DRAMA IS DEAD! What the industry is trending toward

[Haylar Garcia]

Hey all, just saw this article, it is a great tale on what new screenwriters
(who want to make a living as screenwriters) should keep in mind when fashioning your next opus.

):




http://www.deadline.com/2010/04/‘drama-is-dead’-say-hollywood-agents/

[Jim Brennan]

That's what makes the world go around. There have been many critically acclaimed and award winning films I have watched and just scratched my head.... Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men, Titanic...

[Jim Brennan]

Interesting article that shows how quickly trends and can change....and then change again.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/06/studios_sequels_remake...

[Christopher Vickers]

If drama is dead in Hollywood, then perhaps it's time for the Indies to bring it back.

I'm getting sick of the "drama at work" rhetoric, which is why I work the open shift. There isn't anything worth putting my butt in a theater seat anymore that isn't a reboot, rehash, or something based on a damn comic book/video game. When I see what is going on in the movies, it just crushes me to see that there's no original dramatic stuff anymore. If it is dead, it's because Hollywood is KILLING it.

[Jim Brennan]

I think there's an argument to be made that Hollywood tends to make what they think we will pay for. If great drama (like say Lars and the Real Girl) packed them in, they would make more of them. Instead, hordes of people go to see Transformers. So you could assume that we tell Hollywood what to make with our choices as consumers. Meaning that Hollywood isn't killing drama...we are.

Of course it's not that simple. Using the above example, I'm sure that Hollywood poured far more into advertising with Transformers. I believe that they hope to make specific films such an "event", that people will see them even if they get bad reviews, just so they don't feel left out of the water cooler conversations. They count on marketing and marquee value over quality to drive box-office. So they too are guiding the ship. You could take it one step further and say they even decided to make a feature film based on a cartoon...based on a toy (can't even remember which came first)

The one thing I am pretty confident in is that, although there are many things that are different about Hollywood today compared to 20, 40 or even 60 years ago, the one thing that has never changed is that producers are going to make the products that they believe are the most marketable. If you look at the list of films made in any year, going back to the 30's, you will find just as many bad films as you do today. In fact, you may find more since the machine made a lot more films back then.

Drama's not dead. As always, you just have to look for it.

[Christopher Vickers]

The BAD films are why MST3K existed for quite some time. I always did like to watch the bad scifi get heckled to hell and back. And being a fan of scifi I began to write into my own universe when I was 15, and started with stories. None of the original drafts from those days exist anymore, and even if they did, my dad would have had them locked in a file somewhere in his private stash that would have been destroyed by fire some 8-10 years ago. I'm working on my universe primarily from memory. From there, I think I'll shut up about my work.

I've been one for the last few years to wait for the DVD to come out, as I can't afford to head for the theaters, but I do keep track of the trailers coming out. I suppose that the biggest scifi films to come out were Star Trek last year, both of the Transformers and Iron Man movies, and maybe a handful of others. I hadn't spotted anything truly dramatic in them, only senseless blow-stuff-up action (save for Trek, with the way they built up the primary characters, which if you go by the established time line, there WERE several errs, but the alternate timeline piece covered that base somewhat adequately).

I personally want something original from Hollywood, but all they're coming up with is Xerox copies of something (or if you want to get archaic, a ditto copy).

I think your comment on something that is based on a cartoon, which is based in turn off of a toy, is Transformers...and there were three, if you wish to count the animated movie that came out in the 1980s, and then the recent live-action movies.

As for the science fiction stuff that's come out, I think that the competition between Star Wars and Star Trek is pretty much drowning the original stuff coming out (look what happened to Firefly and FarScape). And now, they're throwing Stargate into the mix.

It's really no wonder that network is going downhill to the point of incorporating the WWE into their lineup. As far as the other really dramatic stuff, it's being drowned out by movies that have a lot of explosions and pyrotechnical action...and television is being drowned out by so-called "reality" shows.

[Haylar Garcia]

yup

[Gary Lange]

There is a saying in the livestock world of farming, go into the animal raising business that is currently a flat market, stay out of the hot market animals.  If that sounds counter-intuitive there is a rationale behind it.  It takes a while to breed livestock, from birth to butcher, if the market is flat today, by butcher time the demand will outstrip the paltry supply and the price will skyrocket, Maybe the same is true of Drama Movies.