Centerfield

Unless you are starting from a best-selling book (e.g. Harry Potter), it is difficult to get a movie made in Hollywood which does anything very original. Why? Because this is how you sell a movie to a major studio or anyone else with money to make a major film:
Step 1) say "This movie is meets ."
Step 2) explain the plot is 26 words.

That's it. Based on that, you either get money to make your movie or you don't. And if you have to explain your script as a cross between two movies which have already been done, how original can you be?

Of course, if there was a hit with one, a sequel is easy to get funded. But it's hard to make it seem original if it's not even a cross between two others. That's why life invented sex, after all.

Your alternative, of course, is to got to (or set up) an independent movie company. Then you can do anything that you want . . . assuming that you can find the money to make it yourself. And, once you finish, you have to find a distributor for your movie, which can be a challenge.

Probably the best an independent movie company will get the first time is a direct to DVD sale. To get distributed to movie theaters, you are going to have to make a couple of direct-to-DVD movies, and have them do surprisingly well. Then a distributor might be willing to chance a theater release. Even then, probably not the kind of publicity that would brand it as a block-buster.

Simply too much risk to spend lots and lots of money on something new and different. So audiences are left with tired repeats and sequels and remakes.

OK, lets try writing Step 1 again (with different kinds of brackets):
Step 1) say "This movie is (name of successful, preferably extremely successful, movie) meets (name of another successful movie)."

In your title, you assume Hollywood had brains for the aliens to suck out....

I'm pretty sure they were all sucked out and eaten during the first remake of Night of the Living Dead. Fits the timelines.

LOL! Though "Harry Potter meets Spiderman" sounds like it would be really different.

Hmmm...I'd watch that.

Especially if they could work in pirates and an animated donkey.

Especially if they could work in pirates and an animated donkey.

Which is only a slight warp on the "...and a pony!" standard. :-)

wi,

Hollywood has three additional problems.

In Hollywood, none of the movie executives really read novels or books. That is why so many movies are remakes of television shows. (See nancy Drew this summer). They remember watching them as kids (Brady Bunch, Beverly Hillbillies, Addams Family)

Second, they have to sell the movie to the public in less than 30 seconds. It is easier to sell Shrek III since so many people have seen the movie in theaters or on DVD.

Third, movie exectives overestimate star power. People really do not like movie stars as much as they like the character they played in a certain movie. When they make a move and have Harrison Ford play away from his normal character, people hate it.

Jean, it's fun to speculate about what a movie might be like from a description like "Harry Potter meets Spiderman." But what I find really fascinating is reading a script and then watching people try to figure out how to describe it as a cross between two successful movies. When it actually has nothing to do with their characters or setting, just a vaguely similar theme.

Could you get to "Indiana Jones meets Star Wars" from a script about 14 worlds linked by magic transportation (plus Earth, which is available, but magic doesn't work so you can't get back)? Even with an evil magician who kills off all the other magicians, and a guy who figures out how to make batteries for magic so he can use Earth as a base to attack her - and does. It's a great script, but how like the combination is it? _I_ sure wouldn't have thought of it!

sd, your first and third points are all too true. (Not reading themselves is why they make movies from best sellers: no need to actually look at the book personally to see that people liked the story.) But for the second, a 30 second clip can sell other products, so how would a movie be that much harder? Granted, it would take some creativity to come up with a catchy commercial. But with a little work it could be even more captivating than just saying Shrek III.

I hate to sound like an old fogey, but as someone that loves watching movies from the 40s and 50s, it astonishes me how much better the writing and character development was in those days. Of course, that probably goes hand-in-hand with the generally lower attention span of movie-goers, especially since teens apparently dominate movie consumers these days. Many great movies from back then would get laughed out the door today. And even the serious movies today often lack the quality of dialogue that the old movies had. (Not that all the old movies were good, of course, but there were a lot more made and the studios were more willing to allow at least some good ones to be made, for prestige if nothing else.)

Marc, I think some of that is that screenwriters of the era didn't grow up under a constant media barrage. They had to read! And thus they also learned to write. Now we're seeing a complete generation of screenwriters who grew up watching media instead of reading books.

I think you are right, Tully, but I think it also is a difference in the audience expectations as well. For one thing, there was not the expectation of constant stimulation and, of course, much of what we see today would not have been allowed. I have always found it interesting how the old movies had dialogue that you could actually imagine happening whereas in many movies today, the dialogue is simply something to kill time until the next special effect.

I saw the "40 Year Old Virgin" over the weekend. Let me first say that I am not a prude about language; I certainly think it's appropriate to have soldiers in battle say fuck, as in "Saving Private Ryan", for example. And I swear quite a bit myself. But I don't know anyone in ordinary life that swears like the characters in the movie did. To me, it really created a disconnect between the plot and and the characters. I think it coarsened what could have been an interesting premise.

Marc, the other difference is that the screenplay writers in the 40s and 50s generally got their start as playwrites. In plays, the dialog is the critical element -- nobody gets to change a word of dialog without the playwrite's OK. Change the set, or the stage directions? No problem. But don't touch the words!

In movies, on the other hand, what is critical is the image -- the idea, if you will. Actors and directors change the dialog all the time, and nobody thinks a thing of it.

Add to that the fact that movies are not filmed linearly. Even what you think is a single scene may be shot at different times, or even different days. Did the camera angle change? Quite likely shot at a different time. The result is that movie dialog is frequently like nothing you ever hear in real life.