jones were born. He fused a childlike spirit with an academic sophistication, and created two of our greatest contemporary cultural treasures in the process.

         Keeping in touch with the child within — something all people, artists foremost, should strive to do — doesn’t mean willfully stunting one’s own intellectual and emotional development. And while I’m sure it’s a childhood dream come true for filmmakers like Abrams and Johnson to make their own Star Wars films — kind of like playing with the biggest playset imaginable, complete with real-life action figures! — there’s something creatively bankrupt and artistically misguided about it. Children play with toys, because it’s what teaches them to develop their imaginations. Later, as teenagers, maybe we even try our hands at fan fiction; I certainly did: I wrote a story in high school called “Indiana Jones and the River Styx.” Those were the early stages of my artistic development: first creating freeform reenactments with action figures, then later trying to construct more disciplined narratives within the framework of established worlds and characters. But eventually, I had my own things to say, and action heroes of my own creation whose adventures I wanted to chronicle. And Lucas remains to this day an important formative influence for me in that respect, but, to be clear, he’s only one of many. (Something I’ll explore deeper in the next post.)

         For me, movies like The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and now The Last Jedi, which are nothing more than big-budget fan fiction, represent a generation — my generation, sad to say — that was given a chance to explore new fictive worlds, yet opted instead to revisit the old ones ad infinitum. Whether you like those films or whether you don’t, you can’t help but ask, What are they worth? They don’t advance new ideas or offer new cultural insights; they just serve up the same old comfort food — which somehow tastes a little less delicious with every serving.

         And that, to me, is how Gen X has failed in its responsibility to the culture. Far from inspiring our imaginations, we’ve dedicated billions of dollars to reenacting Star Wars as opposed to reinventing it as something new and different and relevant to the folkways of the here and now. These movies aren’t made with a childlike spirit, but rather a childish one. (For an excellent overview of the differences, see this post from our friend Erik Tyler.) They’re trying to recapture a feeling from childhood, but they’re going about it the entirely wrong way: They’re hoping to recreate the moment itself, which is gone and never coming back, versus the sensation we felt when we first experienced it, which is renewable, provided we do our part as artists to facilitate the evolution of our stories and not the endless recapitulation of them. That’s the lesson to take from Lucas and Star Wars — and certainly Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, too — as you create your own works of narrative art.

         Keep me posted on your progress, Carlos…

         Sean

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           Carlos Tello de Meneses

           February 4, 2018 at 8:13 pm

           I believe many of the same things. While thinking about what I’d do if I could play with certain characters and worlds, I always thought these were supposed to be thought experiments and/or catalyst for creating my own worlds. After all, we have Rio Bravo only because of Hawkes and Ford’s contempt for High Noon. And like you said, we have Star wars thanks to Lucas’ love for sci-fi serials and we have Middle-Earth thanks to Tolkien’s obsession with mythology and language. It’s alchemy. I want my own worlds to be an extension of myself, not “original” or “unique” ’cause I think those are tricky concepts, but mine, something only I could have created, and I belive that’s only possible through an honest exploration of what makes me “me”, what I love, what I hate, what i believe in, and such.

           It’s always a pleasure trading words with you, Sean, and I’ll certainly keep you posted!
         • 

           Sean P Carlin (Post author)

           February 6, 2018 at 5:20 pm

           That’s right: The narrative arts are a continuum, with new offerings building upon — and sometimes directly and even consciously rebuking — what came before. So, in the example you pointed out, John Wayne makes Rio Bravo as a response to High Noon — an alternative view of the American West and its archetypal hero. But then Clint Eastwood made a bunch of Westerns in the early days of his career, a decade or so after Rio Bravo, that were a reaction to the mythic John Ford/John Wayne view of the West: They were far darker, not at all romantic, and more morally ambiguous. And Wayne let Eastwood know of his distaste for films like High Plains Drifter, telling him in a letter: “That isn’t what the West was all about. That isn’t the American people who settled this country.” But Eastwood had a different interpretation of our mythologized history than Wayne, who himself had a different interpretation than Gary Cooper. All were valid in that they were sincere efforts, and resonated with (many of the same) audiences throughout multiple eras. Our culture is enriched by having all those diverse points of view.

           E. L. James famously wrote a bunch of Twilight fan fiction that she then turned into its own multiplatform franchise: Fifty Shades of Grey. And without opining on the artistic merits of either of those series (which I’ve done elsewhere), James clearly used her passion for Meyer’s fiction as a “thought experiment” — a creative incubator — until what emerged more accurately represented her interests and particular imagination (whatever you may think of it).

           Now, most fan fiction we may write never evolves into an independent story of its own — and that it did in this case betrays the problematic nature of both James and Meyer’s work — but as an exercise in creative evolution, it’s can be a helpful developmental tool. We should want to explore our own worlds, and create our own characters, even if they owe a debt — as everything inevitably does — to someone else’s work. That’s why storytellers like J. J. Abrams — and now David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, who’ll be jumping George Martin’s ship for George Lucas’ — are such an enigma to me. With all that considerable clout, don’t you motherfuckers ever want to write something that comes from within you?

           Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe there’s something to be said for making an actual living as a storyteller, and working on projects that draw a substantial audience, and that that doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive with artistic integrity. But for reasons discussed in this post, as well several others on this blog, and per the conversations you and I have had both on- and offline, Star Wars seems ever more like the ephemera of a previous century, and it has become emblematic, in my view, of a backward-looking, nostalgia-addicted generation that has abdicated its responsibility to the culture in pursuit of an ever-elusive nostalgic fix. When George Lucas created it, Star Wars was anything but a “sure thing”; it took courage and vision to pursue that project, against the counsel of powerful naysayers. Has Gen X thus far shown that degree of creative courage? Or are we simply content getting paid big bucks to write fan fiction?

           Thanks, Carlos. Wishing you only the best of luck on your own projects…
4. 

   D. Wallace Peach

   January 29, 2018 at 4:46 pm

   I think Boylan hit the nail on the head when she said that we like the movies we grew up with because they take us back in time to that time in our lives. I know that’s true of many movies for me. They’re classics in my mind because of where I was, who I was, and what was happening around me. Music is a great example of how what we grew up with still owns a rich portion of our hearts.

   Franchises are fine for a while but as I age they fail to recapture the feeling I had when I was ten or sixteen. I lost interest in Star Wars, Star Trek, and many of the Super Hero movies. Part of it may be the screen writing, but I’ll bet a lot of it is just outgrowing the stories. It would be nice if Hollywood realized that and started creating the wonders that will capture us as well as the new generation. I would love that. 🙂

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     Sean P Carlin (Post author)

     January 30, 2018 at 5:17 pm

     Hey, Diana!

     Yes, the Boylan quote really resonated with me, too. The sheer newness of movies — and books and music, too — at that age, when we’re receptive to the wonders of storytelling, unaffected by cynicism, is I think in part what imprints on our minds, and stays with us for the rest of our lives. If you’re a kid in 1977 who’s never left his middle-class suburb, and you go see Star Wars, you’ve just had an entire universe opened up to you! And if Star Wars had gracefully and permanently exited the cultural stage in 1983, I think my generation would feel a healthy fondness for it akin to Back to the Future and Ghostbusters, but perhaps not an obsessive interest… one cultivated by the continuing stream of new movies/novels/TV shows/videogames. And when you wait thirty years to see Luke Skywalker back in action — an event endlessly teased and exploited by both the filmmakers and the studio — only to basically be told you were an idiot to wait around for this guy, he isn’t who you remember, and we’re not going to give him any meaningful business in this story, you have the right to feel affronted by that, even if you yourself are somewhat complicit in the sense of getting your expectations up. But expectations or no, The Last Jedi had a strange streak of contempt for first-generation fans — it enjoyed disappointing them — and that, in my view, is a complete bastardization of what Lucas set out to do when he created this series.

     So maybe Star Wars stayed too long at the party, or we did, or both entities did together, but however it happened, the law of diminishing returns seems to have finally caught up with this franchise. We do outgrow these things, after all. I mean, how many times can you consume the same story before you hunger for something different? That’s a question I’ve spent the last two years asking publicly, and I never would have guessed that at the close of 2017 we’d see Justice League catastrophically underperform, and The Last Jedi drive diehard fans from Star Wars in droves. Didn’t imagine that was gonna actually happen. Maybe it was the kick in the ass Gen X needed to at long last let go of the 1980s…? We may very well end up thanking Rian Johnson for what he did!

     Thanks for reading and commenting, Diana! And feel free, anytime, to stop by and share new books or movies or TV that you think deserve wider recognition…

     Sean

     Reply
5. 

   Jacqui Murray

   January 29, 2018 at 6:12 pm

   Great summary. I had no intention of reading this entire piece (I usually allot 2-3 minutes to a post!) but I couldn’t stop. My 30-year-old son, an Army sergeant and committed nerd/sci fi fan (he’s in satellites; he says they’re all Marvel comic et al fans) felt meh about it. But your nephew–I bet that’s the pulse of the problem. We long-time SW fans do have expectations and your nephew listened with an open mind.

   I’m glad I kept reading. Nicely pulled together.

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     Sean P Carlin (Post author)

     January 30, 2018 at 5:46 pm

     Well, thank you, Jacqui, for sticking with the entire piece, a lengthy one even by my standards! I don’t take the time you spent reading it for granted. For the past two years, I’ve mostly refrained from weighing in on the new Star Wars movies, since everyone has an opinion about them, and who needs yet one more? But I felt, in this instance, I had a different perspective to bring to the table — up till now it’s been a strictly binary debate online, with defenders calling The Last Jedi a subversive masterwork, detractors a tone-deaf betrayal — and I felt there was a more truthful, nuanced position I hadn’t seen expressed. And once I started typing, I realized I had a lot to say! (This post should be, if all goes to plan, my final word on Star Wars.) Thanks for reading and commenting.

     You’re 100% right: My nephew — like all of his peers — isn’t bringing forty years of emotional baggage and heightened expectation to every new Star Wars film. My generation grew up alongside Star Wars, whereas he’s more of a third-generation fan — born well after the originals and even a year after the last prequel — so Star Wars already has a long history that he is able to catch up on over a period of weeks, not years, like those of us who lived with it through that history in real time. It’s a different relationship (a narrative versus postnarrative association, now that I’m thinking about it).

     And Disney is discovering that the cultural love for Star Wars is more complicated and multifaceted than they’d realized — that there are different generations of fans that bring different expectations to each movie, and ya just can’t please all the people all the time. And Star Wars is struggling right now to figure out which faction to service, and how to service them, and they’ve thus far attempted two wildly diverse approaches — nostalgic (The Force Awakens) and iconoclastic (The Last Jedi) — to mixed feedback. And as I’ve noted in other replies on this post, Disney is going to have to figure out who the target audience is (especially now that they’ve alienated the diehards), and settle on a consistent aesthetic (and preferably the vision of a single filmmaker) that can serve as the house style. They should have done that to start, of course, but that’s what they need to do — pronto — if they’re going to turn this ship around. Ball’s in their court.

     Reply
6. 

   Stacey Wilk

   February 1, 2018 at 5:47 am

   Hi Sean. I always look forward to your posts. It appears you and your readers have hit on all the hot buttons. (I skimmed the comments section) But I’ll add this, which someone may have said, but Hollywood is interested in making money. Profit is more important than whether or not the person sitting in the seat feels nostalgia, and if spectacle sells over substance, guess what you’re going to see?

   We all bring to the movies or to books or any art form our own perceptions and experiences that influence whether or not we enjoy that piece of art. How we feel watching a movie at the age of ten will most likely not be the same thirty-five years later. We aren’t the same person any longer.

   Recently my seventeen-year-old read A Clockwork Orange. He loved it. I had never read it, somehow missing it all these years, so I decided to read it too. About half-way through I said, “this book is awful” and stopped reading it. For me, that book was nothing but gratuitous violence. My son could not understand my view on the book. In fact, was a little insulted that I didn’t enjoy the book as much as he did.

   I explained to him, his view of the world is different than mine. My experiences and perceptions skew my opinions on art. As do his. He isn’t wrong in liking that book. If he enjoyed, felt some emotion from it, was moved by it, that was exactly what should happen. What the author hoped would happen. Had I read that book in high school I may have a different opinion. And possibly thirty years from now, should he reread that book he may wonder what he liked about it in the first place.

   I do wish all the reboots would go away. I’m certain plenty of very good stories are floating around waiting for a place to land. But again, why should Hollywood or any publisher invest in the unknown when they can back what has already proved to be the winning horse? Someone should tell them, that horse is old, tired, and in need of a nap.

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   • 

     Sean P Carlin (Post author)

     February 1, 2018 at 2:16 pm

     Stacey! Thanks so much for the thoughtful, comprehensive response!

     To continue along your line of thinking, what we respond to in art very much depends on a host of factors: our age, our gender, our socioeconomic status, our life experiences — to say nothing of our unique personalities and sensibilities. All of that is a contributing factor. For instance, I know a lot of guys my age — white males from upper-middle-class suburbs, incidentally — who spent their teenage years in the ’90s listening to hip-hop and even hardcore gangsta rap. I never did, despite the fact that the genre has its origins in my hometown of the Bronx; oddly enough, I related more to hard-rock bands like Rush and the Who (neither of which are even American!), who often sang about their experiences growing up in middle-class suburbia!

     But perhaps for my suburban counterparts, rap music put them in touch with a culture and a way of life that was intriguing yet foreign to them. The very particular Bronx experience that art form expressed, though — and, to be sure, hip-hop, like all modes of artistic expression, arose from an emotional need for it — wasn’t my Bronx experience, so it didn’t really resonate with my teenage self. Instead, I looked to art — be it music, books, cinema — to take me to worlds that were foreign to my experiences, that piqued my intrigue. It was only in adulthood that I came to appreciate what rap music was doing — articulating a particular cultural experience — and it’s only now, as an artist myself, that I have returned to my roots to tell stories about the City of New York as I know it (in Escape from Rikers Island, et al.), something I discussed in last month’s reflection on my Bronx upbringing.

     With particular respect to Star Wars, it was only through my response to Jacqui‘s comment above — and that’s why I thrive on this kind of direct dialogue, because it helps me refine and better understand my own positions on the topics I write about — that I realized Disney is facing something of a unique conundrum with this franchise. I’m assuming, when they acquired the rights to it from Lucasfilm, they thought, “Great! Everyone loves Star Wars! We got ourselves a license to print money, baby!”

     And I think what they’re discovering is that “everyone” accounts for different factions of fans who bring correspondingly different expectations to each new Star Wars movie. On the one hand, you’ve got the first-generation fans who grew up with this series in real time, and thusly feel very proprietary about it; they’ve also spent the last thirty-five years both waiting to see Luke Skywalker back in action, and wondering if that would in fact ever even happen. So, for them, The Last Jedi is the culmination of literally a lifetime of hopes and dreams, a reunion with a childhood hero they didn’t know for certain they’d ever see again.

     On the other hand, you’ve got the third-generation fans, for whom forty years of history is binge-experienced — compressed and consumed like a season of television that streams on Netflix. They haven’t invested the same extensive volume of time — the same years of their lives — in Star Wars, so what an eleven-year-old expects from the experience isn’t what a forty-year-old does. Consequently, Disney finds itself trying to service two incompatible and irreconcilable demographics. So, I think a franchise they assumed had can’t-miss four-quadrant appeal is proving, because of the long history of the series and the nature of the emotional (and temporal) relationship different generations have with it, to be a more complicated beast to manage than they’d anticipated. That’s something I find fascinating, and an aspect of all this I hadn’t really considered when I wrote the post itself. (So thanks for letting me piggyback it on my reply to your comment, Stacey!)

     To come back around to your point, Stacey, yes: Art speaks to us in different ways at different stages of our lives, and it has value as both an expression of something we’re feeling in the moment (the way your son may be responding to antiauthoritarian themes of Clockwork Orange, a message that appeals to teens) as well as a reminder of something we once felt but have since outgrown (like the innocence and wonder Star Wars evoked, or the violence and misogyny I now find so repugnant in many of the ’80s action films I adored as an adolescent). That’s the complexity of the gift art can give us: It can provide the insight into human nature we need to grow emotionally and intellectually, and it can also serve as a marker of that growth — a reminder of a way we used to feel but no longer do. And for many of my friends — the ones who said they think they may’ve outgrown Star Wars — The Last Jedi serves as an agent of the latter. All that means — and they can and should take heart from this — is the Star Wars they knew and loved now offers a different, less immediate, kind of value to them.

     Thanks so much for chiming in on this; I’ve really been enjoying the conversation this piece provoked, and I’m happy you contributed.

     Sean

     P.S. I’ve never read A Clockwork Orange myself. Saw the movie when I was a kid and found it extremely unpleasant and unappealing. I know it has its ardent supporters, and I’m sure I’d feel differently — certainly more appreciative of it — were I to watch it again (and/or read the book), but I just have no interest in revisiting it, a position I’m sure you second!

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     • 

       Stacey Wilk

       February 3, 2018 at 2:12 pm

       Sean,

       You’ve brought up so many more wonderful points I don’t want your response to go unacknowledged, but I don’t know what to hit on first.

       I’m wondering if the people at Disney ever sat around a table and discussed who they were really marketing to. Was it everyone and anyone? Old fans, new ones? Did they think about the fact those of us who sat in the theaters in the ’80s would view their movies in one way, and those seeing the movies for the first time, say those born in the 2000s, would want, need, and relate to the story in a completely different way? Just because Mickey Mouse is timeless doesn’t mean Star Wars is.

       Art does speak to us in different ways and at different stages of our lives. And yet, some things, like a song, or a movie, or a book, may always fill our hearts with joy, or make us cringe, and no amount of time or life experience will change that.

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       • 

         Sean P Carlin (Post author)

         February 3, 2018 at 3:34 pm

         The short answer — and you should know by now I never just leave it at that! — to your question as to whether Disney/Lucasfilm thought through which audience they were targeting with these new movies is, No, they didn’t. That was the beauty, after all, of this particular $4 billion investment: The brand appeals to everyone!

         I recall when this plan was first announced — a sequel trilogy interspersed with “standalone” entries — that it sounded to me like Disney was taking a postnarrative approach to universe-building, akin to what they’d done so successfully with Marvel, and I questioned whether they fully understood the story mechanics they were so casually invoking. I remember sharing those concerns with colleagues here in Hollywood who unanimously felt the Lucasfilm Story Group had a tight grip on all this, and understood the responsibility they had to restore the brand’s luster after the bitter pill that was the prequels. I was dubious, though.

         I think, as I argued in my response to Erik above, that the narrative schizophrenia of The Last Jedi is very much an unintended product of a story that’s trying to be postnarrative — that is to say, one in which plotlines quite intentionally don’t correlate or resolve — when the saga itself was consciously designed as a classic monomyth. In other words, the filmmakers imposed incompatible story models — with competing worldviews, no less — on Episode VIII, and found the final product didn’t satisfyingly adhere to either.

         But there’s another aspect to all of this I didn’t consciously acknowledge until I starting discussing the matter further here in the comments, and it also goes to the ways different generations view narrativity. First-generation fans (Gen X) who grew up with Star Wars and watched the saga unfold in real time came to The Last Jedi with hopes of seeing Luke Skywalker back in action again, alongside Han and Leia and Chewie. Right or wrong, that’s what we expected. And Rian Johnson, exercising questionable wisdom, basically told those fans to fuck off.

         Whereas for third-generation fans, like my eleven-year-old nephew, the vast history of Star Wars — the one Gen X spent literally a lifetime investing in, waiting patiently for years between movies — is reduced to an on-demand, binged experience: In the span of a few weeks — if even that long — they’ve caught themselves up on forty years of history and they’re ready for the next installment. So the “return of Luke Skywalker” doesn’t carry the same emotional weight or sense of expectation for them, therefore they aren’t disappointed by how he was depicted in The Last Jedi — it’s just one more episode in the never-ending continuum of the saga, right? And they’re not wrong to feel that way — it’s just the perspective they have on the material having made no temporal investment in it. It’s the difference between showing up for the harvest versus having sown the seeds and tended the crops.

         And I don’t believe for one minute Disney — or Lucasfilm, or its president Kathleen Kennedy — took any of that into consideration. I think there was probably a very hubristic sense of confidence in the brand — that, like Mickey Mouse, it’s all things to all people, and so long as we include a little bit of this (new characters), and a little bit of that (old characters), there will be something in it for everyone to like.

         And that is corporate storytelling at it’s absolute worst. Star Wars has proven to be a much trickier brand to manage than they anticipated, because the long history of the saga, dating back to before the Digital Age and the collapse of linear narrativity, means that it means different things to different generations; it doesn’t just automatically appeal to all of them. But there’s no question that if you’re a first-generation fan, and you waited thirty-five years for the onscreen reunion of Luke, Leia, and Han, that ain’t happenin’ now — we’re past that as a possibility any longer — and if you walked away from The Last Jedi disappointed on account of that, my advice to you is to bail out now. ‘Cause the Star Wars you’ve been waiting for is never coming back. With Episode VIII, the last remnants of Lucas’ Star Wars have been swept away.

         It is what it is. We don’t need to be happy about it to accept it and move on. The Last Jedi at least gives us the opportunity to divorce ourselves from Star Wars if we now choose to.

         And to chime in on your last comment: Yes, some works of art speak to us — continue to resonate — throughout all the seasons of our lives. It’s a rare thing, but it does happen. When I guested on the Spinal Tap Minute podcast last summer, I talked about how, for me, Spinal Tap has been the gift that’s kept on giving — that unlike nearly every other interest/hobby I cultivated at the time I was introduced to Spinal Tap (back in junior high school), Tap still intrigues and entertains me. There are a few other artists, and works of art, that remain timeless and relevant to me, and I really do cherish them, because they are few and far between.

         Reply
7. 

   Michael Wilk

   February 21, 2018 at 10:20 am

   Here’s my take in Abrams and Johnson and how it relates to your critique:

   Abrams and Johnson approached the material from a place of pure contempt. They don’t like Star Wars or Star Trek or any other beloved franchise. They think they’re better and smarter than the original material and so are compelled to try and “fix” something that was never broken. For all their flaws, Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas got their science fiction and fantasy stories right the first time. There was never a need to reinvent the wheel or try to deconstruct it. But we get lazy, stupid little children like Abrams and Johnson who literally want to erase the originals from living memory because they know their own crap won’t be remembered five years from now let alone forty, and so go out of their way to either archive or demean the material. That’s why Johnson seeks to “upend expectations” (code word for trashing the original movies in every way imaginable), and why Abrams tried to have CBS archive the real Star Trek shows and movies and get toy manufacturers to stop selling merchandise based on them.

   The problem is that no one ever told guys like Abrams and Johnson that they can’t tell a story for sh**. Nobody was willing to be the adult in the room when these boys were coasting through film school skipping screenwriting class because they thought they were too cool for it, and explain to them that they don’t have the skills to tell a good story or even a mediocre one, and that they seriously need to re-evaluate their reasons for being in this field. So now we have a generation of corporate movie-makers with no understanding or passion for the craft, who only clock in, do stuff according to a checklist of what the studio demands, and go home thinking they’re the best-est ever because oh look the movie made its money back at the box office and if it didn’t, there’s always disc and digital to make up for any losses.

   In every scene and every interview, there’s a sneering contempt, a level of condescending head-patting that just insults the audience, and then to add injury to insult, berate us for daring to voice our discontent. Seriously, why is no one sitting these a**holes down and telling them that if they don’t go back to film school and get it right this time, they’re finished in Hollywood? Why are studios content to vomit out garbage that now only barely makes back the money thrown at it, and continue to even hire these losers in the first place? Does no one remember what Frank Zappa said about the guys in suits who didn’t understand what they were selling, but were willing to take chances because the return was worth the risk, as opposed to the “grown-up” hippies who think they know better than the consumers what we want?

   Okay, end of rant.

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   • 

     Sean P Carlin (Post author)

     February 22, 2018 at 4:02 pm

     Michael! Welcome to the blog, brotherman! I love a writer/filmmaker with a strong point of view, an informed opinion, and a willingness to express it! You’re the kind of guy I wrote this post for, in fact.

     Please come back next week for an essay I’ll be posting on the difference between imitation and inspiration, in which I’ll talk at far greater length about J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson and their ilk. For now, though, I’ll say this: I think Abrams is a talentless hack without an original idea in his head, hence the reason his entire career has been defined by the visions of other artists, be it Lucas or Roddenberry or Bruce Geller. He’s the perfect filmmaker for a creatively bankrupt studio system that would rather milk old, culturally irrelevant brands over cultivating new ideas for a correspondingly new millennium: Abrams is safe; he’s predictable; he’s reliable; he’s giddily nostalgic. He’s a technician, not an artist.

     Johnson is peculiar. On the basis of the two feature films he made before The Last Jedi — Brick and Looper — you would in no way have singled him out as the Next Great Talent. Brick is so self-consciously stylized, so taken with its own cleverness, and Looper is a deeply problematic narrative for reasons I demonstrated in this post. He’s not a great screenwriter — there’s nothing in his limited oeuvre to suggest he has a masterful grasp on story mechanics — and I have no idea, exactly, what his agenda was with regard to Star Wars: Episode VIII. I’ll certainly say this: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blockbuster movie that displayed such open contempt, to use your word, for its own fan base. It was weird, weird shit, man.

     But in order to understand how a guy like Johnson — a filmmaker with a substandard command of storytelling — gets a gig like Star Wars, you have to come to terms with what I was discussing with dellstories above: The studios and prodcos and agencies all over Hollywood are populated with failed writers who nevertheless found other work in the Biz. So, you’ve got execs and producers that don’t know shit about storytelling — absolutely zero, right? They acquire the rights to an IP like Star Wars, and they know they have something cool — something valuable — on their hands, they just don’t know what to do with it.

     That’s where the screenwriter comes in. They invite writers to come pitch a take on a project — what’s known as, for the sake of those readers out there not in the industry, vying for open assignments — and hands-down every time, the scribe that gets the job is seldom the most talented or qualified, but rather the most personable, the most confident. The best one in a room. Its the screenwriter that walks into a pitch meeting like he’s about to lay a golden egg — the one who sells these eager-but-idiotic execs on a vision — that scores the coveted assignment. Because in a town full of people who don’t know what they’re doing — who are looking to someone else to tell them what to think, and what to like, and how to feel about a piece of material — the filmmaker who can waltz into an office with utter confidence in his pitch, and his abilities to deliver on the promise of that pitch, is the one producers want to be in business with.

     That, after all, is how a piece of shit like Transformers got set up. It was pitched — and sold — as a story about “a boy and his first car.” Great fuckin’ pitch… though that sure as hell wasn’t the movie they made. But that’s irrelevant: The pitch got the screenwriters hired, got the project greenlighted, and got the movie produced…

     And then once a screenwriter or filmmaker has a track record for getting movies made, that makes them even more appealing — even if the movies themselves are dog shit. Take a writer like Skip Woods, whose screenwriting credits include Swordfish, Hitman, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The A-Team, A Good Day to Die Hard, and Sabotage. I mean, holy shit, right? Each one of those is worse than the one before it. (And, just to be fair to Woods, sometimes good writers are arm-twisted into writing shitty material, just as sometimes good scripts make for lousy movies for reasons the writer has nothing to do with, like the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) But, regardless, Woods produces drafts that get films greenlighted, so that makes him all the more attractive to producers and studios.

     It’s like a guy in my former writers group once said: Imagine you’re going in for brain surgery, and you have a choice between two doctors — the first is fully credentialed and capable of performing the surgery, but he’s never technically operated before; the second doctor, on the other hand, has a dozen brain surgeries under his belt… except every single patient died on the table. That’s Skip Woods — a writer whose every produced movie is a dud. But, if given a choice, a studio will always go with a writer with a track record — even a disastrous one — over a newbie. And Abrams and Johnson have track records.

     So, the answer to your admittedly rhetorical question — Why is no one sitting these assholes down and telling them that if they don’t go back to film school and get it right this time, they’re finished in Hollywood? — is because the people hiring them don’t have any more refined sense of story (or basic sense of it, for that matter) than filmmakers like Rian Johnson. I know a guy — a production executive — who was completely perplexed as to how Kathleen Kennedy could’ve allowed the concept/script for The Last Jedi to move forward. The answer is simple: What makes you think Kennedy knows what the fuck she’s doing? Who the hell is she? What are her storytelling credentials, exactly? The reason why no one was willing to be “the adult in the room” is this: There aren’t any adults in the room. It’s all a bunch of undisciplined children.

     Thusly, shitty movies get made, earn a billion dollars, thereby allowing the next shitty movie to get made… which will also earn — wait for it — a billion dollars. It’s only if we, the audience, start demanding better from our popular entertainments will Hollywood stop forcing bad movies down our throats. (And certainly the recent underperformance of Justice League is a step in the right direction. Maybe if Solo bombs, as it’s predicted to, and Episode IX takes a hit as a reaction to discontent with The Last Jedi, Disney may very well get the message. We’ll have to wait and see.)

     I’m so grateful, Michael, to have had your passionate contribution to this discussion. Please stop by again; your “rants” are welcome anytime!

     SPC

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       Michael Wilk

       February 22, 2018 at 8:48 pm

       Heh. I’m glad you liked what I had to say!

       It’s quite clear to me that the same level of contempt for Star Wars by Abrams and Johnson is in display for Star Trek. STD just reeks of hatred for the original series and anyone who likes it. Now, I should point out that I’m only a casual fan. I’ll go to see the movies and stay caught up on the TV show, but I’ve never been to a convention and I don’t generally do cosplay (that said, I do have a 10th Doctor coat, 7th Doctor sweater-vest, and 4th Doctor scarf). But I do enjoy going to see a movie or flipping on the telly to get lost for a while in a good story. And when I’m so blatantly insulted, and then berated on top of that for not taking kindly to the insult, that just pisses me off. So, as Mr. Dirk benedict pointed out years ago, it’s never the studio’s fault or the writers and directors and producers for putting out garbage, bt only ever the audience’s fault for being too “stupid”, “racist”, “sexist”, etc. to appreciate what’s being shat out for consumption.

       Now, by contrast, for all his storytelling flaws—and there are many—you can just tell right away that George Lucas even at his worst expresses a love for cinema and you can see the influences of Tolkien and Kurasawa films and Westerns and old Republic serials, that went into the original Star Wars trilogy. And although, yes, the prequels were largely bad, I will give credit to The Phantom Menace for trying to set up something that could have been great. My problems with it were only that there was no need for Qui-Gon Jin, seeing as how in ESB Obi-Wan’s ghost clearly tells Luke that it was Yoda who’s instructed him, that the droids and Jango/Boba Fett were included, and that Anakin really ought to have been older (close in age to Padme, who also should have been portrayed older) to justify his piloting skills. I think where Lucas went wrong primarily was that in telling the story of the fall of Anakin Skywalker from grace and his transformation into Dath Vader, we are deprived of a fixed point-of-view character. Was the prequel trilogy Anakin’s story? Obi-Wan’s? Palpatine’s? And then it went downhill from there. Oh, and I’m probably the only one who didn’t have a problem with Jar Jar Binks, understanding he was the comic relief.

       And don’t even get me started on that ass clown Steven Moffat. Yeesh!

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         Sean P Carlin (Post author)

         February 25, 2018 at 4:42 pm

         I love intellectual engagement on this sort of stuff, particularly with someone with a strong opinion! My wife once suggested I change the blog’s tagline from “Writer of Things That Go Bump in the Night” to “Highly Academic Discussions about Really Dumb Shit”!

         I opined on Star Trek: Discovery in my previous reply to you, so I won’t reiterate that here, but to address the matter of feeling insulted and berated by a piece of entertainment: Yeah, The Last Jedi sort of says to its audience, “Oh, you thought you were going to get answers to all the questions we set up in the last movie? Well, you’re not, and you were an idiot for ever expecting any.”

         I mean, if there were no answers — and of course there weren’t, because this is J.J. we’re dealing with — then don’t ask the fuckin’ questions in the first place! Why couldn’t they simply have established Rey as a nobody from the get-go, as they more or less did with Luke in A New Hope (before revealing his lineage as the son of Vader in the first sequel)? Weirdly, they effectively did the opposite here: They heavily implied Rey was someone special, only to tell us in the next movie: Nah — she ain’t anyone of significance. (And how exactly did Kylo Ren even know this…?)

         In other words: Don’t set up an expectation on the part of the audience only to yank the rug out from under them and then tell them how goddamn stupid they were to stand on it. To call J.J. a one-trick pony wouldn’t even be accurate, because, time and again with him, there is no trick — merely a setup without a payoff. It’s all cocktease without orgasm.

         And you’re absolutely on the money about Lucas (whose creative process I’m going to look at in this week’s post): The prequels are at least noble failures. He tried something different with A New Hope, and it worked; he tried something different again with The Phantom Menace, and it didn’t. But at least he tried. At least he dared to fail.

         The story arc of the prequels rests on an ill-conceived foundation for, as you rightly observed, a few critical reasons: starting Anakin’s story off at too young an age, failing to give us a fixed-POV character, and basically turning the prequels into an exercise in inevitability. What I mean by that last point is this: In Return of the Jedi, Obi-Wan told Luke — and, by extension, us — how it was that the virtuous Anakin Skywalker became the villainous Darth Vader, and then when Lucas dramatized those events in Revenge of the Sith, they played out exactly as Obi-Wan said.

         Whereas the more dramatically interesting thing to do, in my estimation, would have been to depict the events differently than Obi-Wan recounted them, but to also have accounted for why he didn’t have the whole picture. A few years ago, I developed a backstory to a legendary piece of American folklore (the outline of a novel I’m going to write in the next year or so), and I learned a lot from the experience about how to structure a prequel: You have to deliver the story to a place where it segues seamlessly into what we already know, but do it in a way that is totally unexpected. That’s where Lucas failed: He tells you exactly what he’s going to do… and then does that exactly. He didn’t subvert our expectations or surprise us in any way, so there was very little wonder to take from the experience.

         As for Moffat: I was a huge fan of Doctor Who when Russell T Davies was showrunning it, but ultimately bailed on the franchise after Moffat took over. What had been under Davies’ stewardship dorky, intellectual fun became downright Delphic in the Moffat era: Before the opening credits even rolled, the show had already left me hopelessly lost with no chance of catching up. So, I reluctantly said, “Fuck this.” Fittingly, here’s what Alan Moore — being quoted from the same interview as the one I cited in my last response to you — has to say about that subject:

         I hadn’t yet realised that the somewhat belated date on which the Guardian had finally published the interview was, perhaps coincidentally, the date of the much-publicised Dr. Who anniversary — another phenomenon that had passed me by completely — during which a number of people in their thirties, forties and fifties would be enjoying characters and situations that had been created to entertain, well, the twelve year-old boys of fifty years ago. I hadn’t been thinking about Dr. Who when I made my original comment, but I suppose the timing of the interview may very well have made that appear to be the case, and anyway my opinions are probably as applicable to Dr. Who as they are to the Avengers movie that I was actually discussing. They would also probably be as unpopular and unwelcome in either instance.

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8. 

   Sterling Archer

   February 21, 2018 at 5:30 pm

   “Doesn’t it feel good to come to terms with that? It’s finally time for something else.”

   No, it doesn’t. Because now there’s negativity attached to something I love, and there’s a gap in my world. Something that used to make me feel good, doesn’t anymore. Those of us who’ve seen and hated The Last Jedi don’t want to hate Star Wars, and this whole “deconstruction” kick that so many directors are on only accomplishes giving the finger to a fan base, that without whom there would be no Star Wars.

   The year 2017 has been a crap-tastic year in that regard. It’s made me hate The Daily Show. It’s made me hate Star Trek. And it’s made me hate Star Wars. I guess in a certain sense I should be glad that The Beatles broke up when they did, now I can have them frozen for all time, as I remember them. Perfect. Incorruptible. Fully “constructed”. Nobody can come along and ruin that for me. Unless of course somehow Yoko Ono once again finds a way.

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     Sean P Carlin (Post author)

     February 25, 2018 at 10:55 am

     Hey, Sterling — thanks for reading and commenting, my friend. (And apologies to you for the delayed reply.)

     As someone who grew up on Star Wars and Star Trek and superheroes, and who — like you — has watched those cultural treasures devolve into creatively depleted nostalgia acts, rest assured I feel your pain, pal. The cinema of George Lucas in particular was what inspired me to be a storyteller, something I’ll discuss in greater detail in an essay I’ll be posting later this week.

     And as a fellow fan who empathizes with your disappointment, let me say a couple of things, which you may or may not find comforting or helpful. One: Star Wars has not been tainted by The Last Jedi. I’m not suggesting for even a moment that it’s the movie first-gen fans waited for or deserved, but it hasn’t in any way retroactively corrupted the franchise. I wrote an entire blog post about this subject last year called “This Counts, That Does Not.” I would encourage you to give it a read, but the upshot of the essay is this: The only entries in a media franchise of any kind (be it Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, the MCU, etc.) that are “canon” — that is, officially recognized as authentic — are the ones that are officially recognized by you. If Heir to the Empire, which has been retconned by Disney, is a meaningful Star Wars story to you (as it is to me), but The Last Jedi isn’t, then decide for yourself right now that the former is canon and the latter is not. Simple as that. All those stories are “out there” — they all exist to be enjoyed and/or judged — and nobody decides for us which ones “count” and which ones “don’t”; we decide that for ourselves. That’s the privilege we enjoy as fans.

     Now, that said, that we are self-empowered to disregard The Last Jedi doesn’t change the fact that it’s the only filmed Star Wars sequel starring Luke Skywalker we’re ever going to get, and it is, subjectively, a crushing disappointment. But… the point I tried to make in the post’s closing statement was that if you, like me, had been waiting thirty-five years for a new adventure with Luke, Han, and Leia — if you’d longed to see Hamill, Ford, and Fisher onscreen together again — we must now accept the fact that that is never going to happen. Never. (And, no, I don’t know what the brain trusts at Lucasfilm were thinking reassembling the original troika of actors and then not giving them any storylines together. When the history of this new trilogy is written twenty years from now, that will certainly be regarded as one of the stranger decisions that got made.) With the onscreen deaths of Luke and Han, and the off-screen death of Carrie Fisher, there’s now no hope whatsoever we’ll get a proper homecoming.

     And though that may be a bitter pill to swallow, that irreversible truth indemnifies us against future Star Wars-related disappointments. We are now finally free to choose to let go of Star Wars. We no longer have to keep retuning to this franchise with Pavlovian fealty, because the thing we wanted so desperately from it is never coming no matter how badly we wanted it. So why not use this opportunity, unwelcome though it may be, to extricate ourselves from an unhealthy relationship with a forty-year-old franchise that we’ve thus far allowed to seduce and disappoint us time and again?

     And, hey, keep this consolation prize in mind: We’ll always have the originals. I have my own private fantasies about what became of Luke, Han, and Leia after the death of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, and they are no more or less valid than J. J. Abrams’ or Rian Johnson’s our yours. George Lucas’ Star Wars belongs to all of us, and The Last Jedi is only as canonical as you consider it to be. I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna happily forget I ever saw it — Rian Johnson has no power over me or my affection for Star Wars unless I give that over to him — and what happened to those heroes after the events of Return of the Jedi will be something I decide for myself; they’ll live happily ever after in my imagination, where they will continue to inspire me for years to come…

     That’s what I meant when I said it that even if The Last Jedi has made you feel like shit about Star Wars, you should at least welcome this opportunity to recognize, once and for all time, that Star Wars as we knew it is gone forever. There can be solace in acceptance, and acceptance by nature is bittersweet, because we only have to learn to accept things we wish weren’t so.

     Thanks so much, Sterling, for reading and commenting. You are most welcome here anytime.

     SPC

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     • 

       Sterling Archer

       February 26, 2018 at 10:27 pm

       I do understand what you’re saying to a certain degree, however there’s a few places I take issue with. To use a music analogy, I’ve fully made peace with the fact that I’m never going to see Nirvana (before you say anything I was 21 when Nevermind hit, but they played my town once in a dinky little club when they were nobodies, and never came back). And even though I’ve said that the Beatles are now frozen in time, it doesn’t change how Yoko Ono impacted John Lennon’s ability to make music. The difference in this case is there’s no Paul McCartney to pick up and carry the torch (well, maybe Marvel is the “Paul” in this case, but work with me here). Much like how Yoko Ono affected John, Rian “Yoko” Johnson has left his greasy fingerprints on the series. From here on out we will be getting “Mind Games”, and there’s no “Band On The Run” on the horizon to counter it. And even though Paul’s solo work could never match his work with the Beatles, you could still listen to Ram and a track like “The Back Seat of My Car”, and say “that’s a damn good song”.

       The part about how we decide what’s canon and what’s not doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either, because I can decide not to buy the Blu Ray, I can turn the channel when it’s on television, but the events of this steaming shit pile still affect the story going forward. Unlike the James Bond series (which I’m also a huge fan of) or even the Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novels, the universe doesn’t reset with the next film. There’s forever the “stink” of Rian Johnson on the series, as if he were a skunk and sprayed it marking his territory. Everything still happened. It still reeks of him. Yes, I still have the original trilogy, but like a girlfriend who slept with one your buddies, you can’t quite look at her the same way now, and you don’t want to spend any more time with either one than necessary. Maybe I look at it different because I’m a sports fan. No matter how hard I try as a NY Knicks fan, there’s no way to pretend that they didn’t get beat by the Chicago Bulls in that pivotal game five at the Garden in 1993 (the “Charles Smith Game” ). I can deny it all I want, but there’s still a banner at the United Center that says “Chicago Bulls NBA Champions 1992 – 1993”.

       As stated before, now there’s negativity attached to something I used to like, and there’s a gap in my world. The “taint” now comes in that I can no longer look forward to a new Star Wars movie. I don’t want the new Star Wars movies, but at the same time they’re not giving me any reason to like it either.

       But on the plus side, I am loving the new series Final Space on TBS. So at least there’s that.

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       • 

         Sean P Carlin (Post author)

         February 28, 2018 at 3:23 pm

         No, you’re right, Sterling, we don’t know what would’ve been had Lennon not married Yoko. For that matter, we don’t know what never-to-be creative treasures Mark David Chapman stole from the culture when he took Lennon’s life. Those are alternate universes that we’ll never have a glimpse of. For me, it comes down to a matter of perspective: We can choose to lament what should’ve been but never was, or we can choose to celebrate what we were lucky enough to get, prematurely cut short though it may have been. Stephen King wrote an excellent book called 11/22/63 about a man who uses a time portal to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination, and the ultimate moral of the story is this: Don’t dwell on things you can’t change. The arc of history is what it is. Is American history tainted by JFK’s unfortunate murder? Is the legacy of the Beatles tainted by the Yoko factor? Is Star Wars tainted by The Last Jedi? (Some would argue The Phantom Menace beat Rian Johnson to the punch nearly two decades ago.) Or is it all just part of an historical continuum — some events welcome, others not so much, but all of it pushing history ever-forward, for better and for worse? That may be a more philosophical and delphic response than you find helpful, but it’s all I got!

         I’m certainly not looking forward to any new Star Wars movies myself, but I’m taking The Last Jedi as my cue to bow out of this franchise before it disappoints me again. (Not that The Last Jedi disappointed me, because, as I said in the piece above, Star Wars stopped enchanting me a long time ago.) But it certainly doesn’t retroactively spoil the classic trilogy. It’s not even real Star Wars — just big-budget fan fiction. Better to invest your energy, emotion, and intellect in other things, like Final Space, that still bring you pleasure. “So at least there’s that,” you say? No at least — that’s everything. The universe took away one thing (Star Wars), but replaced it with something else. That’s what’s known as cosmic balance. It’s the invisible force that regulates the turbulent arc of history.

         Reply
9. 

   cathleentownsend

   February 26, 2018 at 7:08 pm

   Wow. Any comments I might add seem irrelevant at this point, especially since I’m not a screenwriter, although I am a short story writer and novelist. I’ve studied three act structure, and I have an ambivalent admiration for Save the Cat. (It’s concise and clear, but it’s so much structure that sometimes it seems stifling, as though there’s not enough air in the room. OTOH, when I’m stuck, it offers hope in the way of detailed steps for a way out of lost-and-confused land.)

   I do love is the three act structure, which I know Blake’s work is based on. I’ve read your thoughts on post-narrative storytelling, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s a trip down the rabbit hole. It’s “we had to annihilate the village to save it” thinking. And I don’t know why anyone settles for it. It would be like rereading Catcher in the Rye–for pleasure! I’d rather bet my storytelling life on a model that’s worked for thousands of years, thank you very much.

   I loved Moana–I think it’s the most brilliant movie I’ve seen in a long time, on so many levels. And I actually read a complaint posted on the writer’s forum that I belong to, that they didn’t approve of how this movie met so many of the hero’s journey plot points at exactly the right places! What?! Do you think that’s easy? Should we have wandered in the wilderness for forty days and nights instead? (My personal opinion of the plot, or lack thereof, for Game of Thrones. Oh, but it has the hot dragon chick, so that’s all right.)

   I’ve thought some (not as much as you–I didn’t care enough) about the latest Star Wars, and it reminded me of the old joke about a Chinese dinner–you were hungry again an hour later. The Last Jedi (which may well prove to be an ironically prophetic title) had some nice moments. Some decent effects. A nice twist–the scene where Rae and Kylo Ren fight back-to-back, only to find out that it’s no real conversion on his part at all.

   It also has Luke being a real dick and Yoda showing up for no real reason at all except that it’s, y’know, a Star Wars movie. Did Leia do anything except worry in the background? What a drag for her.

   I see your point about the person at the helm trying to destroy the old model. But what was the point of resurrecting the old characters then? Surely this point could have been made more fully by proposing a new story in the same universe, a better story, with perhaps cameo appearances by the original characters. Star Trek, TNG used that method to good effect. Novelists who write in series do it all the time. It’s not as though it’s some big secret.

   I have a question for you that’s been bugging me for some time. I can easily understand how a writer can put out a lousy book, especially if they don’t seek informed, critical feedback before they release it. But how does this happen in a movie? There’s so much money being spent, and so many people who have real stakes involved in it. The writer(s). The director. The actors themselves, who on many sets, unless the behind-the-scenes bonus material is a complete fiction, give sustained credible feedback. So why are there so many lame movies out there?

   And it’s not that I’m overburdened with nostalgia–that’s not one of my failings. I’m always genuinely hoping that this movie (to use the Moana example) will be better than Mulan, better than Tangled, even better than Hunchback. What I want is to be transported from the ordinary world for a time. To be able to switch off the inner critic and be swept away by the story, like I was in say, Ladyhawk. Why aren’t we seeing stories like this? It’s not as though we have any shortage of novelists and screenwriters.

   I’d really like to know your thoughts on this. 🙂

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     Sterling Archer

     February 26, 2018 at 10:37 pm

     Part of the reason this happens is unlike in the 1960’s and the 1970’s, you have the younger guard who are actually MORE conservative than the old guard. Frank Zappa did an interview once where he said back in the music industry in the 60’s you had these old guys with cigars and their feet up on the desk, and they’d come across something that was experimental in nature, and they’d say “I don’t know what it is, but let’s take a chance on it, and see if it sells”. Then when that risk paid off they’d say “I don’t know what happened, but let’s see if we can make it happen again, let’s hire a hippy”. Then the hippy eventually becomes the guy with the feet on the desk, and he’s more conservative than the old guy, and he starts saying “No, that’s not what the audience wants, I know what the audience wants”. The young guy they hired is less willing to try something new, than the old guy who says “let’s take a chance”.

     Alan Ladd Jr. was that guy who took a chance on George Lucas. Now Kathleen Kennedy is the one who has her feet up on the desk, and is saying “No, no, I know what the audience wants”. Is it any wonder that everything looks and sounds the same these days? They all look at something like Game of Thrones and say “See that!! That’s what the audience wants!! Go find me someone who will do that, hire some young film maker who can do that!!”. And that’s who we get Rian Johnson and The Last Jedi.

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     • 

       Sean P Carlin (Post author)

       February 28, 2018 at 3:58 pm

       As a business model, entertainment has always been a complicated beast, because art and commerce don’t often share complementary agendas. In Hollywood, that’s more true than ever, for a number of reasons:

       First, corporations own all the studios and networks now, and corporations are by nature and design capitalistic. So, they acquire IPs, like Star Wars, and then do everything they can to turn those brands in steady revenue streams. Movies cost a fortune to make, and a corporation is always looking for ways to minimize risk and maximize profit. This is a fact whether we like it or not.

       Second, the movie industry, as we’ve traditionally understood it, is undergoing seismic metamorphosis. Theatrical exhibition and broadcast programming are dying models; on-demand streaming is becoming the new norm. For that matter, the line between what constitutes a feature film and a television show is rapidly blurring. This is frightening to the studios that have followed a very predictable paradigm for nearly a century, and fear is provoking even higher degrees of risk-aversion than normal.

       Third: Many of the execs and agents that have their hands on the levers of power here in Hollywood went to business school, and don’t really know shit about creativity. This is what George Lucas calls the creative industrial complex, “which means the industrial part rules everything and they screw around with the creative people. To think you know how to do it is just full of hubris, it’s not real. . . . There’s the corporate world, and they’re not creative — they’re lawyers, accountants and they think they’re creative. They refer to it as their movie, even when they had nothing to do with it. The guy who actually sweats blood and tears is the one that actually makes the movie. But they don’t see it that way at all.”

       Lastly, when you’ve got an audience paying for a nostalgic experience, for reasons I’ve covered elsewhere on this blog, the corporations are going to respond to that demand accordingly. So, to some extent, it is a case of We get the culture we deserve.

       So, there are a lot of factors at play here. And while we are perhaps experiencing a heavy tilt in favor of corporatism over creativity in our popular entertainment at present, that’s only, I suspect, because we’re preparing for a pendulum swing in the other direction. The old models are on the verge of collapse, and when they go, the system will be in disarray. And creativity thrives in a state of chaos and unpredictability, the very things corporatism abhors. Wait and see.

       Reply
   • 

     Sean P Carlin (Post author)

     February 27, 2018 at 6:18 pm

     Cathleen,

     What an amazing response to this piece! Thank you! And double-thanks for typing it twice, even though, as you can see, I was able to restore both comments from the trash bin. Why and how they ended up there, when you’ve commented on this blog many times before, is something only the Gods of WordPress know for sure…

     Let me see if I can take your comments/questions point by point. With respect to Save the Cat!, it’s important to understand that what Snyder offers with his beat sheet and genre classifications is a form, not a formula. I know many experienced screenwriters who loathe STC! and its ilk because they view it as trying to reduce a complex art form to a simple, step-by-step science. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got aspiring screenwriters who wrongheadedly cling to the methodology as a set of absolutes: If I do X and Y, I’ll get Z.

     The truth, of course, is that both points of view are incorrect. While Blake does make note of “page markers” — hit this beat by page 12, and the next beat by page 25, etc. — those are guidelines, not rules. They’re averages, based on what he’s observed deconstructing thousands of movies and screenplays. And a good story will hit those beats so expertly, so artfully, that an audience can relax in the (unconscious) knowledge that they are in the hands of a storytelling master, and thusly be free to sit back and have an emotional experience. But accusing a movie like Moana of being too perfectly structured is like complaining that your house is too well built: The front door and the roof and the plumbing are all where they’re meant to be! What’s up with that?!

     The reason why postnarrative shows like Game of Thrones are exciting — for a while, anyway — is because they don’t adhere to that (too) familiar Joseph Campbell pattern, which makes them harder to predict. This is both a good and bad thing. It’s good because it restores excitement to popular storytelling, but it’s bad in the sense that a lot of these stories get trapped in an endless midsection, with no hope of reaching a satisfying resolution. Hence the fatigue with aging shows like The Walking Dead, and the disgust with finales like that of Lost.

     Great analogy about The Last Jedi being like Chinese food. It is fun to look at, but it isn’t nourishing; it doesn’t give you anything to think about. The reason for that is the movie has no layers, something I discuss at length in today’s post.

     I suspect they resurrected the old characters — Luke, Han, and Leia — as a way of providing continuity with the fondly remembered classic movies (as opposed to the prequels, which kind of exist in their own bubble), and of bringing old fans back into the fold. But they made a very questionable decision, once they had Ford, Fisher, and Hamill signed, to not give those beloved characters any shared storylines! I mean, that’s crazy! I get that the “legacy players” need to be subordinate to the new characters, like Rey and Finn and Poe, but why would you miss an opportunity to put the gang back together again? I’d love to hear Disney’s rationale for that. And I certainly think part of the problem with The Last Jedi is that it’s kind of Rey’s story (but not really), and kind of Luke’s story (but not really), and kind of Kylo Ren’s story (but not really). You know what I’m saying? They didn’t have the courage to say: This is Rey’s story, and though Luke is critical to it (as Obi-Wan was essential to Luke’s story previously), he is not the protagonist. So, as Michael Wilk points out in the thread above, the movie gives us no fixed-POV character with which to empathize. It’s lousy screenwriting, to be sure.

     How was that allowed to happen, you ask, with so much money being spent and so much brand capital on the line? That’s a complicated question — one closely related to the one Michael asks above: Why is no one sitting these assholes down and telling them that if they don’t go back to film school and get it right this time, they’re finished in Hollywood? I’ll tell you what I suggested to him: The studios and prodcos and agencies all over Hollywood are populated with failed writers who nevertheless found other work in the Biz. The very people tasked with overseeing the production of a film, from concept to script to movie, don’t themselves know the first thing about storytelling. And what happens is, these folks acquire the rights to an IP like Star Wars, and they know they have something cool — something valuable — on their hands, they just don’t know what to do with it.

     That’s where the screenwriter comes in. They invite writers to come pitch a take on a project, and more often than not, the scribe that gets the job is seldom the most talented or qualified, but rather the most personable, the most confident. The best one in a room. It’s the screenwriter that walks into a pitch meeting like he’s about to lay a golden egg — the one who sells these eager-but-idiotic execs on a vision — that scores the coveted assignment. Because in a town full of people who don’t know what they’re doing — who are looking to someone else to tell them what to think, and what to like, and how to feel about a piece of material — the filmmaker who can waltz into an office with utter confidence in his pitch, and his abilities to deliver on the promise of that pitch, is the one producers want to be in business with.

     And then once a screenwriter or filmmaker has a track record for getting movies made, that only makes them even more appealing — regardless of whether they have actual ability. If you’re the type of writer who produces drafts that get films greenlighted, producers are going to want to work with you, because their job is to see that the movie gets made — period.

     So, the answer to the question of why aren’t these filmmakers getting the critical feedback they need when they need it is this: Because the people hiring them don’t have any more refined sense of story (or basic sense of it, for that matter) than they do. There are a lot of people in Hollywood who’ve flipped through Save the Cat! exactly once (something I wrote about here) and then anointed themselves titans of storytelling. And unlike other professions where you’re required to show some kind of degree or certification of authority in a given field, anyone can call themselves a master storyteller. And as you noted, story is a very complex piece of machinery, with plot and characterization and theme all working in harmony; it takes years of study and practice to develop a command of how to use and balance those elements to create an effective narrative.

     Now, to be fair, there are many talented people out here, hence the reason we still on occasion get great commercial films like Moana and Wonder Woman. But that those movies somehow get made despite all the inflated egos that have to grace these productions with their approval is downright miraculous. When you see a movie you love, consider the astronomical odds it had to surmount to even exist.

     I hope that answers your question! There’s more to it than that, of course, but I think that’s a fairly concise primer.

     Thank you so, so much Cathleen for reading and twice-posting! Sorry again for the WordPress confusion!

     Sean

     Reply
10. 

    cathleentownsend

    February 26, 2018 at 7:34 pm

    Bummer. I just entered this long reply, full of references to three-act structure, Save the Cat, and movies that I love–along with a rant about post-narrative structure–and I just saw it get eaten by the internet. (Someone must have forgotten to feed the giant spider.) So you’ll have to imagine most of that part, although it did include movies that I thought were brilliantly executed–Hunchback, Tangled, and Moana, along with the unrelated Wonder Woman and Ladyhawk. And I liked the latest King Arthur, too.

    I never saw Goonies so I can’t comment there, and I’m not overburdened with nostalgia. What the whole post worked up to was this question. I can write a cohesive, thematic narrative. Lots of writers can. Why is there such a shortage of them in movies?

    And okay, there are plenty of lousy books out there–who really rereads Catcher in the Rye for pleasure?–but there are plenty of gems, too. Some of them even have great visual potential. There’s certainly no shortage of screenwriters, directors, or talented actors. So why are we being fed so many lousy movies?

    I mean, it takes a lot of money to produce a movie. Writing a novel is being an entertainer at the shallow end of the financial pool. I can see how a writer could fail to get informed, critical feedback and put out a shoddy product. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon (and I’m speaking of traditional as well as self-published books, although the former at least usually dresses up its lousy story with correct punctuation).

    Not every movie is being made from existing intellectual property, although I can certainly see how that contributes to the problem. But with so much money and so many minds contributing to the end product, how do we end up with so much poor storytelling? Not a well-told story that’s not to my taste, like say Miss Congeniality, but outright shoddy structure, dialogue, and characterization.

    The Last Jedi (which may turn out to be an ironically prophetic title) was merely a non-cohesive string of scenes–some nice, that briefly invested me in the film, interspersed with Luke being a dick, and things like Yoda making an appearance for no reason at all except it’s, y’know, Star Wars.

    So why? You’re way more tied into the Hollywood scene than I am. I’d really like your take on this.

    Reply
11. 

    cathleentownsend

    February 28, 2018 at 9:08 am

    Thanks so much, Sean. Your reply makes total sense. No matter what the endeavor, humans have a remarkable capacity for shooting themselves in the foot.

    As an analogy, I’m fond of reading history, and please don’t confuse the real thing with the tasteless, regurgitated pap that ends up in history books. (As an example, look up the Vietnam War in HS textbooks, and you’ll see a smiling LBJ greeting the troops, etc. No glimpses of the iconic, horrifying photos that symbolized the war for so many.)

    Anyway, I’ve been rereading about the Battle of Britain (WWII), as an extension of rechecking my knowledge base on Dunkirk (they both happened in the same summer and were causally linked).

    The Battle of Britain is always given a certain gloss, perhaps because Churchill was such a great orator, and he was able to spin the thing in people’s minds. But it (and he) don’t deserve unvarnished admiration. The cold, hard truth is that the British won the battle only because they screwed up less than the Germans, whose fails were epic. (If anyone’s interested in this, go check out how the British government treated Dowding, who was the one person, more than any other, responsible for the victory. He was given 24 hours to clean out his desk. He had committed the unforgivable sin of being right when those in power had thought him wrong.)

    So, okay, it’s just human nature, with industry details. Like all really good replies, it makes so much sense that you wonder why you needed to ask the question in the first place. So thanks for the excellent response. 🙂

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      Sean P Carlin (Post author)

      March 1, 2018 at 4:31 pm

      Oh, thank you very much, Cathleen! I’m glad I was able to shed a little light on the subject. The systemic idiocy of Hollywood is a subject I sadly know all too well, and it’s something I’m trying — with questionable success — to address less often on this blog, for two reasons: The first is that I feel like I’m becoming a repetitive, one-note bore! The second is that my own literary pursuits have taken me further and further from the “Hollywood scene” (which makes it sound, I realize, deceptively glamorous), and I’d like to do more pieces on books and publishing and that sort of thing. Where that gets tricky, of course, is that A) I know less about that business than I do the film industry, and B) movies are easier to discuss with the widest amount of people, because you’re way more likely to have seen The Last Jedi than to have read, say, The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. You know what I mean? It’s just easier to use movies to discuss matters of storytelling because the likelihood of familiarity is so much greater.

      Certainly anyone who reads world history is aware of humanity’s congenital capacity for stupidity and self-deception: It was there in the skies over Britain in 1940, and we have our share of it on the studio lots here in Hollywood. There have certainly been many deeply troubled film productions, from Casablanca to Jaws, that nonetheless somehow produced great (even legendary) movies; there’s no doubt the making of many of those films have been just as mythologized as many of the Allied campaigns of World War II. Storytellers like yourself have a drive, an intellectual imperative, to peel away the propaganda and get to the truth. Because as Stephen King says, “fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

      Thank you, Cathleen, for contributing so much to this conversation; I’m grateful for the time you spared and the thoughts you shared.

      Sean

      Reply