You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [100]
It would appear that the plotters had indeed damaged their own cause in the long term by their choice of targets. They had also earned some of the Crown’s portrayal as bloodthirsty murderers and terrorists, and had lost a possible ally to achieve their own alleged goal (namely, independence and peace for all of Ireland), and all for the sake of making a statement that was totally unnecessary and, from a pragmatic point, completely inconsequential.
You Made What?
Okay, more Hollywood. All that money, so much stupidity, so little common sense. We just couldn’t resist.
HOLLYWOOD, 1980S–’90S
Brian M. Thomsen
In his insightful masterwork on Hollywood filmmaking, Academy Award–winning screenwriter William Goldman accurately contends that the one basic rule of the screen trade is that “nobody knows nothing.”
Multimillion-dollar turkeys are green-lighted every day while executives live with the realization that they are only as secure as their next blockbuster. As a result, the real game in Hollywood is not to discover the next groundbreaking talent, the new Hitchcock or Kurosawa whose films will be studied for centuries to come but rather to latch on to the next sure thing.
Nothing succeeds like success, and the safest decision is usually to stick with what has worked before. Ergo the smart movie mogul will always back a sure thing whether it is a sequel to a blockbuster, a long-awaited collaboration between two popular box-office heavyweights, or even the rare ultracommercial high concept.
Ponder the following sure - to - succeed high concepts:
“What the man who revolutionized the science fiction genre did with his mega-million blockbuster Star Wars (or Alien), he now does for fantasy!”
“A madcap big-budget comedy about World War II from the man behind the Indiana Jones films!”
“A hip and now film that does for new wave what Saturday Night Fever did for disco!”
“The bestselling master of horror in his directorial debut!”
“America’s first lady of comedy in the film version of one of Broadway’s top moneymaking musicals of all time!”
“Hepburn and Wayne together for the first time in the sequel to his Academy Award–winning performance!”
These are the kinds of films that studio marketing types would like us to believe can literally sell themselves, and that is quite true…until someone in the public actually sees one and realizes that the film either doesn’t live up to the hype/expectation, or even worse decides that it wasn’t a particularly good idea to begin with, despite the hype.
As a result all of the “sure - to - succeed” concepts (including, but not limited to Willow, Legend, 1941, Times Square, Maximum Overdrive, Mame, Rooster Cogburn, and Gigli) failed to succeed.
Maybe someone should have realized that fantasy and science fiction were apples and oranges, or that some ideas weren’t either funny or commercial, or that even the most talented of writers might be ill-qualified to handle a film version of his own work, or that class concepts starring seasoned veterans might just wind up being dismissed as dated and possessing limited appeal for the largest segment of the moviegoing public.
The list is almost endless:
Howard the Duck (well, Superman worked on film, and besides it’s a George Lucas project)
The Bonfire of the Vanities (a multi-week New York Times number-one bestseller with Academy Award nominees Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith, and the Mr. Box Office Blockbuster of the moment, Bruce Willis)
MacArthur (just like the one of Patton, but in the Pacific theater)
Why did we ever think that these would be great films?
Maybe because we were told that they were going to be great.
Why did they, the Hollywood