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Motion picture
and television executives tend to clone past successes. They actively
discourage originality because of the high financial risks of dream
making. And all too many members of the creative community are willing
to collaborate with them. American mass entertainment has always been
based on the bottom line, but now it’s increasingly from the bottom of
the barrel.
The nations
screens—big and small—are awash with films and programming that are more
a reflection of dedicated deal-making than they are of meaningful
filmmaking. Commissions have replaced commitment. Packaging has replaced
passion. Whole forests are being devoured to create the pulp that is
transformed into printouts of a never-ending flow of mindless
screenplays that are replays of former screenplays.
It’s hard to
believe that in just fifty short years, we’ve gone from Orson Welles’
filmic feast to such standardized, trivialized fare. In half a century
we’ve gone from Citizen Kane to candy cane. That’s what comes of
playing it safe. That’s what comes of relying on the kind of market
research that asks people whether or not they like a movie that hasn’t
been made yet, and perhaps never will be if enough of them indicate they
won’t see it if it ever was. That’s what happens when moviemakers take
the pulse only of other moviemakers and superimpose the results on an
audience they know only as statistics.
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