Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Generation X (Page 2 of 3)

Grounded and Elevated: Screenwriting Secrets for a Sure-Thing Hollywood Pitch

January 18, 2021 / / 30 Comments

Despite everything, it seems I still have a few friends in Tinseltown.  A development exec I know, aware of my blog’s polemical crusade against late-twentieth-century nostalgia as well as creatively and morally bankrupt storytelling, recently forwarded several e-mails containing informal pitches (from agented writers) he’d solicited for “reboots” of three classic IPs straight from the Gen X archives.  They offer fascinating firsthand insight into the demoralizing vocation of Hollywood screenwriting.

It might surprise those outside the industry to learn only a small fraction of a given screenwriter’s time and effort is spent developing original stories, known as “spec scripts.”  Few of those screenplays ever sell (certainly nowadays), and fewer still are produced; mostly, such projects are mere “calling cards”—writing samples designed to establish a scribe’s commercial sensibilities and creative credentials so he or she might be given the opportunity to vie for “open assignments.”  In those instances, a prodco controls the film rights to an intellectual property (IP)—a novel, a comic book, an old TV series—and, accordingly, invites such candidates to come in and pitch a take on it.

For instance, my prison break–zombie outbreak mashup Escape from Rikers Island afforded me opportunities to pitch cinematic adaptations of the pseudo-documentary series Ancient Aliens and the Japanese manga MPD-Psycho, as well as a remake of the 1992 action thriller Trespass.  If you’re higher up on the food chain—in, say, J. J. Abrams territory—that’s when you might get a shot at a gold-plated franchise like Star Wars or Mission:  Impossible.

Nicolas Cage as an anxiety-riddled screenwriter struggling to adapt “The Orchid Thief” in “Adaptation”

Because for the most part, Hollywood isn’t looking for new ideas; they have enough branded IPs to keep them in business through infinity and beyond.  What they’re looking for are skilled stenographers—writers-for-hire who can take a preexisting property and, juggling input from a thousand different chefs in the kitchen, turn it into a viable script for which a movie studio will be persuaded to invest millions of dollars.  That’s the litmus test:  Can you take an established IP and from it write a script that will motivate the studio to write a check?

The following proposals provide an insider’s glimpse into that singular development process.  With my contact’s express permission, I have reproduced the relevant text from his e-mails verbatim, including all typographical errors and syntactical idiosyncrasies, but excluding the identities of the authors, their representation, the executive, and his production company.

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Naomi Klein’s “On Fire” (Book Review)

October 18, 2019 / / 20 Comments

Since I trained under former vice president Al Gore to serve in his Climate Reality Leadership Corps just over a year ago—a period in which no fewer than eighty-five federal environmental regulations have been rolled back, greenhouse-gas emissions have spiked (after leveling off in years prior), polar-ice melt is outpacing predictive modeling, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has strenuously warned us we have a mere decade to halve our current rate of carbon-burning if we hope to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change—there is one distinct emotional state that has been entirely absent from my life.

Despair.

I might, in fact, be happier and more optimistic than at any other point in my adult life.

Activism, I’ve discovered, is the antidote to despair, to doomism.  Over the past year, I’ve given public presentations on the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would charge fossil-fuel extractors for the privilege of pollution—of treating the public commons of our atmosphere like an open sewer—they’ve thus far enjoyed free of charge.

This past March, my Climate Reality chapter was proud to enlist Los Angeles into the County Climate Coalition, an alliance of jurisdictions across the United States, formed by Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese, that have formally pledged to uphold the standards of the Paris Accord.  Less than six months later, we were in attendance as the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the OurCounty sustainability plan, one of the most ambitious green initiatives in the United States.

And just last month, I joined 300,000 activists in Lower Manhattan for the Global Climate Strike as we swarmed the streets of City Hall, marched down Broadway, and rallied at Battery Park—where no less than Greta Thunberg addressed the crowd.  None of that, as it happens, has left much time to actually worry about the climate breakdown.

Greta Thunberg at the Global Climate Strike in New York City on September 20, 2019 (photo credit: Sean P. Carlin)

But that level of activism, I acknowledge, isn’t something to which everyone can readily commit.  So, if you want to share my profound hopefulness about the solutions to the climate crisis—if you want to appreciate the world-changing opportunity humanity has been handed by history—do yourself a favor and read a book that might admittedly be outside your comfort zone:  Naomi Klein’s On Fire:  The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.

Naomi Klein’s “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal”

I promise:  You won’t be inundated with scientific facts and figures; if you want to understand the basic science of global warming, Mr. Gore’s documentaries An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and An Inconvenient Sequel:  Truth to Power (2017) are both excellent primers.  Naomi Klein’s On Fire is a recently published collection of her essays and lectures from the past decade, bookended by all-new opening and closing statements on why a Global Green New Deal is the blueprint for an ecologically sustainable and socially equitable twenty-first century:

The idea is a simple one:  in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts.  Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion.  Challenging these underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once. . . .

. . . In scale if not specifics, the Green New Deal proposal takes its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal, which responded to the misery and breakdown of the Great Depression with a flurry of policies and public investments, from introducing Social Security and minimum wage laws, to breaking up the banks, to electrifying rural America and building a wave of low-cost housing in cities, to planting more than two billion trees and launching soil protection programs in regions ravaged by the Dust Bowl.

Naomi Klein, On Fire:  The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2019), 26
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Oh, Snap! The Nostalgia-Industrial Complex — ’90s Edition

July 29, 2019 / / 13 Comments

Et tu, Millennials?  The old nostalgia-industrial complex got its hooks into you, too, huh?  I must ask:  Have you not witnessed in firsthand horror what pining for the good old days has done to Generation X…?

To recap:  We Xers have thus far spent the twenty-first century reliving all our childhood favorites—Star Wars, Super Friends, Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, Lethal Weapon, Halloween, Bill & Ted, Tron, Transformers, Terminator, Top Gun—a pathological exercise in self-infantilization that has catastrophically retarded both the culture as well as a generation of middle-aged adults who are at this point more passionately invested in Skywalkers and superheroes than are the juvenile audiences for whom those characters were originally intended.

Always keen to recognize—and replicate—a winning formula, a new permutation of forward-thinking backward-gazing has recently seized Hollywood:  Sell nineties-era nostalgia to the generation that came of age in that decade!  Over the past few years, we got a pair of Jurassic Park remakes-masquerading-as-sequels that didn’t inspire a single word of enthusiasm (certainly not a second viewing), but nonetheless earned over a billion dollars apiece, while our last conventional movie star, Dwayne Johnson, used his considerable clout (or more aptly muscle?) to resurrect both Jumanji and Baywatch.  As for this year?  Hope you’re excited for warmed-over helpings of The Lion King, Men in Black, Toy Story, Aladdin, and yet more Jumanji.  And while we’re at it, let’s welcome back slacker duo Jay and Silent Bob, because surely their grunge-era stoner humor still holds up in middle-age—

Our sentiments exactly, fellas…

—as well as Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, back from buddy-cop purgatory for more Bad Boys badassery!  You know damn well whatcha gonna do when they come for you:  Buy a ticket!

For an indeterminate, but clearly not immeasurable, swath of moviegoers, there is no marketing campaign more alluring than one that taps into foggy childhood memories. . . .

. . . The great nostalgia-industrial complex will [continue] steamrollering us against our better judgment into multiplexes, hoping for a simulacrum of the first high we felt watching great characters years ago.

Tom Philip, “Summer ’19 Brought To You By Nostalgia-Bait Movies,” Opinion, New York Times, July 4, 2019

Not just multiplexes.  (And how are those even still a thing?)  On the small screen, VH1 revived game-changing nineties slasher franchise Scream this summer (how, for that matter, is VH1 still a thing?), and new iterations of decade-defining teen melodramas 90210 and Party of Five are on the way.  Dope.

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Age of Innocence: On the Bygone Pleasure of Being City Kids

February 28, 2019 / / 24 Comments

Contrary to common misconception, city kids do indeed have backyards.  We even had a name for ours:  New York.

My little grade-school gang and I enjoyed a free-range childhood we exploited with an adventurous spirit influenced in equal measure by the intrepid curiosity of Indiana Jones and the gleeful tricksterism of Axel Foley.  We discovered secret subbasements hidden in the cobwebbed bowels of the Bronx’s mammoth apartment complexes.  We explored the abandoned housing/condominium developments commissioned during the 1980s building boom then subsequently left to rot and ruin after the ’87 Wall Street crash.  We scaled the vertiginous understructure of the Henry Hudson Bridge.  We even dressed up as Boy Scouts and sold candy in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria.  (Karmically, we never got to spend our ill-gotten gains.  Of our quartet, we selected the guy whose mother was least likely to find the cash—we made over $70 in profit, an astronomical sum for four kids in 1990 who couldn’t afford a slice of pizza between them—and stashed it at his place.  She found it anyway, though, and blew it on booze.)

There’s so much I could say about those days, but I could in no way express my sentiments more truthfully or concisely than Stephen King’s plainspoken summation from The Body:  “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.  Jesus, did you?”

It didn’t take age and perspective to recognize how special our fellowship was—I knew that and cherished it even then—but I can’t say I fully appreciated just how lucky we were to have the Biggest City in the World as our personal playground until I’d lived elsewhere.  Take my home of the past seventeen years:  L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, population 1.77 million.  Every square block of it (that isn’t a strip mall) looks exactly like this:

No hidden facets.  No winding streets or towering edifices, no sidewalk cellar doors or obscured alleyways promising adventure to those willing to probe parts unseen.  Hell, by this vantage, the Valley doesn’t look much different from a Monopoly board, with all its identical houses tidily arranged side by side on rectangular lots.  Maybe it’s shamefully condescending of me, but I feel sorry for kids who have to grow up here.  What about the above inspires or invites exploration the way New York does?

Or should I perhaps say did?  It’s possible, upon recent observation, that culture is irreversibly changing.

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Maybe It’s Time: Here’s to Making 2019 the First Official Year of the 21st Century

December 28, 2018 / / 28 Comments

“Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.”  How ironically apropos that in a world led by a reality-show president, where facts are subjective and everything from our energy sources to our economic policies to our pop culture are the antiquated vestiges of a previous century, that a lyric by a fictitious rock star from a remake of a remake of a remake of a movie from 1937 should emerge as the perfect, hopeful mantra of an impending (if belated) new millennial era.  I propose officially adopting it as such; it might make what comes next a little easier to accept for those of us still clinging nostalgically to the 1950s (Baby boomers) and the 1980s (Gen X).

If you belong to one of those analog generations—I’m an Xer myself—and you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of working with a Millennial, you know their nonlinear minds interpret the world in an entirely different manner than those that came before them.  The first wave arrived in the workforce a decade ago, expecting a seat at the table before they’d earned one, demanding their voices be heard before their opinions were informed by practical experience.  Their operating philosophy seemed to be:  Yeah, but just because we’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it… this way.  In their view, the arduous, incremental, straight-line path of our institutionalized practices and protocols didn’t square with their hyperlinked grasp of our new Digital Age reality.  Thusly, conventional (read:  linear) thinking was to be openly challenged, not obediently emulated.

Like many of my fellow Xers that came up the hard way—those of us that knew our place, paid our dues (there’s that pesky sense of linearity again), never assumed we had all the answers—that worldview has often left me bewildered at best, infuriated at worst.  And the sense of entitlement so endemic to Millennials is only compounded by their corresponding characteristic of impatience:

“They’ve grown up in a world of instant gratification.  You want to buy something—you go on Amazon, it arrives the next day.  You want to watch a movie?  Log on and watch a movie—you don’t check movie times.  You want to watch a TV show?  Binge!  You don’t even have to wait week to week to week.  Right?  I know people who skip seasons just so they can binge at the end of the season.  Right?  Instant gratification.”

Simon Sinek, “Simon Sinek,” Inside Quest with Tom Bilyeu, August 7, 2016

Now, to a middle-aged generation still trying (without success) to take the seat at the head of the table from the unyielding occupancy of the Boomers, the Millennials’ impulse—their self-ordained imperative—to grab the wheel and make “meaningful impact” is their most vexing attribute.

And—Christ help me for saying this—it just might change everything for the better.

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Through the Looking Glass: How Johnny Depp’s Reclusive Tendencies Are a Funhouse Reflection of Our Own

August 31, 2018 / / 29 Comments

From his days on Jump Street when I was in junior high, to his offbeat movie roles during my time as a “serious” film student in college, to our shared penchant for supernatural cinema, Johnny Depp has steadfastly remained the most exciting actor of his generation.  But his apparent withdrawal from reality in recent years is the role I’d most come to identify with after my screenwriting career catastrophically imploded.  Alas, Mr. Depp—this is where I leave you.

Rolling Stone recently ran a feature profile on actor Johnny Depp, detailing his extensive financial hardships (a reported $650 million fortune vaporized by his compulsive-spending disorder), legal entanglements (home foreclosures and a contentious lawsuit with his former business managers), personal controversies (allegations of spousal abuse and a growing dependency on drugs and alcohol), and “reports he couldn’t remember his lines and had to have them fed to him through an earpiece” (Stephen Rodrick, “The Trouble with Johnny,” Rolling Stone 1317 [July 2018]:  83).

Thorough as Rodrick’s reporting is, though, the documented facts of the respective scandals are less compelling—less tragic, even—than the wider arc of the narrative he presents, illustrating just how far Depp has come from the “days when he was a male ingénue and not a punchline:  bankrupt, isolated and one more mistake away from being blackballed from his industry” (ibid., 134).

Isolated is precisely the right word; one can’t read the Rolling Stone piece and not be impressed by the extent to which Johnny Depp is alone in the crumbling edifice of his ivory tower:

I want to go home, but feel reluctant to leave.  One of the most famous actors in the world is now smoking dope with a writer and his lawyer while his cook makes dinner and his bodyguards watch television.  There is no one around him who isn’t getting paid.

ibid., 135

Yeah.  But who gives a shit, though—am I right?  Whether you’re of the mind that it’s hard to feel bad for spoiled Hollywood stars devoid of limits or impulse control, or whether, like me, you don’t have a crap to spare for the vacuous affairs of celebrity culture (I’ve been checked out at least as long as “Brangelina” was a thing), the trials of Johnny Depp should logically provoke either schadenfreude or apathy, but certainly not sympathetic interest.

If only this were a movie still…

And yet I don’t merely sympathize with his current state of reclusion—in fact I empathize with it.  Perhaps that’s because the different seasons of Depp’s career—the spring, summer, and arguably now the fall—have run parallel to my own life.  During my time as a film-school student in the nineties, he was one of the most exciting actors to follow because of his uniquely unconventional tastes in directors and material.  After I moved to Hollywood and learned to loathe the blockbuster, he headlined the last big movie franchise I actually genuinely enjoy.  But my awareness of him, and his singular talents, predates all of that.  He’s one of the only major artists whose career I’ve followed since its inception.

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Counter Culture: Over the past Quarter Century, a Small Specialty Shop Became a Bronx Institution

May 31, 2018 / / 24 Comments

Before the geek underground went mainstream—before the Internet exposed its numbers as legion; before corporations fully understood that superheroes were woefully underexploited billion-dollar assets—there was no better place to both talk and learn about pop culture than the neighborhood comic shop.

When it opened in 1991, Magnum Comics & Cards wasn’t the first direct-market specialty store in the northwest sector of the Bronx where I grew up, but it was inarguably the liveliest, the one with the most personality.  That was owed, in no small part, to its colorful proprietor, Neil Shatzoff.

A photo of the shop I snapped on December 30, 2010

Holding court from behind the register, Neil would speak with juvenile exuberance and encyclopedic authority on pop esoterica:  why Brian Dennehy would’ve made for a better Commissioner Gordon than Pat Hingle (I agree, but, hey—at least we eventually got Gary Oldman); why Joel Schumacher’s track record for dark-skewing commercial cinema (The Lost Boys, Falling Down) made him a promising candidate to take over the Batman franchise from Tim Burton (well, it seemed like a good fit on paper…); why Kevin Smith’s unproduced Superman Lives script was budgetarily impractical and narratively quixotic (turns out, it was twenty years ahead of its time).  His disquisitions were all the more entertaining for his impish, whip-fast wit; reflecting on the Academy’s arbitrary predilection to honor films over movies, he once noted:  “Gandhi won an Oscar for Best Costume Design, and all they did was throw a couple of towels over him.”

 

COMIC ESCAPADES

All throughout high school, I’d pop by the shop every Wednesday to get my weekly fix of superhero soap opera—the now-classic Death of Superman and Batman:  Knightfall storylines were unfolding at the time—and, more to the point, to listen to Neil wax pop-cultural.  A decade my senior, he supplemented my cinematic education—the way an older sibling’s musical tastes might rub off on you—by introducing me to genre essentials that were just a little before my time:  The Thing and An American Werewolf in London and Thief (the feature-film debut of Michael Mann and spiritual precursor to Heat) and the Dirty Harry series.  (Though I can’t say for certain, it’s possible the first Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force, influenced the name of the shop itself).

It was by way of the file cabinet–mounted TV behind the counter that I first became aware of things like aspect ratios and audio commentaries and director’s cuts; Neil was an early adopter of LaserDisc, and would dub them onto VHS and play them in the store.  Imagine my surprise to learn there was a “secret” longer version of Aliens (by seventeen minutes!), or a definitive two-hour documentary on the making of Jaws.  In the days before such things were standard-issue features on DVDs, there was only one guy I knew who had access to all that amazing arcana, and he delighted in sharing his zeal for it with his customers.

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A Couple of Gen Xers Talk Movies, Screenwriting, and Zombie Prison Breaks

April 20, 2018 / / 17 Comments

Recently, I participated in a lively Q&A over at Bookshelf Battle about nearly every pop-cultural topic imaginable:  the genesis of Escape from Rikers Island; rumors of the zombie genre’s demise; whether the hero or villain is more crucial to the conflict and meaning of a story; if, in our Era of the Endless Reboot, there are any Hollywood remakes I’d actually endorse; what aspiring screenwriters need to learn (and how they can learn it); and my exclusive, foolproof plan for breaking out of a prison full of flesh-eating undead monsters.  To paraphrase Stefon from Saturday Night Live:  This conversation has everything!

Rest assured, this only LOOKS hopeless…

I invite you to join in with your thoughts!  Feel free to leave a comment on either post—that one or this one—and I will, as always, be delighted to respond.

Please find my discussion with Bookshelf Q. Battler here.

Artistic Originality: Is It Dead—or Was It Merely a Fallacy to Begin With?

February 27, 2018 / / 58 Comments

Over the course of the many insightful conversations generated by the recent post on Star Wars:  The Last Jedi—sincerest thanks to all who shared their time and thoughts—the subject of artistic influence was discussed:  what role it played in the creation of some of Gen X’s most cherished movie franchises of yore, and what part, if any, it has in our now-institutionalized praxis of remaking those films wholesale—of “turning Hollywood into a glorified fan-fiction factory where filmmakers get to make their own versions of their childhood favorites.”

Because where is the line drawn, exactly, between inspiration and imitation?  If the narrative arts are a continuum in which every new entry owes, to a certain extent, a creative debt to a cinematic or literary antecedent, is originality even a thing?

If so, what is it, then?  How is one to construe it concretely, beyond simply “knowing it when we see it”?  And, as such, is there a way for us as artists to codify, or at very least comprehend, the concept of originality as something more than an ill-defined abstraction to perhaps consciously strive for it in our own work?

 

THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND INFLUENCES

Since it was Star Wars that provoked those questions, let me start with this:  George Lucas is one of my eminent creative influences.  When I was in high school in the early nineties, during that long respite between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, when Star Wars was more or less placed by its creator in carbon-freezing, I became aware that the same mind had conceived two of my favorite franchises, and went to great lengths to study Lucas’ career:  how he learned the art of storytelling, where his ideas came from, how he managed to innovate the way in which blockbusters were created and marketed.

“Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” mastermind George Lucas, my first creative idol

In order to more fully appreciate what Lucas created in 1977 when he made Star Wars—a work of fiction so thrilling and inspired it seemed to emerge fully realized from his singular imagination—it behooves us to consider the varied influences he drew from.  The 1936 Flash Gordon film serial Lucas watched as a child provided the inciting animus—a grand-scale space opera told as a series of high-adventure cliffhangers.  (It also later informed the movie’s visual vocabulary, with its reliance on old-fashioned cinematic techniques like opening crawls and optical wipes.)

In a case of east meets west, Joseph Campbell’s study of comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces provided a general mythic and archetypal blueprint to endow Lucas’ sprawling alien-world fantasy with psychological familiarity, while Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress served as a direct model for the plot he eventually settled on (after at least three start-from-scratch rewrites).  Lucas ultimately patterned the series’ three-part narrative arc after Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle (which later directly influenced his high-fantasy franchise-nonstarter Willow), because, prior to Star Wars, closed-ended “trilogies” weren’t really a thing in commercial cinema.

In addition to his cinematic and literary interests, Lucas is also a passionate scholar of world history (as evidenced by Indiana Jones, particularly the television series), and a direct line can be drawn from the X-wing assault on the Death Star to the aerial dogfights of World War II, to say nothing of the saga’s allusions to the Roman Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Vietnam War.  As for where the Force and lightsabers and the twin suns of Tatooine came from… who knows?  The sheer number of disparate interests that met, mated, and reproduced within the confines of Lucas’ brain can never be fully accounted for, even by the man himself.

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

January 29, 2018 / / 46 Comments

Well ahead of the release of The Last Jedi, I’d made a private resolution to stop being so goddamn grumpy about Star Wars and superheroes moving forward.  That’s not to suggest, mind you, I rescind my cultural criticisms of them, merely an acknowledgment that I’d said my piece, have nothing more to offer on the matter, and have no wish to spend 2018 mired in negativity.  There’s enough of that going around these days.

And yet here I find myself, first post of the New Year, compelled by fate—just like Obi-Wan, I suppose, and, more recently, Luke Skywalker himself—to crawl out of hiding.  Here’s what happened:

The week Last Jedi hit theaters, I was preoccupied with last-minute errands and arrangements for my trip home for the holidays, and Star Wars, frankly, was the last thing on my mind.  I was peripherally aware the movie was “in the air”—reviews were near-universally hailing it as “groundbreaking,” the best of the series since Empire—but altogether oblivious that it had already opened.

Until Saturday, December 16.  That’s when unsolicited text messages start pinging in rapid succession from friends and colleagues, decrying it as “the worst Star Wars ever,” “a betrayal,” “the death of the franchise,” etc.  (One old friend even suggested I stay away from the movie at all costs if I wanted to preserve any fondness I had left for Star Wars.)  I couldn’t quite reconcile any of that with the glowing critical notices, so I went to Rotten Tomatoes, and, sure enough, an overwhelming plurality of the audience was hating this movie.  Not strongly disliking it, mind you—despising it.  Some excerpts:

“I will pass on IX and it won’t make any difference in the grand scheme of things, but there is nowhere the plot can go in the final movie that I particularly would care for.  I have no investment in the characters, plot or universe anymore.”

“Steaming pile of bantha poodoo.”

“Easily the worst in the Saga.  Lifelong Star Wars fan.  It’s now all over.”

“Worst movie EVER.  I can’t begin to find the words that express how bad this was.  Guess it’s hard to say much without spoilers.  Just be warned it’s not the star wars you know.”

“You won’t fool me, nor my money, ever again.”

And then there was this succinct four-word review:

“Fuck you rian Johnson”

How to explain such opprobrium?  (Note:  There are those that suggest a vocal minority of haters has merely created the misleading illusion of substantial backlash—possibly that’s true—but the sampling of direct responses I’ve fielded for the most part range from faint praise at best to seething vitriol.)  I mean, these were the movies that were supposed to “redeem” Star Wars after creator George Lucas’ best malignant efforts to ruin all our childhoods with the prequels, right?

Epic fail—”Episode VIII” turned out to be something other than the glorious return of the Jedi many fans anticipated

So, what’s gone wrong? I wondered.  Were fans simply being oversensitive?  Or did filmmaker Rian Johnson, making his Star Wars debut, indeed deliver a credibly bad movie—a “franchise killer”?  How exactly did things reach such an extreme, fevered pitch a mere two years after Disney’s much-anticipated brand-relaunch of Star Wars?

It’s a complicated answer with more than one determinant, but I can get to the heart of the problem for you.

Hold that thought, though.  We’ll get back to Star Wars shortly.

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