Tag: Burn Hollywood Burn

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.

‘Cancel Culture’ & Breakfast At Tiffany’s


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

How exactly does the conservative bugbear of “cancel culture” work if the easy pickings of Mikey Rooney’s portrayal of Holly Golightly’s Asian neighbor in Breakfast At Tiffany’s hasn’t caught its attention yet?

The depiction is so fucking racist that it makes what is otherwise The Perfect Movie in to a solid B+ movie. It comes out of nowhere and doesn’t really do much to serve the plot. In fact, I would go so far as to say we should either cut out that part of the movie altogether or film the movie again shot for shot with a new cast and simply change the plot as necessary to avoid that character’s existance.

The only thing I can think of as to why the movie hasn’t been “canceled” in some way yet is it’s not on any of the major streamers and, as such, it hasn’t come up as an issue.

Notes On ‘Scriptnotes’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I really enjoy the “Scriptnotes” podcast, but I do have some…notes. My chief beef is the very strength of the podcast is its weakness — it’s two very accomplished, successful and knowledgeable guys talking about what it’s like to be be two very accomplished, successful and knowledgeable guys.

As such, sometimes they are rather….patronizing…to the serious concerns of people who are just starting off in the business. The show seems more for people who actually have a career in Hollywood than someone who aspires to have a career in Hollywood.

But you can’t be all things to all people.

I guess I’m suggesting that there’s a market for a Scriptnotes for extras who aspire to be screenwriters. Or something. A program that takes novice screenwriter’s concerns about IP theft seriously, that kind of stuff.

Yet, in general, I find Scriptnotes interesting. I sometimes feel like a street urchin with my nose pressed against the glass of the podcast as they talk about their careers, but lulz.

Why Hollywood Needs More Movies Like ‘Greenland’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Greenland was a good, but not great, movie. But there was one specific aspect to the movie that I have to give it credit for — it wallowed in the tacit conservatism of a regular dude put in extraordinary circumstances trying to keep his family safe.

It was CIS comfort food on a creative level and I think we need more of that kind of stuff if we, like, don’t want the United States to buckle and a second American civil war break out. I’m being serious — a lot of regular old center-Right people I know are really beginning to seethe with rage over “woke” “cancel culture” and the idea that a major Hollywood movie is simply tells a heteronormative story is a change of pace.

I’m all for representation in art — I’m going way out of my way to do just that in the novel I’m working on. But I also find it amusing that even in the genre I’m working with, there are some tropes that if I flip them or toy with them cause me to end up in, well, some pretty heteronormative territory without even thinking about it.

The point is — there’s plenty enough room in this world for all God’s chillins. I love the liberal democracy I live in right now and I’m growing nervous that if the center-Left doesn’t get its act together we’re even more fucked than we might be otherwise.

Remember, all the CPAC cocksuckers need is to get their golden orange god (or someone like him) elected ONE MORE TIME and that’s it. We live in an autocracy for the rest of my life.

We’re fucked. We’re all so totally fucked.

Half-Assed Review: ‘Greenland’ & The 10,000 Year Old Story


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I went into “Greenland” blind. As it opened, I thought maybe it would pass what I call the “10,000 year old story” test. This is the following test: could this story be told in some form 10,000 years ago?

It, at first, passes the test.

Man comes back from the hunt. Has problems with his wife. His kid is sick. The world is changing and the story is about how he protects his family in the context of that change.

Then things went crazy with “Greenland.”

The story was soooo contrived and leaned so heavily on zombie movie tropes (even without zombies) that I couldn’t bear to finish watching. Here’s what I would have done:

Greenland SHOULD have been about:

Act I
The lead up. At the end of the first act, the world ends and our Hero is now living underground inside Greenland.

Act 2
Hero and family have to get used to living in this new world.

Midpoint: His son, now an adult — rebels against the strict rules of under-Greenland meant to keep humanity alive (or something)

All is Lost:
His is exiled onto the Aboveland

Third Act
Hero and wife go searching for son.

They go through some adventures but finally discover him.

Turns out, the surface, while a struggle to survive on, is beginning to recover.

Our hero becomes the leader of Aboveland.

Or something.

But the Greenland I saw was a good movie…but not my kind of movie. Way, way, WAY too contrived.