Tag: Burn Hollywood Burn

The Fate Of Yahoo


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m so old I remember when Yahoo first burst on to the public consciousness. It was probably around the same time as blogs like Suck.com took off. Those were wonderful, revolutionary times. My biggest regret is I wasn’t able to take advantage of them to do something more…productive…with my life.

Anyway.

Yahoo is kind of circling the drain right now. But it does have two big things going for it — eyeballs and a namebrand. Yet there is a major problem going forward: it’s kind of been bought simply to have all the money squeezed out of it while it slowly dies. For Yahoo to mean anything again, you would need someone with big bucks and a lot of vision to wrestle control of it and completely think outside the box.

If I had a few billion on me, here are two ideas as to what to do with Yahoo.

  1. Social media
    While I know social media is not very hot right now, if you really wanted to save Yahoo, what you do is completely re-imagine it. You lay off a big chunk of its workforce and then rebuild it from the ground up to be something akin to a mixture of Twitter and Facebook. I have thought this out to an extreme, absurd degree. But, in general, what I would do is bone up on the old Usenet news of 25 years ago, updated it and make the site sort of like Reddit but with more features.
  2. A Modern TV Guide
    You might also turn Yahoo into a TV Guide of sorts for the all the streamers people now use. Turn Yahoo into an entertainment portal for streamers with content connected to them.

    Otherwise, I got nothing.

Golden Globes: Goodbye & Good Riddance — It’s Time For The Streamers To Step Up


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The Golden Globes, if you think about them, have always been something of a grift. What happened was, over the years, as the Oscars grew more powerful and our society began to grow more modern, The Golden Globes kind of came along for the ride.

They became a part of the Oscar voting season because they gave people some sense of who was leading heading into them. But, at their center, there was a problem: they were nothing more than the votes of the Hollywood Foreign Press. That’s it. Nothing particularly special about them.

As such, it definitely seems at the moment that their era has ended because of changing expectations on the part of Hollywood. In the end, their demise may be historically value free.

Having said all that, it’s past time for the major streamers to join forces to have their own awards shows. They’re so powerful in Hollywood now, it makes sense that they would have some sort of awards show of their own. Something big and flashy for Hollywood types to get dressed up for. If MTV can have its own movie awards, then the streamers can, too.

I have no idea what is going to happen. Maybe the Golden Globes will come back after some existential thought. Who knows.

The Curious Case Of Modern American Pop Culture


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now that the COVID19 pandemic is gradually beginning to abate, at least in the United States, it makes one wonder What’s Next. It would be nice to think that we might be entering a post-Rona world tan, ready and rested. That there might be the shock of the new in some respect on the cultural front.

And, yet, it definitely seems as though that’s not going to happen.

It definitely seems as though we’re going to continue to go through the paces. No new musical genres will burst forth. No new publications will stir new points of view. No new movies will will shock and delight in new, innovative ways. Something pretty big would have to happen for this not to be the case.

I can only speculate that maybe because the Internet is mature and Silicon Valley is thinking way too small that this is it. For the foreseeable future, American culture will continue to be in a vague neutral.

What’s so frustrating about this is I know, given the opportunity and resources, that I, personally, could do something really cool. I do have a novel I’m working on, and I’m pleased with how that’s shaping up. But it would be so nice to be able to work on a successor to Gawker or something. Something that would shake the media landscape up.

I think I’m just going to have to be content with pinning all my hopes and dreams on the novel.

New Scifi Franchise Idea: Reboot ‘Timebandits’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I’ve said before, all the major Hollywood movie franchises are either dead from being creatively strip-mined or so bloated as to be unwatchable. It seems to me there’s room for a new franchise because of this and the perfect movie for it would be the classic 80s comedy Timebandits.

The thing about Hollywood is, “Nobody knows nothing,” as the old saying goes. Everyone — even the best — are simply thrashing around, looking for the next big hit.

All I’m saying is, it’s within the realm of possibility that if you gave Timebandits the Star Wars treatment that there might be a pretty big audience. What Star Wars did for space travel, a Timebandits franchise could do for time travel. Or something.

This is an example of how Hollywood has lost its way. It’s so busy sucking it’s own cock via “woke” movies that it totally misses the point of what they’re supposed to be doing — making money telling great stories.

I think some of all of this is an indication of the economic dynamic of modern filmmaking. Either you make a huge tentpole superhero movie in the context of a franchise, or you make a small “woke” movie that nobody watches.

It’s possible that whatever dynamic is causing modern pop music to suck is also at play with Hollywood.

Zendaya & A Rebooting Of The ‘Alien’ Franchise


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As it stands, almost all the major Hollywood franchises are either bloated or dead in the water from being stripped mined. We’re reaching a moment when a reboot for any of the major scifi franchises could happen and enough people would be young enough that it wouldn’t be seen as the sacrilege that it actually was.

This brings us to the Alien franchise.

What I would do is, be ambitious. I would completely reboot the franchise from the beginning, giving all the principles a three picture deal. That would be one way to assure consistency of tone. The actress I feel would be perfect to play the new Ripley would be Zendaya. She’s tall like Sigourney Weaver and it would take the franchise into the modern world to have a POC like Zendaya playing the heroine.

I would grab a good horror director and be on my way. The new Alien and Aliens would be simply modern reinterpretations of the originals, while the third movie would be what we were promised at the very end of Aliens — it would be set on earth.

The point of all of this is it seems to me that Hollywood is so wrapped up in trying to stop 9/11 via superhero movies that they are growing more and more disconnected from their audiences and what they want. People don’t want “woke” movies and they’re growing tired of superhero movies.

It’s time Hollywood went back to basics and told good stories with mass appeal.

The Fatal Flaw Of The Star Wars Franchise


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve written about this before, but I thought I would mention it again because it’s on my mind for some reason. I can pinpoint for you the moment the Star Wars franchise was dealt a mortal blow — when Lando Calrissian is introduced as a man in Empire Strikes Back.

That’s the moment when the whole Star Wars universe met its doom.

The reason — it’s natural for characters to pair off as a franchise matures. As such, Leia and Han pair off…leaving Luke Skywalker with nothing (or no one) to do. Just think, if Lando was a woman, you open the first movie of the new trilogy with a brown Ray.

Ta-da, you have a whole new avenue for the Skywalker family to go down.

But, obviously, that can’t happen now.

I honestly don’t know what happens with Star Wars now. I guess they just keep selling toys and blowing up bigger and bigger Deathstars until the sun goes dark or something.

Burn Hollywood Burn: Is Oscar Dead?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I love the Oscars and I love movies. And, in all honesty, if I had had a mentor of some sort to knock some sense into me when I was, say, 15, I would have gone into creative writing as a young man and bounced to LA as soon as I got out of college with a Creative Writing / Theatre degree. (Or something like that.)

But, alas, that’s not what happened.

Anyway — given how niche the movies the Oscars are celebrating are, we have to begin thinking the unthinkable: that the Oscars are dead. They’re now irrelevant.

I only say this in the context of what they once where. For generations, an Oscar movie was both a creative and financial success. It’s only been in the last decade or so that Hollywood has begun to grow more interested in the artistic quality of the movie and not the “double dees, double dees” aspect as SNL would tell us.

I think Hollywood should embrace this as a form of freedom. They should not televise the awards anymore, but put them on Amazon Prime or Netflix and let them be four hours without interruption.

My Novel’s Villains Aren’t Bad Enough Yet


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now that I’m beginning to slip into a groove about how to wrap up this first draft before the sun goes black, I find myself thinking about how to make the final project better.

One issue is my villains remain more “moods” than evil personified. They just aren’t up to the evil found in Stieg Larsson’s original Millennium series. But I do think I’m going to do some reading to at least give my villains some sort of ideological underpinning for their dickhead behavior.

I’m getting there. I’m getting much closer.

I have a specific book I’m eyeing as I write this that I think will be the key to giving some sort of motive to my villains. And, I recently read Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized” which, in a sense, helps ME with the universe I’ve constructed. That book — despite not giving any answers to why we’re polarized –definitely was an eye opener for me as to try to make this novel an allegory about the fading Trump Era.

ScriptNotes, My Novel & The Curious Case Of The Female Villain


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Because my novel is meant to be something of an vaguely allegorical rant about the Trump Era, I need an Ivanka Trump. As such, I doing something that Stieg Larsson didn’t do in his original Millennium series — have a female villain.

I have this “female villain” for a number of reasons. One, because I want to slyly rant about Ivanka Trump being so fucking complicit and also because I want a more realistic depiction of human nature than the all-women-are-heroes that was found in the Millennium Series. And I need a female villain because that’s one way to show the “bad guys” side of things without reveling some pretty huge secrets that I want to hide from the audience until the Third Act.

So, that’s how I realized I needed a flawed female character.

This is even more interesting when you realize the screenwriting podcast ScriptNotes just recently talked about this very thing. In general, there is a huge dearth of female villains. This is probably because, well, one, male writers struggle to write accurate depictions of non-villain women and there’s a real danger of coming across as a misogynist if you don’t do it right.

But I’m an idiot, so I’m going to at least TRY to have a very flawed, very complicit female character in the novel I’m working on who is aware of some very dark things that her dad is doing, but does nothing to stop him. At least, that’s the vision at this point.

‘The Lady Bird Gambit’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The novel has an existential problem, in a sense. And that problem is it’s meant to be a vaguely allegorical critique of the Trump Era and the Trump Era is, thankfully, over.

And, yet, I press on for two reasons. One is what I call “The Lady Bird Gambit.” This is the idea that if you really develop character and plot — and just make something a great experience for the audience — that they’ll forgive you if you’re also leaning into “instant nostalgia.”

Love this movie.

So much has happened, in a sense, since 2020 started that I think if I make it clear that’s when the novel is set, then when I go off on subtextual rants about how insane those days were, then people will give me a pass if the story they’re reading is otherwise just a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, the other issue is MAGA-GQP-Trumplandia ain’t going nowhere. In fact, if my fuzzy understanding of novel post-production is accurate, then just about when this novel would be published (IF I SELL IT) would be just about when we have to start worrying about the fucking MAGA cucksuckers again.

As such, in a sense, I keep working on this novel because I know in the long-term I’m putting my stick where the puck will be, no where it is right now. But, also, I just love this story and I’ve gotten so far into the process that I simply can’t in good conscience give up.

You can’t edit a blank page, as they say.