Star Wars holds a special place in Western Culture and, yet, the whole thing is so fucked up because of bad storytelling on the part of Disney that it’s time to do a hard reboot.
You go back to the beginning and fix all these organic problems with the Star Wars saga that have been rationalized out of existence over the years. You actually give the saga some thought.
To fit the expectations of the audience, you would have to start from the very beginning and reboot The Phantom Menace. Now, of course, all of this would cause the fan base to scream bloody murder, but it has to be done for the long-term life of the franchse.
So, you spend about a year thinking up how you can make the new Star Wars universe actually make sense and entertain people as much as possible. Once that’s done, you go through the entirety of the franchise and reboot ALL the movies, even Episode 4, 5 and 6.
But you would have to be methodical and logical about such a dramatic move. Otherwise, you’re just going to piss everyone off and waste a lot of money. But the issue is — too much of modern pop culture is coasting off of what was done several generations ago.
We need to reboot pop culture to give new generations new lore.
I have a great idea for a movie, but, alas, I’m too old and too fixated on my first novel to get around to try to write its screenplay. The story goes like this — it’s 10,000 years ago and a bunch of humans are struggling to survive.
A very fey guy who isn’t strong enough to go on the hunt — but has a family to feed — comes up to the leader of the tribe, begging for food. The leader of the tribe scoffs at him and says why do you deserve any food, you didn’t do anything to help.
So this scrawny little guy proposes that in exchange for a good story, he and his family get some food. So, our Hero proceeds to tell a tale about a young woman who pretends to be a man so she can go on the hunt. The movie shows the tale as imagined by the storyteller on the screen, interspersed with him telling the story.
At the midpoint of the movie, our Storytelling Hero makes some sort of goof in the story because he’s never been on the hunt. He has to invoke the gods to keep the story going. Maybe have him make up a One True God on the fly or something.
The story continues. At the end of the third act, something happens to interrupt the story telling and it seems as though All Is Lost for our Hero and his attempt to get food for his family.
The third act begins when him going back to his starving family. He has to tell them there will be no food for the time being. He gets into a fight with his wife who says she should have listened to her mother and never had sex with him.
Then a surprise happens — the leader of the tribe again wants to hear the story. He’s so excited, he wants to know what happens next. So, again, our Hero storyteller continues to tell the story of the young woman who pretends to be a man to go on the hunt.
At the climax of the story, she is somehow saved in a due ex machina kind of situation, and the tribal leaders roar their approval because this is the first time anyone has every done such a trite ending. The joke is, everyone thinks this otherwise hackney ending is so original because it’s the first time anyone has thought it up.
The rest of the movie deals with the surreal situation that our Hero is involved in. He gives his wife and child some food, and then goes into the darkness of the cave to also give his male lover some food, too.
It’s possible that the issue of the entertainment business shifting into streaming could be looked back upon as rather quaint. The issue is — some spunky start-up is going to come out with an AI generated movie within 18 months and, well, there you go.
When that happens, it’s just a quick jaunt to AI digital assistants churning out personalized movies and TV shows out of whole cloth without any humans being involved in the process. This is probably going to happen REALLY FAST to the point that virtually overnight all the hand wringing over the transition to streaming will just fade away.
But for the moment, I’m at a loss as to what to do about streaming. It’s such a structural shift in how entertainment is distributed that….I dunno. There definitely seems to be a chance that number of movie theatres may grow smaller and smaller.
And, yet, as I mentioned, if AI takes over, there is likely going to be a real demand for live theatre again. So, maybe some number of movie theatres will be turned into live theatre venues? That certainly would be a strange future. But I suppose I’m something of an optimist when it comes to “human generated art.”
At some point, people are going to grow tired of an endless array of AI generated TV shows and movies and they’re going to want something created by humans — and that will lead to the potential return of live theatre being the center of the artistic world.
Carol is just the type of movie I *should* want to watch. I started it, but stopped because, I dunno, something about it turned me off. But I think I’m going to try — TRY — to watch it again.
Cate Blanchet stars in “Carol.”
I think some of it comes from the vibe is shoots off. Something about the over-serious nature of the relationship turns me off. And, yet, I can tell it’s also just the type of Serious Storytelling that I should enjoy.
Ugh. I’m so torn.
And all of this happens in the context of me feeling more and more guilty about how little content I actually *consume*. I really just read my own stuff over and over again and that’s not good. I need to expose myself to other people’s work. These thoughts are happening in the context of preparing to query my novel at some point in 2024.
I’m going to have to have something to “comp” it to other than Stieg Larsson’s work which is, at this point, nearly 20 years old. Ugh. It’s times like these when I realize leaving the extended delusional state I’ve been when developing and writing this novel is going to be extremely jarring.
The latest version of MidJourney is alarmingly-good at producing high-res images. And it’s only a matter of time before those still images are put together to create the moving picture — movies. But for the fact that politically the United States may collapse into chaos in late 2024, early 2025, I would say that Hollywood’s goose is cooked.
At least the human part of it.
But just like the development of TV was delayed by WW2, it’s possible that an American Second Civil War / WW3 may delay the roll out of AI. It could be that not until that particular political clusterfuck is sorted out that before AGI is reached and we have to deal with the economic implications of all that.
Let me clear — all of this is just me spitballing. I’m not expert on such things, but I do have a more-than-casual interest in media M&As. So, the news that Paramount Global and Warner-Brothers Discovery have held merger talks made me sit up straight.
They key thing is this deal could happen in without the issue of selling a TV network or selling CNN. It could be a pretty simple turnkey solution to problems that both of these mega media companies have. And CBS News has long wanted to formally partner with CNN.
So, there you go.
All the other possible combinations would involve either selling a TV network or CNN. This proposed merger seems pretty cool to me.
Enough time has passed that The Terminator franchise can be hard rebooted. You start from the beginning with a new, young cast. You redo The Terminator only with a significantly bigger budget. And, if you really wanted to go crazy, you might could even use AI to use a “young” Ah-nuld to play the Terminator role again, only in a new, rebooted story.
But should you do this, you make a crucial change to the plot in an effort to surprise audiences — you use the multiverse concept to throw them for a loop. It could be the big secret of the reboot — that when the dude is sent back in time to save Sarah Connor — he doesn’t realize he’s been sent into a DIFFERENT TIMELINE.
How, exactly, this would work in what would be a new, open-ended franchise, I don’t know. But that’s why they pay Hollywood suits the big bucks.
Hollywood is so dumb. It is clear that technology has reached the point where it could simply license Harrison Ford’s image and then churn out Indian Jones movies like Bond movies without having to worry about recasting him or rebooting the franchise with someone like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
The audience wants Harrison Ford, so why not give him to them?
There is a narrow window of opportunity, however. Soon enough, everyone will have the opportunity to generate their own personalized Indie movie in the comfort of their own home through a digital personal assistant like from the movie Her.
But the point remains — Hollywood is strangely timed about something that is clearly the future. In the future, every major franchise can live forever through AI generated movies.
The original script for The Blues Brothers was over 300 pages long. While I don’t quite have the problem that Dan Akroyd had with that project when it comes to length, I definitely have a problem.
In number of scenes, at least, the first act of this novel is going to equal the entire second act. This is bad structure. And, yet, I think what I’m going to do is just finish an “alpha” release of the third draft then take stock of things. I will have two options depending on how things work out.
If the novel is no more, than, say, 140,000 words, then I will just say damn the torpedoes’ full speed ahead and try to pitch what I have. If the final alpha release is closer to 160,000 words, I’m going to think seriously about splitting it in two and connect the two novels through a cliffhanger.
No matter what, I think I need to YET AGAIN try to begin work on a backup project — probably a scifi novel. I have a really good scifi take on pandemic fiction that I think I could probably knock out pretty quick because I have so much more experience about how to write a novel after years of struggle.
But I am really pleased with how this third draft is sorting itself out. The big issue is there are all these elements to the novel that simply can’t be “yadda yadda yadda’d” if I want to do it properly. Now that I know how to tell a story, I realize that writing a novel — at least for me — is a lot like trying to move a huge ship one way or another.
You can’t just turn on a dime. If you think up a really cool element of the story with a secondary POV character, you have to give that element some thought or otherwise people will feel cheated.
That’s why I have a huge first act at the moment. And, yet, I try to comfort myself by realizing that the first act of The Girl Who Played With Fire is just as enormous. All this goes back to the cold, hard fact that the point of writing a novel is to equally tell a good story and finish the Goddamn thing.
So as long as I serve up a great story to readers, I doubt the average person will get too worked up that it has an enormous first act. And, remember, the issue is there are a number of known unknowns. I just know scene number, not length. And I haven’t rewritten the rest of the novel that is already written from the second draft.
So, I’m going to buckle down and finish the third draft without much regard to some pretty basic issues. Once the alpha release is done, THEN I can make an executive decision as to what to do next.
On a structural basis, my novel is a lot like Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire in the sense that the Big Event doesn’t happen until the end / beginning of the first act. It took me forever to figure out the structure of that novel…until I learned it was actually the first half of a much bigger story. After that piece of information, its structure make a lot more sense.
But other than having The Big Event be the thing that pushes my heroine in the the Special World, otherwise, if I do my job right, the rest of the structure of the novel should be pretty conventional. At least, that’s my goal.
My big concern is that it takes soooo long for The Big Event to happen that people will grow board or annoyed. And, yet, there is so much drama — and sex — in the first act that I’m pretty confident that people will be so busy reading all the spicy scenes in the first act that they won’t even notice that that many thousand of words have gone by without, well, The Big Event happening.
My heroine looks, in general, like Corrie Yee in my mind as I write her.
I, in general, like what I’ve come up with. But, as I keep saying, all of this is being done in a near complete vacuum so, lulz, I have no idea what the fuck the audience will think of it — especially some of the more spicy elements. Some of what I’ve come up with is supposed to be serious, but because it’s not hateful and scary…I could see it be as rather….uhhh…comical.
But I can’t help who I am. I’m just not as dark and scary as Stieg Larsson in my writing.
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