7/31/23
Newsletter #413
The Crack of Dawn
I hated Project Greenlight since it first started because it’s a sham. Ostensibly, and as far as the audience is concerned, the idea of the show is to give a young, wannabe filmmaker a crack at making a Hollywood film, leading to a possible shot at stardom, or at least an entrée into the Hollywood firmament. But that’s not the actual point of the show. The true point is far uglier, and much more in line with the Hollywood zeitgeist. The point is to watch some poor, unsuspecting, unprepared shmuck fail. It is a follow up on the old Hollywood adage, “There’s nothing better in Hollywood than watching your best friend fail.”
From the glimpses that I caught of the first season, with those perennial do-gooders, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who didn’t seem to be in on the joke. I think those putzim (that’s plural for putz) honestly thought they were trying to help these struggling, aspiring director-writers; as opposed to just setting them up to fail. But fail they all did. Nothing good came out of the experiment. What we got to see was some poor dumb asshole being browbeaten by a tough 1st Assistant Director, who constantly reminded them every two minutes that they were falling behind schedule and had better rethink their plan. And since they had no experience at rethinking their plan, while a 100-person film crew stood idly by staring at them. After each shooting day, all the head honchos would disingenuously speculate, on camera, as to why it all went to hell. Except that they all knew – as did I – that it was entirely because they had tossed a minnow into a shark pond. The results were predetermined.
I’m struggling for an analogy. OK. It would be like having a contest among architects that whoever drew the best plan got to go build the building. A person who has spent their entire life in an office drawing blueprints, suddenly finds themselves on a building site in charge of a big construction crew, with cranes and bulldozers. They have probably never done anything like it, and may well have never even picked up a hammer. Their eventual – and usually, immediate – failure is inevitable. And since no decent movies came out of Project Greenlight, it obviously wasn’t about the final outcome – the movie – it was about the needless drama of fucking it up.
Since I won’t even check, I don’t recall the show being all that popular. It ran a few dismal seasons and was gone, and nothing came out of it. A few foolish, naive friends of mine called me and said, “You should get on Project Greenlight.” I tried to explain that I was the last person they wanted on their show – a DGA director who always came in on time. What a bore. That’s not what they were looking for. Let’s face it, folks, the point wasn’t success; the point was humiliation.
In this creatively bleak epoch in which we are presently ensnared, where Hollywood truly thinks a good idea is, hey, let’s make a movie out of a toy — a toy? Why didn’t I think of that? — this is their thinking: since Project Greenlight sucked, and nobody liked it, and it all came to nothing, let’s remake it.
This is now all second-hand. I have not seen the new Project Greenlight. I saw very little of the first one. But now, as it was explained to me, this is the “inclusive” version of Project Greenlight — where it’s all female, black, brown, Asian, LGBTQ — and white people are excluded, particularly white males. Apparently, to achieve inclusion the first thing you must do is exclusion. I am reminded of producer Sam Goldwyn’s famous line, “Include me out.”
Hollywood, or more specifically, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – where I’ve seen a lot of movies – now has what is known as an “Inclusion Standard,” which, if you do not meet, you are excluded from the Oscars. The Inclusion Standard immediately invokes exclusion, I write with an old motherfucker’s snotty smirk. The joke my young friends is on you. Here’s the Academy’s rule:
Beginning in 2024, film producers and directors will be required to submit to the Academy a dossier of the sort that points to the race, gender, sexual orientation and disability status of their film's cast and crew members.
If you don’t meet some criteria in every category you are EXCLUDED from the Oscars.
Oh, fuck! Say it ain’t so, Joe. If I’m not sufficiently inclusive then I’m excluded?
This may well be the Post-Ironic Era, except that irony is like gravity. Saying that it doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away. Irony doesn’t give a shit whether you believe in it or not. Certain things just are. Yin and Yang, for instance. You can’t have one without the other. Inclusion creates exclusion.
Since the knuckleheads who made the rule, who honestly think that they’re doing a good thing when they’re doing a bad thing, don’t understand what they’ve fucked with, I’ll be happy to explain it to them.
The rarely invoked word is verisimilitude, with is defined as, “the appearance of being true.” Movies can never be true; they are always, at best, the appearance of truth, or some strange form of it. Movies have to create their own truth. For the people out there who don’t get it, and feel the need to create rules in regard to creativity, they are simply envious because they are not creative. Creativity means no rules, except the ones that I choose.
The first time I recall seeing a blatant display of this inclusiveness really at work, was in Mary Queen of Scots (2018), with Soairse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth. It seemed like good casting, and if the writer could write at all (and that’s too much to ask) there could be some good confrontations.
But immediately I became distracted and annoyed by Mary’s court of eight or ten people. Her courtiers are attractive young folks, all well-spoken, and from all parts of the globe, with every ethnicity possible represented: black, white, male, female, flamingly gay, Asian, Eurasian, Heinz 57 Varieties. My brain, whether I like it or not, began to whir. How did this aggregation of people end up here in Scotland in 1561? As the camera panned around revealing these young, multi-ethnic people, were it I, the shot would have ended on a 400-pound King Kamehameha holding a staff.
And this is where that wonderful word verisimilitude resurfaces. Verisimilitude is “the appearance of being true.” It’s not true; it just looks true. That is, until you fuck it up and it doesn’t look true. You may have included a spectrum of the world’s ethnicities, but you have excluded the verisimilitude, the joy – the point – of believing what you’re seeing . . . for whatever reasons, and even if they be noble, they are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Alas. And the dawn is just rising. The blue gels are behind the trees.
What do you mean?
Hollywood is the only town where you can die from encouragement.