Rambling about Movies, and what Hollywood's failure mode is
I think at some point we need to talk about how the idea that a stand-alone feature-presentation of +90 minutes being the "premier form for visual media" has stunted visual story telling. "Feature Length Movies" are not the be-all and end all of film, let alone visual media.
And how this idea when combined with rigid "auteur theory" prescription of the "Directors Vision" being the only thing that matters, has led Hollywood into a blind alley of repeating the same mistakes over and over in an attempt to turn what should be Serials into Set Pieces.
As an example, imagine for a moment, if instead of being sliced between different Directors with radically different ideas of how it should go, a recent Space Wizard series of movies had been developed as a coherent series. With a character bible, and a forward planned outline.
(Or for that matter, the original trilogy of Space Wizard movies. And no, no one who's a writer really buys that it was conceived as a trilogy, when the middle and last movie have such wildly different characterisation and intents. Sound similar?)
re: Rambling about Movies, and what Hollywood's failure mode is
I do not think Characer Bibles produce homogeneity, as they just write down the core personality of a character. Nor are they immutable, character development over a series leads to addition to their entries in the character bible.
The reason any series needs them, is that sometimes writers/directors get obsessed with working in "twist surprises" into things to make their part of the series an 'event'. This is fine, so long as it actually fits in with the series. It fails flat when it does not, and is outright bad when it's done for the sole purposes of pulling the rug out from under the existing continuity of the series. (See for example "We had to use this out-of-character twist because some people had worked out how Game of Thrones would end.")
re: Rambling about Movies, and what Hollywood's failure mode is
@jayblanc No, I understand the purpose. I just don’t think I like the result. But what I’m wondering, I guess, is if it might be better to hand more control over character and character development to the actors? You’d still have problems of ego, but it would at least be a group rather than a single auteur.
re: Rambling about Movies, and what Hollywood's failure mode is
I was a professional actor. That's not our job, unless you just want improv sketches. Keeping a character in our heads is *hard*, and not sustainable. It's the writers job to provide us with the material to base our characterisation on, and the directors job to give us guidance and *direction* on how to shape that characterisation.
re: Rambling about Movies, and what Hollywood's failure mode is
@jayblanc I see. Well, I bow to your experience then.
Rambling about Movies, and what Hollywood's failure mode is
@jayblanc My problem with series of that kind - in comics as well as film and TV - is that they can inherit a deadly homogeneity from the writers’ bibles and also an inconsistency of tone from changing writers and directors between episodes. I guess the old Hollywood studio system got around that by focusing on the actors?