The thrill is gone

The thrill is gone

The baby-boomers 1946-1964, me included watched movies differently than the following generations, Gen X and arguably the Millennials (there's a few rogues in between but they're not important). 

Some of you might hear boomers say that movies aren't as good as they used to be, or the actors aren't good or the stories seem to always be about CGI effects and zombies.

In truth they aren't as good, at least for us. The reason is simple, we've seen every possible plotline in thousands of plotlines. It's hard to find a movie that isn't like something else. But there's also something missing.

We really believed in movies.

Coming out of WW2, the studios began to face that evil empire known as television. And they really didn't know what to do. Movies began to look like bad TV. They had giant wide screens but the content wasn't enough.

And Elizabeth Taylor helped close the studios down.

She made Cleopatra for $1 million salary. This was the first big price ever. Before every actor worked for a studio and not negotiate for a part. Liz changed all that. Of course there were others doing it but her's was the biggest. And it flopped.

Some people say it still hasn't made it's budget.

So what did we  believe?

We believed that there really were a thousand extras on the wide shots because there were real people standing so far away from the camera you needed binoculars to see them.

It was real.

Okay, there were some special effects in movies, big studio movies like War Of The Worlds. But even then, if we didn't believe it all, we believed it could happen. Aliens attacking Earth. Of course the cold war made us feel that the aliens could well be Russians.

And then there was morality. Morals. Meaning bad guys get their just fate and good guys always win. Naturally that's not the case in real life but movies are not real life either. 

We even had cartoons where someone or something died. You should watch Lady And The Tramp from Disney, everyone cried. And Shane, the great western (although a little bit too long) where Shane the gunfighter rides away from a small boy and off to die after a shoot-out. And the boy shouts after him in echoes. 

Every kid cried at that movie.








And in the late 60's we got The Graduate, which spoke directly to us boomers in our teen and early 20's times. We examined society and that led to a lot of things including sexier movies and of course, Viet Nam. Which brought rebellion and marching against the war. 

It all worked more or less until the early 1980's. Something new came out on TV.

Entertainment Tonight.

Up to then, the general public knew little about how movies are sold and what actors are having feuds and what is an agent or a manager. We knew nothing of these things. 

And the biggest thing to happen -- happened.

The weekly gross of current movies.

Suddenly we all begin to see what happens that isn't on the screen. We learned how much actors got paid and how much a movie made, and if it was a flop or a hit and who was in trouble and everything we didn't know about movies.

And I said to a friend; "This is the end of movies as we knew it."

From now on the smoke and mirrors we used for movies to make the movies real suddenly were exposed. Sort of like when the magician tells you how he really made a rabbit disappear. People now knew how movies were made.

They knew how much movies cost, who was hot and who was not and a thousand things they never knew before.

The magic was over. Movies were fake now, because the audience knew how they were made.

So what happened next?

A smile for Paris

Like all of us, I was really upset with the terrorists who took so many innocent lives some years ago. My French producer lives in central Paris said his close friend took a bullet but fortunately is recovering.  So this was little story in Paris some years ago.

The producer (and director) will be making my script Chase (La Poursuite).

It's a very difficult issue, living here in the U.S. and Canada. Canada is especially distant from most of the world's troubles and mostly because Canada isn't familiar to most troubled places.

I was in Paris four years ago with my brother and found a nice little hotel in the Republique area just off Blvd St. Denis and stayed for a week. We had the perfect Paris experience, I hadn't been there since I was working in Luxembourg on a film.

I also met some Algerian men, I think I mentioned this in a past blog. Anyways, Dave and I would wrap up each evening with a few glasses of wine. Each night, I noticed a barber shop for Africans and also noticed that the barber shop was always loud. Lots of arguments. 

On our last night I decided to go across the alley and ask them what the arguments were. That's when one of them, a big guy, approached me and pointed saying I was John Malkovich. I said no, but he said yes.

He took me inside, introduced me and suggested all of us go for wine at that little place Dave and I went to. I found out that the arguments were about sports and politics interestingly enough. 

Etonne, the big Algerian said it was hard to get jobs there. And BobX, the barber shop owner was always afraid he might lose the barber shop. The others also felt it was difficult to make a living. But for now, we were all friends, I think there may have been one who was suspicious but when I showed him my 4-yr old pic he had to laugh.

It's the photo on the blog cover, how could you not like that kid?

Sadly, it occurred to me Friday, my brother emailed and wondered how those Africans were doing, and realizing it would even be harder for them, as employment was rare. I wish I had a solution. 

And I wish I can see them again sometime soon to drink and laugh and talk about our lives, good and bad.

Anyways, I'll post something else in the next day or two.

Where do you get ideas for a movie?

Finally back on the blog, week-end holiday messed up a lot of work for me, and I took off a day or so.

Having said that, I get a lot of people who ask me where my ideas come from so here goes.

In the beginning, as they say, I had really bad ideas. My first screenplay was about a guy going to a film school and having conflicts with his father. This was pretty much based on my summer at the Banff School of Fine Arts in the magnificent Canadian Rockies way back in 1972. 

It was a really bad script.

I still have it and take it out now and then to see how far I've gone, although some might say not very far. Anyways, I have managed to do a fair amount of work, that being 20 feature-length movies of which half were my originals and the other half were rewrites.

Let me explain the rewrites; it's where I came into a project almost ready to film but for some reason didn't want to use the original writer. This is quite common and in most of the rewrite jobs, it was a "Page One", meaning that I basically rewrote the complete screenplay. One screenplay called Riddler's Moon went through about 25 rewrites, some minor, some huge. 

The huge rewrite was due to the fact that the movie was set in Nebraska, I think, and we were filming in Luxembourg in Europe. We had a town with barren fields but when we came to Luxembourg, the fields were green and yellow and flourishing. What did I do? The only thing that I could think of is to make the lush green fields poison. Sounds simple but it worked.

But back to my ideas; I have written a few movies based on old movies I saw as a kid, changing characters and ideas. Once I wrote a screenplay called Dream House which was based on another movie I wrote years before called The Tower. 

Both movies used the same idea; a computer that ran an office tower and went berserk and a house computer went berserk. Nobody noticed.

Early in my writing I used a formula found in screenwriting books wherein you "create the characters" by inventing them using age, type, etc. But these never really felt real. 

This changed when I wrote a script called Secrets of the Salmon and based it on a real character I knew, an executive who had drug and alcohol problems. I added some of my characteristics (not drugs or alcohol) as well as a few other people I knew.
 
From then on I would look for real people and base the character I would write loosely on them and it worked. Salmon worked so well that Jody Foster's company, Smart Egg, wanted to meet me because they didn't believe a man wrote it. It was later optioned by ABC.

I used this formula from then until now and I still use it. Creating a character may work for some writers but I'd rather steal characteristics than make them up, they're always better because they're real.

This worked well especially for women characters and I'm not the only one who works this way. 

What other ideas?

I read a lot of magazines and newspapers and find good ideas; some of them that I have on file include:

- A true story about a small town where women decided to close the town down from men and have a "night without men". 

- A baseball star who won the world series but died in combat before he got recognized.

- Mars - I have been trying to do a story on Mars and just haven't found the right thing yet. It'll probably be a copy of a classic book or old movie... or maybe original.

I have little notebooks in every room and always carry a notebook with me because I know that if I don't I probably won't ever remember the idea I lost.

So, if you are looking for an idea here's a few things to consider and don't get all wrapped up about stealing an idea; every idea has been made and I always say that each time I come up with a great idea, 4 other writers have also, two thinking of writing, one has it written and one is in post-production. So don't worry if you have a similar idea:

Funny thing is, for me at that certain age where nobody wants you, it seems I get more ideas than I ever did. And I think it's just from reading books and newspapers and almost everything. 

And I also watch people, I'm not a writer who tries to write in Starbucks, I watch people and what they do. Real people will give you more than whatever you can create.

It always brings back that common expression when you hear someone describe an event or meet a strange thing that happens, someone will always say these words; 

"A writer couldn't have written that".

Actually, writers could have written that and probably more than once.