So, I want to talk about this profile of Worldwide Motion Picture Group, and their scientific process (“scientific” process) of evaluating the statistical likelihood of success for a screenplay. Here is an AVClub article about them, and about their founder, Vincent Bruzzesse.
This is actually very exciting for me! I like the idea of behavioral psychology, and you know, simple machines that are designed to churn out plots and stories have been around in Hollywood for half a century at least.
Shakespeare was supposed to have written all of his plays in one draft, each of them bursting perfectly formed into the world like the goddess Athena from the skull of Zeus. I don’t currently know any writers who can do that, but the model that playwrights have access to is either apathetic, disingenuous or expects exactly this sort of miraculous birth.
Yesterday, I saw “Future Fest”, which is a Luna Theater production of short “science fiction plays”, themed around time travel (I guess, kind of?), which whole thing is part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. I haven’t been doing a lot of reviews of theater lately, for a lot of reasons, but I saw these plays and because they are plays performed in a theater, and because Luna Theater is selling tickets to them, and because it is a part of a cultural even that I, as a Philadelphian, am ostensibly meant to be interested in (“The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts”, which, I don’t know if that’s a festival of international arts? Or is the festival itself international? Whatever. The point is, it’s not a couple skits some cats were doing in their backyard just for the heck of it), I have decided to write about this.
We need to talk about these plays, guys.
A while ago, somebody sent me a link to this article on Cracked that was something like “Five Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person.” I didn’t really care for it, and I’m not really sure how anybody looks at Alec Baldwin’s speech in the beginning of Glengarry, Glen Ross in its context and comes away thinking that the only reason you’d think his character was horrible was if you were a narcissist. He is literally arguing that you don’t matter unless you sell the most houses! That is an awful thing to believe, and also drives people to cheat Jonathon Pryce out of his life savings!
Anyway, those are actually five harsh truths that will make you an asshole. I have been meaning to write a response to it for a while, and I guess this is it. Five harsh truths that will ACTUALLY make you a better person, as opposed to a shitty, self-absorbed punk.
So, maybe you hear about this crazy GQ article in which my fellow Philadelphian Buzz Bissinger (author of Friday Night Lights ) talks about how he spent more than half a million dollars on fancy leather clothes, most of which are from Gucci. Now he is in rehab for his shopping addiction. That is good news, because he clearly had an addiction that was, like many addictions, probably symptomatic of a sense of deep personal unhappiness, and deep personal unhappiness is bad for everyone, even when you can afford to throw a half a million dollars of leather pants at it.
The article is about three parts, and two of them I am not going to get into. The first is that it’s an addiction, yes, and addictions are bad, and it’s good that dude is in rehab. The other is when he talks about he got into S&M and gay orgies, and that is his business, I am not even interested in that.
The third part that’s pretty important is that half a million dollars of Gucci leather makes you look fucking ridiculous.
I was going to write a big screed about this Veronica Mars kickstarter project, and about how ultimately destructive it is for people to base their cultural identity on products provided from an utterly amoral (all corporations are by their nature fundamentally amoral) industry that actually literally is not capable of caring less about them (the market dynamic of “paying for product” means that a corporation is going to care exactly as much about you as your money is representative of a share of their income, that is what “free market” is – if you can spend ten dollars on a movie, then Warner Brothers cares ten dollars about you; if their global revenue for a movie is three hundred million dollars, then they care one thirty-millionth about you). Then I decided NOT to write about it, because I actually don’t even care about 1) Veronica Mars or 2) people who like Veronica Mars. Nothing against you/those guys, it’s just that “the creation of Veronica Mars projects” is not a field of human endeavour that I happen to be interested in.
Making art is a field that I’m interested in, though, so maybe I should talk about this.
This is a very long essay, and it probably constitutes the end of my interest in NBC’s SMASH. I know that most of you will be happy to hear that.
The second season of Smash begins with Karen Cartwright (Katherine McPhee), dressed as Marilyn Monroe, onstage and singing a song called “Cut, Print… Moving On.” Like all the songs on Smash, it is utterly devoid of context; like all the songs on Smash, it seems impossible that there’s any way to combine it with any of the other songs to form something even resembling a comprehensible musical. All pretense that the in-story show, Bombshell, is really a play that people might actually want to watch is abandoned. The song could have easily been called “Here Is the Beginning of the Second Season, We Have a New Creative Team, We Noticed It Too; Aren’t We All Very Clever?”
Now I will write about this article by Andrew O’Hehir over at Salon, which is a discussion of several movies (Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln, and The Gatekeepers), because it is actually pretty appalling. Let’s just set aside the headline (“Is Feminism Worth Defending with Torture”) as being race-baiting hokum (it carries the attendent implication that 1) the War on Terror is being prosecuted in order to improve the lives of women, and 2) all “enemy combatants” in that war must be misogynist because they are Muslim), and talk just about the torture bit that he brings up. Here, I will quote the relevant material.
Does a society that produces female CIA agents (and reelects a black president) gain the right to commit atrocities in its own defense? Is torture justified if the torturer is a university-educated woman, and the tortured a bigoted Muslim fundamentalist?
I think those are excellent questions for us to ask ourselves, arguably defining questions of the age, and I think the longer you look at them the thornier they get. I certainly incline toward the predictable left-libertarian response that torture and other illegal and unconstitutional actions (like, say, the government assassination of United States citizens on secret evidence) are immoral and unjustifiable in almost every instance. But you’ll notice that I’ve left myself a little wiggle room, and if we’re honest we recognize that morality is always relative, and only available in shades of gray.
So.
I am performing Dramaturgery on NBC’s pilot Revolution. In order to make this show interesting to me, I’ve made some kind of small but important changes to the backstory (detailed in this post here). That post is pretty extensive (and, to be fair, maybe misleading in terms of a criticism of Revolution — my backstory looks like it’s got a lot of stuff in it, but it could very well be that the current writers have just as much stuff in their story bible, obviously we just haven’t seen it yet), but you can probably skip if for now unless you’re really interested.
Holland doesn’t like me to do this stuff because he thinks it’s pointless, but I don’t think it’s pointless — I think if I get really good at this sort of thing, maybe one day someone will hire me to do Dramaturgery BEFORE they film the pilot, and then we’ll avoid this whole mess. Now. To work!
There are two ways to go with a story like Revolution, and I think Moff is right in one sense, in that just how a society breaks down in the sudden absence of electricity could be pretty interesting, and I think the other sense is how a society builds itself up after the apocalypse, and in the absence of electricity. There are a lot of pretty neat questions to be asked: what is the individual’s responsibility to the state? How much security is worth sacrificing for the sake of stability? Should civilization be about building bigger states, or should we be content with small agrarian communities? What exactly IS civilization – the material well-being of its people, art, culture, roads, what is it? What is the value of science – is it inevitably good? Should it be controlled? By whom? What about kings? Democracy? What about religion – how can it benefit a society’s build? How can it be a hindrance? How exactly do all these things come together, and what is the purpose of them?
