Ah, the “shared cinematic universe”—the favored narrative model–cum–marketing campaign of the new millennium! Pioneered by Marvel, it wasn’t long before every studio in town wanted a “mega-franchise” of its own, feverishly ransacking its IP archives for reliable brands to exploit anew. By resurrecting the Universal Classic Monsters, Universal Studios saw an opportunity to create its own interconnected multimedia initiative… and the so-called “Dark Universe” was born.
Well, not born, exactly—more like announced. When the first offering, Dracula Untold, took a critical beating and underperformed domestically, Universal promptly issued a retraction: “Just kidding! That wasn’t really the first Dark Universe movie!” An all-star cast was hastily assembled: Russell Crowe as Jekyll and Hyde! Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s monster! Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man! Angelina Jolie as the Bride of Frankenstein! And first up would be Tom Cruise in The Mummy…
Except—whoops!—The Mummy bombed, too… at which point the sun rather quietly went down on the Dark Universe project altogether. Seems launching a shared fictional universe is considerably harder than Marvel made it look. Imagine that.
The thing is, we already had a revival—arguably a cinematic renaissance—of the Universal Classic Monsters in the 1990s. Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were given gloriously Gothic reprisals in an (unrelated) series of studio features that starred some of the biggest names in Hollywood. None of those projects were cooked up in a corporate think tank, but were instead the idiosyncratic visions of a diverse group of directors—the artists behind no less than The Godfather, The Graduate, The Crying Game, Dangerous Liaisons, and Basic Instinct, to name a few—employing horror’s most recognizable freaks to (for the most part) explore the anxiety of confronting the end of not merely a century, but a millennium.
If the respective creative efforts of these filmmakers were uncoordinated, their common agenda was entirely logical. Many of their fiendish subjects, after all, first arrived on the cultural scene at the end of the previous century: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published in 1886; both Dracula and The Invisible Man in 1897. Furthermore, their stories tended to speak to either the hazards of zealous scientific ambition (Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), or, in the case of Dracula and The Mummy, the limitations of it—of humankind’s attempts to tame the natural world through technology: “And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (from Jonathan Harker’s journal, dated 15 May).
Even the Wolf Man serves as a metaphor for the primal instincts we’ve suppressed under our civilized veneer; far from having learned to let our two halves coexist in harmony, they are instead at war within the modern man and woman. These are existential issues that seem to weigh more heavily on us at the eve of a new epoch, which is arguably why the monstrous creations we use to examine them flourished in the literature of the 1890s and then again, a century later, through the cinema of the 1990s. It goes to illustrate that sometimes fictional characters simply speak to their times in a very profound way that can’t be engineered or anticipated. It’s just alchemical, much as Hollywood would prefer it to be mathematical.
With that in mind, let’s have a look at the unofficial “Universal Classic Monsters reprisal” of the nineties (and I’ve included a few other likeminded films from the movement) to better appreciate what worked and what sometimes didn’t.
BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1992)
The first in this Gothic-horror revival cycle became—and remains—the one to beat. That James V. Hart’s screenplay was the most faithful adaptation of the source material to date would’ve been innovative enough, but director Francis Ford Coppola’s mad genius produced a breathtakingly cinematic experience unlike any other. Drawing from a diverse array of influences—Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, the symbolist paintings of Gustav Klimt, the German Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich—and relying almost exclusively on old-fashioned in-camera special effects—rear projection, multiple exposure, forced perspective—Coppola’s Dracula exists in a fairytale realm that resembles neither the real world nor other fantasy cinema of its era. Sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s sexy—often it is both at once.
If you can take your eyes off Gary Oldman’s Count—good luck—you’ll note his shadow is out of sync with his movements, and that the walls of his castle literally (if nigh imperceptibly) close in on Keanu Reeves’ Jonathan Harker. The entire production was shot on soundstages in Culver City, which only contributes to the nagging sensation that there’s something indefinably unnatural about this world. Rather than relying on scenic British locations as earlier productions had (the Christopher Lee and Frank Langella adaptations, for example), this Dracula gets its European flavor from its chilling score, provided by Polish composer Wojciech Kilar, who was little known to American audiences at that time. Nothing about this movie feels familiar or comfortable…
… which is the entire point of its narrative: It’s about the ideological clash that occurs when modern Western science meets ancient Eastern superstition—and the frustration that ensues when the methods of the former are unable to account for the manifestations of the latter. It is only Dracula’s enlightened metaphysician-philosopher who’s reconciled the powers of the old centuries with the possibilities of latter-day belief:
Jack, you are a scientist. Do you not think there are things in this universe which you cannot understand—and yet which are true?
Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins); screenplay by James V. Hart
You’ve got to hand it to Coppola: He took one of the most revisited stories (and repurposed characters) in the entire Western literary canon and produced something wholly unique from it. That’s an act of cinematic necromancy worthy of his subject!
WOLF (1994)
Jack Nicholson stars as book editor Will Randall, “a man of taste and individuality” being eaten alive by the practices and politics of corporate America. When Will is bitten by a wolf he accidently hit with his car, he begins experiencing a curious lycanthropic transformation that arouses his latent wild side. Will is a literate, sensitive soul in a vacuous, cutthroat world who spends considerable time ruminating on the downfall of civilization:
PARTY GUEST #1: Because the rainforest is being destroyed so rapidly, all these new viruses are going to colonize throughout the world and destroy vast segments of the population. I’m only quoting the New Yorker, you understand.
PARTY GUEST #2: Yeah, every upscale magazine tries to make the case that the world will end if have no rainforest.
WILL RANDALL: Well, you could make a case that the world has already ended. That art is dead. We are exhausted. That instead of art we have pop culture: daytime TV; gay senior citizens; women who’ve been raped by their dentists confiding in Oprah; an exploration in depth of why women cut off their husbands’ penis.
Screenplay by Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick
One of the many delightful surprises of Mike Nichols’ Wolf is that when you learn of the premise—Jack Nicholson becomes a werewolf—you are primed for one of Jack’s unrestrained, over-the-top performances à la The Shining and The Witches of Eastwick and the Joker. But that’s not at all what he delivers here: It’s a subdued, measured portrayal of a repressed late-middle-aged man—note the way the production design of his apartment and office building subliminally suggests caged environments—who comes to embrace the irreconcilable truths of his duality, and, in turn, learns to live authentically.
MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN (1994)
Taking a page from Coppola (who served as a producer here), director and star Kenneth Branagh went back to the 1818 book for inspiration, eschewing some of the common Frankenstein cinematic tropes that had long since slipped into cliché (and were so brilliantly parodied by Mel Brooks in Young Frankenstein).
“Knowledge is power only through God” cautions his university’s motto, and visionary student Victor Frankenstein sees an opportunity to augment the modern discipline of scientific method with ancient esoteric knowledge for the purpose of cheating death… and perhaps even creating life:
No, it’s not impossible, we can do it—we’re steps away. And if we can do that—if we can replace one part of a human being—we can replace every part. And if we can do that, we can design a life. We can create a being that will not grow old or sicken. One that will be stronger than us, better than us. One that will be more intelligent than us, more civilized than us.
Victor Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh); screenplay by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont
The cynical notion that being human means we are consigned to a state of imperfection, of limited existence, that can somehow be improved upon by “technosolutionism” very much echoes contemporary faith in transhumanism: the dubious hope that “mind uploading” will at last liberate us from our own mortality, the very thing that makes us human in the first place—a subject explored in a movie released a mere week after this one…
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE: THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES (1994)
No, Louis and Lestat were not part of the Universal Classic Monsters troupe, but it stands to reason the success of Coppola’s Dracula paved the way for this long-in-development adaptation of Anne Rice’s 1976 novel to finally come to fruition. But whereas Coppola’s film is a surrealist phantasmagoria, Neil Jordan’s Interview is a handsomely produced costume drama in which vampires move about freely if surreptitiously in the real world. In many respects, Rice’s vampires have achieved the very existential ideal Victor Frankenstein envisioned: a being that will not grow old or sicken; one that is stronger than us, better than us, more intelligent, more civilized. And yet…
Their apotheosis hasn’t made their pursuit of meaning any easier or more fruitful. If anything, traveling across the continents and through the centuries has only confused matters for them, and left them subject to the law of diminishing relevance in an increasingly modern world:
ARMAND: Do you know how few vampires have the stamina for immortality? How quickly they perish of their own will? (Scoffs.) The world… changes. We do not. Therein lies the irony that finally kills us. I need you to make contact with this age.
LOUIS: Me? Don’t you see? I’m not the spirit of any age. I’m at odds with everything. I always have been.
ARMAND: That is the very spirit of your age. The heart of it. Your fall from grace has been the fall of a century.
LOUIS: But the vampires in the theater?
ARMAND: Decadent. Useless. They can’t reflect anything! But… you do. You reflect its broken heart. A vampire with a human soul. An immortal with a mortal’s passion. You… are… beautiful, my friend.
Screenplay by Anne Rice
MARY REILLY (1996)
And now for a new take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with John Malkovich in the title roles. But whereas the aforementioned Dracula and Frankenstein films sought unprecedented fidelity to their source materials, Stephen Frears’ Mary Reilly (itself based on a 1990 novel by Valerie Martin) reimagines the Jekyll and Hyde tale from the point of view of the meek housemaid (Julia Roberts).
You so root for this film to work, but Roberts and Malkovich, fine actors both, seem miscast, and the story is underplotted. It pays lip service to Stevenson’s themes (“You’ve no idea how strange and twisting are the ways of science”), but never really develops them in any meaningful way, and the love story—the narrative twist upon which Mary Reilly is premised—lacks any passion. Consequently, the movie tanked.
SNOW WHITE: A TALE OF TERROR (1997)
Like Mary Reilly, this one’s receded from cultural consciousness, but I thought it worth including simply because it was an earnest attempt to produce a darker—and arguably more tonally faithful—adaptation of the 1812 fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, with Sigourney Weaver in the role of the Evil Queen. Though this Snow White aspires to the operatic grandeur of Coppola’s Dracula, it plays more like a high-school Renaissance faire. No wonder it went straight to video.
THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE (1997)
If John Grisham and Ira Levin had ever collaborated on a story, it’s easy to imagine it would’ve been this one, in which a preternaturally gifted young defense attorney from Florida, Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves), is taken under the wing of John Milton (Al Pacino), managing partner of a literally diabolical New York law firm. Of all the movies in this cycle, this is arguably the most explicitly of its moment:
Eddie Barzoon, Eddie Barzoon. Ha! Ugh, I nursed him through two divorces, a cocaine rehab, and a pregnant receptionist. Ha! God’s creature, right? God’s special creature? Ha! And I warned him, Kevin—I’ve warned him every step of the way. Watching him bounce around like a fucking game—like a wind-up toy! Like two hundred and fifty pounds of self-serving greed on wheels. The next thousand years is right around the corner, Kevin, and Eddie Barzoon—take a good look, because he’s the poster child for the next millennium! These people—it’s no mystery where they come from. You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire, you build egos the size of cathedrals, fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse, grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor—becomes his own god! And where can you go from there? And as we’re scrambling from one deal to the next, who’s got his eye on the planet? As the air thickens, the water sours—even the bees’ honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity. And it just keeps coming—faster and faster. There’s no chance to think, to prepare. It’s buy futures, sell futures, when there is no future! We got a runaway train, boy. We got a billion Eddie Barzoons all jogging into the future—every one of ‘em getting ready to fist-fuck God’s ex-planet, lick their fingers clean as they reach out toward their pristine cybernetic keyboards to tote up their fuckin’ billable hours!
John Milton (Al Pacino); screenplay by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy
Despite the movie’s depressingly accurate prescience—two decades after its release, no less than the highest office in the land is occupied by “two hundred and fifty pounds of self-serving greed on wheels”—its gender politics haven’t aged particularly well: Charlize Theron succumbs to a certifiable mental breakdown the moment Keanu stops paying attention to her, and Connie Nielsen functions strictly as a one-dimensional object of sexual desire. But Taylor Hackford’s devilishly entertaining morality tale boasts an ambitious script, atmospheric production (featuring great New York locations), and a hell of a scenery-chewing performance from Pacino, who spends the closing fifteen minutes near-monologuing, and it’s somehow utterly captivating from start to finish.
THE MUMMY (1999)
I could offer no summation of this movie more concise than this actual excerpt of dialogue from it, an exchange between pilot Winston Havelock (Bernard Fox) and hero Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser):
HAVELOCK: “What’s the, uh… what’s the challenge, then?”
O’CONNELL: “Rescue the damsel in distress. Kill the bad guy. Save the world.”
Screenplay by Stephen Sommers; story by Sommers, Lloyd Fonvielle, and Kevin Jarre
Alas, no metaphors or thematic aspirations in Stephen Sommers’ remake of the Boris Karloff classic, which but for copyright restrictions could’ve well been called “Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Mummy.” It was a huge success, though, leading to countless sequels and spin-offs.
SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999)
The Headless Horseman was never one of the Universal Classic Monsters, but stylistically speaking, Tim Burton’s adaptation of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) bears the most in common with the horror films of that era. The color palette is so muted it’s practically a black-and-white film, save for the jack-o’-lanterns and free-spurting blood, the latter of which recalls the jellylike Technicolor vibrance of the old Hammer productions.
There isn’t a hell of a lot of plot to work with in the original short story, so Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is reconceptualized as a squeamish police constable from New York sent upstate to investigate a series of beheadings attributed to an axe-wielding apparition on horseback. Set explicitly in the autumn of 1799, Ichabod frequently expresses exasperation that, at the precipice of a new century, superstition over science is still the preferred mode of faith.
The dialogue is terrific (Tom Stoppard performed an uncredited rewrite); Johnny Depp masterfully tightrope-walks between pathos and comedy to deliver an affectingly deep characterization of Ichabod Crane as a man “beaten down by reason”; and Tim Burton, whose résumé is admittedly hit-and-miss, was born for this material. Sure, the whodunit machinations are a little convoluted, but in a modern media landscape in which plot is valued at all cost over story (to wit: the dreadful postnarrative television series of the same name that aired on Fox from 2013 to 2017), Sleepy Hollow’s old-fashioned aspirations more than compensate for any minor narrative imperfections.
HOLLOW MAN (2000)
Since this cycle arguably began prior to Coppola’s Dracula with the John Carpenter/Chevy Chase film Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)—though that was such an ignoble bomb, and tonally out of step with everything here, it hardly seems worth counting—it’s fitting that it more or less ends with another crack at updating H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, first adapted in 1933 by James Whale featuring Claude Rains, this one from Paul Verhoeven.
When molecular biologist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) is unable to reverse the effects of an invisibility serum he’s tested on himself, he relieves the boredom of quarantine by indulging—hedonistically and even criminally—the wicked delights of his newfound superpower. The visual effects are (still) great, but it’s the screenplay here that’s hollow. Sebastian starts out as such an irredeemably egomaniacal creep that as soon as he’s empowered with invisibility, he instantaneously becomes the most psychosexually depraved permutation of himself. “It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have to look at yourself in the mirror anymore,” Sebastian at one point declares. I only wish Hollow Man had offered a nuanced study of that notion rather than merely a passing mention of it.
Some of these movies were more ambitious than others, some more successful—creatively and commercially—than others. But so many of the themes in which they traffic—the folly of thinking metaphysical conditions can be reduced to and reproduced by algorithmic formulae; the commodification of natural phenomena for personal enrichment; the pursuit of meaning through artistic creation—run counter to the very notion of Universal’s failed corporate initiative known as the “Dark Universe.” Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man aren’t public-domain assets to be exploited; they are immortal cultural analogs of the forbidden desires and primeval impulses that lurk within the deepest recesses of our hearts. These monsters can tell us a lot about ourselves, provided we respect the very darkness we invoke when we summon them into service.
As much as Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman is one of my all-time faves, there’s an essential problem w/ a monster vs. monster fight (this includes something like Freddy Vs. Jason)
Who do you root for?
Arguably, if set up properly, you could watch Batman fight Superman and, assuming you can suspend your disbelief enough, worry that one of them would hurt or kill the other
But when Freddy fights Jason or Frankenstein’s Monster fights the Wolfman or Alien fights Predator… they’re both dangerous, and you’re not rooting for either one to win. In fact, you’re safer if they fight each other instead of going after you, and best off if they both kill each other
While I’m not fond of Godzilla being a good guy, at least that gives us someone to root for in those kaiju battles
It’s easy to overlook this when the monsters in question are popular, and more interesting, characterized, and fun than any of the humans in the movie. But spectacle is not story
So if monster fights are not the way to go, then should the monsters team up?
The problem here is related to the Inverse Ninja Law (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu): Last time Dracula showed up and we were screwed. Now Drac has Frank and Wolfie w/ him, and we’re… tripled screwed? Or does each monster somehow seem… less?
Not to mention the difficulties of giving each monster enough screen time. This is WORSE than superhero movies, because in addition to the monsters, you have to give the token human “heroes” time. Yes, a superhero movie needs to give time to the villain, but it can be less because they don’t need audience sympathy
Double Mumbo Jumbo could also be an issue here, but not necessarily, as long as the monsters are pre-established, in one way or another
One last problem is that the people making these movies think they’re making Monster In The House, but they use characters developed as Superhero. Sometimes the token humans are doing Golden Fleece at the same time
Monster Mash SOUNDS like a good idea, but outside of comedy it rarely works
Wisely done in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, was making Larry Talbot—the man trapped in eternity to become a ravenous monster every lunar cycle—sympathetic. His efforts to find a final release from his curse drive his part of the story, foiled by the increasingly mad scientific curiosity of Patric Knowles’ Dr. Mannering, allow the audience to empathize with his plight and root for him, and when that wrench is thrown into Talbot’s plans, we feel for him even as his inner monster breaks loose and finds itself thrown into open confrontation with another monster, this one born of scientific hubris.
In Freddy vs. Jason, it is precisely the humans we root for, trying at first to escape the monsters, and, realizing they can’t, can only get them to battle one another and hope they kill each other off. It shouldn’t have worked, but the screenplay respected both franchises enough to make it work.
Well argued, Michael. The trick to pitting monster against monster is positioning their irreconcilable agendas at odds in a way that is germane to the tragic nature of their respective existences. I think that is precisely what Goyer attempted to address in his take on Freddy vs. Jason (though I don’t think he ever got as far as writing a draft of it), though the movie New Line ultimately produced was for the most part a thin and somewhat contrived excuse to have both monsters creatively slaughter a bunch of innocent teens before doing battle with each other.
I concur with your assessment that Freddy vs. Jason respected each franchise enough to be aesthetically true to both of them; I recall thinking that when I saw the movie (over fifteen years ago at this point). I remember that opening scene of the topless girl on the dock felt exactly like one of the classic Friday the 13th movies from the ’80s, and of course having Robert Englund as Freddy gave the picture continuity with the previous Nightmare on Elm Streets. It wasn’t a deep movie, but at least it was fun, which is more than can be said for those dreadful Alien vs. Predator flicks. I should revisit it at some point.
Back in the early aughts — when franchise mashups like Freddy vs. Jason, Alien vs. Predator, and Batman v Superman were still embryonic projects languishing in development hell — I met David S. Goyer at a screenwriting convention here in Los Angeles, and I recall him saying that such conceptual crossovers were the ultimate sign of a series’ creative exhaustion (which didn’t stop him, it’s worth noting, from writing Batman v Superman, but I digress).
Anyway, Goyer talked about a meeting he took with New Line a few years prior in which the producers of the proposed Freddy vs. Jason movie were trying to figure out a way to address the very creative conundrum you identify, Dell: Who wins? What Goyer suggested — and I thought this was reasonably brilliant — was that Jason should prevail on account of the fact that Freddy is a child abuser, and Jason an abused child. As I recall — and I’m sifting through well over fifteen years of accrued memory here — his idea was that Freddy was one of the camp counselors at Crystal Lake responsible for Jason’s death!
That’s probably about as smart a take on a Freddy vs. Jason premise as anyone could’ve conceived, but I don’t think — and I admittedly haven’t seen the movie since its initial release in ’03 — any of that wound up in the final product. To my recollection, it was ultimately just a B-movie about two monsters (a macabre jokester and de facto zombie miles removed from their original tragic incarnations) trying to rack up the highest body count — including each other! And you’re right, Dell: You’re not rooting for either of them, and the movie itself isn’t about anything other than “immortal combat,” if you like. It’s a glorified videogame at best.
Alien vs. Predator was an even bigger problem, because at least Freddy and Jason started as human beings at one point, whereas the Xenomorph and the Predator were just forces of nature in vaguely humanoid shapes. They’re not characters, so there was no shared backstory to retroactively develop between them as Goyer had for Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees (unused though it was). Consequently, the audience got stuck following a bunch of underdeveloped human characters that served no plot function other than to be A) cannon fodder and B) a distraction from the fact that the story’s two protagonists were nonhuman entities driven by a single-minded imperative. Those movies are simply unwatchable. Maybe the concept works as a comic in which audience expectations are appreciably lower — Dark Horse certainly had a lot of success with it in the ’90s — but as a feature film, it’s just an exercise in meaningless mayhem. Another videogame writ large.
As for Batman v Superman: You can read my thoughts on that here.
And yes: The Double Mumbo Jumbo principle does not apply if the conceptual “buy-ins” were established in previous entries, which is how the MCU operates. (It’s also why the various — and often contradictory — mythologies presented in the X-Files and Indiana Jones franchises don’t step on each other.)
One last point you raised, Dell, that I would like to address is that indeed many of the above movies (Dracula, Wolf, Frankenstein, Interview, and Hollow Man) are Superhero, not Monster in the House (Mary Reilly, The Mummy, and Sleepy Hollow are MITH). I was going to include each movie’s Save the Cat! genre classification as I have in the past (in “Going Fishing” and “Monster Hunting” and “Mirror/Mirror”), but I’ve recently come to the conclusion the STC! genres have been so badly corrupted by Blake Snyder’s idiotic successors that it isn’t even a tool worth teaching anymore. I mean, I use it — and am grateful for it — but the imbeciles over at STC! treat it like a game: It’s time to play… Guess That Genre! It’s not, alas, the utilitarian storytelling resource Snyder had intended it to be; all the posthumous books and blog posts the “Master Cats” have subsequently published have left that pool irreversibly pissed in, I’m sorry to say. At least you and I can still find use and value in Blake’s work, Dell!
Would you believe I have only seen The Devil’s Advocate and the 1999 Mummy. Wow, Sean, do I have some catching up to do on 20 year old films. Ha ha. Where was I? Oh yeah, working, parenting, exhausted.
I’m not surprised that the Dark Universe venture flopped. Same old same old.
I have been watching the Marvel interconnected serials and have enjoyed most of them. The series approach allows for deeper character development and more complex, overlapping plots. That appeals to me versus the shallower tropes that I’ve seen a bazillion times. (The latest John Wick movie was ridiculous – I couldn’t believe my husband had to pay for that).
Anyway, thanks for the movie list and for giving a couple months of popcorn and Saturday night viewing fun.
I was in high school and college when most of these came out — studying cinema and eager to be a screenwriter — and they were a huge influence on my own fiction, none more so than Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is a cinematic experience unlike any other. I hope you will watch Dracula, Diana, and then come back to let me know what you thought of it!
I think you’d also like Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, because it shares the same pure love of both pagan magic and the natural world that is evident in so much of your own work, Diana, from your novels to your poetry to your flash fiction.
I haven’t seen any of the John Wicks, and the last sequential Marvel movie I saw was Age of Ultron in 2015. (In addition, I’ve seen Black Panther, though not any of the films that led up to or away from it, including all that Infinity War and Endgame stuff.) I know they have their fans, and while I do on some level admire the complexity of their interconnected narratives, I ultimately side with Scorsese when he accuses superhero movies of being theme parks: Like theme parks, you have to experience every attraction they have to offer (and pick up some licensed merch, to boot), else you’re “missing out.” Mega-franchises — like Dark Universe aspired to be — are marketing campaigns, selling you the same product over and over and over again by leveraging FOMO (“fear of missing out”), deploying tactics like “spoilers” (forcing you to keep up or have the latest plot twist ruined), and “retconning” (when the last half-dozen subpar sequels are written out of the continuity, promising a “fresh start” for disaffected fans of the earlier films).
Part of the joy of discovering movies like Dracula and Wolf and The Devil’s Advocate when I was a kid was that each was a new, unfamiliar experience — a chance to expand my own imagination and understanding of what stories could do — whereas mega-franchises sell the comfort of the familiar. They don’t challenge me, and for that reason I have largely abandoned them; I’ve essentially refused to keep up with them. I’m not suggesting they don’t have their place, only that they don’t have a place in my life.
But while some of the ingenuous joys of moviegoing have been permanently lost to age and experience, I have also developed a deeper appreciation for my formative influences as I’ve come to see how they’ve inspired my own works of fiction. So, the intellectual complexities of insight supplant the recreational pleasures of entertainment — an even if admittedly unwelcome trade.
Thanks, Diana, for reading and sharing, and I do hope you rent and enjoy some of the fright flicks above! I can certainly think of worse ways to spend the cold, dark nights of late autumn!
The problem, as you and I have pointed out in the past, is essentially trying to build a house without first laying the foundation. Kevin Feige began with stand-alone movies that did well on their own and teased at an eventual Avengers team-up, which was then delivered to epic finale. The other studios found themselves racing to catch up, but failed to understand how and why Marvel’s shared movie universe worked so well. Warner Bros. seems belatedly to have learned the right lessons with the releases of Shazam! and Joker, but with Hollywood hack Jar Jar Abrams coming aboard, it’s doubtful that DC and Warner Bros. will survive his oh-so-brutal ministrations to their properties.
With regard to Universal, its Invisible Man reboot seeks to do, ham-handedly, what was already explored in The Hollow Man—also ham-handedly, but unlike the new movie, doesn’t talk down to its audience on the level the upcoming release probably will. That’s what comes from letting the likes of hack and serial thief Alex Klutzman take “charge” of things. Universal hasn’t learned any lessons from its recent failures, either, nor does it show any inclination to.
It’s long past time the studio’s execs got out of the way and let auteurs with real visions, stories, and talent take over.
I actually think starting w/ the Justice League COULD have worked
We already know Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, so we don’t actually need an introduction to them. And this would have differentiated DC from Marvel. IF the movie had been made by someone not deliberately out to “deconstruct” the characters. And IF the movie hadn’t assumed that we audience members were idiots
And Suicide Squad WAS different from anything Marvel had done. But executive meddling kept it from being as good as it could have been (They only had six weeks to write the script! Seriously!)
> failed to understand how and why Marvel’s shared movie universe worked so well.
Marvel made it look easy. So everyone else assumed it WAS easy
>It’s long past time the studio’s execs got out of the way and let auteurs with real visions, stories, and talent take over.
I agree completely. Even if an auteur fails, at least it’s an honest failure. But I don’t think it’s gonna happen any time soon. You;d need a studio exec w/ more smarts than ego for that to happen. And I doubt that there are many of them running around
I don’t know why people in charge of studios think it’s easy to create movie franchises, especially given the sheer number of flops relative to the number of successes. The biggest problem with Hollywood is that it is so thoroughly taken over by corporate suits with no experience in or passion for making films and television shows, there is hardly anyone remaining who even cares whether the product is any good. There’s this assumption that the audience will either love or, if not, it can go f*** itself. The suits exist in a bubble into which reality is forbidden from ever penetrating, lest the fragile ego inside collapse into a black hole of despair.
The success of Joker proves, however, that auteur-driven storytelling can still work and even turn a profit. The failure of Disney Star Wars, CBS’ violations of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, Snyder’s DCEU, and Sony’s Ghostbusters, should be a lesson that tossing a half billion dollars at a project is neither a guarantee of profitability or a particularly wise investment.
In a very cost-intensive business is which everyone is looking for a “sure thing,” franchises — or brands, or IPs, or however one cares to identify them — are as close to a “formula” as Hollywood gets. I’m not justifying this mindset, you understand — merely explaining it. This has always been the case, it’s just reached pathological proportions in the last twenty years as several factors have converged: corporations own all our culture’s most prominent intellectual properties; movies are costlier than ever to produce and market; the audience for them is fractured in our multimedia landscape, meaning attracting eyeballs is infinitely more challenging in the Digital Age; and the overwhelmingly intractable complexities of 21st-century existence have made us long for the simple analog pleasures of the 1980s — meaning there is a robust market for nostalgia. So, every time we go see a Star Wars movie, we are casting a monetary vote for more of them. That’s the reason I will be sitting out this month’s Return of the Skywalker — now and in perpetuity.
And — who knows? — perhaps others will, too. It’s encouraging to me that Solo: A Star Wars Story, released in the wake of the (rightly) reviled Last Jedi, bombed. And not just Solo; in the last few years, plenty of “sure things” have unexpectedly underperformed (if not outright tanked): Terminator: Dark Fate, Ghostbusters (2016), Charlie’s Angels (2019), Star Trek Beyond, Baywatch, Alien: Covenant, Blade Runner 2049, The Predator, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Independence Day: Resurgence, Hellboy (2019), Shaft (2019), Men in Black: International, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows…
I mean, Hollywood isn’t going to learn anything from that, but maybe audiences will? Maybe in the months ahead we’ll be smart enough to pass on Return of the Skywalker, to say nothing of No Time to Die, Mulan, Bad Boys for Life, Top Gun: Maverick, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Godzilla vs. Kong, Dune, Bill & Ted Face the Music, Halloween Kills, Fantasy Island, Coming 2 America, and — if there is a God — Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, the unwanted sequel to an atrocious movie that literally everyone hated. On the subject of 1980s nostalgia, here’s a piece of advice I suggest we all exercise when the above are offered in the coming year: Just Say No.
Ditto all of this. Let me give you both a little inside information about “creative” execs: They are all failed writers who now make their living giving accomplished writers their marching orders. Screenwriters are compelled to sit in these awful meetings with studio execs, placate their fragile egos by taking their wrongheaded notes, and then go off and try to make those bad ideas work. I’ve seen more instances of these idiots “improving” a great piece of material into a failure than I could at this point accurately tally. No other business works like that — whereby the “dropouts” call the shots! It’s why I had to get out of the industry: My salvation, to paraphrase Dracula‘s R. M. Renfield, depended upon it.
I don’t think Hollywood is ever going to voluntarily change, but I do think the current system is unsustainable — even increasingly unstable as the recent WGA strife illustrates — and that it will in the relatively near future implode. And from there, a new mode of commercial creativity will inevitably emerge. Same way I think that our sociopolitical order of extractive capitalism — the gig-and-dig economy identified by Naomi Klein — will in the none-too-distant future give way to a new worldview of social cooperation and empathetic coexistence. I can’t say it’s a fun experience to be living through a period of such dramatic social, economic, environmental, and industrial turmoil (the very things many of the turn-of-the-century horror stories examined in this post reflected), but I am optimistic for big changes over the next decade or two. The old systems are breaking down, and new ones are pushing through like the flowers of spring against the frost of winter. So, be frustrated… but don’t lose heart.
Yep. Marvel built its empire brick by brick, first unobtrusively crosspollinating its films by having an occasional supporting character (Nick Fury, Phil Coulson) or object (Captain America’s shield in Tony Stark’s workshop) appear, then bringing the various heroes together for an all-star team-up (Avengers), and then once that was established, allowing the characters to freely come and go in each other’s movies (the way Iron Man was a constant presence in the MCU long after his final solo movie in 2013). That took patience and vision, something the other studios failed to grasp and/or respect. I mean, I’m no fan of Kevin Feige — popular storytelling, in my opinion, is worse off for the mega-franchise model he’s innovated — but I do stand in (admittedly horrified) awe that he pulled it off.
I hadn’t heard much about the new Invisible Man until a colleague told me just last week that it’s basically Hollow Man meets Sleeping with the Enemy. I mean, that’s certainly a compelling pitch… but a lot of great pitches make for shitty movies. (Case in point: Transformers was pitched by Orci and Kurtzman as a story about “a boy and his first car.”) We’ll see…
I don’t hold out much hope for the studio system, especially now with conglomerates like the Walt Disney Company devouring companies (and their IPs) like Unicron and hiring their reliable stable of talentless hacks to “feed the machine,” but I also believe the sheer unsustainability of rebooting stale franchises at the expense of taking a chance on new ideas will eventually lead to systemic collapse.
To wit: In addition to some recent high-profile flops (Charlie’s Angels and Terminator: Dark Fate), the WGA and ATA are nowhere near resolving their differences, and the Writers Guild is staring down the barrel of yet another potential strike! To my view, all signs are pointing to a Hollywood apocalypse in the not-too-distant future. Now there’s a reboot I can support!
Well, you know how much I love movies and this post is fantastic. Coppola’s Dracula is always a favourite—that scene where they’re racing the setting sun always gives me chills. But my favourite vampire films are The Hunger and Let The Right One In. I had no idea that Stoppard worked on Sleepy Hollow—I used to teach Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (more for my own enjoyment than the students). Now I want to spend the weekend watching monster movies😊
I’m gonna be honest: I never cared much for Coppola’s interpretation of Dracula. Too much sex and romance thrown into the story where it was never actually needed. Don’t get me wrong; as a stand-alone film it’s superb, but it’s not Dracula.
You know, I’ve heard Coppola’s Dracula praised for being the most faithful adaptation of the novel ever produced, and, conversely, I’ve heard it criticized for being the idiosyncratic vision of Coppola with little attributable to the work of Stoker himself.
Here’s my take on that: Both assessments are true.
It’s a cinematic interpretation of the novel — Coppola’s vision of Stoker’s creation. Plot-wise, it is arguably the closest official adaptation of the source material to date, but Coppola and screenwriter Jim Hart did take some creative liberties — most notably the romance between Dracula and Mina. But — speaking strictly for myself — I actually thought that narrative amendment was an improvement on the source material, because it not only gave Dracula a very human motivation, but it kept him active in the plot after he leaves Transylvania. In the novel, once the action shifts to London after the first fifty or so pages, Dracula barely appears in the story: He is discussed, and alluded to, but seldom directly present. The movie’s romantic subplot solved that problem, and the filmmakers cleverly accounted for why that part of the story was “omitted” from the novel when they had Mina tear out any relevant pages from her diary that referred to it and throw them into the ocean on her way to marry Jonathan in Romania.
As for the film’s sexual content: most if not all of it is suggested by Stoker in his text. I personally love the scene in the seraglio in which the Brides seduce Keanu! I find it at once titillating and horrifying! For my money, Coppola brought that episode from the novel to life in a way that enriched my appreciation for Stoker’s description rather than superseding it; Coppola’s visuals and Stoker’s prose complement each other quite effectively, methinks.
A few years ago, I published a comparative analysis of Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger’s interpretations of the Joker. Here’s an excerpt relevant to this discussion of Dracula:
Given that, to declare any particular interpretation of Dracula official or unofficial, canonical or noncanonical, worthy or unworthy is, ultimately, a very personal matter: The “true Dracula” — like the true Batman, or the true Ebenezer Scrooge — is whichever one each of us chooses for ourselves. That’s the gift these cultural treasures keep on giving us.
I saw Coppola’s Dracula on opening day in 1992 at 19th Street and Broadway in Manhattan; the show was entirely sold out and the only seat available was in the front row all the way to the left side of the theater! But I didn’t care: I was captivated from start to finish. Having grown up on the slasher exploitation flicks of the 1980s, I had no idea horror could aspire to such awesome artistry! After that, I devoured vampire fiction (both movies and novels), including The Hunger; I also love Let the Right One In, though I admit to having never read the source novel (nor that of The Hunger). I ought to rectify that…
Yep, Stoppard was an uncredited writer on two of my favorite movies: Sleepy Hollow and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; his influence on both is undeniable. I adore Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; I took a class in college on the absurdist dramatic movement of the 1960s — Beckett, Albee, Pinter, Stoppard — and really fell in love with it. I bitch a lot on this blog about the sheer meaninglessness of contemporary television drama, but the great existential playwrights of the sixties knew how to use “meaninglessness” to say quite a lot about the human condition.
I think great monster stories, which are often about an unnatural bastardization of the human condition (be it vampirism or zombification or lycanthropy), serve in their own way to comment on the truth of our mortal existence in all of its complexities and limitations; through these dark fantasies, we gain insight on — and even appreciation for — human nature that we wouldn’t otherwise have. That’s why I love reading/watching these stories, and it is certainly why I love writing them. And what I aspire to do with my monster yarns is bring the same spirit of disciplined artistry and emotional truthfulness that Stoppard endowed to such “popcorn flicks” as Sleepy Hollow and Last Crusade. In a way, that’s the very brand of this blog: I aim for deep intellectual explorations of some very “stupid” subjects!
I would love to read your take on this
Something any “mega-franchise” or “A vs B” needs to consider:
https://www.ericdsnider.com/misc/batman-in-the-operating-room-why-some-comedy-isnt-funny/
tl;dr:
Classically trained actor Robert Reed (the dad on “The Brady Bunch) tries to explain to the producers the different styles in theatre, and why he could not act in a slapstick style.
My view: Reed is basically correct. While some people say, “it’s a comedy. It doesn’t need to make sense” I strongly disagree
Some comedies don’t need to make sense, but some do
The Monkees could handle a plot point by turning into superheroes (The Monkeemen), including the ability to fly, even though they were not superheroes normally, just for that one scene. It worked because it was funny
In the Big Bang Theory the characters could cosplay as superheroes, but could not actually have superpowers. Sheldon could imagine himself having superspeed, but he wouldn’t really have it w/in the reality of the show
Now someone could write a fanfic where the BBT cast all gain superpowers, and it could work. But only because a fanfic is distinct from the original (though sometimes a fanfic might be indistinguishable in all ways from a regular ep)
I do have one quibble: Fantasy is a Genre (not Blake Snyder genre) and the others are styles. A story in any of the other styles could still have fantasy elements, as long as the elements are established from the beginning
This is an absolutely terrific piece, Dell — thanks for linking to it here. I was previously aware of Reed’s creative carps with The Brady Bunch, because they were well-documented in Barry Williams’ 1992 memoir Growing Up Brady (Williams may’ve even included excerpts from some of those memos, if I recall accurately). There’s so much I could say about “Batman in the Operating Room” that it probably deserves its own post (or series of them), but let me see if I can’t address my salient points without, as I am known to do, writing what amounts to a goddamn thesis dissertation!
What Reed is getting at is that dramatic storytelling adheres to principles — not necessarily rules, which are for the insecure — in order to make meaning of its given scenario. A disciplined storyteller uses tone and genre conventions to set audience expectations up front — to assure them they are in the hands of someone who knows what he’s doing — and through that agreed-upon reality he is free to explore a theme and, as a parting gift, offer the viewer emotional catharsis by way of a character arc. (Transformational arcs are one of the least understood aspects of storytelling — even by seasoned writers — and I’ve been meaning to write a post on that for years.) By establishing narrative parameters — limits to what can happen in a fictional reality — a writer engenders trust, which in turn makes his audience receptive to the message or moral he’s embedded in his story.
Now, a truly skillful storyteller can subvert conventions to make a point, too. You see such subversion a lot in the antiplot cinema of Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch and even Monty Python, but it’s occasionally used to terrific effect in classical “archplot” movies like Scream, in which the tension comes from explicitly understanding the conventions of the slasher subgenre, and then catharsis is taken from watching them turned on their head in the climax. I just this past weekend watched Adam McKay’s Vice for the first time, and was taken with the way it operated as a Shakespearean biopic of Dick Cheney that also sends-up the subgenre by self-consciously acknowledging its clichéd tropes. Screwing with story conventions is also, of course, the province of presentist fiction — what we’ve come to call “postnarrativity” — and since Snider cites The Simpsons, let’s hear what Rushkoff has to say about that show:
To my knowledge, many of the writers on The Simpsons are Ivy League–educated, and Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has already proven he understands classical story structure and genre conventions (I am, as you know, a huge fan of how he backdoored into Star Trek with The Orville, the spoof-that-wasn’t-a-spoof-after-all!). And my (growing) problem with so much of the television that masquerades as “postnarrative” is that it smacks of the same lack of discipline that afflicted The Brady Bunch: It gleefully disregards many of the principles of linear narrativity but still promises conventional conclusion and catharsis (which it inevitably fails to deliver). I’ve heard so many people puzzle over how Game of Thrones could have been so deftly written for seven seasons only to succumb to utter sloppiness in the home stretch, to which my response is: Maybe the writing was never good in the first place? Because if it had been, the whole sprawling narrative wouldn’t have collapsed under its own weight at the end. I don’t think GoT deserved any of its Emmys; I think the whole show was a cheap parlor trick designed to hold the audience’s attention for as long as possible and then deliver, despite its explicit promises, absolutely nothing in return for its viewers’ time and devotion. That’s not subversive storytelling or postnarrativity — it’s just lousy writing.
But Robert Reed, by contrast, was a classically trained thespian who understood (and respected) the mechanics of drama, as that memo makes manifest, and his frustration (if I’m interpreting correctly) came less from the Schwartzes disregard for “rules” than their lack of discipline. There’s violating the rules of drama to make a point (as The Simpsons does, and the Theatre of the Absurd did in the sixties), and then there’s violating them because you don’t understand and/or respect them. And the reason why shows like Game of Thrones (and Westworld) are so meaningless (in contrast with Waiting for Godot and Seinfeld and Family Guy, et al., which are era-specific commentaries on meaninglessness) is because the writers have thoughtlessly disregarded the principles of narrative. Benioff and Weiss have publicly admitted as much themselves.
And what concerns me is that the more of this bad writing we osmotically absorb, the more the institution of storytelling is itself compromised. No one under thirty watches movies or reads books anymore — they’ve experienced none of the classics, I assure you — and all they watch instead in the way of narrative entertainment is world-building bullshit like Game of Thrones, which is rewarded with Emmy after Emmy, so that becomes the metric for How to Do It.
Now, since this reply has already become the prolix dissertation I feared, how does what Reed have to say apply to mega-franchises? Episodic television, ongoing movie franchises, and mega-franchises do allow for some tonal fluctuation, though not within the same installment. An audience member will accept that a new episode or sequel can shift tone from the previous chapter so long as the overarching aesthetic reality is consistent. Both The X-Files and Doctor Who vary wildly in style from episode to episode: some are straight sci-fi, some horror, some adventurous, some comedic.
Multipart movie series have switched genres to tremendous success; take Indiana Jones, for example: Raiders is an epic romantic adventure à la Lawrence of Arabia and Casablanca; Temple of Doom, as its title implies, is a horror film; Last Crusade is a buddy road-trip comedy; Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is science fiction. Each movie varies tonally from the others, yet the series is aesthetically unified. (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull admittedly less so than the first three, but that had more to do with the lazy reliance on CGI and Janusz Kamiński’s oversaturated cinematography than the story’s Atomic Age setting or extraterrestrial MacGuffin.) John Williams’ scores even contribute to each film’s individual identity while establishing they are all part of the same family: Note the romantic yearning in the Raiders music, the pulse-pounding intensity of Temple, and the adventurous whimsy of Crusade — and yet we always close on the familiar “Raiders March.”
Or how about Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy? Batman Begins is a classic hero’s journey origin story; The Dark Knight, a crime saga à la Heat; The Dark Knight Rises is a disaster movie. And yet the viewer accepts that these three films exist in a shared, cohesive reality. Now, you certainly couldn’t have the Riddler from Batman Forever show up, or King Tut from the 1960s series, because those interpretations of Batman established aesthetic realities dramatically incompatible with Nolan’s trilogy.
Both Indiana Jones and The Dark Knight certainly benefited from a consistent guiding creative hand (Spielberg on the former, Nolan on the latter); sometimes a change in director works, sometimes it doesn’t. Martin Brest established the tonal reality of Beverly Hills Cop (“Fool Out of Water”); Tony Scott’s sequel, Beverly Hills Cop II (“Cop Whydunit”), has a much slicker look and pace (in keeping with Scott’s style), yet still feels in sync with Brest’s movie. John Landis’ Beverly Hills Cop III, on the other hand, is a slapstick mess that feels more like a subpar Blues Brothers movie than Beverly Hills Cop. So, Indy, Dark Knight, and Beverly Hills Cop all sort of prove that genre and/or stylistic shifts can work if the overall aesthetic reality established in the first film is honored. But, like Reed argues, you have to know what you’re doing in order to make those sensitive changes work. Nolan’s on record as having known what he was doing. I think Spielberg and Lucas also consciously understood that they were using each Indy movie as an opportunity to try something a little different within the aesthetic framework they’d established on Raiders. (Lucas did something similar on Young Indiana Jones: some eps were high adventure, some war epics, some coming-of-age romances, some political melodramas, some farcical comedies, some even whodunits!)
Which brings us to the mega-franchise. This one is complicated. Like a TV series (The X-Files, Doctor Who, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles), you get to try different stylistic experiments in different installments. But then you have to marry all that in a team-up movie and make it work! From a purely executional standpoint, I admire the hell out of what Kevin Feige has accomplished with the MCU. He understands that you can have an espionage thriller (The Winter Soldier) and then also on the same family tree have Thor: Ragnarok and Doctor Strange, neither of which I have seen but I know enough about them to realize they invoke entirely different genre conventions. And then you can put those characters together in an Avengers and it all kind of works somehow! Feige just understood the material: He knew those characters, the world they inhabited, and the creative possibilities it afforded. He knew his shit. He saw the Whole of the Moon, as the old song goes.
So, I guess all of this comes down to what I’ve been saying since my very first post: Know your shit. Study Aristotle, and Campbell, and Vogler, and Snyder. Read Rushkoff (the “Narrative Collapse” chapter of Present Shock, at least). Understand the tools, experiment with them, and have the creative courage to innovate. Writers should be as well-versed in story structure as physicians are in anatomy; sure, every story is different just as every patient is different, but we should start with a baseline understanding of what constitutes “normal” before we prescribe a particular course of treatment for the project at hand.
All that said, I don’t think mega-franchises are the best forum for creative experimentation. For reasons I’ve expressed elsewhere on this blog, I think they’re mostly marketing campaigns, designed to get us to watch/buy every product in a franchise. Like our stupid employer-based private healthcare system, mega-franchises are designed first and foremost to turn a profit. Feige’s done some interesting things, sure, but he had the benefit of being the first out of the gate: No one saw the MCU coming. But like everything else that proves successful, it’s been coopted by corporations and reverse-engineered into a plug-and-play Hollywood formula. And so many of the filmmakers these corporations trust — Abrams, Snyder, Benioff and Weiss — don’t appear to have a particularly strong command of the delicate components of narrative. (Nolan is a refreshing exception.) And if those guys are regarded as the standard-bearers for excellence in commercial narrativity, we’re going to have a generation of filmmakers that fail to understand that creativity is guided by principles. Those principles, unlike rules, are flexible, but ignore them at your peril. When Daenerys burns King’s Landing to cinders on a whim, it’s the modern-day equivalent of Greg Brady’s tonic turning his hair orange. Who knew the creators of Game of Thrones would’ve been wise to study The Brady Bunch?
Anyway, Dell, you always elevate the conversation around here! Thank you.
SPC
P.S. Yes, I agree with your assessment of I Dream of Jeannie. Per Blake Snyder, it would be an “Angel Bottle.” In terms of its style, I might call it “comedic magical realism”? I don’t know; I see what Reed was going for, though. It’s a hell of a fascinating memo; like myself, it seems Reed was deeply frustrated by what he observed as an erosion of discipline in his craft. I’m sure the Brady producers wrote him off as a diva, but the memo actually shows him to be a thoughtful, eloquent, erudite critic of the commercial televisional venture of which he was a part. Far from a repudiation of the “shitty sitcom” that employed him, that memo stands as testament to how earnestly he cared about it — perhaps more so than even its creative custodians.
>Benioff and Weiss have publicly admitted as much themselves. (https://popculture.com/tv-shows/2019/10/27/game-of-thrones-creators-confessed-being-inexperienced-fans/)
Interesting to compare this w/ your Sky Captain essay (https://www.seanpcarlin.com/sky-captain/)
There may be something to be said for a long apprenticeship versus instant success after all
Jesus, Dell, I haven’t looked at that essay in a long time! Funny to see how my own style has changed — how long some of those paragraphs run! (And it’s also funny that I invoked the Waterboys’ “The Whole of the Moon” in that piece, too, as well as my previous reply in this thread. Who knew that was my favorite song?!)
You know, if you want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a teacher, or even an air-conditioner repairman, you’re expected to meet standardized criteria for certification, which may include studying a prescribed curriculum and/or apprenticing/interning in some capacity. But because of the subjectivity of creativity, those standards don’t apply. Creativity is viewed as a “magical power” that one can summon at will or one can’t — simple as that.
This is, of course, bunk. There are two components to creativity: talent and skill. The former is congenital (meaning you’re born with it), the latter cultivated (meaning you develop it). I know innately talented writers who’ve never studied the craft; they write strictly intuitively. Some have stayed in the game rather successfully by “winging it,” but most flame out. Look at Kevin Williamson: He did something astonishing when he wrote Scream, but because he didn’t fundamentally understand how he did what he did, he’s never been able to reproduce that first success. (Hasn’t stopped him from enjoying an enviable career, though.)
Conversely, I know absolute masters of the craft — folks who can cite McKee and Vogler and Snyder verbatim (and, accordingly, diagnose problems in scripts with preternatural acumen) — who don’t themselves possess even a scintilla of talent; they’re own writing has no life, no emotion, no thematic resonance whatsoever. The characters are flat, the dialogue stilted, their narratives pointless. (I don’t know how familiar Robert Kirkman may or may not be with the fundamentals of craft, but he’s definitely one of those writers — and I know a few personally — who lucked his way into a career despite an abject dearth of natural talent. One need only read The Walking Dead to know he has no idea what he’s doing.)
This is a controversial topic I’ve discussed with many, many colleagues over the years, and the question comes down to this: If you’ve achieved success (the way Williamson and Kirkman have), does that by definition mean you deserve it? I mean, you got there, right? You beat the odds. Over 99% of folks who attempt to break into the arts-and-entertainment biz can’t lay claim to what you can. If you got it, do you therefore deserve it?
Here’s what I know: When creatives attain success that they haven’t earned, or aren’t ready for, either they pay for it (like the Conrans did) or the culture does. What I mean by that is we then get stuck with a lot of very shitty material — like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead — that defines the culture but doesn’t move it forward (and arguably retards it). It used to be that bad writers were consigned to working on comic books and soap operas and Saturday-morning cartoons, but now they’re given prestige TV shows! I’ve recently reread a number of the comic-book storylines that our generation considers “classic” — like The Death of Superman saga — and even I was a little surprised by just how appallingly abysmal the writing was. And it made me realize that these were writers who couldn’t cut it in other media — like television or cinema — so they were stuck cranking out this childish crap. (Hey, it’s a living!)
But now we live in a culture in which comic creators themselves — not merely their costumed creations — have been deified. The lines between these mediums have been completely obliterated. And I’m 100% fine with art — or any mode of creative expression — mutating and evolving, but we’ve been consuming so much shitty writing for so long, our compass for what’s good and what’s crap is completely skewed. As Edward Norton recently observed, “Moviegoers are so used to getting fed the equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup that they can’t taste anymore.”
And it isn’t merely superhero fiction that promotes bad storytelling. Consider Shonda Rhimes: She has done, what appears at first glance, a very admirable thing by sharing her (colossal) success with her protégées — using her muscle to get them opportunities in the television business. But here’s the thing: Except for working on Grey’s Anatomy, Peter Nowalk had had no experience when he was given his own series, How to Get Away with Murder (and it showed). Same with Stacy McKee and Station 19 (another dramatically retarded piece-of-shit show). It used to be you’d have to spend years on the TV circuit (writing for many different shows), working your way up from staff writer to story editor to co-producer to producer to supervising producer to co-executive producer to executive producer and then finally, if you were supremely fortunate, to showrunner of your own series. But by the time you got there, you were ready for that weighty responsibility — you’d been trained for it. You’d earned it.
But now, because there’s so much content needed for all the various (and exponentially multiplying) outlets and platforms, writers are put in charge of series well before they’re ready. And it manifests in the final product! Perhaps Benioff and Weiss — and, by extension, Game of Thrones — would’ve been better off for having worked on a few shows before being handed the keys to this massive high-fantasy undertaking. Maybe it was arrogance — or, at the very least, overconfidence — that convinced them (to say nothing of George R. R. Martin and HBO) that they could handle that project.
So, yeah, for the sake of one’s career, the work one produces, and the culture at large, there is something to be said for “paying your dues,” to use that as a catch-all expression for patiently and methodically learning your craft. As I’ve stated elsewhere on this blog, there’s value in trying and failing sometimes. And isn’t it preferable to endure those trials (and errors) when no one’s paying attention, verses when you’re riding high on a big-budget feature like Sky Captain or a worldwide phenomenon like Game of Thrones?
If I can repeat what I said in a comment on “Almost” Doesn’t Count: On Trying and Losing (Repeat as Needed)
To be a success (by whatever you define as success) in most fields you need five things, in varying amounts:
1. Raw, natural talent
2. Knowledge, such as can be learned from books or websites
3. Persistence
4. Experience, which can often teach things from 2, and can only happen if you have 3
5. Pure dumb luck
In some cases, an increase in one area can make up for a lack in another. Note that three areas are under your control
I define “skill” as a combination of 2 and 4
Well said then, and well said now, Dell. And I second my earlier response.
To jump back a few steps to our “Batman in the Operating Room” convo, for no reason I can explain, I thought of Baywatch the other day, and was reminded of its ill-fated spin-off series, Baywatch Nights. If you don’t recall, David Hasselhoff’s character Mitch (a lifeguard by day) joined his buddy Garner (who was like a municipal police officer that patrolled the beach on bicycle) in opening up a detective agency. It was a peculiar (and quite possibly the only) instance of a lead actor of a series also taking the leading role — simultaneously — in a spin-off. I guess the idea was he saved swimmers during his day job and solved cases at night…? Stupid, but… whatever.
However, in an attempt to boost ratings, the producers of Baywatch Nights changed the format in the second season from Lethal Weapon Lite to The X-Files: All of a sudden, Mitch is investigating supernatural phenomena, from sea monsters to vampires to voodoo cults. But keep in mind, he’s still manning his lifeguard tower in MTV-style music-video montages by day on the mothership series! I mean, to Robert Reed’s point, I don’t know how Hasselhoff reconciled the fact that he was playing the same character in two totally aesthetically incompatible shows. (I guess that’s why Baywatch Nights died an ignoble death only one season into its science-fiction experiment.) That the producers even thought that could work shows how little they understood — or little how they cared about — the stylistic reality they’d established on Baywatch. Honestly, the conceptual conceit of Baywatch Nights is no different than had Mulder and Scully showed up in Malibu at Hasslehoff and Pamela Anderson’s lifeguard station — it’s Batman in the operating room.
Man, that memo ought to be required reading!
To be honest I remember sleepy hollow, interview with a vampire and hollow man very vaguely. The others I haven’t seen.
Coppola’s Dracula is the one to see, Lena, especially given what a horror afficionado you are! James V. Hart’s screenplay sticks much closer to the plot of Stoker’s novel than pretty much any previous stage/screen adaptation (and the screenwriter’s sole instance of “creative infidelity” — the Dracula/Mina romance — arguably improves the story), and Coppola’s sumptuous visuals are in a cinematic class by itself. Yes, Keanu Reeves is woefully miscast (I would’ve much preferred to see Tim Roth as Jonathan Harker, personally), but Gary Oldman delivers the goods with each iteration of the Count he’s tasked with portraying: warrior prince, old man, Victorian vampire, etc.
While the character of Dracula has continued to appear in movies (the 2004 Universal Monsters throwback Van Helsing; the 2014 origin story Dracula Untold) and TV “reimaginings” (the 2013 series on NBC; the 2020 miniseries for the BBC) over the intervening three decades, it’s rather telling that Coppola’s film is that last direct adaptation of Stoker’s novel to have been produced. It’s a tough act to follow.
Thank you, Sean. I will definitely check it out. So many of my favorite actors in one movie can only be good! And thank you once again for all the effort you put into your blog. It’s an absolute pleasure to read.
Oh, thank you, Lena. I take a lot of pride in this ongoing project, for whatever it may be worth to people. Have yourself a safe and joyous weekend, all right?
Always a pleasure. Believe me, your ongoing project means a lot to people. Enjoy the rest of the week and keep safe!
Be sure to come back and let me know what you thought of Bram Stoker’s Dracula once you’ve had a chance to see it!
I Most certainly will!
I’m looking forward to it! That’s my favorite kind of movie!