A television series based on an immensely popular action-movie franchise shouldn’t have been a creative or commercial risk—quite the opposite. But with The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which premiered on March 4, 1992, filmmaker George Lucas had no intention of producing a small-screen version of his big-screen blockbusters. Here’s how Lucas provided a richly imaginative model for what a prequel can and should be—and why it would never be done that way again.
Though he more or less innovated the contemporary blockbuster, George Lucas had intended—even yearned—to be an avant-garde filmmaker:
Lucas and his contemporaries came of age in the 1960s vowing to explode the complacency of the old Hollywood by abandoning traditional formulas for a new kind of filmmaking based on handheld cinematography and radically expressive use of graphics, animation, and sound. But Lucas veered into commercial moviemaking, turning himself into the most financially successful director in history by marketing the ultimate popcorn fodder.
Steve Silberman, “Life After Darth,” Wired, May 1, 2005
After dropping the curtain on his two career- and era-defining action trilogies (Star Wars concluded in 1983, then Indiana Jones in ’89), then failing to launch a new franchise with Willow (his 1988 sword-and-sorcery fantasy fizzled at the box office, though even that would-be IP is getting a “legacy” successor later this year courtesy the nostalgia–industrial complex), Lucas did in fact indulge his more experimental creative proclivities—through the unlikeliest of projects: a pair of prequels to both Indiana Jones and Star Wars. And while both arguably got made on the strength of the brands alone, the prequels themselves would, for better and worse, defy the sacrosanct conventions of blockbuster cinema—as well the codified narrative patterns of Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey”—that audiences had come to expect from Lucas.
A perfunctory scene in Return of the Jedi, in which Obi-Wan finally explains Darth Vader’s mysterious backstory to Luke (a piece of business that could’ve been easily handled in the first film, thereby sparing the hero needlessly considerable risk and disillusionment in The Empire Strikes Back, but whatever), served as the narrative foundation for Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy (1999–2005), in which a precocious tike (The Phantom Menace) matures into a sullen teenager (Attack of the Clones) before warping into a murderous tyrant (Revenge of the Sith). Underpinning Anakin’s emo-fueled transformation to the dark side is a byzantine plotline about Palpatine’s Machiavellian takeover of the Republic. Meanwhile, references to the original trilogy, from crucial plot points to fleeting sight gags, abound.
You’ve all seen the movies, so I’ll say no more other than to suggest the story arc—which is exactly what Obi-Wan summarized in Return of the Jedi, only (much) longer, appreciably harder to follow, and a tonally incongruous mix of gee-whiz dorkiness and somber political intrigue—is precisely the kind of creative approach to franchise filmmaking that would’ve been summarily nixed in any Hollywood pitch meeting, had Lucas been beholden to the corporate precepts of the studio system from which the colossal success of the original Star Wars afforded him his independence.
Which is not to say Lucas’ artistic instincts were infallible. Financially successful though the prequels were, audiences never really embraced his vision of an even longer time ago in a galaxy far, far away: Gungans and midi-chlorians and trade disputes didn’t exactly inspire the wide-eyed amazement that Wookiees and lightsabers and the Death Star had.
Maybe by that point Star Wars was the wrong franchise with which to experiment creatively? Perhaps it had become too culturally important, and audience expectations for new entries in the long-dormant saga were just too high? In the intervening years, Star Wars had ceased to be the proprietary daydreams of its idiosyncratic creator; culturally if not legally, Star Wars kinda belonged to all of us on some level. By explicitly starting the saga with Episode IV in 1977, he’d invited each of us to fill in the blanks; the backstory was arguably better off imagined than reified.
As an IP, however, Indiana Jones, popular as it was, carried far less expectation, as did the second-class medium of network television, which made Lucas’ intended brand extension more of an ancillary product in the franchise than a must-see cinematic event—more supplemental than it was compulsory, like a tie-in novel, or the Ewok telefilms of the mid-eighties. The stakes of the project he envisioned were simply much lower, the spotlight on it comfortably dimmer. In the event of its creative and/or commercial failure, Young Indiana Jones would be a franchise footnote in the inconsequential vein of the Star Wars Holiday Special, not an ill-conceived vanity project responsible for retroactively ruining the childhoods of millions of developmentally arrested Gen Xers. Here Lucas expounds on the genesis of the series:
In the process of making the Indiana Jones films, I kept thinking about what was Indiana Jones like as a young man? ’Cause Harrison [Ford] would ask me, Steve [Spielberg] would ask me—you know, everybody was sort of curious about… about how this adventurer grew up. And in the process, I came up with this idea of him seeing the world through the eyes of a soldier and a secret agent and having various other adventures of hunting for treasure.
George Lucas and Sean Patrick Flanery. The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: “A Look Inside.” Paramount Pictures, 1999. Videocassette (VHS).
On its face, the conceptual premise of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992–1996) is straightforward enough: At odds with his father at home in Princeton, New Jersey, antsy for adventure, and compelled by his wide-eyed idealism to help ensure a just and favorable resolution to the Great War, sixteen-year-old Indiana Jones (Sean Patrick Flanery) absconds for Europe to enlist in the Belgian army (as America hadn’t yet declared war on the German Empire). So far, so good, right? Europe in 1916? Bring on the subterranean snake pits, blood-guzzling cultists, booby-trapped temples, and supernaturally empowered MacGuffins!
Eh… not quite. Instead, Indy’s exploits included getting treated for tropical illness by Albert Schweitzer (“Congo, January 1917”), losing his virginity to Mata Hari (“Paris, October 1916”), escaping a German prison with Charles de Gaulle (“Germany, Mid-August 1916”), and finding himself caught up in historical events including the Easter Rising (“Ireland, April 1916”), the Battle of the Somme (“Somme, Early August 1916”), the Russian Revolution (“Petrograd, July 1917”), and the Paris Peace Conference (“Paris, May 1919”). As Entertainment Weekly once put it: “No temples here. Plenty of doom.”
As a university professor and Biblical scholar, there was always a cerebral facet to Indy—both the character and film series—but Lucas leaned into that on Young Indiana Jones in way I don’t imagine audiences would’ve expected… or network execs would’ve preferred. The production was staggeringly complex, shooting on location in over 35 countries, unheard of for an ongoing series even today. The average one-hour drama requires approximately ten shooting days, but an episode of Young Indiana Jones took three weeks to film. In order to meet the demands of a full broadcast-TV season, Lucas shot two episodes simultaneously, with Flanery portraying the teenage adventurer, and actor Corey Carrier starring as the series protagonist aged eight-to-ten on a global lecture tour with his father and mother, where he rubbed elbows with Teddy Roosevelt in British East Africa, Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Leo Tolstoy in Russia… you get the idea.
With two different lead actors alternating in a role originally made famous by the biggest movie star in Hollywood, on a series of episodic adventures in which the setting changed weekly and featuring plots more concerned with earnest history lessons than perilous tomb raiding, the series Lucas envisioned was going to be a challenge for even the most receptive of audiences, but the program’s most unconventional aspect was its scheduling: When Young Indiana Jones originally aired, episodes were broadcast in random order, jumping week to week from “New York, June/July 1920” to “Vienna, November 1908” to “Northern Italy, June 1918” to “German East Africa, November 1916” with no discernable rhyme or reason. Though nonsequential narrativity is commonplace to the point of cliché in today’s prestige television dramas, this grab-bag approach was probably asking too much of audiences in 1992.
There was, it turned out, an overarching narrative design to The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, but it only became evident once the series was released on DVD in 2007 under the new title The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, the shows themselves repackaged in an entirely new presentational format. Never an artist to pass up the chance to improve upon perfection, Lucas took all the produced shows and reassembled them into a series of 22 feature-length episodes, presented chronologically across three boxed-set volumes that spanned 1908 to 1920: The Early Years (cute but for the most part inessential); The War Years (the meat of the series); The Years of Change (a mixed bag).
Lucas’ “feature film” reconceptualization of the TV series post factum accommodates the rhythm and flow of some episodes far better than others. Several of the shows originally aired as movies-of-the-week, with a cohesive narrative throughline across a given two-hour installment; in many other instances on the DVD sets, however, a pair of altogether unrelated hourlong episodes were artificially grafted together by way of new “bridging sequences,” manifestly shot years after the original production, as the actors appear noticeably older. In those cases, the often-clunky transitional material is best regarded by the viewer as a signal that we’re now shifting to a new story and setting, one with no appreciable narrative connection to the first half of the reverse-engineered “feature.”
I suppose Lucas will be Lucas, God bless him. But reconfiguring his TV series to make it feel more cinematic did a disservice to the material, because the show’s episodic structure is actually one of its great creative assets. After all, the movie series upon which Young Indiana Jones is based is itself episodic, which allowed Lucas and Spielberg to shift genres with each new self-contained story: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is a romantic epic; it’s basically Casablanca meets Lawrence of Arabia. Temple of Doom (1984), by contrast, is a horror movie. The Last Crusade (1989) is a road-trip buddy comedy. And Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) is science fiction. Part of the fun of those movies is that each one aspired to be a variation on an established formula—a tonal remix of what had come before, familiar yet different.
Young Indiana Jones worked much the same way. With Indy himself being the only consistently recurring element in each show, episodes could vary in genre from high adventure (Young Indiana Jones and the Phantom Train of Doom; Young Indiana Jones and the Treasure of the Peacock’s Eye) to whodunit (“Princeton, February 1916”; Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues) to war epic (“Somme, Early August 1916”; “Verdun, September 1916”) to whimsical romance (“London, May 1916,” “Northern Italy, June 1918”) to espionage thriller (“Istanbul, September 1918”; Young Indiana Jones and the Attack of the Hawkmen) to political drama (“Austria, March 1917”; “Paris, May 1919”) to musical comedy (“Barcelona, May 1917”; Young Indiana Jones and the Scandal of 1920) to slapstick farce (“Prague, August 1917”) to Gothic horror (“Transylvania, January 1918”). Tuning in every Saturday was a true adventure: You never quite knew where you’d be whisked off to next!
“It has aspects of an anthology and features the same character at different ages. The shows themselves go from wild crazy comedy to very serious tear-jerking dramas. So it’s all over the board.”—George Lucas on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
Daniel Cerone, “Rethinking Indiana Jones: George Lucas Picks Up Where Indy Began, Breaking TV’s Rules in the Process,” Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1992
It occurs to me that so many of the TV shows of that era were “genre-jumpers.” Ostensibly an issue-driven police procedural, 21 Jump Street (1987–1991) indulged occasional episodic digressions from the crime genre into psychological melodrama (“Orpheus 3.3”), romantic escapade (“Chapel of Love”), broad comedy (“The Dreaded Return of Russell Buckins”), neon-noir (“Eternal Flame”), international intrigue (“La Bizca,” about the Salvadoran Civil War), and even a Rashomonic retelling of a single event from multiple irreconcilable points of view (“How I Saved the Senator”).
Ditto The X-Files (1993–2002), which shifted fluidly from episode to episode among not only the many different subgenres of sci-fi and horror, and ranged in tone from paranoid conspiratorial thriller to tongue-in-cheek “creature feature,” but also experimented with both Rashomonic and real-time stories (long before 24 got to them), and even did a reality show–style installment in the vein of Cops, shot entirely on videotape. The premise of The X-Files—his-and-her FBI agents investigating extraterrestrial and paranormal phenomena—was consistent from week to week, but the genre conventions and stylistic aesthetics varied greatly.
Certainly the colossal success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), which produced an episode with almost no dialogue and then later an episode performed nearly entirely in song, is owed to this manner of try-anything storytelling, a creative approach Russell T Davies consciously emulated when he rebooted Doctor Who in 2005, a show that could present as hard sci-fi one week only to then pivot in the very next installment to historical adventure or love story or Gothic horror or murder mystery or American Western. Wow!
I envy all the writers who were staffed on the series listed above. As much fun as it is to watch those shows, how much fun must it have been to break stories for them? And yet, during my time in Hollywood, I heard colleague after colleague assert how bad television was when we were growing up… but how brilliant it is now!
Really? Because I don’t see that. As skull-numbingly boring as a show like Game of Thrones is to watch, I can only imagine how joyless and excruciating it must’ve been to write. It’s the same monotonous shit week in, week out. That’s what happens when you set out to create, as Benioff and Weiss explicitly did, a “73-hour movie.” And they’re far from the only ones: Many showrunners enthusiastically adhere to the “ten-hour-movie” model of televisional narrativity so fashionable in our present era of “prestige” dramas.
The trouble with that is, every episode has to have the same look, feel, and pace as the one before it—a “house style” to which the writers and directors must immutably conform—because each part is meant to serve not its own standalone narrative, but rather an aesthetically unified whole. Shifts in genre and tone, after all, are only too jarringly conspicuous when entire seasons, if not entire series, are binged over the span of a single weekend.
When shipwreck- and cave-divers go exploring—go with me on this for a moment—they are tethered to a distance line “as a means of returning to a safe starting point,” per Wikipedia, “after a penetration when it may be difficult to discern the return route.” Such is the function continuity used to serve in our serialized fiction. Personal backstories (like Mulder’s abducted sister) and interpersonal relationships (like believer Mulder and skeptic Scully’s will-they-or-won’t-they sexual dynamic) moored both the show’s writers and its audience to a set of narrative constants that provided familiarity and orientation—a.k.a. continuity—and that, accordingly, allowed the series itself to experiment stylistically with the goal of flourishing creatively. If an experiment didn’t go as planned, the writers could follow the distance line—the established continuity—back to clearer waters to regroup.
And to be certain, Young Indiana Jones, Jump Street, X-Files, Buffy, and Doctor Who all produced their share of episodic turkeys over the years, as did the multiple Star Trek series of the 1990s, which also refused to conform to any single structural and/or stylistic formula like, say, the way predictably plotted, disposably cookie-cutter TV adventures such as Knight Rider and The Dukes of Hazzard did. Not every narrative experiment attempted is going to work, not every creative gamble will pay off as planned.
Case in point: Arguably the best episode of Young Indy, “Paris, May 1919,” is paired on home video with what might be its worst, “Princeton, June 1919,” a mishmash of four distinct plotlines that never gels into a cohesive story in its own right. (And—quick aside—the stereotypical and often reductive characterizations of women on this series, particularly Indy’s girlfriend-of-the-week, by and large leaves a lot to be desired, but I digress.) That’s just the risk one assumes in the interest of artistic experimentation; the “Princeton” episode is an unfocused dud, but “Paris” is an intelligent and supremely compelling hour of television—and it’s almost exclusively comprised of long, talky scenes around tables about geopolitics! Some episodes work better than others, but on balance, the juxtaposition of gee-whiz dorkiness and somber political intrigue succeeds in Young Indiana Jones, in contrast with how it played in Lucas’ Star Wars prequels.
Unlike the Star Wars prequels, Lucas didn’t get caught up in seeding Young Indiana Jones with Easter eggs or expounding on past events and relationships merely alluded to in the feature films. It’s like he got that out of his system with the brief opening prologue from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which we learn, in ten entertaining minutes, how Indy (River Phoenix) acquired his fedora, his bullwhip, his ophidiophobia, and even the scar on his chin. Boom—done and done. Exactly two characters from the movie trilogy appear in the TV series: Indy and Henry (Lloyd Owen)—that’s it. We never meet Indy’s revered mentor Abner Ravenwood, or see his first encounters with rival René Belloq, faithful sidekick Sallah, surrogate father figure Marcus Brody… none of them are mentioned let alone depicted. Lucas was more curious to explore Indy’s relationship with other kinds of familiar characters:
Obviously, Indiana Jones is a fictitious character, but I wanted to make the other characters in the piece as accurate as possible to give you a real intimate picture of what some of these very famous historical figures were like. . . .
I mean, there are so many people who are pivotal to the way we think now in the last part of the twentieth century, who existed at the last part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a real joy to be able to work with all of these important figures and be able to touch upon them with Indiana Jones’ life.
George Lucas and Sean Patrick Flanery. The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: “A Look Inside.” Paramount Pictures, 1999. Videocassette (VHS).
Right—that was the point of this project. Lucas wasn’t interested in drawing pointless and indulgent connections to every offhanded reference and plot point from the big-screen adventures. Instead, Young Indiana Jones was its own thing: a period drama about the geopolitical conditions of World War I that wound up setting the stage for the rest of the twentieth century. There is continuity with the feature films—Indy’s mother (Ruth de Sosa) dies prematurely, as established in Last Crusade; Mystery of the Blues gives us a welcome glimpse of Indy’s experience at the University of Chicago, which was acknowledged as his alma mater in Raiders—but this was never meant to be an exercise in franchise scorekeeping or dot-connecting, a cynical excuse for forensic fandom.
Instead, Young Indiana Jones was about worldbuilding, but not of sprawling fictional realms like Westeros or Middle-earth or the galaxy in which Star Wars is set. It’s about the new world order that got established after the Great War, when England, France, and the United States imposed crippling punitive consequences on Germany and carved up the Middle East for themselves and, in the process, gave rise to both the global military conflicts and American imperialism that defined the twentieth century. As mentor T. E. Lawrence (Douglas Henshall) laments to protégé Indiana Jones as the latter departs Europe for America in the wake of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles:
LAWRENCE (from the train platform): We gave the old men victory and they threw it away. We offered them a new world, and they made the old one over again. Still, it might’ve been worse.
INDY (calling from the window of his departing train): What?
LAWRENCE: I said it might’ve been worse!
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles: “Paris, May 1919,” written by Jonathan Hales
It’s moments in Young Indiana Jones like this that not only demonstrate Lucas’ honorable creative intentions for the series itself, but even subtly shed light on why Harrison Ford’s adult Indy is who he is. One of the defining characteristics of Ford’s Indy, fittingly absent from Flanery’s naïve portrayal, was his jaded optimism. In the movies, Indy is a hero who seldom if ever comes home with the prize for which he’s risked life and limb. He’s someone who understands, through countless experiences, that most endeavors conclude in failure, or at best a compromised outcome, but that they’re worth undertaking nonetheless—that there’s value in trying and coming up short sometimes. I mean, if that philosophy doesn’t account for the creative spirit that inspired and animated The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, what does?
Learning how Indy came to develop his nuanced worldview, one adventure and one setback and one disappointment at time, is far more interesting and, ultimately, more satisfying than knowing precisely how and when he first met Marion or Marcus, or the “many adventures” he shared with Wu Han before that fateful night in Shanghai, or the heretofore unexplained circumstances under which Abner discovered the headpiece to the Staff of Ra. That’s all horseshit. Prequels like that—here’s looking at you, Solo—aren’t about challenging an audience with new ideas and visions, merely rewarding them for obsessing neurotically over old ones.
Whereas continuity was once a distance line that made creative experimentation possible in a series or franchise—that allowed for adventures as narratively, stylistically, and aesthetically disparate as, say, Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies (1994) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) to credibly coexist in the same storyworld—now our transmedia franchises are consciously and exclusively engineered to serve their (ever-expanding) continuities in order to reward the dutiful superfan with omniscient comprehension of said storyworld.
Audiences have been systematically trained to collect and collate the floating facts that crosspollinate the shared universes of Star Wars and Marvel and Game of Thrones (getting its own prequel series this year), et al.—to treat fiction as a pop-cultural scavenger hunt, a test of one’s loyalty to the brand. Passing the test—catching all the references, connecting all the dots, reconciling all the “canonical” details—isn’t merely a gratuity, a gold star, awarded by the filmmakers to eagle-eyed viewers; it’s the entire point of watching. Fully understanding and appreciating the finer points of the continuity is our job, our sacrosanct obligation, as true fans.
One cannot behold the rabid anticipation for the upcoming TV series Obi-Wan Kenobi, set interstitially between Episodes III and IV, without acknowledging the corporate—not creative—impetus for its existence. The miniseries is meant to shed light on the Man Who Would Be Ben’s years in self-imposed exile on Tatooine—a “plot hole,” as such purposeful story gaps are erroneously considered by the fandom—and will feature a prepubescent Luke Skywalker, naturally, as well as Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan), Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker), Joel Edgerton (Uncle Owen), and Bonnie Piesse (Aunt Beru) reprising, to great excitement, their roles from the prequel films nobody actually enjoyed. Sounds about as appealing as a Tupperware pint of Bantha milk to me, but…
And make no mistake: Disney will be coming for Young Indiana Jones soon enough, as well, as it plots a post–Harrison Ford relaunch of the IP in accordance with the same fan-service playbook that’s been so dishearteningly successful for them. Like latter-day Star Wars or the multiversal meaninglessness of the MCU, a Young Indiana Jones reboot will be the kind of show that aspires to be only about itself, concerned solely with the minutiae of its own elaborate mythology, sans any of the rich and varied influences Lucas brought to his multimedia franchise, with which he consistently—if not always successfully—tried something different.
It doesn’t take a crystal skull to foresee the comfort-food approach to the property Disney will invariably take: We’ll meet the budding archaeologist-adventurer in his twenties as he trains under Abner Ravenwood and crosses paths with one familiar face after another, in plots that inevitably incorporate some kind of mystical artifact or magical phenomenon. It will be everything the fan base wants and, more dispiritingly, everything it expects: a parade of point-and-clap perquisites, from callbacks to cameos to cross-references to Easter eggs. And just like Rogue One and The Book of Boba Fett, it will surely supply definitive answers to all the burning questions about Indy’s backstory that were never important enough to ask.
But what it won’t provide—couldn’t possibly provide—is the one key delight the ’80s movie trilogy and the ’90s television series, markedly different though they were, both offered in such reliable abundance, each in its own way: the thrill of discovery.
Very interesting. I loved Indiana Jones, respected Star Wars, but am not intrigued in the prequel/sequels. I think Hollywood has lost its way. OK, yeah, Disney stock is going through the roof (we own it so my retirement is happy about that), but I really question so many of their recent decisions. Sigh.
’nuff said.
Hey, Jacqui!
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles would not meet the criteria for a proper prequel by today’s corporate-branding standards. Absent the character of Indiana Jones, Chronicles could’ve easily been a PBS period drama à la The Crimson Field or The Monocled Mutineer:
I’m no certainly fan of Disney’s creatively homogeneous business model, which is about leveraging nostalgia and forensic fandom to turn the transmedia franchises over which they preside into their own personal LEPE machines, but it’s hard to argue that approach isn’t achieving the desired results:
Until Gen X is able to overcome its addiction to childhood nostalgia — and I don’t hold out much hope for that — I think we can expect endless recapitulations of 1980s favorites like Star Wars and Ghostbusters and Halloween and The Karate Kid and Willow and Top Gun and even Indiana Jones, for which 79-year-old Harrison Ford recently completed principal photography. But for reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere on the blog, I’m moving on. Raiders came out when I was in preschool; Temple when I was in elementary school; Crusade when I was in junior high; and Chronicles when I was in high school. I’m in my mid-forties now; I just can’t keep going on new adventures with Indy. It doesn’t make me feel young; it makes me feel old.
And the thing I love about Indy — the key thing I learned from him — is this: He knew when it was time to let go and move on to the next adventure. For all the lessons Lucas tried to teach with the character, I’m hard-pressed to find one more relevant — and less heeded — than that.
Thanks for joining, Jacqui. Wishing you a safe and productive week ahead!
SPC
You really know your stuff, Sean. Thank you!
Thank you, Jacqui, for your consistent willingness to engage on these issues! I know I don’t always make it easy, given the admittedly esoteric preoccupations of this blog!
I’m actually having trouble now picturing how a prequel could be NOT filled w/ Easter eggs and the like
Technically, Temple of Doom is a prequel; the events take place BEFORE Raiders. But it is NOT a point-and-clap Easter egg hunt. It is its own movie. The enjoyment you get is from the movie itself, not from seeing what elements feature in Raiders
–
A catch-22:
Helming a successful franchise gives you the financial independence and clout to experiment. But there is MAJOR pressure to continue in the same vein, including pressure from yourself as you don’t want to fail (Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 introduced a new term to the English language. All his novels after that have titles that are already conventional phrases. I suspect ((w/ no evidence)) that he did not want to try to introduce another term, and fail). It is SO much easier to chase the all-but-guaranteed success
John Lennon could do the experimental Revolution 9 on the White Album. But because it was just one song and the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”, the poor reception had no effect on his career
If you do not helm a successful franchise, either because you’re just starting or because nothing you’ve done so far has hit it big, you have freedom to experiment. No audience expectations. But you don’t have the clout to get your work in front of a large audience. That might happen, but no guarantee. You certainly can’t make a network TV show or billion dollar movie. And you’re living on whatever you make at your day job
Note that many writers use pen names so they can write more than one series, genre, or age-targeted work. Nowadays, some writers are open about their pen names, but the names serve to indicate that this is a different style, and that you should not expect the work to be the same as the work under the first name (Prolific writers also sometimes used pen names in the same genre to keep from appearing to flood the market)
In some ways, the situation is tougher now. Branding is a major concern for creators. People buy your novel because they like what they read on your blog or Twitter account. Your blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc., have to present a unified vision, or you can’t build your audience
Indeed, Dell: It’s virtually impossible to imagine a prequel à la Young Indy or the De Niro plotline from The Godfather, Part II (a quasi-prequel) being produced today — i.e., a narrative that’s simply meant to flesh out the formative years of a fictional character’s biography in the interest of telling a story that stands on its own merits, not necessarily to explain everything about him/her, shed light on every allusion to the backstory uttered in passing (the Kessel Run), or simply depict established-if-previously-undramatized events in copious, letter-faithful detail (the Star Wars prequels).
I don’t know exactly why Lucas and Spielberg opted to set Temple before Raiders, but I assume it’s because given the story they wanted to tell (a subterranean horror movie that had nothing to do with Nazis), they didn’t want to set it after the events of Raiders because now you’re bumping up against World War II. But when the time came to do Last Crusade, Nazis were the villains once again, so setting that particular movie on the eve of the Second World War was creatively justified. It’s funny, though, how those three movies really don’t cross-reference one another, save a passing (and utterly inconsequential) nod to the Ark of the Covenant in Last Crusade.
By the time they got to the fourth movie, though, they were ladling on the callbacks: the Frank Darabont draft (Indiana Jones and the City of Gods) features the Chachapoyan Fertility Idol from Raiders, includes Henry (briefly) and Marion (substantially) in the plot, and even meta-references Willie, noting that she “moved to Hollywood to be a star and married some big-shot movie director.” Subsequent drafts had Sallah and Short Round cameo at the wedding during the dénouement. The produced film even explicitly references the pilot episode of Young Indy, Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal, when Indy tells Mutt he left home when he was sixteen to ride with Pancho Villa.
All the discipline they showed on the first three films and the TV series went out the window; they just couldn’t help themselves. But, hey — at least that was just two aging filmmakers taking a verbal victory lap. A handful of indulgent references doesn’t hold a candle to the purposeful fan-servicing that goes on in the J.J. Abrams Star Wars sequels (The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker), the “anthology” films (Rogue One and Solo), and the live-action TV series (The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett).
To your point about prequels in the era of forensic fandom, look at the Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014): Even though Tolkien’s source materials were published in chronological order, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit was produced as a post-factum prequel series to his Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003). Not only does it greatly (and not necessarily beneficially) expand on the 1937 novel, but so much of that narrative bloat is owed to Jackson cramming in characters from the Rings trilogy played by the original actors that were either featured in bookend sequences (like Ian Holm as Bilbo and Elijah Wood as Frodo), or else they were “ageless,” meaning Jackson could justify their unchanged appearance in the two trilogies (like Orlando Bloom as Legolas, or Christopher Lee as Saruman and Cate Blanchett as Galadriel in the White Council scene). But beyond pure fan service, it’s really hard to rationalize the necessity of their place in the narrative. They were included because the filmmakers accommodated the story to fit them, rather than the story requiring their inclusion. Contrast that with The Last Crusade: Whereas Marcus and Sallah sat out Temple of Doom, they returned for the third film because there was an absolutely crucial (and substantial) role in the story for both of them.
Returning to the subject of Lucas: I suspect he is a filmmaker who felt creatively captive to — boxed in by — his own success. He seems, from what I glean, like someone who, for all of his enviable accomplishments, is basically dissatisfied with his career. You look at him and go, “With all his money, he could’ve just gone off and made whatever little films he wanted, like his mentor Coppola did in the aughts with Tetro and Youth Without Youth, etc.” After all, Lucas had explicitly said that after the release of Revenge of the Sith he was just gonna go make weird little experimental films and documentaries that no one cares about… and yet he never did.
I think the problem he ran into was that he didn’t just have himself and his own career to consider. The Lucasfilm empire employed an army of people — between ILM and Skywalker Sound, etc. — and he wasn’t going to keep that operation running, keep those folks employed, working on arthouse films. He needed to keep pumping out blockbusters. And I think he’d done everything he wanted to do with Star Wars and Indy, Willow was a nonstarter, and how many blockbuster ideas can one filmmaker really come up with over the course of a career? That he hatched two big franchises was against all odds! So, the only thing left to do was sell off his company to a corporation like Disney that would keep on doing what he knew needed to be done, but that he himself had no personal motivation to do: make more Star Wars.
So, it’s very sad, because he sacrificed his babies in the interest of keeping the company solvent, but now what? He no longer owns what he created, and he doesn’t seem to be very content to use the tremendous money he earned from the Lucasfilm sale to fund personal projects. He really does seem to me to be a victim of his own accomplishments, in some regards. He achieved such stratospheric, unprecedented commercial success, but he couldn’t — or didn’t care to, or a combination thereof — keep up that pace forever. Not that there are many precedents to look to, but I imagine it isn’t really possible to do what Lucas envisioned for himself post–Episode III: After amassing an enviable repertoire of creator-owned, culturally defining movies, as well as establishing a Hollywood-away-from-Hollywood up in Marin County — the Lucas–industrial complex — I don’t know that it was ever realistic to expect he could one day, as an elder statesman of commercial moviemaking, trade all that in to make artsy little nonnarrative films. That mindset — precisely the naïve assumption Michael Corleone harbored in The Godfather Part III about his own career — is an example of what we discussed last month in “You Can’t Go Home Again”: I thought some things… that I could come back.
To the larger point both of us are making, Dell: Yes, I think the freedom to experiment creatively becomes more limited, not less, the greater the level of commercial success an artist achieves. And I do agree that’s probably tougher than ever now, because branding has indeed become such a necessary tool in an entertainment marketplace oversaturated with content, and branding is about delivering on a very focused, very defined product. To say nothing of the fact that many of the old tricks, like pen names, are also harder to pull off, owed to linguistic forensics and pattern-recognition software has been used to unmask everyone from QAnon to J.K. Rowling. The world somehow grows smaller all the time, and yet it becomes ever harder to assert one’s own voice — to be heard over all the noise. Ah, well.
I suppose the lesson in that is if you are an artist who has yet to achieve commercial success, at least take some comfort in the creative license that affords you! Use your relative artistic anonymity to experiment creatively! That’s the lesson I wish I’d known as an aspiring screenwriting: that rather than trying to make my work fit a commercial mold — trying to write what I thought Hollywood wanted — I would have been better off, artistically and likely professionally, had I followed my own creative instincts, had I established myself as a voice unlike any other rather than one like everybody else. Seems so obvious in hindsight…
Thanks, as always, bud, for dropping by!
SPC
Years ago most TV shows were written by at least partly by freelancers, syndication wouldn’t guarantee that the shows would be shown in order, and if you missed an episode you had to wait months for the rerun. If you missed THAT then you had to wait for syndication, and then wait for that episode to come up
As a result, most shows were episodic, w/ a beginning, middle, and end each episode. There were a few exceptions; Soap, Dallas, and once in a while a series would have a big change, usually at the season finale, but basically the episodes were self-contained
Then TV shows changed, arguably due to the influence of Babylon 5 among other things. More shows now had stables of writers, syndication became more reliable about showing episodes in order, and w/ VCRs, then DVDs, and now On-Demand and streaming and binge-watching, the creators could assume you’ve seen every episode
As a result, most TV shows have become post-narrative, at least to some extent. This, in many ways, is an improvement. The shows are more realistic. Real life doesn’t reset every week. Characters could grow and develop, relationships could start or end, characters could even die
HOWEVER
This means that EVERY TV show requires an investment of time and attention. You have to watch all the previous episodes, or at least figure out the complicated story going on. And by design there is little or no closure
W/ my attention span issues I have difficulty following these endless stories. Certainly I can’t follow more than a dozen a week. So I watch very little TV now
Even though many people say that this is the best era for TV I don’t really miss it
Well said, Dell. Ditto all of this.
Right — the idea behind episodic TV as it came to be established in the 50s and institutionalized in the 60s was that a studio invested in a regular cast and a few key sets that could be reused every week, and the episodic (if not formulaic) premise of a given series would allow for freelance writers to contribute scripts that weren’t required to pick up where the last show’s narrative left off. In the ’80s, Star Trek: The Next Generation had an unheard-of open-submission policy that allowed for anyone to send in a script! Many of these submissions were accepted (and often heavily rewritten) to meet the show’s production quota when the producers had fallen behind schedule (or when the 1988 Writers Guild strike barred them from ordering new scripts), and a healthy number of scriptwriting careers were launched as a result: Ronald D. Moore, Bryan Fuller, Jane Espenson, René Echevarria, etc.
For all sorts of reasons — some cultural, some technological — television grew less beholden to that rigidly episodic structure at the turn of the millennium, which produced a lot of great, challenging, narratively unconventional TV series, like Seinfeld and The Wire and The Sopranos. This was a good thing — a creative evolution, absolutely — for both the medium of television and the art form of storytelling.
But like so many things that start as a countercultural experiment, it isn’t long before it gets coopted as a corporate stratagem. The idea of a TV series as one long narrative continuum — a commentary on the shapelessness of existence and the lack of agency any of us have to effect change in the world in which we live, as shows like Twin Peaks and The Wire and The Sopranos and Lost absolutely were — became a cynical way to retain audience eyeballs in an increasingly fractured media landscape. Rather than the pointlessness of those series being their very point, nonlinear, serialized TV shows became puzzles to solve — “mystery boxes” whose meaning could only be gleaned with omniscient knowledge of the series, from pilot to finale, provided a fan was willing to commit to watching every episode (often repeatedly) and doing all the homework required to “figuring it all out.” At that point, TV went from a reprieve from our daily obligations to yet another open-ended obligation in itself.
And now an entire generation has been raised on that kind of TV, much the way my generation was reared on the “program-length toy commercials” of the 1980s; as you know, I’ve even argued elsewhere on this blog that today’s transmedia mega-franchises are the next-gen permutation of the toyetic cartoons of the 1980s — that once Gen X took charge of the entertainment industry, we simply adapted and expanded the corporate-storytelling model we’d grown up on! What is the MCU if not the old syndicated after-school/Saturday-morning cartoon shows writ large, in both content and capitalistic imperative?
And the thing is, I was inspired to pursue professional screenwriting by the stuff I grew up on: I wanted to write self-contained little movies like The Lost Boys and State of Grace — the kind of cinema that is now permanently extinct — and I was excited by TV shows like Jump Street and Young Indy, shows that didn’t aspire to be cinematic, but rather embraced the creative possibilities of their episodic formats. But that’s not what TV is anymore. The kinds of movies and shows I yearned to write are now relics of the 20th century; these days, it’s all about establishing an ever-expanding transmedia franchise. And that’s just not the kind of storytelling, to the extent that it even qualifies as such (when it’s more aptly just branding), that excites me as either a viewer or a writer. Not next month, but likely in May, I’m planning on a publishing a post in which I highlight some recent television shows that are the kinds of programs that engage me emotionally and intellectually in a way that “must-see” cultural juggernauts like Game of Thrones and its “prestige drama” ilk just never did.
In the meantime, one of the themes of my planned April post (in which I’m going to talk at length about Mad Max: Fury Road) is about the forgotten pleasures of consuming less content — watching fewer movies/television shows, but watching them more selectively and mindfully. Such is why, despite my repeated proclamations to the contrary, I can’t seem to dial back my blogging: Each new post gives me an idea for the next one! As Jim Carrey once said: Somebody stop me!
I’ve really enjoyed the Young Indiana Jones episodes that I’ve seen, and want to see more. Guess I’m not a “real Indy fan” but I don’t care much how they relate to the later movie series (which i also really like). But then, I’m not a TV series viewer and have never watched Game of Thrones (nor do I want to). Much of the blog discussion is over my head, not being involved in film writing (my genre is historical fiction). But I admire your analysis and find it always fascinating. Thanks for your posts.
Thanks, Lennie! I hope you’ve been well!
As I mentioned above, when the series was released on DVD, it was presented chronologically in three boxed sets. Volume One: The Early Years contains seven feature-length episodes, the first five starring Corey Carrier as Indy aged eight to ten, the last two with Flanery, where we meet him as a high-school student (“Princeton, February 1916”) who gets kidnapped on spring break (“Mexico, March 1916”) before deciding to head to Europe to enlist in the war, where he has brief stopovers in Dublin (“Ireland, April 1916”) and then London (“London, May 1916”).
Volume Two: The War Years in an eight-episode set, and every show here is terrific (save Espionage Escapades, which is a farcical episode that falls flat). Here we see Indy as a soldier in the trenches along the front in the French countryside, then he’s reassigned to infantry in Africa (these episodes, written by Frank Darabont, are outstanding) before he becomes a secret agent, which takes him to Austria and Russia and then the Middle East. These are the episodes to watch!
Volume Three: The Years of Change, the final seven installments, wraps up Indy’s adventures in the war, sends him on an old-fashioned treasure hunt in the South Pacific (Treasure of the Peacock’s Eye) before a sojourn in Paris to be present for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, then has him head home for college to study archaeology, at which point the final three shows of the series shift to a lightweight tone as Indy goes from the Prohibition-era jazz clubs in Chicago to Broadway to Hollywood (forming a sort of pop-culture trilogy of its own). Those last couple of episodes are cute enough, but part of me considers the Paris Peace Conference episode the true “series finale,” as it brings many of the themes and issues raised in “Mexico, March 1916,” the start of Flanery’s arc, full circle.
The DVD sets also contain over ninety supplemental documentaries to provide historical context for the figures Indy encounters and the events in which he partakes. They’re terrific!
For a while, the show was available on Netflix (no longer), and now it can be streamed exclusively on Paramount+ (though I don’t have a subscription to that service myself, not that I need it, since I own copies of the DVDs). I’m fairly sure the companion documentaries have never been made available on the streaming services, though, and for some reason I don’t understand, the episode Mystery of the Blues is inexplicably omitted from the lineup on Paramount+ (as it was on Netflix, incidentally). It’s just not included! The only thing I can figure is that Mystery of the Blues is the one episode of the show to feature Harrison Ford as 50-year-old Indy (he narrates the story and appears in its bookend sequences; he’s got a full beard because he was also shooting The Fugitive at the time), and I wonder if the residuals to which Ford is entitled make that particular show more costly to exhibit on TV and/or streaming service? Or perhaps since streaming didn’t exist in 1993, that mode of exhibition (unlike network TV and home video) was never stipulated in his original contract, so the episode can’t be shown without raising all sorts of thorny contractual and financial questions? I don’t know.
Whatever the reason, it’s unfortunate that ep isn’t included, because I count it as one of the series’ best. As much as I think the previous episode, “Paris, May 1919,” would’ve made a fitting series finale, we’d have lost out on this window into Indy’s time at the University of Chicago. The plot is based on the true-life murder of an actual mob capo, “Big Jim” Colosimo, that occurred in May of 1920 (when Mystery of the Blues is set), and whereas the average ep of Young Indy featured one, perhaps two, historical figures, in this show nearly every character — and it’s a huge ensemble — is based on a real-life person. Plus, the music (by Joel McNeely) is aces, and Jeffrey Wright should’ve received an Emmy nod for his turn as Sidney Bechet; the friendship that forms between Indy and Sidney is really special. And, of course, you’ve got Harrison Ford in a snowbound adventure (involving the recovery of a Native American peace pipe) that frames the main story, so this show has a lot going for it. Shame it’s never included whenever the series is made available to stream. Who knows — perhaps one day I’ll do an episode guide as a companion piece to this post?
Hope you’ve remained healthy and productive throughout pandemia, Lennie, and that you are looking forward to the warmer months to come.
Kind regards,
Sean
I tend to avoid sequels and prequels, Sean. Especially if I really enjoyed a film. Subsequent efforts to extend the franchise always seem to disappoint. So I watched the first Star Wars trilogy(?) and the first Indiana Jones. I didn’t even know there was a young Indie. My husband and I do enjoy series on television that tell a story from beginning and end. We’re always looking for a good one.
I suppose the creative mandate for any sequel, prequel, or spinoff, Diana, should be the same as the one for any story period: Is there a premise here that justifies its own narrative? Sequels and prequels, however, are often motivated only by the commercial success of the earlier movie or novel. With any sequel to a successful movie, the filmmakers should ask themselves: If this were the first film, would it be as fulfilling and as satisfying as the original was?
One of the examples I often use to illustrate that point is the 1987 buddy-cop thriller Stakeout. Here’s the logline: Two wisecracking Seattle detectives are unenthusiastically assigned to surveil the home of the ex-girlfriend of a recently escaped convict, a routine task that becomes comically dangerous when one of the cops finds himself embroiled in an illicit affair with the woman he’s supposed to be secretly watching from across the street.
What a logline! No wonder that project sold! And the movie they made from Jim Kouf’s screenplay was absolutely terrific: funny and sexy and thrilling! (This is true even despite the moral reservations I’ve expressed about the story.)
By contrast, here’s the logline for the 1993 sequel, Another Stakeout: Remember those two zany cops you loved from the last movie? Yeah, they’re back for more undercover high jinks.
Amusing though it is, there’s no real narrative premise underpinning the second movie — no raison d’être other than the first one was a hit. That’s true of so many sequels, including The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and a zillion others. Such is why the most memorable sequels — Aliens and The Dark Knight and Temple of Doom — justify their existence by being different movies, with different stories to tell, either advancing the established narrative and/or enriching the protagonist’s emotional journey (as Aliens did) or challenging the values and/or ethical assumptions of the earlier movie (The Dark Knight) or simply shifting the genre (if Lawrence of Arabia was the was the cinematic antecedent on which Raiders of the Lost Ark was modeled, then Gunga Din served as the inspiration for Temple of Doom).
My point is, it all comes down to motivation: If there is a creative reason for a sequel, you get The Empire Strikes Back or The Godfather, Part II. If, however, the motivation is entirely financial, well… that’s how we got stuck with an endless string of sequels to one-and-dones like Halloween and Jurassic Park.
Prequels are especially tricky, because you really need a good reason for doing one — for taking a narrative backwards instead of forwards — beyond merely a desire to flesh out an established backstory. With Young Indy, Lucas really just wanted to do a TV show about World War I, and he used Indiana Jones as the vehicle for that; he wasn’t interested in depicting every key moment of Indy’s formative years as alluded to in the feature films, but rather the key moments of the first few decades of the 20th century.
But with those Star Wars prequels, all he really wanted to do was take the backstory that Obi-Wan sketched in Return of the Jedi and give it its own full-trilogy treatment. But most backstory rarely justifies such narrative expansion, particularly if it isn’t telling us something we don’t already know. That, after all, is why it’s called backstory; if it were that important in itself, it would just be the story.
Star Wars and Star Trek are both hopelessly mired in prequelitis right now, which is indicative of two key truths about those franchises: They are creatively depleted, and they exist only to capitalize on the nostalgia of the fandom. A true prequel either needs to be its own narrative entity, much as Young Indy was, or it has to segue into the story as we already know it, but present the preceding events in such a way that our previous assumptions are subverted, as Gregory Maguire’s Wicked does. The mistake Lucas made with Star Wars was taking Obi-Wan’s verbatim account of Anakin’s fall from grace at face value; he needed instead to find a way to arrive at the same endpoint — the story that began in Episode IV: A New Hope — while presenting a series of events that differed in detail from how they were related by Obi-Wan, that challenged the previous assumptions of both Obi-Wan and the audience. As in: There’s what you think happened… but here’s how it really went down…
Having written a 45-page story treatment for a prequel to a popular American folktale, I’ve given a lot of thought to what accounts for a creatively successful prequel verses a point-and-clap exercise in backstory expansion. Perhaps one day I’ll actually get around to turning that outline into the novel I planned it to be!
In the blog post I have planned for May, Diana, I’ll discuss a number of TV shows I’ve seen in recent months that not only tell a complete story, but also promote socially responsible values — a sort-of sequel post to “Challenging Our Moral Imagination.” Hopefully you and your husband will find some helpful viewing suggestions among those recommendations! In the meantime, I wish you all the warm days and creative inspiration that spring has to offer!
Sean
>the creative mandate… should be… : Is there a premise here that justifies its own narrative?
All those times you’ve talked about how creatively bankrupt Hollywood is, you just summed up the problem right here. You’ve covered this topic many times, but I don’t think you’ve ever been this succinct about this before
It’s interesting to watch you develop and grow your ideas. One of my favorite bloggers just quit blogging. He’d been doing it for decades, and he’s embarrassed at some of his early posts. So now he’s worried that fifteen years from now he’ll be embarrassed by what he wrote today. So he quit blogging
I hope that, no matter how much you learn and mature, when you look back at your earlier stuff, you won’t quit because you worry that future will be embarrassed by present you
And, hey! I still like the older stuff. Even if the ideas aren’t as developed as they are now, there’s still great stuff in there
Oh, wow. Thank you for that encouraging feedback, Dell — sincerely! I hadn’t thought about it that deeply when I wrote that line (“Is there a premise here that justifies its own narrative?”), but you are spot-on: that’s ultimately at the heart of every creative (if, sadly, not commercial) miscalculation Hollywood makes. It’s certainly the reason why Star Wars captured the imagination of a generation in 1977 — it was this heartfelt story of hope and heroism, the idiosyncratic vision of a single mad mind who consciously used a conventional narrative structure (familiar…) to support a gonzo space opera (… yet different) that resonated so profoundly with a culture demoralized by Vietnam and awash with violent urban antiheroes like Harry Callahan and Travis Bickle — and it is the reason why any satisfaction derived from the latter-day nostalgic revivals is purely momentary, a point-and-clap thrill that fades as fast as it manifested, like seeing the three cinematic Spider-Men discuss the optimal type of web-shooters: mechanical or organic? (What had been an effective coming-of-age metaphor in the original Raimi film got abjectly reduced to a cheap moment of fan service–cum–continuity reconciliation in Spider-Man: No Way Home. I mean, that’s the sort of thing that would’ve once been the premise of an SNL sketch, for God’s sake, and yet now stories that exist only to comment on themselves are the stuff of billion-dollar, culturally monopolistic entertainment.)
When A New Hope and Scream were released, audiences continued talking about them for days and weeks, months and years — even decades! Contrast that with The Rise of Skywalker and Scream 5, which came out on a Friday… and by that Monday all conversation about them had come to a screeching halt. Case in point: I’ve never seen either of those films, and yet I haven’t heard a single “spoiler” about them — and not because I’ve gone out of my way to avoid spoilers! (A movie I’ll never see can’t, after all, be spoiled.) Those films — along with Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Halloween Kills and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Star Trek: Picard — mean nothing… to anyone. None of them narratively justify their existence.
In any Creative Writing 101 class, a student is encouraged to justify — if only to themselves — why they want to develop a particular project. What about that story makes it worth the considerable investment of time and creative energy required to write it? In other words: If you can’t articulate your passion for the project, then what’s the point of pursuing it? If only Hollywood applied the same standard.
I suppose all of this is to say that the creative litmus test we landed on here in all of its formulaic simplicity — Is there a premise here that justifies its own narrative? — only emerged from years of thinking about these issues, blogging about them, and discussing/debating them here in the comments. That’s why I tend to leave such long replies to reader comments — because I’m inspired to think more fully through the issue at hand! That’s what I’m doing in any of my replies: thinking extemporaneously. Stephen King once described writing as refined thinking. When an idea is floating around in the soup of your cerebrum, you think you understand it, but what tremendous insight can be gleaned from forcing yourself to write about it! I consistently surprise myself in every essay I write, including “Young Indiana Jones Turns 30.” E.M. Forster once said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” I can point to at least one passage in all my posts from the past few years — this is absolutely true of “Patriarchal Propaganda” and “There He Was… and in He Walked” and “Scream at 25″ and “A Hollywood Ending,” among many others — that made me go, “Oh, I didn’t know that’s the way I felt about that…”
Because over nearly eight years of blogging and, to date, 109 posts, I’ve come to understand that the value in blogging is how it functions as an intellectual incubator. After all, the initial notion of a “weblog” was that it was an online diary of sorts. That’s absolutely how a blog should be treated! With this blog, I have a record of how my thinking on certain issues has evolved, or become clearer, or more nuanced, or in some cases changed dramatically. My feeling on blogging — or any writing, for that matter — is that if you read your old material and agree with every choice you made and every opinion you expressed, you’re doing something wrong. Because to stand by everything you’ve ever uttered means you’ve always had all the answers, and that’s antithetical to what it means to be human, and what it means to consider yourself an intellectual.
When I started this blog, I was searching for answers on a number of issues: the reason for Hollywood’s all-things-eighties fixation (something I first began pondering, to no definitive answer, in “Attack of the Clones”), and I was also trying to puzzle out why the Save the Cat! genres couldn’t be applied to so much of what I was watching (hence the fascination with postnarrativity that began in “Journey’s End”). By exploring those issues in many subsequent posts (some more intellectually successful than others), from different angles, I was able to produce a complex thesis like “In the Multiverse of Madness.” But make no mistake: “In the Multiverse of Madness” would’ve never come to pass if its central ideas hadn’t been thoroughly workshopped in posts like “The Great Escape” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse.”
Consequently, when I go to write about a piece of pop culture that’s been thoroughly (and often exhaustively) covered elsewhere — like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Ted Lasso or Desperado or Scream or my forthcoming piece on Fury Road — I feel that I’m at least able to approach those films/shows from a perspective that is sufficiently different and personal. You know? I have a point of view now — one that I’ve refined over many years and dozens of essays — that gives me the confidence to say, “I can bring a new perspective to this discussion.” For instance: I read many, many retrospectives on Scream a few months ago in celebration of its 25th anniversary and in anticipation for its brand-new legacy sequel; some of them were predictably worthless and some of them pretty good, but none of them saw in the film what I saw in it, and even the few pieces that verged into similar critical territory — like this solid analysis from Vox — didn’t cover it nearly as well as I did, not to be immodest.
But “Scream at 25″ is not the essay I would’ve written ten years ago or even five, just as this is not the analysis of Young Indy I would’ve produced even a few years ago. (And just as the recent chronicle of my professional implosion in 2014 wouldn’t have been nearly as insightful or meaningful if I’d written it any sooner than I did.) These essays only came about because I’d been through the think-write-repeat process enough times to have rock-solid confidence in my POV. And that is not to suggest I have (or ever will have) all the answers, merely that I’ve become better at asking the right questions, which, in turn, allows me to arrive at richer conclusions.
So, for all those reasons, I am sorry to hear about that blogger you follow who’s calling it a day. There’s nothing inherently wrong with moving on — I’m a big believer in (and practitioner of) letting go of things that are no longer serving us — but it’s unfortunate that personal embarrassment was the catalyst for his decision. I think of the blog like one of those doorjambs in someone’s childhood bedroom that’s hatch-marked with dates and measurements of when the kid was this tall, then that tall, etc. It’s a record of one’s growth trajectory. It’s an encouraging thing — a reminder of how far we’ve come!
I suppose one can always delete old posts that are either embarrassing or no longer reflective of the blogger’s beliefs/opinions. I’m not really embarrassed by or ashamed of any of my posts, even though there are a few that I think could be much, much better if I had a second chance to write them (“All That You Can’t Leave Behind” springs to mind in that regard, an essay I’d love to take another crack at). But that’s the great thing about a blog: You never run out of chances — or space — to amend and/or emend yourself! I’ve considered at various points including an editor’s note on some old posts that express views I’ve since reconsidered and revisited, with a link to a more recent essay that reflects my current position on the matter, but then I think, Oh, what’s the point? That’s the sort of thing George Lucas drove himself, and his fans, crazy doing — constantly tweaking and revising and “improving” old work with which he was never fully satisfied.
Instead, better to invest that creative energy in the next project, you know? That’s the spirit that keeps compelling me to write new blog posts and new novels, after all: They all invariably fall short of what I’d envisioned for them, but the next one represents yet another shot at achieving perfection! You don’t chase perfection because you actually believe you’ll ever attain it; you do it because it inspires you to keep writing, and, by extension, continue improving. Just keep writing. If the current project turns out better than the last one, don’t take it as a sign of what a subpar writer you were, but rather view it as evidence of what a better writer you’ve become! Like I’ve always advised: Don’t look back.
Thank you, Dell, for the kind and encouraging words. They mean a lot.
SPC
My pervasive thought as I read this, Sean, is that the movies and shows I enjoyed growing up (and since) were enjoyable to me precisely because I didn’t have to keep up or remember everything. Each movie or episode was “unto itself.” I wanted shows like The Facts of Life or The Brady Bunch to tell me a different story each time, albeit with the same cast of characters I’d invested in, not a continuous story where I had to remember what happened last episode—or last year—in order to come along for the ride. That is exhausting to me, not fun.
For this same reason, though, I was able to enjoy movie series like “Indiana Jones…” because I wasn’t hung up on what tied them together. I expected that Indie (or James Bond, or Daniel, aka the Karate Kid) wouldn’t have the same girlfriend “this time” or need to explain in detail what happened to the last in order to tell me “today’s story.” Likewise, I think I’m able to somewhat enjoy postnarrative franchises, because I don’t try to remember everything or connect the dots; whatever is happening in “this one”… happens, as far as I’m concerned.
That said, I have found myself becoming more and more fatigued trying to allow myself to let “this one be this one” with these mega-franchises. It’s almost like they are trying to condition the viewer to become over-invested and “addicted” to the ever-expanding details or you literally can’t enjoy “this one” anymore. So even though I feel connected to and invested in some characters (e.g., Wanda Maximoff, some of the X-men, etc.), I feel utterly turned off by the point to which “expanding” has brought these characters: fractured multiverses; timelines done, redone, undone, etc. I’m intelligent enough to keep everything straight. I just don’t want to. That becomes work, not enjoyment, for me.
And that isn’t a judgement on anyone else. As is made clear by the success of these types of ever-expanding stories, other people who aren’t me do enjoy them and find value in them. I just have too much going on and too much I want to get done in the real world to invest that kind of time or energy into what feels like a bottomless pit of a pretend world.
Hey, Erik!
It’s funny how we never questioned why Indy had a different girlfriend in each movie, or why James Bond suddenly looked like a completely different person! We didn’t need any of that stuff explained or reconciled; you could just accept that unseen events happened between movies that altered the status quo, or that another actor was taking over the role but that the continuity itself was left (more or less) intact. I never went to see an Indiana Jones film or tuned into a new episode of the TV show in search of “answers” to open plot threads from the previous installment. That wasn’t the point.
But it is now. Even the just-completed Daniel Craig arc of the 007 franchise exists in its own self-contained continuity, separate from the long-running series that started with Sean Connery’s Dr. No in 1962 and concluded with Pierce Brosnan’s Die Another Day in 2002. The five Craig movies are a complete narrative unto themselves, from Bond’s origins in Her Majesty’s Secret Service (in Casino Royale) to his death (according to what I’ve been told about No Time to Die), and they bend over backwards to “connect” all the cross-referenced dots (like retroactively making Bond and Blofeld adoptive brothers). Because that’s all fans care about anymore: pingbacks. Story is secondary, if not altogether irrelevant.
To my appraisal, that started to happen once all these franchises that were originally intended for children got dragged with Gen X into middle age. We couldn’t just sit back and enjoy a movie for its own sake anymore; we wanted all the details elucidated and reconciled in order to maintain a coherent theory of everything.
To your other point, corporate mega-franchises are absolutely — and methodically — “trying to condition the viewer to become over-invested and ‘addicted’ to the ever-expanding details or you literally can’t enjoy ‘this one’ anymore.” In my two-part post “In the Multiverse of Madness,” I talked at length about the explicit engagement strategies corporate brand managers use to keep us hostage-buying each successive offering in a transmedia initiative in real time, and why Gen X in particular has been so susceptible to those tactics.
Now, I quite enjoy putting a lot of attention and thought into the things I watch and read; as evidence, I offer my latest post, “Book Review: Blood, Sweat & Chrome by Kyle Buchanan,” which takes a deep dive into the themes and morals of Mad Max: Fury Road. But what I don’t want are homework assignments or Easter-egg hunts. I’m not going to get drawn into an endless exercise in forensic fandom. It’s a rabbit hole that leads everywhere and nowhere — “a bottomless pit of a pretend world,” as you put it.
I understand that the way we tell stories changes with both the times and with new presentational formats; for instance, streaming is increasingly blurring the once-clear line between movies and television. And that’s fine! But what I see now is a lot of really poor storytelling at best (Game of Thrones), or — even worse — corporate storytelling that leverages nostalgia to nourish consumerism (Star Wars, Marvel, etc.). Say what you want about Young Indy, but it wasn’t produced to appease superfans or sell merchandise. It was an honorable creative effort. It inspired me then and it inspires me now. So, I honored it here.
Sean
At the end of the day, studios and television channels are businesses. And the simplest goal of a business is to maximize profit. Like you, I wish that could be done with greater morality, creativity and, as you put it, “moral creativity.” But profits alone drive the majority of corporate decisions.
As such, the only reason that such corporations will ever develop greater morality, creativity or moral creativity is if the lack thereof begins to impinge on profits. The fact that people like you and me will stop investing in the ever-expanding franchises likely won’t be enough to affect profits. Ironically, I suppose those our age who keep investing in reboots, and those like you and me who reflect on a time when the current story was “unto itself” are coming from a similar place—wishing that certain things would not change. For some, that is a wish for beloved characters and worlds to never die. For others (like us), it’s a wish for storytelling itself to return to what seems to us a purer form. But in the end, it’s all wishing.
This brings me back around to choice, as always. I can’t worry what Hollywood or other viewers choose to do. I can only make choices about my own consumption—as you are choosing to do for yourself in practicing a greater degree of minimalism. More and more, I ask myself, “Can any choice I have in this matter make a difference?” If the answer is yes (and the power of each of us with regard to personal choice is much greater than some at first might think), then I make my choice accordingly. If I assess that no choice I can make will change it, then the choice I make is to let it go. To do otherwise would only create anger, frustration, worry, misanthropy, etc.
So I mentor. I write books to encourage people to stretch in their own perspective on their personal choices. Likewise, you use your blog and your personal conversations to inform people, add perspective, make readers aware of causes they can choose to get involved in, etc. We put information on the table without pushing it. And in doing so, my hope is always that people will see something in me or my life that looks genuinely attractive to them, that they’ll ask questions, and that they’ll perhaps then take a new perspective or course of action.
Well said, sir. Yes, Hollywood is governed by the mandate that drives every corporate entity: turn a profit. Moral creativity isn’t its concern, merely profitable creativity. Such is why I so admire what George Lucas did: He was successful enough to become independent from Hollywood, and he produced projects he wanted to make, not necessarily ones that would be best for the bottom line. At the time Young Indy premiered in 1992 — when Lucas was still at the height of his creative clout and cultural influence — he repeatedly tempered expectations for the series, and publicly acknowledged (as I noted in my reply to Jacqui above) that the project was probably doomed to disappoint fans of the Indy feature films as well as fail to appeal to the audience that would otherwise appreciate the kind of historical drama he was in fact making. He knew it would be an uphill climb — and decided it was worth the effort, anyway. And despite a few shortcomings (with particular respect to its often-reductive portrayals of women), Young Indy is probably the most morally imaginative project he’s ever produced. Certainly the most intellectual, the most concerned with pragmatic, real-world matters.
And you are absolutely right when you suggest that no individual has the power or influence to sway the corporate decision-making process. From the days of silent film, Hollywood has always been an industry more concerned with commercial entertainment than art, if you can appreciate the difference, and there isn’t anything inherently wrong with that imperative: i.e., providing escapism for profit. Both of those things — escapism and profit — have their place. But what the industry has gotten very good at doing is turning us all into obligatory “hostage buyers” of its product, and the methods by which they do that — covered in depth in “In the Multiverse of Madness” — have been given steroidal amplification by the telecommunications tools of the Digital Age.
So, what I try to do isn’t to change Hollywood — because that would be a waste of time — but rather to shed light on the systematic ways in which the industry turns us all into willing “hostage buyers” of its product. And by using the tools of minimalism — asking oneself if a multimedia juggernaut like, say, Star Wars is worth the continued investment of our money, time, and attention — we have a way to determine whether once-favorite franchises are still adding value to our life’s experience. Because if they’re not, we can always choose to let them go.
That’s what I’ve suggested to friends of mine who walk out of The Rise of Skywalker or Ghostbusters: Afterlife or The Matrix Resurrections all hot under the collar over how bad they were. I’ll say, “Gee, these movies don’t seem to be adding value to your life anymore. Why not just move on from them?” Some friends will tell me they get what I’m saying intellectually but aren’t ready to let go because you never know when there might be another truly great installment, but others have reevaluated their ongoing “obligations” to these franchises. One old pal (the same guy who saved that pizzeria flyer I featured in “You Can’t Go Home Again”) was telling me a few weeks ago that his eight-year-old son absolutely loves The Rise of Skywalker, but has overheard a lot of people shit-talking it. So, the boy asked his dad, “Is it a good movie or…?”
And my friend told his kid, “All that matters is that you like it.”
To which the kid responded: “But do you like it?”
“I had my Star Wars movies,” the dad said, “and these are yours, so enjoy them.”
So, to your point, Erik, when friends come to me to bitch about the latest Star Wars or Batman movie they hated, and they hear me respond, “I don’t watch those series anymore,” sometimes they’ll start asking me questions about why I quit, and whether I ever experience FOMO, and is it even possible to just stop watching those movies and live your life as if they don’t exist? And I simply answer their questions honestly: I give them the information they’re seeking, and let them decide for themselves what to do with it. I don’t personally care what someone else reads or watches. Do what makes you happy, I say! But I have a lot of friends who continue to follow mega-franchises that don’t seem to have brought them joy in a long, long time, so rather than commiserate with them about the latest disappointing installment of this or that, I simply remind them that just because you liked Batman or Star Wars when you were nine doesn’t mean you subscribed for life. Because Hollywood has gotten very, very good at inspiring reflexive brand loyalty, the point of which is to reassure you that you don’t have a choice — and why would you even want one, anyway?