How to Improve Storytelling
How Much Longer Can Hollywood Sustain This?
To be clear.
I'm not against reboots.
Those of you who engage with me know that
is about forgotten pop culture.Spinoff media, lost adaptations, and failed attempts that you can still find documentation of on the internet.
I'm against the soulless remake.
And if you’re a part of the pop culture detective squad that makes up
, so are you.We demand entertainment that shows effort, playfulness, and a sense of involvement. Entertainment that makes you a participant, and not just a mindless spectator.
The current wave of reboots/remakes/reimaginings are made with no effort on the part of the remakers to bring something new to the table.
Not even to bring something of themselves to it.
Because they are empty.
Not only are they not familiar with the source material (and often encouraged to ignore it), but they are also not familiar with their own thought process.
They not only haven’t developed an appreciation and a sense of history with a particular genre, they have no interest in doing so.
They never develop a sense of indentification with a particular genre, so they don’t study the great works in that genre.
Or even the underseen gems within that genre.
They are concerned with themselves.
With their pronouns and their feelings.
And because what they say and feel are ideas someone else grafted onto their brains in a rough, jerry-rigged way, they approach filmmaking in the same way.
They can’t see themselves as part of the audience.
They see themselves as ABOVE the audience.
I posted a reply in a Note someone posted about remakes a couple of months, ago and their reply perfectly summed up the situation:
The way forward.
We've had some great remakes in the past:
The Fly (1986)
The Thing (1982)
Cape Fear (1993)
Sorcerer (1976)
These all show effort to update the stories in some clever and interesting way.
We can have great remakes again.
Some that were poorly made, or adapted the first time, and can benefit from a second chance.
Some that were misunderstood or seen as controversial, and might be better received today.
We just need to let talented filmmakers with skill AND respect for the source material work without restraints.
To tell the story as the resources best allow it and not worry about the feelings of an outlier group that doesn’t care about the original or the remake anyway.
In a recent interview, Christopher McQuarrie, the writer/director of the recent set of Mission:Impossible movies, stated that fan service is poison.
Honor the work.
Ignore fan service.
In my graphic novel, The Plot, I have buried Easter eggs and references that don’t get in the way of the narrative.
A few examples of great remakes. Get over your issues about old movies and the look of 35 mm and check these out. You’ll fall in love with movies again.
The Thing and The Fly are good examples because Carpenter and Cronenberg understood why those stories worked and reimagined them through their own distinct directorial voices. Body horror elevated to art. Compare that to something like the 2016 Ghostbusters, which felt like it was made by committee who'd never seen the original and wouldn't have cared if they had. You can feel when a director loves the material versus when they're just cashing a paycheck.
How was your weekend, Jay?
Happy Monday!
I think a lot of the recent remakes track to the craze right now over IP - they'll make money no matter what people really think of them, because Hollywood is mostly bereft of originality but awash with too much money - it's incapable of thinking small, and they want commercial directors who follow orders and don't, in the widest sense of the term, stray from the script (of how things should get done).