10/6/23
Newsletter #480
The Crack of Dawn
For at least 20 years I’ve had to listen to the same tired old “wisdom,’ that I now know beyond a doubt isn’t wisdom at all, just misplaced optimism, combined with a general misunderstanding of reality. It goes like this: I say, “Music sucks these days,” to which some wizened person will reply, “No, it’s not the music, it’s you. You got old and, just like your parents, you simply don’t like what kids are listening to these days.” Well, I already did a newsletter in regard to why modern music is so shitty – repetitive, simpleminded melodies and lyrics that are more easily identified by algorithms, no key changes, no rhythm changes, auto-tune, drum machines, etc. See: Why is Modern Music so Awful? - YouTube .
Regarding movies, I started getting a strong sense that something was going wrong as far back as the late-1970s. Let me see if I can explain my somewhat jumbled thoughts. There is a very perceptive, well-written, and well-known book called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind about the little golden age of movies in the late-1960s and early ‘70s. The premise is that there was a power vacuum in the Hollywood studios after the demise of the old movie moguls and their minions, but before they were all swallowed up by giant corporations. For about a decade the filmmakers were in charge. Then the corporations bought the studios and then the young executives with Harvard and Yale business degrees and no movie backgrounds at all took over.
The thing is, the movie studios were being taken over by big companies starting in the 1920s when Loew’s bought up a passel of studios, combined them and created MGM. Louis Mayer ran the studio, but he didn’t own it anymore. By the 1960s, all kinds of companies had purchased the movie studios. A shoe manufacturer bought Warner Brothers and it became “A Kinney Company,” Paramount became a “Gulf + Western Company,” Columbia became a division of Coca Cola, etc.
I don’t think that’s the issue. I suspect that the problem really began with the beginning of algorithmic logic – how do you boil a person’s tastes down into the smallest equation?
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls contends that the last “golden age” was from 1967 with The Graduate to 1980 with Raging Bull. I accept 1967 as the beginning – that’s the year the Academy dropped the black & white cinematography category – but I say it’s over by 1977 with Star Wars. The golden age was actually completely over with the release of Jaws in 1975. Outdated old Hollywood thinking was that you didn’t release important pictures in the summer. Everybody was out swimming and wouldn’t go to the movies. Since Universal didn’t think very much of Jaws – it wasn’t an important film like, say, Airport: 1975 – they released it in the summer, and it was the biggest smash success ever.
However, Jaws isn’t a genre. What is it? A summer blockbuster? Even AI couldn’t do much with that. No, Jaws is a just a terrific film, so you can’t copy it (which Jaws 2 proved). Therefore, Jaws is the end of that ‘60s/‘70s “golden age,” not the beginning of the next period.
The beginning of the next age, which has not proven golden, is May 25, 1977. Since I keep a daily journal, and have since 1975, this is the entry for that day. “What did I do today? I went to the movies with Rick and saw the very first showing (public, that is) anywhere in the world of Star Wars which was really a lot of fun. It’s story is a bit shallow, but the way it was done – wonderful.”
It was a noon matinee at the Chinese Theater on a sunny, warm day. The line was around the block. William Katt stood behind us. I like how when I sat down to type my journal entry, I began with, “What did I do today?” Just a few hours after sitting through the film twice, Star Wars had not only already left my consciousness, it was gone forever. I was fully satisfied and never needed to see another Star Wars movie. I did, but I didn’t need to. After the third one I was done forever.
OK. Algorithm-wise, now you had something you could work with. Forget giant sharks, which never worked anyway, now you had visual effects (FX). X number of FX, with some meaningless horseshit in between them, equaled X dollars at the box office. Since George Lucas hadn’t even used movie stars, that was a huge savings right there. X number of FX, minus stars, equals more money in profit. And though AI and algorithms didn’t exist, the thinking that led to them began.
How do we reduce people down to their simplest equation? We know that humans like FX. Give them this many and X dollars shit out the other end. Oh, yeah, and some of that meaningless crap in between the FX.
I said it at the beginning, I had some noodling to do.
So I started my website, Beckerfilms.com, in 1998. Why? Because my friend Bruce Campbell had already started his and I was trying to keep up. That’s why. But Bruce had a mission, to keep his fans aware and up to date on his innumerable appearances in movies, TV, conventions, etc. I, on the other hand, was on a mission from God.
In my assessment, the lost piece in the movie puzzle was story structure. Three acts. It wasn’t binomial theory. How old was I in 1998? 40. I honestly thought that with this wonderful new advancement in technology, the internet, I would be able to convey this priceless simple nugget of information to young screenwriters, and it would make a difference. Movies would get better. I wrote a series of five essays entitled, The Need for Structure. I set up a Q&A which I answered every day.
Let the intercourse begin. Oh, yeah, this was when I was working on Xena. My Q&A immediately became almost entirely about Xena and her sexuality. What sort of relationship did Xena and Gabrielle have? And should I get something about screenwriting, it was constantly folks telling me that I was an asshole, and they were rebels with no need of constrictions like structure. They had to be free. Rules were for fools.
And that’s the truth.