Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Wednesday, December 17, 2003
15:48 - Hollywood Thrashes About http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0356634/	(top)
It's clear to me what's going on. Hollywood is out of ideas. Plain and simple. They can't come up with anything new. New ideas, the currency of storytelling, are all but frittered away now, and they don't grow on trees. What Hollywood needs is a sugar daddy for their supply of ideas, and they know it. They think they've got one, too. It's called CG animation, and the studio execs have got it into their heads that CG will save their skins. Here's how. CG makes it possible to make live-action movies out of existing properties that previously only existed in a still, drawn, 2D format. Formerly it was necessary to do full-scale animation to bring, say, Scooby-Doo or The Grinch to life; but now that the Great Savior, 3D animation, has arrived, Hollywood can make the much cheaper live-action films that springboard off the existing popularity and name-recognition of the title characters. All they have to do is convert the 2D properties into 3D models, and they have an instant story and basis for a movie. They can now bulldoze through a rich and untapped universe of 2D comic strips, animated TV shows, and storybook characters, from The Cat in the Hat to .... God help us... Garfield. This is only the beginning. It doesn't matter if most of these movies suck; like spammers, for whom one single bite in a million spams sent out is enough to justify the whole effort, Hollywood can sustain itself on the one surprise hit that they manage to crank out a year, though they seem not to gain any understanding of why a given movie is successful and another is a flop. They'll just keep trying until something sticks (George of the Jungle), and then do it over and over again, no matter how execrable the result (Dudley Do-Right). Nah, maybe I'm being unfair. Stuff like Fight Club and The Sixth Sense do keep being made. There will always be creative writers with new original ideas that manage to capture the public's attention. And clued-in scriptwriters will always be able to develop a pleasing and satisfying story, if the execs will allow it. For example, there's a kind of script that I've been noticing lately: it depends on either a) the audience, b) different sets of characters, or c) both being left in the dark about some crucial plot point, having only seen an incomplete picture of it, until the moment of revelation at the end that turns the world upside down for the characters in question and kicks the movie into high gear for the viewers. This is as opposed to a script where you just create a setting, define a goal, set up some characters, drop them into the story and let them go to it. I had all but given up on Disney producing any more of the former, more complex stories; The Lion King was the first time they'd done one (the audience knows what's going on, but the different sets of characters are variously missing crucial bits of information until the moment of revelation, when everything changes and the movie crashes to its close), and I'd begun to assume it was the last as well. But Brother Bear is in fact another of exactly that stripe: the central character growth and the climactic series of events do not occur until the moment of revelation that resolves the half-seen story partially revealed earlier in the movie. The audience might have guessed at the whole picture, but the characters don't figure it out until near the end. (Actually, the Emperor's New Groove has a revelation moment like that too. It's all about character growth in that film's case. Other Disney films have minor revelation moments too-- Tarzan, Mulan, Beauty & the Beast-- but they're not really what I'm talking about. The various transformation scenes or unmaskings don't cast the whole preceding plot into a new light; they just resolve it.) This kind of script is not inherently better than the more straightforward kind, but it does tend to make a movie more memorable. It's why Toy Story is so much more satisfying than Finding Nemo, for example-- the former is a complex story centered on the slow revelation of facts previously invisible to the characters, while the latter is a fairly simple adventure where one thing leads to another, and another, and another, until the credits roll. Straightforward stories without revelatory twists can be good, but it's the Sixth Senses and Fight Clubs and Shreks that people really remember. And in the end, all the pre-existing 2D properties in the world won't win audiences' hearts and minds as much as a good mind-warping script. But, of course, those take a lot more work.