Month: February 2015

So the Academy Awards happened. I haven’t watched the ceremony in years because it just no longer seemed relevant to me, often more of an exercise in money, politics, and prejudices than actual quality. Then again, my own prejudices swing towards genre, “escapist” fare, and the Academy by and large does not acknowledge such efforts except perhaps to toss them a visual effects or sound award. Call it an agreement to disagree.

Nonetheless, I’ve read some thinkpieces and summaries on the show and a recurring theme appeared to be a backlash against superhero movies, which is a shame as I feel like 2014 saw the release of two of the best films ever to come out of Marvel Studios. I have both Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy on blu-ray now. Guardians in particular I have now seen four times over and have thoroughly enjoyed each viewing. I have an instinct that neither will be wearing out their welcome with me anytime soon.

Now, I could spend this blog reiterating some counterpoints to things like Dan Gilroy’s praise of independent and serious filmmakers standing against the “tsunami of superhero movies”, but others have already quite elegantly stepped up in their defense, or defense of “lighter” film fare in general.

Instead, I want to bring up this thought. Thirty years ago, 1985 saw the release of several movies that impacted my generation to such an extent we still remember them and share our experiences of them and quote them to this day: Back to the Future, Better Off Dead, The Breakfast Club, Goonies; heck for purposes of this blog, let’s throw in Return of the Living Dead, the movie that first introduced the cry of “brains!” to the zombie genre. You know what movie I rarely, if ever, see referenced? Serious, important (albeit not indie) Best Picture winner Out of Africa.

Now am I claiming Goonies was a better film? Well, Out of Africa does seem to make a lot of “overrated” lists, especially since it beat out the still much more memorable The Color Purple, but yeah, that’s the thing. Being remembered probably should count for something. I sometimes feel like the Oscars might be more relevant as a celebration of filmmaking excellence if, instead of choosing between the movies of the previous year, they chose their Best Picture nominees from films that released five or even ten years before. After all, we should be looking past the trendy shine of the moment, right? That’s why all these pop culture box office megahits are just dust in the wind, not worthy of consideration next to real, meaningful cinema.

And yet, Ghostbusters is still a worldwide phenomenon to this day, while you would have been hard pressed to find any 30th anniversary fan-fests of Terms of Endearment or even Amadeus. Can you truly continue to write something off as nothing but popular, lowest common denominator tripe when it retains that power to make people laugh, cry, and/or scream over the decades? When it inspires entirely new generations, the way so many current industry professionals can point to a film like Jaws or Star Wars and state, “When I first saw that, that’s when I knew I wanted to make movies.”

In relation to superhero movies, the comparison can be made to the era of Westerns in cinema that dominated studio output for many years because audiences had a hunger for cowboy stories. Out of those hundreds of films we have a handful of all-time classics, some true stinkers, and a great majority that were just forgettably mediocre. And despite their box office success or critical acclaim or lack thereof, only the passage of time truly sorted out the wheat from the chaff.

Now do remembrance, inspiration, and cult followings really equate to quality? All right, if I say “yes” someone’s going to remind me that Troll 2 or The Room have become phenomena over time since their debuts. And… I’m actually comfortable with that. Look, I’m not saying they’re on the level of Casablanca, but I do believe the truly awful can be as inspiring and memorable as the truly great.

If you’d like to hear more from me and some of my colleagues on how that could be, and you’re in the L.A. area, I invite you to come down to the Long Beach Comic Expo this Sunday, March 1st, where at 3:30pm I will be part of a panel entitled “The Satellite Show Presents: Yakmala!”. It’s our bad movie watching club. If you can’t make it, well, here’s a blog I did expressing some of our core principles for movie selection. Yes, we’re actually picky about our terribleness. Plan 9 From Outer Space may not be a good movie, but Ed Wood wanted it to be, and that sort of misguided passion can shine down through the ages just as much as it does for the passionate films that work.

There exists a military strategy maxim that is attributed to Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. In its original verbose form, it is translated as “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.”

You may be more familiar with its condensed form: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” It’s the idea that the battlefield is an ultimately chaotic place, where even the most meticulous plans can go horribly awry due to factors beyond control. In fact the meticulous plans are the most vulnerable to failure, depending on how unwilling those in charge are to abandon them when they don’t work. Moltke’s other, less famous quote states, “Strategy is a system of expedients”, which is more or less saying that it alters based on the conditions, opportunities, and limitations of the moment.

Creative writing is not the same thing as mass warfare, but it really does seem similar in the respect that it is a rare thing for a script to survive contact with the actual process of production and have the final product emerge unchanged. A great example of this is Jaws, which I now own on blu-ray and have long been familiar with just how much the original creative vision Spielberg sat down and storyboarded had to change because of matters beyond his control, like the mechanical shark breaking down on a constant basis. They had to get creative and use various means to imply its presence instead, and even though it all seemed like a day-to-day disaster and failure at the time, the end result was cinematic history. Had Spielberg been inflexible the movie probably couldn’t have happened at all, much less been an all-time classic.

Even in my personal experience, working with just one other person, the amount of behind-the-scenes compromise that occurs in producing the comic might surprise you. Sometimes we can’t find the reference we need for the angle I envisioned. Sometimes things get accidentally left out, or other things are inserted I didn’t intend to be present. There are occasions when this happens that I’ve insisted on correction, but just as often I’ve taken the long view and looked over my strategy, seeing if it can be adjusted based on the new circumstance, and more than once I’ve actually ended up excited at the opportunities. I would love to say everything happens just as planned because that makes me seem really cool and collected and mastermind-y, but then again I’m pretty sure those kinds of masterminds only really exist in fiction. Mind you I’m not claiming to be a strategic genius, but I’d say the historical guys we hold up as such certainly had their plans, but their real talent was in being able to to take apparent setbacks and turn them into an advantage, finding solutions rather than devolving into paralyzed panic.

Will they be good solutions? Maybe, maybe not, but it seems like the only true defeat is when you just flat out give up and sink into the despair that your story just can’t be accomplished. Many an army commander lived by the idea that so long as their force remained intact, they could lose any number of battles and still maneuver for an eventual victory.

So if you feel like you painted yourself into a corner with your writing despite your planning, well, maybe it’s time to knock out a wall just so you can keep going. Who knows? Maybe your house of ideas will actually turn out better for having that cross-ventilation. Or, true, you could just end up with a jagged, silly-looking hole, but hey, could be worth a try if the alternative is just ditching all the work you’ve done altogether.

So in the last month or so, Dawn and I started binge-watching Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. We held off for awhile, even after the first season became available on Netflix, due to all the bad buzz I kept hearing about the early episodes. I was assured by those of my friends who had kept watching that “it gets better”, but I still had to ask the question: if there were only six or so episodes of Season 1 in the “gets better” category, should I just watch those and skip the rest?

Surprisingly, the consensus seemed then to be that, while much of Season 1 had its issues, it was worth watching. It laid all the foundations for what was to come after, and the payoff would be that much sweeter even if the first episodes themselves weren’t particularly compelling.

So we took the plunge and started from episode 1. While I won’t argue the idea that the series certainly does get better, we didn’t find it as much of a chore as we were led to believe. Maybe we were approaching it from hindsight, and that helped? I’ve also heard that watching big chunks at once allows the threads of the story to hang together far better than for those who were watching week to week (or sometimes not even week to week, since I’ve heard there were some breaks and hiatuses along the way).

Have we as a society gotten too demanding of our TV shows, like they have to knock our socks off out of the starting gate (or within a few episodes thereof) or we give up on them? I think of Babylon 5 which was one of my favorite shows ever, but how to this day I never watched what I was assured was a comparatively mediocre first season. Star Trek: The Next Generation was another show so (in)famous for having a rocky start that it named an entire TV Trope, “Growing the Beard“, since fans mostly agree it started getting good around the same time Commander William Riker decided to sprout facial hair. For quite awhile following its debut, Parks and Recreation was derided as a limp, pointless clone of The Office. There have been quite a few other examples over the years of series that took some time and development before they hit their stride.

Mind you, again, it’s probably much easier to deal with an uneven first impression in hindsight, with assurance that the time you’re dedicating will be rewarded. Going back to check out a TV show, particularly one with multiple seasons, can be a daunting prospect. Hitting an episode, or worse, several episodes where it felt like you could have skipped them and been none the worse for your experience, can be downright demoralizing.

But maybe I’m a bit more sympathetic these days, especially in terms of the early going. After all, I still remember the criticism of this very webcomic about our first “episode” being a span of pages where nothing interesting happened. I still contend with that assertion, but it’s not quite on the level of some of the nailbiters we put forth by the end of episode 7. Foundation building is a necessary but potentially boring aspect of fiction, as you get your first introductions to the characters and the setting. I figure that’s why in a lot of action movies these days you’ll get those introductions in the midst of an already occurring action scene, except I feel more often than not you’ll get out the other side of said action scene and still have only the barest sketch of who the people involved are and why you should care about them.

Did the early parts of a series like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D compare to its post-beardy existence? Nah. But they were enjoyable enough, and at least some part of every episode seemed to be working to lay the groundwork for the future. From the beginning the showrunners were supposedly promising “Everything is connected”, but after disappointments like Lost (at least in terms of answering questions) I can see how it would be rough to keep faith based on that alone. I had the benefit of being, basically, a man from the future, so I could look at it all and enjoy from that standpoint.

And once I do look back like that, in addition to my enjoyment of the entertainment, my writer side gets to wondering just how much of everything was actually planned from the beginning. But that’s a topic for another time.

Well, so, there’s an old proverb most commonly expressed as “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too”, basically meaning you can’t have something both ways, especially when both those ways are favorable to you. One of the concrete examples of that would be commissioning a design job: if you tell the designer you want it done ultra-fast, low-cost, and high quality, they will, depending on their level of professionalism, respond with varying degrees of laughing in your face. At least one leg of that triangle is going to have to give.

I realize that’s three things, so let’s do another example. You want to sell your car to a buyer and get the money for it, but still retain all ownership of your car. Doesn’t seem very logical, especially to the buyer who would be getting nothing out of the deal. It’s like deciding to stop paying your power bill, but still wanting your electricity.

Well, that’s us. Apparently a recent court decision has the potential to declare major movie studios can do just that.

http://www.tessgerritsen.com/gravity-lawsuit-affects-every-writer-sells-hollywood/

Now I’ve written before on the pitfalls artists can encounter when entering into deals involving their creative work, but Tess Gerritsen’s case seems like a whole new level of weird. If you didn’t read her post at the above link, the upshot is that in 1999 she published a novel entitled Gravity, and ended up optioning the rights to make a movie out of that book to New Line Cinema, of course with name recognition and compensation to her should it happen. She even did some script work on a screenplay, and the movie got far enough along she heard a director had been attached… but then the project was shelved.

Now if you’re keeping track, you’ll realize a quite successful Warner Bros produced movie came out recently with the name Gravity. There were similarities to Gerritsen’s book, even moreso given the screenplay rewrites she did, but… eh, parallel evolution can happen. It wasn’t until her agent uncovered that the man who co-wrote the “original screenplay” for the 2013 movie was the same man who’d been attached as director on the earlier attempt, Alfonso Cuaron. Still, Warner had merged with New Line in 2008, gaining access to all its properties, so they had legal rights to use Gerritsen’s work. Sure.

But that’s where it gets weird. Somewhere in 2008-2009 Cuaron writes his screenplay, the movie is developed and released, and not only does Gerritsen not see a dime of payment, she isn’t even credited.

Outrageous? Unethical? Probably. Also not uncommon in Hollywood. Hell, my friend produced and showed off a short film at San Diego Comic-Con, and two years later Divergent was made and bore some really shady similarities to his work. Hard to prove these sorts of things, though. If it weren’t for Cuaron’s earlier involvement with the proto-Gravity, it probably wouldn’t have merited much more than an annoyed shrug from Gerritsen.

The part that gets weird is that in the court case that was filed, Warner apparently didn’t argue that the eventual film wasn’t based on Gerritsen’s work, they just argued that because Gerritsen’s contract was with New Line, they didn’t have to honor it.

That’s the eat the cake and still keep the cake part. Warner merged with New Line, meaning they got access to all of New Line’s properties and dealings, but Warner is arguing that they have the rights to make a movie involving a writer’s intellectual property, rights acquired as part of New Line’s contract with Gerritsen, but they don’t have to honor the part of the contract where they would be paying her and giving her credit.

And apparently, the judge agreed with that reasoning.

Some writers are worried this will set a nasty precedent, given how often mergers and buyouts occur these days. Are they correct? Maybe. We only really have Gerritsen’s side of the story, but if true, the line of reasoning doesn’t seem very logical at all.

Certainly it’s a very, very good argument for making sure any optioning agreements a writer makes with any movie studio come with an expiration date. Hopefully the courts would at least consider that part of a contract to be something to be honored.