The Silicon Valley Pivot will Kill Hollywood

 Made with certain parts of my brain, and my two opposable thumbs.

As both the SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guide – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) and the WGA (Writers’ Guild of America) are on strike and the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) refuses to negotiate, we’re probably wondering what the studios’ end game actually is.

Apart from the quest to make so much money they can use it as mattress stuffing.

I have friends in the industry who are mostly in crew and VFX (but also a couple of actors), so I can tell you right now that the life has never been glamorous. At all. It’s exciting, heck yes, but the novelty wears off after a few years. They’re trapped in a gig economy with no promise of a steady pay check. They might make some sweet, sweet money one year, and go into a lull and not work for years after that.

Crew wind up working in dreadful locations (too hot and surrounded by bugs, or too cold and in danger of getting frostbite), working very long hours (load in times of 6.00AM and load out times of 10.00PM or later are not unheard of), for very average amounts of money because they’re below the line on a film budget.

Working in VFX sounds like a nightmare. People sit in front of computer all day, pushing out shots while they’re get hassled by everyone. The higher-ups view their carefully crafted sequences and then (cover your eyes everyone) the higher-ups indulge in a bit of pixel-fucking. I’d never heard of this term before, but apparently it involves multiple directors or producers or others starting off with the phrase, “I love it, buuttt....” and then telling you that they think the blue of the sky is too blue and you should make it less blue. Which shade of blue? Who knows. They’ll leave it up to you, so they can come back in three days time and tell you that the sky looks wrong because it’s not blue enough.

Actors lives aren’t exactly alluring either (unless they’re in the elite company of the very few who are at the top of the ladder). Even well-known actors are aiming for a solidly middle class existence. A surprising chunk of their pay gets trimmed off the top by their agents, along with various other fees. The actor pays tax on the full amount, even if 10 – 40% of their pay has already gone to others.

In a nutshell, the studio execs sell the world a lie. Hollywood is pushed as the dream factory. And working in the dream factory is amazing. This was never really true and it’s even less true in modern times. Today the execs are mostly people that regard content as a product. Like a cheeseburger. If they could just figure out how to make the cheeseburger as cheaply as possible, in a consistent manner each time, then the product will make a profit with zero downside.

As Silicon Valley becomes increasingly involved in the industry, the execs seem to have pivoted to a ‘tech bro’ attitude. Why pay anyone when people are just producing a widget? The AI and various bits of software will do the actual work. In this model writers and actors aren’t talented creatives – they’re just like the people who work at Amazon warehouses (no insult to the people who work hard at Amazon) or Uber drivers (no insult to the people who work for Uber). The software on their phone/device tells them what to do, and they go do it. If that’s the direction the executives are working towards then the novelty of working in Hollywood will wear off, much like it did for Uber drivers. Once Hollyweird loses its glamour, people will do other things and only agree to be a writer if they’re desperate. Which means the studios will not be getting the best of the best.

On a positive note, as anyone who works in IT knows (and I’d be one of those people), it’s rare for any software project to be delivered on time, on budget and without defects. The execs in Hollywood have never been near an IT project in their lives. As long as IT has been running, it’s always been a bug-filled hellscape that runs on a wing and a prayer. The executives can’t just plug all of their requests into a cloud AI instance being shared by all the common people (and other studios) out there. They like to keep secrets so they’ll have to move their AI model in-house. And they’ll need one instance per studio. And infrastructure (cue the massive server room and expensive air conditioning), and security to prevent people accessing the server room, and a team to deal with things like production databases where you store the widgets and AI generated ideas. And people who ensure the wonderful AI is up and running 24-hours / 7 days a week. And ongoing license fees on a yearly basis to support everything. Studio executives have no idea have much they will be screwed over by Silicon Valley once Silicon Valley convinces them that it’s the right way to go. One wrong move and someone can accidentally wiped out a studio’s entire production database containing all of those dumb ideas, and all of those widgets – and the backups never worked. It’s been that way since 1973 and it’s exactly the same today.

It won’t cost $150 million to produce a movie any more. They’ll ensure writers and actors are paid peanuts. Directors will probably be tossed out of their jobs entirely (don’t worry – we’ll use an AI to determine what to do). Instead it will cost them $300 million every year in operating costs alone. They’ll spend money on extremely expensive enterprise licensing agreements, on infrastructure support, and on staff to support their brilliant AI. All while their AI, who doesn’t know what a human actually is , pumps out an endless stream of shit while supported by a dedicated AI team that needs their own building and a thousand employees just to keep it stable.

And Hollywood will come crashing down into a sea of overly engineered mediocrity that nobody wants, thus killing the entire industry.

Then again, maybe the AMPTP reconsiders their stance and avoid venturing into the darkest timeline.

Enjoy the following examples of databases and systems being breached and burning various companies to the ground. (Scroll down the comments on the GitLab comments to see someone talking about Toy Story 2 almost getting wiped out completely in similar circumstances.)

Good luck, Hollywood!

The Failure of Mortal Engines Isn’t a Surprise

It seems that the movie industry was sort of surprised by the failure of Mortal Engines. The film was directed by Christian Rivers. The screenplay was by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, based on the novel by Philip Reeve. Mortal Engines had all of those things that movie studios love. The movie was a big action and special effects extravaganza. It was gonna be a franchise. There are cities on wheels cannibalizing other cities. And Peter Jackson was involved. And Fran Walsh. And Philippa Boyens.

Come on, people, it had hit written all over it!

Or, did it?

If you’re a fan of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh or Phillipa Boyens you should stop reading now. I have a theory that you probably won’t like. If you stop reading, you’ll be saved from a great deal of indignation and outrage and it will also take away the temptation to send me sternly worded comments about how you are indignant and outraged.

For everyone else, here’s my theory. The failure of Mortal Engines shouldn’t be surprising because Fran Walsh hasn’t written an original screenplay since The Frighteners. Which was released in 1996. That’s twenty-three years ago for those that don’t want to do the math. Phillipa Boyens has never written an original screenplay. Between the two of them they have produced an endless succession of adapted screenplays. That is, the story existed first as a novel (or in the case of King Kong, as another film), which Walsh and Boyens adapted for the screen.

With each adaptation Walsh and Boyens have moved further away from the dilemma that their characters face, or a compelling narrative, and concentrated more on special effects spectaculars that show off the skills of WETA. The lack of original screenplay writing means that they’re always taking someone else’s ideas and characters and then mushing them around until the idea and characters match Walsh and Boyens version of what a movie should look like.

From 2001 to 2003, Jackson, Walsh and Boyens struck gold with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, winning an Academy Award for their adaptation of Return of the King. Personally, I’d argue that a writer would have to work very hard at making the Lord of the Rings suck. In other words, good material is nearly always going to shine through, even in the hands of writers ‘adapting’ the work for the screen.

However since then, their adaptations of novels (and King Kong) have been subject to the laws of diminishing returns. Their films tended to be overly long and increasingly devoid of compelling narrative and character arcs. The characters lacked nuance or an emotional core. Each film since The Lord of the Rings trilogy seemed to be a tiny bit worse. For example, riding on the success of The Lord of the Rings, King Kong did very well at the box office and with critics. But once more it was an adaptation of a previous work, essentially following the same plot line, only with a lot more padding and better effects. I still remember walking out of King Kong without having felt much of anything for the characters, except for the sequence on the ice covered pond between Ann Darrow and Kong. That was a truly beautiful scene that lasted a few short minutes before we’re back to the running and screaming and explosions, and the climbing.

From there the cracks began to show with The Lovely Bones. A movie that veered between a strange sentimentality in a day glow version of the after life and a crime thriller. The book attracted some criticism for exactly the same thing but you would hope that experienced writers like Walsh and Boyens could have dug into the core themes of the book and extracted a work that focused on how a family somehow carries on from such a tragedy in a more emotional and compelling way. The Hobbit seemed to suffer from the same fate. Lots of effects and a padded narrative that tries very hard to forget that The Hobbit was always a children’s book, and consequently suffered as a result.

Then along came Mortal Engines. A movie that’s a bloated special effects fantasy with a dull and confusing narrative, and even duller character arcs. The failure of Mortal Engines shouldn’t have been a surprise. It’s always been coming. It’s just taken a while for everyone to realize that somewhere in the past two decades Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens have developed a writing formula that involves taking the original work, shoveling in a ton of action and special effects, and as an after thought, reducing the characters to the standard tropes found in all terrible movies.

Inspirational writing advice from Charlie Kaufman

Charlie Kaufman gave a lecture back in 2011 emphasizing that the priority of a writer is writing first, and marketing second. Unfortunately these days it’s all about marketing first, and writing second. In a world drowning in self published books, we’re forced into marketing and branding in the vain hope of building an audience. Indie authors know only too well the pain of being told that apart from delivering a novel (a Herculean task), we need to worry about social media platforms, growing a mailing list, maintaining blogs, and targeting the correct audience with the correct genre. Only then will we make boatloads of cash and be able to quit our day jobs. Oh, and if you’re a published author, congratulations, but you’ll still have to market your book because the publisher won’t do it for you.

It’s a peculiar aspect of our time when an author is forced to have a secondary career as a marketing expert.

The End of the Tour

I’ve watched The End of the Tour four times (so far). And, I know what you’re thinking. A movie about two writers having prolonged discussions about fame, jealousy and life isn’t going to be very interesting. But strangely it is. So if you haven’t seen The End of the Tour and you’ve got some spare time, you might find a new movie to like.