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I’ve often professed my love for movies-about-movies, but what about movies-about-movies-about movies?

Faux Filming

Rain of Madness is a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of a fictional film-within-the-film. It’s delightfully unhinged, but also totally in-character. It’s

Rain of Madness is to Tropic Thunder what Hearts of Darkness was to Apocalypse Now, and it’s a pretty good take down of pretentious filmmakers.

Before Blair Witch

Early in development, The Blair Witch Project was intended to be a more straightforward faux-documentary, with a narrator and archival photos, and Ken Burns-y things like that. At some point in post, the filmmakers pivoted to the complete found-footage aesthetic, which meant they had a whole lot of unused footage. They found a pretty good use for it, promoting the fake feature documentary with an even faker TV documentary—

Similar to Rain of Madness, the filmmakers repurposed the footage as a behind-the-scenes documentary of the fictional movie. The Curse of the Blair Witch originally aired on the Sci-Fi channel, and was later included as a DVD bonus feature (which is where I saw it). In some ways, I actually find it creepier than the final film.

Interquels

As a general rule, I dislike immediate sequels. One especially egregious example is The Incredibles, which didn’t end on a real cliffhanger, but rather a “And the Adventure Continues” high note. The sequel absolutely did not have to begin with the Underminer’s attack. The fact that both movies take place over the course of a week makes the world seem small.

I much prefer that stuff happens between movies, off screen. The relationships in Empire Strikes Back feel much more meaningful because Han, Luke, and Leia were off on adventures we never got to see. Conversely, Han isn’t the only one who seems frozen in carbonite at the start of Jedi.

Plus, if time passes in the story world as well as the real one, it gives the filmmakers an opportunity to create bonus content!

Drawing the Matrix

The Animatrix was one of the coolest side projects for any film franchise ever. The Matrix introduced audiences to the virtual world, but the viewpoint was necessarily restricted to the protagonist, Neo. The Animatrix, on the other hand, as an anthology of animated short films, explored the premise from multiple perspectives, ranging from regular people to the robots themselves.

The original Matrix was heavily influenced by anime, so the mostly-Japanese animators fit neatly into the style. Although they all used some computer graphics, Final Flight of the Osiris was the only overtly 3D animated film, which was quite innovative (and expensive) at the time. Although not “required viewing,” the plot leads directly into The Matrix Reloaded.

Why So Serious?

The 2000s were a golden age for alternate reality games promoting movies, from A.I. to Cloverfield to The Dark Knight. The last ARG was so elaborate, including games, puzzles, fake websites, and even real-life campaign rallies for the fictional district attorney Harvey Dent.

It was extremely elaborate; you can explore the ARG wiki page for hours. The company behind the campaign, 42 Entertainment, even filmed news segments for the fictitious Gotham News Network.

Although nearly a million people participated in the ARG, over 74 million people saw the movie in theaters, so it obviously wasn’t necessary to understand the movie’s story.

Faux Futures

The original Blade Runner was set in November of 2019, which you may notice is no longer in the future.

To promote the sequel, Blade Runner 2049, Warner brothers commissioned three short films to cover the time between movies, set in 2022, 2036, and 2048.

Although the first one is animated, the last one, directed by the original director Ridley Scott’s son Luke,1 is most similar to Final Flight of the Osiris, in that it directly sets up the first scene of the sequel.

Once again, the short isn’t exactly necessary to understand the film, but it enhances the experience. It’s the exact opposite of our last example…

Missing Pieces

Alien: Covenant is kind of a mess, largely due to studio meddling, as you’d probably assume. Director Ridley Scott wanted a true sequel to Prometheus, while 20th Century Fox wanted an alien movie with, you know, aliens in it. (I still don’t know who formed a covenant, though.)

This scene that bridged the two movies was cut, and released as a “prologue.” Admittedly, it not totally necessary, but it does explain what happened to the protagonist of the first movie.

But the next “prologue” really should have been in the movie—

[Spoiler alert for a decade-old film you would’ve seen by now if you cared.]

In Covenant, James Franco plays a corpse, having died in his sleep pod in the accident that kicks off the film. His death would’ve been quite a surprise if the above prologue had remained in the movie, Franco being the star that he is (or at least, was).

As it stands, watching the film you’re just like, “Wait, is that dead guy James Franco? Is he going to come back in a flashback or something?” Nope, he’s just there to confuse you.

Special Features

Writing this up, it occurs to me that, twenty-five or even fifteen years ago, this extra scenes really added something to the story world, making it feel bigger and lived in. It felt like we were being served a delicious appetizer before the main course. But more recently, with crap like Jurassic World: Dominion and Alien: Covenant showing deleted scenes that should have been in the movie, it’s like we’re eating leftovers from tomorrow’s dinner.

It might be a cost-saving measure, but I think the studios are tripping over dollars to pick up pennies. Yes, WB had to spend a lot on Why So Serious, but it greatly added to the hype. If you weren’t there, you wouldn’t believe how excited people were to just watch the first six minutes of Dark Knight before I Am Legend.

Marketing isn’t easy, but it can be just as creative and inventive as the film itself. It takes investments of time, money, and most importantly, effort. I’d really love to see studios trying more creative advertising again.

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So consider this a B-side compilation album for paying subscribers. You can watch the whole thing, too, if you become a subscriber.

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Track List

The above montage includes trailers for—

1. Back to the Future

2. Bee Movie

3. The Simpsons Movie

4. Tron: Legacy

5. Toys

6. War of the Worlds

7. Life Force

8. Alien1

9. Fight Club

10. Star Trek

11. Terminator 2: Judgement Day

12. Rocky IV

    

13. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

14. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
    (Which my daughter calls “Hotel Alone”)

15. Scooby Doo

16. The Lost World: Jurassic Park

17. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

18. Super 8

19. Trainspotting

20. The Golden Child

21. Robin Hood: Men in Tights

22. X-Men: Days of Future Past

23. The Martian

24. Psycho

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“Nine times out of ten, I can cut together a trailer in my sleep. Every once in a while, though, there’s an opportunity for real creativity. Two things give me great pleasure in this business. One is finding that strange, off beat, quirky film that you just know people will love if they only give it a chance. Helping people find that movie is the greatest feeling.”

Being the TA, I knew a setup when I heard one. “What’s the other joy?”

“Getting a real turd of a movie and tricking the audience into buying tickets anyway. Opening weekend, that’s my responsibility. Whether or not the movie has legs is out of my hands.”

Today’s post is about those 1 out of 10 trailers that go out of their way to be different.

You can also help support TMFS by liking, sharing, and clicking on any of the Amazon Affiliate links sprinkled throughout. Also also, this post is really long and includes dozens of videos, so your email service may not display everything correctly. I’d recommend clicking directly over to Substack or the app.

Seeing Blind

Generally, I’m not an anti-spoiler zealot. It’s rare that knowing the plot actually “spoils” a movie for me, but I do understand why it bothers some people more.2

There are exceptions, though. Movies whose very premise shouldn’t be spoiled, like Coherence, Dark City,3 or Better Watch Out. Last year, I saw The End of Oak Street,4 at a sneak preview.5 The recruiters didn’t tell us the plot, just the actors and director,6 and half the fun was figuring out what was even going on. So imagine my disappointment when the trailer just straight up tells you what’s happening.

And look, I get it, the marketing department needs to get butts in seats however they can. James Cameron himself decided to spoil the first-act twist in Terminator 2—

I led the charge on marketing, including showing Arnold as the good guy. It wasn’t a Sixth Sense kind of twist that’s revealed only at the end of the film. He’s revealed as the protector at the end of Act One. And I always feel you lead with your strongest story element in selling a movie. I believed our potential audience would be more attracted to seeing how the most badass killing machine could become a hero than they would be to just another kill-fest in the same vein as the first film. Sequels have to strike a delicate balance between honoring the most loved elements from the first film, but also promising to really shake things up and turn them upside down. Our marketing campaign for T2 was exactly that promise, and it worked.

Far me it from me to disagree with Cameron, but sometimes, a trailer can be more intriguing when it shows less. Which is to say, avoid watching the trailer for Oak Street if you can.7 Just go and see it blind this weekend.

In this case, I would’ve much preferred a trailer like this one for The Minus Man, possibly my favorite trailer of all time—

The first time I saw this trailer, I was like, “What is even happening? Holy cow, this isn’t the movie, they’re talking about the movie!” It’s a great little short film in itself, so I’m disappointed I couldn’t find a better quality version of it. Probably because the movie itself isn’t very good, so nobody cares to preserve the trailer.

But still, it demonstrates you can make a trailer that doesn’t spoil the premise…

A Trailer Taxonomy

While researching this piece, I watched scores of trailers that used little or even none of the footage from the actual movie. I was surprised to discover that not all footage-free trailers are alike.

They seem to fall into eight overlapping categories, each with deepening layers of metatextuality,8 from trailers about the making of the film to marketing material that puts the audience inside the story world.

1. Talkin’ Trailers

The highest level of meta is the trailer that talks about the movie as a movie.

Walt Disney faced a conundrum in promoting Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Because the process of hand-drawn animation is so time and labor intensive, he didn’t have any footage to cut a trailer from. He was left with no choice but to simply talk about the movie.9

Rob Reiner likewise didn’t have any footage to show from This is Spinal Tap, but he turned that liability into a comedic asset.

Before behind-the-scenes features on DVDs, before DVDs even, this was a somewhat common style of trailer. Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock did these sorts of trailers a lot.

2. Concept & Test Footage

What do you do if you don’t have any footage yet, and your key creative isn’t as charismatic as Walt Disney? Lucasfilm’s marketing department was forced to utilize incomplete, or work-in-progress concepts and footage in this preview for Empire Strikes Back.

A WIP trailer doesn’t have to involve special effects, though. This Birds of Prey teaser appears to just be a costume test set to music.

It’s more about the visuals and the vibe, which I’ll get into in a moment. But first, there’s another type of teaser you can make before you’ve shot a foot of film. (Or a byte of hard drive, nowadays.)

3. Title Reveal

Name recognition is an important part of any marketing campaign. Not just the names of the director and stars; you need people to remember the name of the movie, too. And what better way to burn the title into the audience’s mind than showing nothing but the title?

The Goonies sold itself on the Spielberg vibe, even though it was directed by Richard Donner. Take that, auteur theory.10 (Side note, if you haven’t yet, take my Spielberg poll.)

Sometimes, the title is really all you need, when the audience loved the first film, as was the case with Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde. It’s literally 30 seconds, but the sequel earned more money opening weekend than the original.

There’s nothing much here but the promise of a sequel in the same tone as the original, but tone can mean a lot, as demonstrated by the next section…

4. It’s a Vibe

There’s a kind of teaser trailer that doesn’t show you so much what the story is, but what the story feels like. Sometimes, they do use stuff that was shot, but may or may not wind up in the actual movie, like a sizzle reel. Cool shots, no plot. A non-narrative montage, if you will.

The first Social Network trailer really is all about vibe. Technically, there is footage from the film in the second half, but nobody remembers that part.11 It’s the “Creep” cover that stuck in our collective memory.

Comedian has one of the all-time great meta trailers. You know those comedy trailers that spoil all the jokes? This is the exact opposite.

It’s a bit of a misdirect, because it tells you everything the movie isn’t. Including, you know, being funny. (Like Minus Man, Comedian is hard to find because nobody liked it.)

Speaking of misdirection…

5. The Fake Out

There have been funny and serious versions of all of the above trailer formats, but this one I think only works for comedies. If you can think of an exception, let me know in the comments.

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Suffice it to say, these teasers are deceptively simple—first, imply by tone and style that you’re giving a preview for a highly-anticipated upcoming film, then reveal it’s a totally different movie.

The thing is, in order to get the setup right, the filmmakers have to create elaborate and specific sets. Half-assing it won’t do, or the audience won’t buy the premise.

Timing, as the say, is the secret to comedy. It’s notable that the reveal comes later in each one of these trailers, which is why I waited until now to identify Wayne’s World and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

In contrast to the concept trailers, which use pre-production material, the fake-out trailer usually requires additional photography, not part of the original shoot. And that’s no joke…

6. Additional Photography

A truly ambitious marketing campaign will film a scene that’s good enough to be in the movie, but isn’t. It’s a short film unto itself, to show the audience what they’re in for, without giving anything away.

“Ambitious” is an understatement for the 1998 Godzilla, which takes direct aim at Jurassic Park by literally stomping on a T-Rex skeleton.

Unfortunately, it was a terrible movie that didn’t remotely live up to its hype.

Spider-Man, on the other hand, exceeded all expectations, even those set by the infamous World Trade Center trailer—

A quick personal anecdote: I got to visit the Spider-Man set in the spring of 2002, because one of my professors was the production manager on the re-shoots.12 On stage, I met producer Laura Ziskin (among others), and somehow had the nerve to ask her about that trailer, which had been pulled from circulation after the 9/11 attacks.

She told me, “No one will ever see that trailer again. Ever.”

Neither of us knew that a few short years later, YouTube would come online and the Spider-Man trailer became easily viewable by anyone.13

7. Use the Whole Buffalo

Filming a stand-alone short to promote your feature is one thing, but maybe you don’t want to go through the effort and expense of shooting it. And maybe your feature is too long? Just cut the opening scene and release it online and call it a “prologue.” That’s what Colin Trevorrow did with Jurassic World: Dominion, and honestly, it’s way better than anything else in that dumb movie.

Ridley Scott did likewise with Alien: Covenant, an only slightly better movie, but the excised scene made the final film more confusing.

8. Enter the World

Now we come to the deepest level of meta storytelling. The following aren’t about the movie, and they’re not part of the movie. They’re designed to make you think you’re in the movie’s world.

Consider the following ad, which isn’t for Mocking Jay - Part 1, but rather set inside the universe of the Hunger Games. It assumes that you, the viewer, also live in Panem.

The interruption at the end by Beetee Latier (Jeffrey Wright) further enhances the effect. You’re watching in-universe propaganda highjacked by an in-universe character, who directly addresses you. At no point does the teaser “break kayfabe” (a wrestling term for the portrayal of staged elements as legitimate or real).

Ads aren’t the only form of media appropriated for in-universe marketing. For Prometheus, Guy Pierce gave a TED talk as Peter Weyland, in the far distant future year of… 2023.

So Many Options

Of course, the broad categories I outlined can overlap quite a bit. A vibe trailer can be made from repurposed footage, a title reveal can be test footage, things like that. The point is, filmmakers have options. Not every trailer needs to be exactly the same and totally predictable.

I genuinely hope marketers and filmmakers read this and become inspired to put as much creativity into their trailers as they do the films themselves.

Prevues of Coming Attractions

I started writing this a week ago, hoping to find a couple fun clips to share. I didn’t expect to find such a wide variety of techniques and styles and approaches to marketing across the decades. There were so many, I had to cut a bunch to make this post a reasonable length.

Rather than let them go to waste, I created a montage of the ones I couldn’t fit into today’s post.

That parallel neatly illustrates my topic today: film cycles. Specifically, the fact that we seem to be entering a fourth cycle of superhero cinema this century.

A Quick Recap

Here’s Richard Nowell’s formal definition of a film cycle:

Relatively large quantities of similar films are made and released over a limited period of time before production declines markedly or ceases altogether, sometimes temporarily, other times permanently.

A cycle can be an industry-wide trends, due to world events (2000s films directly or allegorically addressing terrorism post-9/11) or technological advances (the 3D craze of the early 2010s). A cycle can also occur within a single studio, such as Disney’s live-action remakes.2 Genres can cycle in and out of favor, like westerns and romcoms. There can also be cycles within genres; think of the shift from found footage to elevated horror.3

I bring this up because a lot of people think we’ve been living through a singular Age of Superheroes for the last two and a half decades, but I contend that we’ve actually seen four cycles. A few years ago,4 I predicted that the fourth cycle would consist of hybrid superhero/horror films, but that prophecy hasn’t come to fruition. Last year,5 I adjusted my forecast, and I think Spider-Man: Brand New Day has definitely confirmed it. This is my breakdown, then, of the four superhero cycles:

1. Serious Superheroes (2000-2013)

2. Cinematic Universes (2008-2019)

3. Retrospective Heroes, AKA Multiverses (2017-2026)

4. Neo-Classical Superheroes (2022-???)

As you can see, there’s big overlap between them. That’s because these sorts of movie take a long time to develop and produce; it’s like trying to steer an ocean liner. Even while one studio is innovating, another is still chugging along in the previous cycle for years.

At the end of this post, I have a handy-dandy chart breaking down how every major comic book superhero film fits into these subgenres. But first, a detailed analysis of each cycle, one-by-one.

Serious Superheroes - The First Cycle

In 1997, Warner Brothers released Batman and Robin and it was... just the worst. No one liked that movie, not even the cast and director. The original Batman had broken records in 1989, but within a decade, audiences grew sick of the increasing levels of campiness. Almost no other comic book superhero movie connected in the 90s, unless you count Blade. Which I don’t.

Three years later, Fox released X-Men to both critical and commercial success. Turns out, audience did like superheroes, just without the cheese.

X-Men was the “pioneer production” that created the template for the next few years—indie filmmakers given enormous budgets and a lot of leeway to explore “real world” concepts, either literally (Peter Parker can’t afford rent) or metaphorically (Mr. Incredible’s superheroics as a stand-in for marital infidelity).

Many, though not all, of these films were origin stories. X-Men wasn’t, but the “reinforcing hit” Spider-Man laid out that story structure—

• A character leading a more-or-less ordinary life gains amazing powers.

• A montage of the hero learning how to use said powers.

• As he/she/they address minor crimes, a larger threat grows in the background.

• The first time the hero confronts the villain (who has the same powers but a costume with the opposite color scheme), he loses.

• After a pep talk from a mentor figure, the hero overcomes the villain through superior mastery of said power.

• Also, there’s often a sky beam.

The sequels of this era tended to be better than the original, once the studio gave the filmmakers more creative control. Then, the studio decides to meddle with what’s been working, and the third film is a mess.

The Serious Superhero cycle reached its apotheosis in 2008, with the release of The Dark Knight and Iron Man. Dark Knight is probably self-explanatory, being the highest grossing movie of the year by a wide margin, but perhaps Iron Man requires more clarification.

Jon Favreau was a writer/director/actor with only one real hit under his belt, the Will Ferrell Christmas comedy Elf. The origin story follows the above plot template beat for beat. Tony Stark, like his comic counterpart, wrestles with the implications of America’s military industrial complex and foreign conflicts (at least as far as popular entertainment can).

All of which situates Iron Man firmly in the Serious Superhero mold. Only the post-credit scene, which was shot at the last minute on a whim, was even a hint that Marvel was about to launch a new cycle.

Cinematic Universes - The Second Cycle

A single film does not a cinematic universe make. You need a second to join the universe, which is why The Incredible Hulk officially kicks off this cycle.

Interconnectedness is obviously the hallmark of the Cinematic Universe cycle, but other patterns emerged over the course of the decade it dominated movie theaters, some by necessity and others contingent on the particular participants involved.

Like the earlier cycle, the first films (i.e. Marvel’s “Phase One”) were directed by filmmakers with a wide range of style. Thor did not look like Captain America. But as characters met each other on screen, the studios decided they required a central, unifying vision. This was why Marvel initially hired Joss Whedon, not just to direct The Avengers, but to be a kind of “showrunner” for Phase Two. Due to internal power struggles which I won’t go into here, Whedon was displaced by studio head Kevin Feige.

Warner Brothers followed suit. When they pivoted their Superman series from Serious Superhero (Man of Steel) to a Cinematic Universe (Batman V Superman), they handed creative oversight to director Zack Snyder.

As a result, auteurism was generally subordinated to studio mandate.6 Workman directors replaced auteurs. Consequently, this led to a more consistent or flattened style, depending on your taste. Sometimes the conflict was visible, as with the incongruous third act of Wonder Woman, but occasionally a directorial vision snuck through the process, as with James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy series.

The origin story format had become stale, so it was either played with (Captain Marvel) or eschewed entirely (Spider-Man: Homecoming).

A Cinematic Universe consisted of multiple sub-franchises, each telling a story in parallel, rather than separate series as the serious superheroes did. Rarely did one film lead directly to the next theatrical release. Characters would have their own concerns in their primary series, join together in team-up movies, then go their separate ways (with occasional visits from guest stars).

Other than the cross-overs, few films were “required viewing.” When a character joined another sub-franchise, they were given at least an establishing character moment, if not some expositional backstory so everyone in the audience could follow along. And just to keep things from getting boring, fighting-leads-to-friendship was a common way to introduce characters to the audience and to each other.

Title characters rarely went more than a year without appearing in either a cameo, and ensemble, or their own eponymous series. This will become significant later.

Appropriately, the Cinematic Universe Cycle ended with a bang, not a whimper. The wildly successful Avengers: Infinity War exemplified all of the above—TV directors, the Guardians fighting the Avengers before teaming up, core concepts like the nature of the Infinity Stones explained carefully for any viewers who had missed the exposition in Doctor Strange.

Retrospective movies - The Third Cycle

After more than a decade of cinematic universes (and failed attempts), a creative refresh was needed in the genre. Just as importantly, many of the lead actors’ contracts were coming up. Marvel studios (and later DC, in a half-assed way), addressed both by introducing alternate universes as plot devices.

That was only part of the cyclical shift, however. The other half was generational stories, often where a character’s mantle was based on—Black Widow, Hawkeye (in his show), Captain America. Other times, it was about the mentor/mentee relationship, as with Spider-Man and Iron Man, Captain and Ms. Marvel, She and He Hulk.

The multiverse implies an exploration of parallel universes, but these films were just as much, if not more often looking backwards. Although it precedes the actual influx of multiverse movies by half a decade, Days of Future Past could be regarded as the prototype, passing the torch from the older generation of X-Men to the prequel cast. That meta-textual level, conflating the characters and actors, got more heavy handed as the Retrospective Cycle continued. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man teamed up with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield's versions in No Way Home. The Flash brought back two separate Batsmen, among others.

Ironically, while the multiverse was being explored, the bonds of the intertextuality loosened. Marvel greatly increased their output, across film and television, while at the same time, characters re-occurred less frequently. Most infamously, Shang-Chi went five years between appearances.7

Thus, audiences were less attached to the new characters, while pining for the old ones. The most successful films in this era were the ones that brought back old, beloved actors, like Hugh Jackman in Deadpool & Wolverine.

Partially due to COVID interrupting both distribution and production, and partially due to the quality of the films themselves, the third superhero cycle has been far more hit-or-miss financially. So now, I need to take a brief detour into the factor ultimately determines which trends become a cycle, and which remain a simple cluster. The answer is simple…

Audience Appeal

The superhero genre has frequently attracted horror directors, from Sam Raimi to James Wan. Even Zack Snyder got his start remaking Dawn of the Dead. So it’s no surprise that many superhero films featured horror elements, like Doc Ock’s awakening in Spider-Man 2.

But towards the end of the Cinematic Universe cycle, a cluster of overtly horror-inspired superhero movies popped up—Brightburn (creepy kid movies), The New Mutants (teen slashers), and The Batman (heavily borrowing from Seven). Only the last one was successful, but probably for unrelated reasons, which I’ll get into later.

Sony tried to force two different cinematic universes into existence at this time, first centered on The Amazing Spider-Man, and later built around his villains. (Also, weirdly, Universal tried to model their “Dark Universe” after the MCU.) A lot of reasons could be given for their failures, but the primary one, I think, is that the movies just weren’t very good. Audiences voted with their wallets.

Filmmakers push the boundaries of a genre, try new things, experiment. But superhero movies in particular are so expensive, the studio just will not fund them if they don’t make a profit. The Serious Superhero films earned money hand over fist, because they appealed to the audiences’ tastes at the time. Audiences returned to the Cinematic Universe films (especially Marvel's) over and over, because they liked the characters.

But the proliferation of retrospective stories was so great, they spilled over into streaming television. Audiences didn’t want to do that much homework while, at the same time, those few who did follow every movie and show didn’t feel rewarded with intertextual payoffs.

The Entertainment Strategy Guy

Is Super Hero Fatigue Real?

(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occ…

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2 years ago · Entertainment Strategy Guy

Like Disney running out of cartoon classics to remake, Marvel only has so many “retired” actors they can pull back in. What is a struggling megacorporation to do?

For the first time in decades, their Distinguished Competition took the lead...

Neo-Classicism - The Fourth Cycle

The Batman was DC’s first genuine hit in three years.8 It was also not part of DC’s shared universe or multiverse. It was a return to basics, like the earliest of the Serious Superhero films. What sets it apart from that earlier era, and what we see popping up again and again in this Neo-Classical Cycle is that, while it features a “young” Batman, it’s not an origin story. Audiences know who Batman is, they don’t need an introduction. Essentially, the filmmakers had leeway to start on second base, narratively speaking.

Personal issues with the director interfered with an immediate sequel to cash in on the film’s success, and the Retrospective Cycle was (and is) still ongoing, which adds up to a longer-than-usual delay between the speculator production and the later imitators in this cycle. Again, superhero films are big, expensive ships, and it takes some time to turn them around.

After a turnover at the top of DC, though, Superman was rebooted, once again without an origin movie. Marvel utilized its multiverse premise to re-introduce the Fantastic Four in the Neo-Classical style, also without the origin plot.

These films aren’t subversive in any way. In fact, they seem designed to embody the platonic ideal of their characters, which is something we’re seeing in Marvel’s TV output.

Another intriguing aspect of this new era is the emphasis on the superhero’s personal lives. Again, this was common in the Serious Superhero Cycle, but the genre drifted away from that in recent years. Since the Avengers first teamed up, characters generally seemed to be all-superhero all the time.

Which brings me full circle back around to Brand New Day. It obviously fits in the overall continuity of the MCU, but at a smaller scale. More relevantly (and I’m not giving away anything that’s not in the trailer), the protagonist’s core problem is that he’s spending too much time as Spider-Man and not enough as Peter Parker. It’s not a literal reboot like the DC movies or FF, but it is emotionally a back-to-basics approach to Spidey. This mirrors The Batman in a lot of ways, which also seemed to be about the dangers of being wholly subsumed into the Batman persona.

Another aspect that unifies this burgeoning cycle is the visuals. The production design and cinematography are all distinct from previous entries in their respective series, and distinct from each other, but all emphasize color. Yes, even The Batman, which not only has a lot of true-black, but also very deep reds and oranges that you wouldn’t see in either Nolan’s or Snyder’s versions.

Because we are currently in a time of transition, you’d expect to see some hybrid films. Supergirl is visually distinct, but it does include some backstory without being, strictly speaking, an origin film. It’s also a more cynical film, which might account for its box office failure.

Days of Fiction Past

Why Supergirl Failed

Supergirl is on track to make numbers similar to Morbius, which means its online discussion has shifted from “Will it make money?” to “Let’s talk about the autopsy.” Like most online discussions, it is neither productive nor pleasant. Mostly, it consists of angry excuses and angry gloating…

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2 months ago · 219 likes · 98 comments · Days of Fiction Past

On the Marvel side, the Thunderbolts only includes one “old” character in its cast to pass on the Avengers mantle. But it also rejects the cynicism of the “evil superman” trope that has become prevalent in the last few years. The movie suffers due to drawing from too many previous projects that were produced too long ago, but at the same time, gives every character a solid introduction so the audience doesn’t get lost. You know, just like the original Avengers film.

Taken together, all of this seems to confirm my prediction that bright, colorful, positive superheroics are going to be the way forward.

Seeing into the Future

At the time of writing this, the next big superhero film is Avengers: Doomsday. Judging by the trailers, it appears to fall squarely in the Retrospective Cycle. But I suspect it might be the end, too. Just like with Infinity War ending one cycle and Endgame beginning another, I predict Secret Wars will turn out to be a Neo-Classical superhero story. The generally positive audience reception, particularly Brand New Day’s already massive success, demands it.

The Big Chart

As promised, here’s all four cycles of 21st Century Superhero movies.

I didn’t actually thoroughly examine his oeuvre or anything; it was just a sense that I had. Still, this rather tongue-in-cheek comment garnered a lot of reactions, ranging from polite disagreement…

…to extreme dismissal of all things Spielbergian…

…to this lunatic who imagined things I didn’t say and then got mad about them.1

Anyway, since it evoked such strong emotions, I thought maybe I ought to consider the question a little more rigorously. As I went through Spielberg’s filmography movie-by-movie, I realized I shouldn’t decide the question on my own.

This survey includes every single (theatrically released feature) film Spielberg has directed. Take a minute to fill it out, and let’s settle this!

Rate the Spielberg Movies

Edited to add: apparently, surveys can only be done via the website, not the app. You do have to be a subscriber, but free is fine.

There’s no nuance to the survey, and that’s intentional. The question isn’t a 1-10 scale, or even a 5 star rating. My initial claim was “more bad than good,” so it’s an entirely binary choice. I allowed “haven’t seen,” just because it’s not fair to rate a movie you’ve never seen.

Leave a comment

I’ll share the results, and my own opinions, in a future post.

Caveats

I desperately wanted to include the Columbo episode “Murder by the Book,” because it’s great, but I couldn’t justify its inclusion while excluding the other couple of TV-movie/failed pilots he shot. I did include Duel, since it was released theatrically in some markets.

I left Twilight Zone off because he only directed one segment. I debated Poltergeist, but ultimately decided since he’s not officially credited, I shouldn’t count it.

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The short answer is, of course, money. The long answer is... also money, but money is downstream of audience interest, which merits further exploration. So come join me on this magical journey into the wonderland of intellectual property.

[This is a long one, so your email client may truncate it; click through to Substack to read the whole thing. And be sure to stick around to the end for a post-credit scene.]

Once Upon a Time...

Remakes aren’t a new phenomenon. The British comedy short The Countryman and the Cinematograph was remade by American Edwin S. Porter as Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show in 1902.1

Remakes aren’t inherently bad, either. Some of the best movies of all time are remakes, even if you didn’t know they were—Ben Hur, Ocean’s 11, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Thing, The Fly, The Blob.2 Heck, A Star is Born gets remade every generation or so, and then nominated for a bunch of Academy Awards every time.

Of course, film isn’t the only medium where artists remake others’ work. Theater companies have put on revivals since time immemorial. Admittedly, this is slightly different than cinema, since the only thing retained of a play is the script, while the performance itself is ephemeral. You can re-watch a movie over and over, while a play is different every night.

But music is recorded, and bands play covers all the time. You can enjoy the original, or the cover, or even both, when the later artist adds their own style and personality. And this, too, is older than you might think; as Ben Laude explains in a fascinating video…

Mozart employ[ed] techniques less associated with today’s classical music practice than they are with popular music… Specifically jazz improvisation and freestyle rap. At the core of jazz training is learning to play old standards in a new way. Putting your own personal stamp on someone else’s tune by freely embellishing it.

We can often appreciate film remakes in a similar way, with the filmmakers applying their own style to old material. In the end, it’s the quality that matters, not whether or not it’s original. We shouldn't dismiss remakes simply because the are remakes; we have to take them on a case-by-case basis. And to the core of today’s topic, Walt Disney himself remade films quite a lot.

IP Freely

Disney built his career, and later company, on adapting pre-existing intellectual property. Some of his earliest cartoons where the Alice Comedies—very loose adaptations on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

For historical context, Disney directed the first of these in 1923; the book was published in 1865. It’s about the same span of time as from the first Dune novel to Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation. Because copyright lasted much less time then, Alice was already in the public domain.

Not having to pay the original author is certainly a plus, but that’s not the only reason Disney mined the classics for movie ideas. He knew that stories which had stood the test of time would support a good movie (even if he made significant alterations).

His insight was proven true, when he established a regular pattern of re-releasing Disney cartoons every 7-10 years. Prior to the advent of home video, he could bring his films to a new audience who were too young to see it the first time around. Every third or fourth cycle, there would be a marked surge in revenue for re-releases, as parents brought their children to see movies they watched when they were kids.3

Video Killed the Re-Release Schedule

Decades after Walt’s death, this cycle was interrupted by the mass-adoption of VCRs. Suddenly, people could rent their childhood favorites anytime they wanted. The Disney corporation instituted the “Disney Vault,” where they sold their library titles for only a short period of time, but people could still buy and sell tapes on the secondary market, or even copy them, thanks to Sony v. Universal.

VHS and later DVD sales kept many studios, particularly Disney, afloat for decades, even as theatrical attendance dropped. Audiences could watch what they wanted, when they wanted, in the comfort of their own homes, while distributors saved money duplicating cheap discs instead of printing expensive film reels. It worked out well for everyone.

Until streaming came along.

The DVD market collapsed in the late 2000’s, thanks to the rise of streaming. Digital distribution cost even less than DVDs, but it also brought in far less revenue. Virtual copies didn’t degrade the way VHS or even discs do. Pirating was much easier.

The biggest problem for Disney was that there was no way to hold an old movie in the “vault,” building up demand until the next re-release. The general audience wasn’t inclined to make the trip to a theater to watch a movie they could stream at home. The studio owned intellectual property in a buyer’s market, so they decided to do what any smart real estate tycoon would do—redevelop it.

New… But Not Too New

Audiences want fresh experiences and filmmakers pursue artistic innovation for its own sake, but there’s also a limit to how far the former will allow the latter to push creative boundaries. We call out cliches and tropes, but also don’t enjoy having our expectations subverted too much. This sort of ambivalence can frustrate Hollywood executives who desire some sort of consistency and predictability.

But a well-educated filmmaker understands that they are working within a broader tradition. David Bordwell explains—

Modern filmmakers inherit a vast tradition of narrative schemas. Those can be reiterated or revised in unpredictable ways. The tradition is kept alive and engaging, as long as novelty is balanced with familiarity, innovation with redundancy. The way Hollywood tells it is always indebted to the ways Hollywood told it.

He calls this “variorum”—

The urge for novelty puts pressure on artists to try to fill every niche in the ecosystem, sometimes forcing competitors to strain for far-fetched possibilities.

Given all of the preceding, it shouldn’t then be surprising that the first of the modern, live-action remakes was Tim Burton’s wacky vision of Alice in Wonderland.4

I should note that I’m discounting the 90s remakes of The Jungle Book and 101 Dalmatians because the huge gaps in time indicate that those are of a different cycle altogether. And speaking of cinematic cycles, the live-action Alice was released the same year as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, based on the famous Mickey Mouse short from Fantasia. Remember that one?

Alice was what Richard Nowell terms a “trailblazer hit” in his book Blood Money, while Sorcerer’s was a “failed speculator production.” For more on how genre cycles work, check out this video about the superhero and slasher cycles—

It was another four years before Disney released its next live-action remake, Maleficent, which told the Sleeping Beauty story from the villain’s point of view.

After that reinforcing hit, they were off to the races. Cinderella hit in 2015, followed in 2016 by The Jungle Book (an even more massive hit) and an Alice sequel5 (one of the biggest box office bombs in Hollywood history.)

Beauty and the Beast came out the next year, and Christopher Robin the year after that. Then, in 2019, Disney brought us five remakes: Dumbo, Aladdin, The Lion King, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and Lady and the Tramp. Dumbo tanked, but the next two remakes earned over a billion dollars each. Then Maleficent 2 struggled to break even, and Lady was apparently so bad, the studio didn’t even release it in theaters. They dumped it on Disney+, instead.

As we approach the pandemic turning point, a pattern emerges in these box office returns, even if it’s not self-evident. To see it, we first have to examine the different kinds of remakes.

Film It Again, Sam

There are at least three ways of approaching a remake.

Some adopt not only the story and characters, but the aesthetics, tone, and style of the original, with tweaks for contemporary audiences (possibly with new and improved effects). This happened with Ben Hur twice, for good and for ill.

For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll identify these as “translational remakes.” (Note I’m making neutral categorizations, not artistic judgements.)

Another kind of remake tries to re-imagine, re-contextualize, or re-interpret the original, often changing the entire meaning of the story. Scarface is like that.

These I’ll label “transformative remakes.”

Finally, there’s the edge case of multiple adaptations, where the filmmakers go back to the source material and starts over, largely ignoring the original film, such as the Coen brothers’ True Grit. Call it a “re-adaptation” rather than a proper remake.

Pattern Recognition

Okay, let’s put some hard numbers6 to these live-action remakes.

The first thing to note is that overall, this series has been profitable for Disney. Measured on box office alone, they’ve made their money back, even including pandemic releases and dumping some losers on the streaming service.7 Half of the films did lose money but honestly, batting .500 for a decade and a half is pretty good for a Hollywood franchise.8

This cycle of live-action remakes began with three transformative remakes, two of which made a boatload of money. Thanks to Bordwell’s variorum, Kenneth Branagh and Jon Favreau attempted more straightforward, translational remakes, and audiences embraced those.

Then, something interesting happened—moviegoers rejected all subsequent transformative remakes, while showering the translations with money. It seems to me the audience enjoyed the novelty of seeing their childhood cartoons rendered in live-action,9 but didn’t want the story dramatically altered.

So what accounts for the huge success of Alice and Maleficent? A combination of things. Star power, for one—Johnny Depp was at the peak of his popularity, and a feminist fairy tale is right up Angelina Jolie’s alley. Both films are visually striking. Alice cashed in on the 3D craze.

But also, that’s just what was on offer. Disney wasn’t giving another option. Notice what happened once the translational remakes came out—the Alice and Maleficent sequels crashed and burned. Contrast that with the Lion King prequel, which made bank despite being totally unnecessary.

The financial failure of Snow White can be explained this way, as well. In addition to whatever culture war nonsense swirled around the film’s stars, early leaked set photos seemed to indicate this was another transformative remake.

Audiences rejected the idea, forcing the studio to shoot additional scenes and add CGI dwarfs, which was somehow an even worse idea.

This still doesn’t account for the Little Mermaid struggling to break even, and Moana tanking, while Lilo & Stitch raked in the dough. All three are post-pandemic, translational remakes. So what gives?

The answer, as is so often the case, is timing.

You Gotta Have Timing

But a remake is not a wizard. As I explained in this video essay when the live action Little Mermaid was released, to hit the peak of childhood nostalgia, a studio must release their remake between 20 and 30 years after the original.

Why? Because on average, people have their first kid at the age of 27. That means your child is about the same age you were when the original came out.

All of the biggest remakes of the Disney Renaissance fit in this window—Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King. The live-action Mulan has a great big asterisk next to it, because 1) it was released while theaters were still shut down, and 2) it’s a borderline case between translational and transformative. Who knows how it would’ve performed under normal circumstances?

Lilo & Stitch is towards the edge of that time window, but the marketing clearly highlighted the translational aspects. Little Mermaid was a little too late, while Moana was much too early (especially considering the animated sequel was released just last year). Nobody had time to be nostalgic about it!

Tangled will be an interesting test case, as it’s set to release a mere 18 years after the original. Disney is clearly going for a translational remake here, but will young mothers want to bring infants to the theater?

I should note that this question of timing applies to films specifically targeting that kind of childhood nostalgia. Remaking perennial sellers like Cinderella or Jungle Book is a different matter. There, nostalgia has a long tail, encompassing several generations, not just those who saw the original film on its initial release. In which case I think execution is a more decisive factor. Dumbo was just, you know, not very good.

Disney has largely mined their most memorable classics at this point, anyway. What’s really left? Emperor’s New Groove? I’m not sure that would work in live action. Pocahontas? That’s a whole can of worms nobody wants to open. Disney may well have tapped this well dry. But then again, maybe not…

All is Not Lost

The film studio is just one branch of the larger Disney corporation. Theme parks, toys, clothes, games, etc—all of these account for a bigger portion of Disney’s revenue. The Nightmare Before Christmas was only a modest success at the movie theater, but Disney has nevertheless been stocking Hot Topics with t-shirts and backpacks featuring Jack and Sally for decades.

That doesn’t mean box office returns are irrelevant. Films and TV shows are the tip of the spear; their popularity have great, downstream effects on how much merch is sold. My daughter has princess dolls ranging from Cinderella (1950) to Ariel (1989) to Elsa (2013). All of those were hit films from before she was born.

Remaking an old movie, whether it earns money or not, brings attention to the brand. Even if general audiences reject the new film, simply having it at the front of mind will encourage them to turn back to the old one. Dolls based on Emma Watson’s portrayal of Belle aren’t exactly flying off the shelves, but the classic animated ones had a spike of sales when the remake came out.

So, hit or bomb, Disney wins either way. Translational remakes encourage this behavior, too. Snow White likely moved more people to try out that ride at Disneyland than Tim Burton’s Alice pushed people onto the teacups.

As we come to the end of this rather long essay, I want to dispel one urban legend about Disney’s motivation. There is no “remake loophole” with regard to copyright. Making a new Snow White doesn’t extend the studio’s rights to the original.

Yes, back in the 90s, Disney advocated for the Copyright Term Extension Act, which is why it was nicknamed the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.”

The 1998 Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 95 years from publication or 120 years after creation, whichever end is earlier. For works published before January 1, 1978, the 1998 act extended the renewal term from 47 years to 67 years, granting a total of 95 years.

Now, you can argue (as I do) that copyright is necessary for the existence of creative industries and the current term is far too long. But none of this has anything to do with remakes.

Wrapping Up Remakes

To summarize, some remakes are good, some are bad, but that’s dependent on the skill of the filmmaker and not the nature of remakes. In my personal opinion, other than Cinderella, most of the Disney live-action remakes stink.

But my opinion doesn’t align with the public’s. The general audience seems to want the novelty of watching their favorite children’s cartoons redone in live-action (or photorealistic style), but they don’t want the story changed too much. And if it’s a movie they can take their kids to, all the better.

Disney has been milking the Renaissance nostalgia for 16 years, but they’re rapidly running out of hits to redo. If Moana has taught them anything, it’s that it’s too soon to cash in on the computer animated generation. We’ll see how Tangled affects that judgement in 2028.

The studio has also announced a new live-action film called Stepsisters, which tells the Cinderella story from the evil stepsisters’ point of view. Could the perspective flip be a Maleficent-style success? Or are audiences not interested in seeing the villain excused, as with Cruella? Time will tell. What do you think?

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Speaking of Alternate Interpretations

I have made a few Disney-related videos over the years, and naturally this essay called them to mind. Recently, I made a video about the “true” meaning of The Lion King.

Before that, I’ve been making this (joke) interpretation of the Seven Dwarfs for years…

But this final video about Fantasia isn’t a joke. Everyone’s wrong about the demon guy at the end.

If you’ve worked in film and TV for any length of time, you quickly realize it’s a lot more complicated than that.

It Was Impossible to Say Which was Which

This past weekend, Angel Studios released a new, animated adaptation of Animal Farm, and it’s… just awful.

The original book is accessible to children, but this film is juvenile in both form and content. I know because I saw it at a long time ago, at a test screening.

Granted, it could have changed since then, but everything I’ve seen in the trailers and read in reviews indicate that what I watched is largely what wound up on the screen—fart jokes, Seth Rogen’s stupid laugh, and a complete inversion of the entire point of the novel. The filmmakers took an allegorical critique of the communist revolution and transformed it into literal communist propaganda.

That’s not exaggeration or hyperbole. I mean literally literal communist propaganda. For longer than anyone reading this has been alive, whenever a communist regime fails, apologists claim it was due to outside capitalist forces interfering with the otherwise perfect utopia. That’s exactly what’s depicted in this movie—Napoleon and the other pigs are corrupted by an outside corporation (which wasn’t in the novel).

And it’s not like the filmmakers didn’t read the book or something. This alteration was fully the intention of director Andy Serkis—

The thing is, many people are blaming Angel Studios for the film, rather than (or in addition to) Serkis. After all, it’s their logo at the start of the movie; they’re the ones putting it out in theaters. Ultimately, they’re responsible for this movie getting made, right?

The Only Creature That Consumes Without Producing

You can find the Angel Studios criticisms coming from both sides of the political spectrum. Laura Miller over at Slate writes:

Animal Farm [ends] with a confusing and quasi-biblical climactic catastrophe that leaves the movie’s main character—Lucky, a young pig who does not appear in the novel—realizing that true freedom means “helping each other, not because we have to, but because we choose to.” If all this sounds vaguely Christian, be aware that this movie has been released by Angel Studios, the Mormon-founded independent film distributor.

She also says that people who think Animal Farm was anti-Marxist, as opposed to anti-totalitarian, are “obtuse.”

On the opposite pole of the political compass, at condemns Serkis’s left-wing activism, and then writes, “That’s who Angel chose to trust with one of the most important anti-communist works ever written.”

Pittman has similar issues with the casting of Laverne Cox as Snowball:

Angel Studios put this person in a PG-rated animated kids movie. The company that Christian parents gave their money to because they were told it was the safe alternative to Hollywood.

You can agree or disagree with either of these political stances, or maybe fall somewhere between. I don’t know and I don’t care, because this isn’t a political Substack.1

Too Much Film School is about studying the history and methods of filmmaking, and there’s one very important fact everyone seems to be missing—Angel Studios didn’t make the movie. They didn’t hire Serkis or Cox, they didn’t add any biblical messaging. The name is Angel Studios, but they only served as a distributor on Animal Farm.

Some Studios are More Equal Than Others

The term “studio” can mean a lot of things. At a basic level, it’s the space where movies are filmed. From the earliest days of cinema, the people who owned the studio space financed and produced their own films. That’s not necessarily true today; Raleigh, Quixote, LA Center Studios, Manhattan Beach Studios, and dozens more rent sound stages.

Angel Studios doesn’t do that. They have offices, not production facilities. They’re a “studio” in the sense that Disney, Universal, et al. are—a corporation that serves as both a financier and distributor.2 (As an aside, the major studios also own physical stages that they use for their own productions and rent out to others.)

There is a more important distinction between the big film companies and Angel Studios. The major studios (and minor ones, like Lionsgate) either acquire scripts or hire writers to develop scripts, then fund the film’s production, and ultimately distribute the finished movie to theaters and/or streamers. (Angel kind of does that, but it’s more complicated.)

Major distributors don’t usually acquire finished films; independent distributors do. Occasionally, an independent decides to start producing their own movies, and thus become a kind of minor studio. That’s what happened with A24, for example. But Angel Studios is even more unique in the way that it’s creative decisions are made.

Most studios are corporations, which comes from the Latin corpus, meaning “body.” In other words, they act as a single entity. Decisions are made at the top by one or a few officers, and everyone else in the hierarchy is simply executing the plans.3 It’s an oligarchy.

Angel Studios is a democracy. They have what they call the “Angel Guild,” investors who volunteer their time to review projects. “Investor” is probably overstating it; you can buy a membership for $12/month. When a project is submitted to Angel, it goes through two rounds of voting. The first round is a small group of “Defenders,” who check whether the movie fits Angel’s family-friendly brand. If it passes that round, then the full project is made available to a “statistically significant sample”4 of the full guild.

Like any democracy, this process can’t really be said to represent the will of the entire group; just the majority. Think of it the way some people will say “not my president” if their preferred candidate doesn’t win an election.

So, it’s not “Angel Studios” the unified entity deciding to distribute Animal Farm; it’s simply the majority of some portion of the membership who chose it. It’s closer to—although not exactly the same as—Patreon or Substack, where a fraction of the user base decides to financially support particular creators. The platform just transfers the funding from one to the other, and facilitates the distributing of the product to the audience.

Going back to Marcus Pittman, addressing Angel Studios directly:

You chose to distribute it. You’re selling tickets right now. Your name and your logo are on the poster. You cannot hide behind “we’re just the distributor.”

But that’s a significant distinction. Angel Studios will consider anything from scripts/pitches to completed films, but in the case of Animal Farm, it came to them as a finished movie. Angel didn’t develop the script, cast the actors, fund the production, give notes on the edit.

So what did go wrong?

Sometimes You Might Make the Wrong Decisions, Comrades, and Then Where Should We Be?

Nobody knows exactly what happened, because Angel Studios doesn’t release the statistics of their Guild voting. They won’t even publicly release the pitch Serkis and his team gave the Defenders, so it’s hard to say if what they were promised is what they got.

I do have some theories, though, with varying degrees of probability—

They actually liked it

This is the least likely possibility, in my mind. The Angel Guild consists of around 2,000,000 members; a “statistically significant” sample would probably consist of around 5,000 Angels, 70% of whom had to approve of the film.

Frankly, I doubt you could find 3,500 people in the entire world who would enjoy this movie. I don’t think Andy Serkis even likes it. It’s got a C- Cinemascore,5 which is devastating for a kid’s movie.

They didn’t understand it

Angel Studios is open about its conservative Christian values, and presumably the guild members support that mission. Everyone likes to dunk on their political opponents and call them stupid, so it’s tempting to say members just didn’t understand Serkis’ subversion of Orwell’s message.

But the movie isn’t subtle; it’s clunky and obvious, condescending even for a children’s movie. Anyone excited for an Animal Farm adaptation would immediately know this wasn’t Orwell’s story.

They didn’t watch it at all

This is, sadly, the most likely option. Even at big studios, decisions are as often made based on the talent involved (and Andy Serkis is undeniably talented) as the actual script. I can easily imagine someone seeing the pitch and thinking, “Animal Farm? I love Animal Farm! And Andy Serkis was in Lord of the Rings. This is gonna be great!” And then they just didn’t bother to watch the whole thing to the end.

The producers gamed the system

$12 is a very low barrier to entry. I wouldn’t put it past some unscrupulous producer to invest in a bot farm and create dummy accounts in the hopes of voting on their own film. Even sixty grand would be a small investment if it meant a wide release.

But of course, you couldn’t guarantee your 5,000 bots would be in the voting sample. You’d probably have to create a lot more fake accounts to target your movie specifically.

Activists hacked the system

(This one is baseless speculation, so take it with a whole shaker of salt.)

If you’re the kind of person who’ll invest tens of thousands of dollars in municipal elections to get your party into positions of power at the local level, how much would you spend to affect cultural institutions that can impact the national conversation? You could buy thousands of memberships for people already on your payroll, and just tell them to vote the way they would want to anyway. If you’re not concerned with promoting any specific project, eventually a critical mass of your activists will be chosen to review some project that promotes your views over the broader Guild’s.

Again, I have no reason at all to think this happened. But it’s not impossible; in fact, it would be easy to pull off undetected, given enough money.

To Exchange One Orthodoxy for Another is Not Necessarily an Advance

Animal Farm is the way that it is because of Andy Serkis, screenwriter Nicholas Stoller, and the rest of the filmmakers. It was going to come out one way or another, even if only on streaming. Angel Studios didn’t produce Animal Farm, but they did put their logo at the front of it, which has done immense damage to their brand. Their voting system has broken the trust their core audience once had, while at the same time not attracting new viewers. It was basically a lose-lose.

You may not like the movies Angel has made and/or distributed, but in an era of mega-mergers like Fox/Disney and Paramount/Warner Brothers, I for one am glad for any independent voices at the theater. The original business model was to be an alternative to Hollywood, not a poor-man’s distributor that only serves as a backup plan when the “real” Hollywood shoots down an obviously flawed movie.

Whether this whole debacle was deliberate sabotage or a lazy accident, I don’t know. But the executives who’ve ceded their decision making to the Angel Guild need to rethink the process so this doesn’t happen again.

What I do know about is cinema history. From nearly the beginning, filmmakers have been imagining voyages to our nearest celestial neighbor. So today, I’m bringing you ten lunar films, including documentaries, hard sci-fi, and pure fantasy.

This isn’t a countdown, however, because that would imply an ordered list. It’s more of a survey class. You’ve probably seen some of these; others you may never have heard of. Some are classics; others not so great. Taken together, though, they give a broad view of the many ways lunar travel has been portrayed in cinema.

[By the way, this post is too long for email, so be sure to open it up on the app or website. Also, there’s bonus material at the end for paid subscribers, so consider upgrading if you can.]

Silent Film and Music Video

Americans reached the moon first, but Europeans visualized it decades earlier.

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)

Inspired by his countryman Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon, Georges Méliès created one of1 the first science fiction movies. (Although it’s on the softer end of the Mohs Scale.)

For nearly a century, only black-and-white copies of A Trip to the Moon were available. Then in 1993, a color print was found among donation of 200 films to the Filmoteca de Catalunya film archive in Spain. The film emulsion itself wasn’t color, of course; that technology didn’t exist yet. Rather, every frame was meticulously painted by hand. It was impossible to duplicate such prints; each print had to be colored individually, so it’s amazing even one survived.

HBO Max includes the color version among their large collection of Méliès films. So does Kanopy, alongside a fascinating documentary about the making of the film, The Extraordinary Voyage.

A Trip to the Moon is easily one of the most recognizable short films in movie history; even if you don’t know the title, you’ve seen imagery associated with it. When we watched Hugo, during the film history sequence, my wife said, “Hey, that looks like that Smashing Pumpkins video…”

Tonight, Tonight (1995)

While pitching ideas for the newest Smashing Pumpkins music video, directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris originally wanted to pay homage to Busby Berkeley musicals, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers beat them to the punch. Apparently, their hearts were dead set on doing a pastiche, so they settled on mimicking A Trip to the Moon because the album’s cover reminded them of a silent film:

The cover was, in fact, a collage incorporating an 18th century portrait by Jean-Baptiste Greuze:

So, the video is an homage inspired by a collage the directors didn’t actually understand. It was the 90s—everything was meta and stupid like that.

I kid. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and all that. I can’t really throw stones from my glass house, since I recently did the same thing with a short film of my own.

Anyway, the Tonight, Tonight video is a classic, and now you know where it came from.

Frau im Mond (1929)

Fritz Lang’s most famous film is probably Metropolis, but most people have never heard of his big-budget, sci-fi follow-up, Woman in the Moon. That’s because it’s… not very good.

But it is an interesting historical artifact. It’s meant to be hard-science fiction, portraying the cutting edge of technology. A lot of it turned out to be inaccurate (the moon has no atmosphere, go fig), but the filmmakers got a lot right, too—a launch pad, a multi-stage rocket, cushions to counter-act g-forces, and most notable of all, a countdown.

That last one wasn’t a prediction so much as a dramatic necessity. Sound technology was beginning to become available, but Lang was reluctant to incorporate it into his movies just yet. (That wouldn’t happen until his classic M, arguably the best film of the early sound era.) Instead, he created a visual way of building the tension before liftoff—

Countdowns aren’t, strictly speaking, necessary in reality but the film had a round-about influence on NASA’s space program. Woman in the Moon, like Metropolis, was a financial failure at the time of release, but it was popular amongst German rocket scientists. The first successful V-2 rocket was decorated with the Frau im Mond logo, at the behest of Wernher von Braun.

Documenting the Space Race

If you recognize the name von Braun, it might be because that’s who Doc Brown is named after…

Or maybe it’s because he was a famous rocket scientist, who appeared on The Wonderful World of Disney…2

Man in Space (1955)

Walt Disney was fascinated by futurism and transportation, so it’s unsurprising he produced this short documentary about space travel (currently available on Disney+). It was so in-depth and informative, not only did President Eisenhower request a copy to show to American rocket scientists, the chair of the Soviet commission for spaceflight obtained a copy to show to his scientists.

When it aired on television as part of The Wonderful World of Disney, it was viewed by over 40 million Americans, who learned for the first time just how possible manned space exploration truly was. The film introduced the concept of a multi-stage rocket to the public. (Woman in the Moon was a flop, remember.)

Wernher von Braun (in the clip above) was the Nazi scientist largely responsible for the development of the V-2 rocket, which was used to bomb London, Paris, and numerous other allied cities during World War II. After the war, he and many of his colleagues were snuck out of German to the US, so they could aid our rocket program (rather than the Russians).

This was known as Operation Paperclip, which I, growing up, always had the impression was a secret hidden from the public. After all, how would Americans react if they knew their government was collaborating with former Nazis? Scenes like this one from Captain America: Winter Soldier reinforced the idea that most people weren’t aware of the connections between our space program and our former enemies—

But the Disney clip clearly demonstrates this is a misconception. The episode aired in 1955, just ten years after the war; everyone watching knew exactly what a V-2 rocket was, and von Braun’s German accent left little room for doubt as to his history. It seems Americans understood, at least implicitly, that former Nazis were recruited to our space program.

So, sometime between the 50s and my childhood in the 80s, this knowledge came to be treated as if it was a secret conspiracy. I honestly don’t know how that process happened. If you do, leave a comment below.

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Speaking of conspiracies…

For All Mankind (1989)

is absolutely correct that, while we went to the moon a half dozen times, we generally only think about the first one. Which is why I highly recommend For All Mankind. No, not the Apple TV show, but a documentary I’d never even heard of, which I discovered browsing Criterion.

The movie came about because Al Reinert, as a writer for Texas Monthly, discovered that NASA had huge amounts of high-quality footage from the Apollo missions that had never been seen. It took nearly a decade to sort through millions of feet of film and over 80s hours of interviews with astronauts.

He and editor Susan Korda cut the footage together as if it was a single mission, from launch to moon landing to splashdown back on Earth once again. There’s no narrator, but the interview audio is used over the whole film to give insight into the astronauts’ thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. It’s genuinely one of the best documentaries I have ever seen, an awe-inspiring tribute to one of mankind’s greatest achievements.

And it’s not even the only moon movie Al Reinert was involved in…

A Chariot in the Sky

The current moon mission is named after the goddess of the moon, but the original program was named Apollo by NASA manager Abe Silverstein because, “Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program.”

Apollo 13 (1995)

I don’t really need to explain this one, right? Critics loved it (94% on Rotten Tomatoes), audiences loved it (the third highest-grossing film of the year, just behind Toy Story and Die Hard 3), the Oscars loved it (9 nominations, 2 wins). It’s the source of one of the most famous, and most quoted, lines in movie history.

Interestingly, that line is itself a misquote of the real event. Jim Lovell didn’t actually say, “Houston, we have a problem;” he said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” William Broyles Jr., co-writer with Al Reinert, explained to the Washington Post:

The past perfect tense wasn’t as dramatic as ‘We have a problem’ — which meant that the problem was happening right then and was continuing, which in fact it was and would shortly cause the mission to abort.

Sometimes a single line can mean a lot.

Broyles and Reinert were nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars, but, just like For All Mankind, they missed out on the big award.3

Apollo 13 is one of the last, great practical effects movies before CGI took over Hollywood. There were a couple of computer-generated effects, but it was mostly scale models or real actors on real sets. This wasn’t some principled stance on the filmmakers’ part, though; it was just cheaper at the time to rent a KC-135 and simulate zero gravity (just like how NASA trains real astronauts) than to create it in a computer.

They did have an advantage over previous attempts at hard science fiction, since Apollo 13 was based on real events, and they pretty much knew what it ought to look like. This next movie, on the other hand…

Apollo 18 (2011)

Prior to Artemis II, Apollo 17 was the last manned mission to the moon. But what if there was a secret 18th Apollo mission? It’s like the opposite of the moon landing hoax conspiracy—we went to the moon more than you know!

Apollo 18 came at the tail end of the found-footage horror cycle started by Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity, being “newly discovered footage” of a heretofore unknown lunar mission. I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for found footage. I enjoyed this movie more than either the critics or the general audience—

I appreciate the amount of effort that goes into creating a sense of verisimilitude in a movie like this, from the camera angles to the editing. It’s filmed mostly on one set, but that set is as meticulously researched and detailed as the lunar module in Apollo 13. The stated reason for the secrecy of the mission (monitoring ICBM activity in Russia) makes no sense, but that nonsense turns out to be part of the plot.

Although obviously fictional, they did have real Apollo missions to base their production design on. That’s not true of the next couple of movies…

Lunar Living

A moon base is still science fiction, although we are much closer now than we ever have been, thanks to Artemis.

Until that happens, we can still watch the following movies…

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Stanley Kubrick is simultaneously one of the greatest directors of all time, and still somehow one of the most overrated. I really like Kubrick’s movies, but a kind of cult has grown up around him, full of people who believe his movies are literally perfect. Even his own fans don’t really understand him or his process.

Kubrick hated filming on location. He obviously sent the art department up to the moon to take accurate measurements, and then rebuild it on a soundstage.

Kidding aside, I love 2001. I take any chance I can get to watch it on the big screen. I even saw it at the Hollywood Bowl once, with a live orchestra, which inspired this joke of a video—

But if we’re really honest, we have to acknowledge that 2001 can be a slog in parts. Its only interesting character introduced almost halfway through the movie, and dies with 40 minutes left. But that’s mostly irrelevant, because the visuals are mesmerizing. (Which is why stoners in the 60s turned an esoteric sci-fi flick into a massive hit.)

The thing is, the mind-blowing special effects were created by Douglas Trumbull, Tom Howard, Con Pederson, and Wally Veevers, not Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick was a credit thief (something I plan to address in more detail in the near future), and his only Oscar is stolen. The man has a complicated legacy, and that ought to be acknowledged.

Back to this essay, some of the most amazing scenes don’t take place on the moon, but in outer space, where the production had to figure out how to film characters upside down. I devoted a whole chapter of this video essay exclusively to 2001.

Moon (2009)

I believe very few movies are actually “ruined” by spoilers, but there are exceptions—Coherence, Better Watch Out, Gambit, the upcoming End of Oak Street (which I saw at an early test screening, when it was still called “Flowervale Street”), and this movie, Moon.

Okay, I’ll tell you a little bit. It’s about a miner extracting Helium 3 on the moon, alone except for a boxy robot. That’s it. Don’t watch the trailer, don’t read the summary on Wikipedia, don’t look it up on TV Tropes. Just watch the movie.

Men on the Moon

The final entry on this list isn’t technically a movie, but it is an over two hour epic about space travel, international intrigue, and a Mooseberry fudge cake.

Jet Fuel Formula (1959)

Rocky and Bullwinkle were doing serialized TV long before anyone ever heard the term “prestige television.” Jet Fuel Formula is their first and longest ongoing story, spanning 40 chapters. The plot, such as it is, is convoluted, but that’s part of its charm. Not being constrained to the traditional 7 or 11 minute cartoon allowed the writers to meander into virtually any topic, location, or simple gag that they wanted.

Jet Fuel Formula incorporates nearly everything mentioned in the above films: the space race, Cold War espionage, rocket scientists, aliens. (Yeah, there are aliens in some of those movies; I won’t tell you which ones.) The show satirizes the government and the military, the news media and the entertainment industry. The heroes are a moose, a squirrel, and a pair of moon men; the villains are a couple of Soviet spies and a Nazi war criminal.

The animated format meant the writers could make meta commentary on the medium of television one moment, and a silly pun the next. As a children’s show, it flew under the radar at the time, but now it’s a perfect time capsule distilling the zeitgeist of an age.

Originally, two chapters aired per episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle, one at the start and one at the end, with two other animated segments a few interstitials between. Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can watch the whole Jet Fuel Formula saga stitched together as one cohesive movie on YouTube (at least until the copyright gnomes find it).

[Fair warning: Rocky and Bullwinkle is almost as well known for its limited animation as its snappy dialogue, but even by that standard, the first few episodes are rough.]

Goodnight Moon

And that’s my list! Obviously, I couldn’t include every moon movie, because I was trying to limit myself to ten. I’d ask you to mention your favorites in the comments, but for some reason, Substack doesn’t allow me to open comments up to everyone when the post has a paid section.

So instead, why don’t you share this post, and mention what I missed in your note? Also hit the heart button, because that’s always nice.

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Blue Moon

The following didn’t fit the above list because, although they’re all about the moon, they don’t actually go to the moon.

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If you’re new to Too Much Film School, below are some more videos and articles from the archives. And don’t forget to subscribe to get all future ones!

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Rebirth of the Author

Last year, I uncovered a secret meaning in Back to the Future—

The year before, I thoroughly debunked the theory that Bruce Willis’ character was dead the whole time in The Sixth Sense—

According to Roland Barthes, the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author. We shouldn’t limit our interpretations of a work of art to the author’s intent. The above theories are totally valid.

This is, of course, very stupid, as I explain in this video essay—

Film schools teach this nonsense—

And that’s where the “media literacy” people come from—

The video at the top of the page takes Quentin Tarantino’s word out of context, but he really does have a lot of kooky ideas about movies—

But a kerfuffle in the news got me thinking about the not-so-great aspects of my years at my alma mater. Truly, it was the best of times, it the blurst of times.

Today we’re going to learn just why this Substack is called .

“Have They Stopped Screaming, Yet?”

I learned from that Silence of the Lambs is having a moment, but not in a good way. She created this little collage of The Discourse™ for her Substack—

She explains the context in “First, They Came for The Silence of the Lambs”—

[Actor] Ted Levine is now apologizing for Buffalo Bill, along with one of the film’s producers. This has been an ongoing debate about Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece, as activists attempt to destroy its legacy by saying it has done harm to transgender people. You’d only think that if A) you had not seen the film for yourself, or B) you are irretrievably stupid.

The thing is, none of this is new. I basically had this exact conversation in front of a class of 400 students over two decades ago.

“Big Through the Hips? Roomy.”

One of the required courses for cinema students at the time was “Race, Class, and Gender in American Film,” taught by the worst professor I ever had. He treated the course like “Race, Race, and Race in American Film.” No matter what movie we watched, even if it very clearly about gender or class issues, every lecture focused on Race. But that’s not the only reason this professor was the worst.

He would show up to class late. Not just by a couple of minutes. I mean like twenty minutes, half an hour. Way past the time we were legally allowed to leave. And when he did eventually deign to grace us with his presence, his TA would play theme music as he walked down the aisle. He would come waddling in from the back of the theater, taking his sweet time, like he wasn’t already late, just sauntering along and tapping his cane in time with the music.

Oh, did I mention he had a cane? He had a cane. Not as a cool affectation, like Richard Attenborough in Jurassic Park. No, he had a cane like Orson Welles1 in Touch of Evil.2

Plus, he did what only the most vile professors do, something that I genuinely think ought to be illegal—he assigned his own books as required reading. Not one or two, but around a half dozen of his books had to be purchased by each and every one of his 400 students (who didn’t choose to be there, mind you, because again, this was a required course). He didn’t even use them in class! The next course I took with him, I didn’t bother purchasing any of the “required” texts, and it didn’t affect my grade at all.

“His Pathology is a Thousand Times More Savage and More Terrifying”

But as I said, this professor’s singular obsession was race. And never was this fixation more pronounced than when we watched Silence of the Lambs mid-way through the semester.

You’d think his lecture would explore gender roles and perceptions in the FBI.

But no, he barely touched on that. So maybe you imagine he’d use his limited lecture time (limited due to his tardiness) to discuss class divisions between Clarice and Hannibal?

Nope. For an hour and a half, he talked about Barney, the black orderly you forgot existed until you read this sentence right now.

I had read all of Thomas Harris’s novels, which of course went into more detail on all the characters. I’d seen the movies a million times. I liked Barney, but c’mon, he’s a bit part in the film. Even a superfan like me couldn’t talk about him for that long, while ignoring the rest of the cast. If you had never seen the Silence of the Lambs, you would’ve thought it was the story of an orderly and his psychiatric patient, judging by his lecture alone.

After allllllll of that, in the final few minutes of class, he did eventually get around to Buffalo Bill. He asserted that the portrayal of minorities by Hollywood went through predictable stages: first they were simply excluded; next they were portrayed as villainous; then they were made the subject of fun; and finally, they were accepted.

The professor taught that this had happened over the course of the mid-twentieth century to black characters.3 Citing Will and Grace, he said gay characters were at stage 3, but transgender4 characters were still languishing in stage 2. They were treated as violent sexual deviants, he claimed.

I raised my hand, and he called on me. “But he’s not,” I objected. “The movie makes it clear that Buffalo Bill is not a transexual.”

If you’ve never seen the movie, this isn’t a matter of interpretation or up for debate. The fact that he’s not transgender is unambiguously stated and affirmed. It’s even a plot point—

My professor responded, “Well, if you don’t think killing women and wearing their skin is deviant behavior, I guess that’s what you’re into.”

Everyone in the class laughed, and for a moment, I genuinely thought they were laughing at him, because it was such an insane thing to say. Then I realized they were agreeing with his non-point. They actually thought he had dunked on me, despite not responding to what I had said in the slightest.

I was dumbfounded. If you’ve ever met me in real life, you know I’m rarely at a loss for words, but this time, I was. I couldn’t believe he had actually accused a student of being “into” murder. I still can’t believe it. To say nothing of the fact that I was absolutely right and he had no response.

So I just sat down. And that’s exactly what he wanted.

“Thrill Me with Your Acumen.”

After class, one student came up to me and said, “You were absolutely right. I don’t know what he was talking about.” One student out of four hundred. The problem with these kinds of professors is they train students that, in order to get good grades and graduate, you must agree with them, no matter how wrong they are.

This isn’t an issue only for film studies, mind you. It happens across the arts. had a similar experience at her alma mater—

Columbia University nearly eradicated my lifelong love of literature. You might be thinking that anyone asked to read for a living would eventually learn to detest the very act itself, and while this may have contributed to my disillusionment with the literary academy, the real plague that drove me away was something much more insidious: literary theory.

All across American college campuses, literature departments have been infested by a lopsided political agenda that masquerades as “literary theory.” This ideology, often presented under the guise of feminist scholarship, Marxist critical theory, or Postcolonial thought-experiments, has poisoned the study of literature and convinced students of English that the purpose of literature is not to explore the human condition but to drive political and societal change. As a result, literary fields such as publishing, academia, and journalism are increasingly dominated by ideological extremists who seek to bring the focus of literary study away from the humanistic tradition and towards their own political agendas.

Pens and Poison

When Literature Lost Its Way

I’d always wanted to be a professor of literature. Sitting in Columbia University’s academic advising office during my freshman year at one of America’s premier institutions for literary study, I pressed my heels into the carpet to dispel my nervousness—I was about to plan my journey to the…

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6 months ago · 104 likes · 19 comments · Liza Libes

recently wrote:

The link between having a degree and being able to think critically is completely broken. Because true critical thinking isn’t just about questioning authority—it’s about knowing how to question, and whether your conclusions are backed by evidence, not just suspicion.

Sure, there are brilliant college graduates who think rigorously and follow evidence wherever it leads. But the system as a whole often rewards polish over curiosity, performance over substance.

Pack Light Live Full with Carmen Van Kerckhove

You believe college taught you critical thinking. It actually taught you not to question.

When the college admissions scandal broke in 2019, I watched the collective outrage with fascination. Everyone was shocked by the cheating—parents bribing coaches, photoshopping their kids onto rowing teams, paying someone else to take the SATs. The audacity! The fraud! The unfairness…

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a year ago · 691 likes · 110 comments · Carmen Van Kerckhove

While it’s true that every major is terrible,5 some are worse than others. As Michael Kinsley observed: “Many ‘hard’ scientists regard the term ‘social science’ as an oxymoron. Science means hypotheses you can test, and prove or disprove. Social science is little more than observation putting on airs.”

But the arts lack even that degree of rigor. As my story demonstrates, a tenured professor can make a claim that goes entirely against the observed text in question, and somehow still keep his job.

“It’s Not a Charm School”

I love Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. It’s a seminal book in horror studies, coining the term “final girl” among other things. I’ve cited it more than once on TMFS.

But as much as I like the book, many of Clover’s claims about violence against women are totally unfounded. In Blood Money, Richard Nowell’s statistical analysis clearly demonstrates male characters in 80s slashers were far more likely than female ones to be killed, killed on screen, and killed gruesomely.

Clover’s critiques are mostly vibes-based, but her work continues to get cited over Nowell’s corrections.

This is why I like and . They consciously check their own assumptions with meticulous research, backed up by real numbers. We need more of their kind of rigor.

Contrast that with my former professor’s theory about minority representation moving from ignoring to accepting. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. It feels right, but I actually have no proof whatsoever. What’s needed is someone to go through film archives and diligently note the way certain characters are portrayed over the years.

But instead of rigor, we get “media literacy,” which is just code for “agreeing with me.”

As an aside, this same professor taught me all of the objections to “authorial intent.” (The so-called “Death of the Author” is part of the literary theory Libes derides above.) Those objections are incredibly stupid, and I knew that even as an undergrad, but by then I had learned not to raise my hand in class. Instead, I made this video—

Elite universities are always at the cutting edge of this sort of thing. Another term this professor taught me was “microaggression,”6 long before it came into common usage. The “progressive stack,” as it’s now known, was parodied in PCU, released in 1994, but written by two Wesleyan grads who attended in the 1980s.

At some point, film schools stopped teaching about film, and started teaching about politics under another name. As the millennials (a cohort of which I am among the oldest) take positions of power, you can see the shift in both filmmaking and film discourse.

Most critics can’t engage with film form, only the content. In other words, whether they agree with the message or not. Sometimes, critics don’t even weigh the content, but rather the people involved in the project.

Take the case of Emilia Pérez. Prior to the 2024 Oscar nominations, it received rave reviews, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 80%, despite being… not a good movie.

But after old tweets from star Karla Sofía Gascón “resurfaced,”7 reviews suddenly took a harsher turn. The RT score dropped 10 percentage points, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s because the majority of the reviews came before the public controversy. A little back-of-the-envelope algebra8 tells us the post-scandal reviews by themselves would earn a score of just 52%.

Nothing about this terrible musical changed in January of 2025. It’s just that critics no longer liked one of the stars. Yet, we only call it “review bombing” when real people do it.9

“You Fly Back to School Now, Little Starling.”

Many people mistakenly believe film school is a kind of trade school, where they teach you technical skills. Those classes do exist, of course. We had professors that taught practical filmmaking skills. Some of my favorite courses were cinematography and production management. The professor of the latter even gave me a chance to visit the Spider-Man set, something I always enjoy doing.

We also had formalists in the vein of David Bordwell, who taught how a film was constructed, not what it was about. You didn’t have to like or agree with the filmmakers in order to understand how they made their film; you could also criticize them when you do like it.

But too many professors were like the one describe above. They taught that “all art is political,” by which they meant, “make art that affirms my worldview.” I just had too much of that. Hence the name of this Substack.

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5

XKCD:

Why are Christian films mostly cringe, and why are Christian novels these days mostly romance? The answer to both these questions is much the same: Christian art has been ghettoized, and the secular culture isn’t to blame. It’s us.

Georgi Boorman

The Ghettoization of Christian Storytelling

Don’t get offended, but…why are Christian films mostly cringe, and why are Christian novels these days mostly romance? Why is “Christian sci-fi” mostly mislabeled spiritual warfare stories and end-times speculation while the Mormons are kicking our holy behinds in actual epic storytelling…

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a year ago · 9 likes · 5 comments · Georgi Boorman

Part of the problem is that the target audience doesn’t demand quality, so long as the film conveys the correct message.1 And since the filmmakers know they have a guaranteed audience, they don’t strive for artistic excellence. This is a mistake, because they wind up (literally) preaching to the choir.

But there was a time when Hollywood’s best writers, greatest directors, and brightest stars made Christian films. These movies weren’t just entertaining, but high art that won awards and critical praise.

Since Easter hasn’t been totally subsumed by secularization,2 I figure this would be a good time to remember some of the best and most devout films ever made about saints, priests, and of course, Jesus.

Palm Sunday

We begin the week, naturally, with Jesus’ ministry.

King of Kings (1927)

King of Kings isn’t the first movie about Jesus, but it is arguably the greatest of the silent era. It’s an epic at over two-and-a-half hours, but even so, it doesn’t cover His whole life.

The film begins, interestingly, with Mary Magdeline3 hearing stories about a miracle worker. We’re introduced to a boy (the evangelist Mark) Jesus had healed, and another blind boy seeking a cure. Mark takes the blind boy to the Apostles, who then introduce him to Jesus. Only when Jesus restores his sight do we—the audience—see the title character for the first time, through the eyes of one He healed.

This is peak silent cinema, Cecil B. DeMille utilizing every visual technique available to radically identify the audience with the characters. But DeMille’s greatest strength is navigating the huge cast while humanizing the littlest among them. He cares as much about the characters and performances as he does the beautiful sets and cinematography (see picture above).

The movie is in the public domain, so you can find it almost anywhere, including HBO and Criterion, but I recommend watching a copy that includes the gorgeous color tinting in the first sequence.

The Lives of Saints

For Monday and Tuesday, we’ve got two movies about saints that earned their leads Best Actress and Best Actor at the Academy Awards.

The Song of Bernadette (1943)

Bernadette Soubirous was a poor, young, uneducated peasant girl who experienced visions of the Virgin Mary. But nobody believed her, because she was poor, young, uneducated, a peasant, and a girl. It’s a story of simple faith in the face of doubt, returning aggression with kindness.

Vincent Price (no relation) plays the villain, in one of his final character acting roles before becoming a full-fledged master of horror. It’s always fun to watch old movies and see actors in these before-they-were-famous parts.

The Academy often gets criticized for conflating “best” with most—the biggest sets, the craziest hair, the fastest cutting. Bombastic performances often take home the big awards, but not this time. Jennifer Jones’s portrayal is understated and subtle, but never simple. Although it lost the top prize to Casablanca (no shame in that), The Song of Bernadette was nominated for a then-record 12 Oscars, winning four—Score, Black and White Art Direction, Black and White Cinematography, and Best Actress for Jones.

St. Bernadette holds a special place in our hearts because of Amelia. After her diagnosis, we went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes (where Mary appeared to Bernadette). She’s even Amelia’s confirmation saint.

Amelia's Novena

A Prayer for Humility

St. Bernadette is the woman Mary appeared to at Lourdes, who then told her family, the local villagers, and her parish priest about all she had seen. Bernadette is thus directly responsible for thousands of pilgrimages to the Lourdes grotto, including our family’s nearly three years ago…

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2 years ago · 7 likes · 2 comments

A Man for All Seasons (1966)

When people refer to St. Matthew, they almost always mean the apostle and Gospel writer. But my middle name, “Thomas,” has a few more options—the Apostle, Aquinas, or the subject of A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More.

He was canonized for doing literally nothing. That’s my kinda saint.

King Henry VIII wanted More to sign the Oath of Succession, which affirmed the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn as legitimate and challenged the authority of the Pope. Because More refused to either confirm or deny the contents of the oath, he was stripped of his titles, imprisoned, and eventually executed. Basically, he’s the patron saint of stubbornness. My kinda saint.

It might sound boring, but writer Robert Bolt manages to dramatize the situation and fill it with some of the most amazing speeches ever put to screen. He rightfully earned an Oscar for adapting his own play, and Paul Scofield won Best Actor for reprising the role he originated on Broadway. But despite its theatrical origins, Fred Zinnemann creates a truly cinematic experience, bringing home two of his eventual four Oscars.

In Persona Christi

Holy Thursday marks the institution of the Holy Eucharist, so the next two days will focus on priests and their work.

On the Waterfront (1954)

Although not the protagonist, Father Barry is the moral center of On the Waterfront. At his best, a priest is not only a spiritual father, but a leader in the material world, as well. This isn’t some made-up ideal; Barry is based on the real-life Fr. John Corridan, who likewise fought corruption and organized crime on the waterfront.

Karl Malden didn’t win an Oscar for his portrayal of Fr. Barry, probably because two other actors were nominated for Best Supporting for their Waterfront roles, splitting the vote. The movie did win eight other Academy Awards,

The Exorcist (1973)

On the flip side, The Exorcist is about spiritual warfare. It’s not just the exorcism itself, in the final act, but it’s also about a priest having a crisis of faith, his internal struggle with God. It’s about a mother willing to do anything to save her child, at the end of her rope when she’s exhausted all of her options. Most of all, the film asks whether there’s any room at all for God in a modern, secular world.

And the world responded. The movie was hugely popular, and remains influential to this day. Adjusted for inflation, it’s still the tenth most popular movie ever. The Exorcist was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, back when the Academy wasn’t afraid of popular films. It only won two—Best Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay. (William Peter Blatty, like Robert Bolt above, adapted his own work, this time a novel.)

Good Friday

There’s really only one choice for this day…

Passion of the Christ (2004)

Say what you want about Mel Gibson (and you can say a lot) but the man can shoot a movie. It’s extremely difficult to watch, but that’s the whole point. Anyone who criticizes the film for not depicting Jesus’ preaching (much) just doesn’t understand why the movie exists. David Ansen wrote, “Instead of being moved by Christ’s suffering, or awed by his sacrifice, I felt abused by a filmmaker intent on punishing an audience, for who knows what sins.”

So I have to admit, this is the one film on the list that’s preaching to the choir. It was made with the assumption that the audience was familiar with the context and importance of the events depicted. It’s a third act stretched out to feature length. To make a cheeky comparison, watching The Passion without a real understanding of Christology is like watching Avengers: Endgame without having seen another MCU movie.

The Passion is also the only film on this list to not win any Oscars. It was massively popular, and released during a nearly two-decade-long span when the Academy was biased against popular films. Although, again adjusting for inflation, it earned less than The Exorcist and the last entry on this list…

Holy Saturday

On the day there is a great silence over the earth, it only makes sense to watch a “Tale of the Christ” (Ben Hur’s subtitle) where Jesus is largely in the background.

Ben-Hur (1959)

This is one of those movies I vaguely remember from my childhood, playing on the TV while I built Legos. Then it popped on the Criterion Channel in a collection simply called STUNTS! Prior to watching it, I had no idea why Ben-Hur had the subtitle “A Tale of the Christ.”

It’s really the tale of a Judean noble who is wrongfully accused, betrayed by a man he trusted like a brother, and enslaved. Then he seeks revenge on the author of his misery, ultimately doing battle in the arena.4 But running concurrently with the story of vengeance, often in the background, is Jesus’s ministry. Judah Ben-Hur doesn’t know it, but he’s on a collision course with Christ. It’s kind of the inverse of The Passion, in that the significance of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is revealed through the perspective of a fictional character.

Plus, it’s got a cool chariot race.

Ben-Hur won a record-setting 11 Academy Awards, which has only been equaled twice (Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King), but never surpassed. Of those three, it’s the only one to win an acting Oscar, for Charlton Heston.5 It’s also the 14th most successful movie at the (inflation-adjusted) box office.

Convent-ional Comedy

After reading this, my wife pointed out that most of these movies are incredibly long and rather somber, so she wanted me to include one of her favorites: Sister Act. It didn’t really fit the “Holy Week” theme, but aside from some questionable theology, it’s a fun and funny movie. And apparently, real nuns enjoy it a lot.

There are probably other edge cases I could’ve mentioned, like Hitchcock’s I Confess or The Sound of Music, but I want to hear what you think. What are your favorite, actually good Christian movies?

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Permission and Property

A mythos, properly understood, is a collection of stories written by disconnected authors.1 Each writer adds or subtracts elements with each re-telling, as befits their particular version. Some elements become stable over time and accepted by everyone; this happens by popular consensus. There is no governing authority, which is what makes it different than a canon of works.

Star Wars, for example, was controlled by George Lucas. No writer was allowed to add major characters to the ongoing story, or retcon previous events, without the approval of Lucas or his staff. When he sold his intellectual property to Disney, the new owners declared, by fiat, that most of the previous books, comics, and games were no longer canon; they commissioned new ancillary material, instead. Even fans who disliked the new stories still accept the concept of “canon;” they simply prefer the old canon.

Contrast this with Robin Hood. There is no central Robin Hood Corporation that decides which elements must remain fixed. He’s an archer, he lives in Sherwood Forest, he robs from the rich and gives to the poor, etc. No one enforces it; this is just what’s been passed down.

Thus, changes to the Robin Hood story can be made without permission. The ones that are unpopular are discarded, while popular ones remain. For example, did you know in the earliest versions of the legend, Robin Hood was a common thief? But because the English are obsessed with class, Robin Hood evolved into a displaced nobleman, and the distribution of his spoils a form of noblesse oblige. (You’ll find this distinct from most criminal protagonists by American writers, who tend to view crime as “the dark side of capitalism.”)

The Robin Hood cast remains stable: Maid Marian, Robin’s true love; Little John, his best friend; the Merry Men, his band of thieves; the Moor, who he befriended on the crusades; Friar Tuck, a clergyman who must balance his public duties against his private support of Robin; the Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin’s physical rival; Prince John, the usurper who offends Robin’s noble heart. Not everyone is included in every version, but most are.

Except, if you’re a millennial or younger, you may not realize there’s one name in there that was added to the Robin Hood mythos within living memory. The BBC series Robin of Sherwood introduced an Saracen character to the cast. British TV series didn’t travel as far in the 80s, so the film that really cemented this character as a permanent fixture was 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Morgan Freeman’s Azeem proved so popular, almost no one adapts Robin Hood anymore without an Black or Arab character.

The Robin Hood mythos, which is at least 700 years old, was pretty definitively altered a mere 35 years ago. No one declared it so; it simply happened organically.

The key distinction here is, of course, intellectual property. Nobody owns Robin Hood, (or ever did, for that matter); Lucasfilm owns Star Wars, and will continue to do so for as long as Disney has lawyers. But what happens when a closely held IP passes into the public domain? Elementary, my dear Watson. And also Sherlock, and The Adventures of Young Sherlock Holmes, and Watson, and...

Is Canon Still Canon?

Sherlock Holmes is an interesting case, because we have a very clear record of the character and stories being controlled by one man (and his estate), and then passing freely into the public domain.

Holmes had a canon, a collection of stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Those stories were adapted more-or-less faithfully over the years. But even with an official canon owned by the Doyle estate, many elements were added or removed. Constantly wearing a deerstalker cap, for example, comes from a stage adaptation; until recently, most adaptations downplayed or ignored Holmes’ drug addiction; and so on.

Now that the character is in the public domain, anyone can write a story about Sherlock investigating anything they wish. Set it in the modern day, make Watson a veteran of Middle East wars. But he better put on the deerstalker at least once...

I think we’re witnessing with Sherlock what must’ve happened with Robin Hood centuries ago. Writers are simply playing with the characters and events that are well known to the audience, adapting and modifying them to see what sticks. Right now, “modernizing” Sherlock is a common trend, bringing him from the late 19th century to the early 21st. I’m curious if, in 500 years, Sherlock will have become tied to a specific era, like Robin Hood was in the Middle Ages, or if he’ll continue to be a “current” character.

Which brings me to the curious case of a character whose canon consists of a single book.

The Arrogance of Presentism

Every mythos2 I’ve discussed so far has a plethora of stories for writers to use as the raw material for their new versions, but Dracula is different. Dracula is one book, written by one man.3 And yet, Dracula became a popular figure independent of that original story, thanks in large part to American filmmakers blatantly ignoring the author’s (and later, his widow’s) intellectual property rights.4

The general thrust of most of these adaptations (authorized or not) was an ancient aristocrat enters modern society, then does evil vampire stuff, until someone finally stabs him in the heart. This was pretty consistent until about a century after the first publication of the novel, when Francis Ford Coppola decided to do a lavish period adaptation, with a big budget, big stars, and big hair.

Coppola wanted to limit his use of visual effects to what was available at the turn of the previous century:

The period of the book was the dawn of new technology. I wanted to make the picture almost in the style of the turn of the century, when motion pictures were the domain of the magician. It would be interesting, I felt, to make it as if we were filmmakers in those days, with all of the naive effects of that time. Underneath, it's a movie about passion, and I thought it would have more ‘soul’ if there were less technology. We actually used an old Pathé camera once! Of course, it wasn't possible to do all of it in the old way, so we did do some postproduction effects.

Although filmed with vibrant color and sound, he wanted the film to feel like it could have been made around the same time it was set. The movie is filled with clever mechanical effects, optical tricks, and beautiful miniatures. Where the film fails, however, while the setting and effects are of the same period, the narrative perspective is purely modern.

Dracula, as I said, is about ancient evil invading the present. The epistolary style of novel wasn’t new, but Stoker’s innovation was using the most up-to-date means of communications—telegrams, phonographic recordings, even broadsheet newspaper reporting. These all seem quaint to us, but they were high-tech at the time.

The issue with Coppola’s adaptation is that they seem quaint to the audience, too. Nothing feels new; it’s the old world invading a slightly-less-old world. Listening to the characters talk about the latest innovations makes you feel like Marty McFly listen to Doc Brown ramble about the Japanese in the 1950s.

Worse still is the portrayal of the insane asylum. We consider the conditions cruel now, but at the time, psychiatry was a new study. Their treatment of the mentally ill was a vast improvement over the past, yet the film is condescending, mocking, and ultimately condemning. And true, cruel practices ought to be condemned, but by placing the audience in that seat of judgement above the past, it removes us from the film’s setting. We’re aloof from the characters, rather than identifying with them.

The irony, of course, is that there are practices and modes of behavior we engage in today that our descendants will surely regard as cruel and unjust. Every generation does the best they can with what they have, and to judge them by modern standards is the height of arrogance.

This is all an undercurrent to Coppola’s film, which often goes unmentioned next to his largest contribution to the Dracula mythos—the love story.

Love Never Dies

Like the Moor character in Robin Hood, most people under forty are probably surprised to learn there is no love story between Dracula and Mina in the book. The Vlad the Impaler5 prologue was made up out of whole cloth.

Just this year, Luc Besson released a version of Dracula that was much closer to Coppola’s love story than Stoker’s. And last year, Robert Eggers remade Nosferatu, itself a knock-off of Dracula, and added the love plot between the vampire and the hero’s fiancée.

Coppola’s version seems to have left an indelible mark, grafting on the love story and permanently fixing the events in the Victorian era. Those two elements combine to make the story less about the fragility of modernity, and more simply a condemnation of Victorian sexual morality. The death of the passionate count at the hands of the repressed Harker and Van Helsing is presented as a tragedy, rather than a victory.

Location, Location, Location

I started this post because I had seen Luc Besson’s new Dracula, and I didn’t like it, both for its similarities to Coppola’s and its dissimilarities to Stoker’s. Those dissimilarities parallel Nosferatu (original and remake) in surprising ways. All three films shift the location, from England to Germany in Murnau and Egger’s case, and to Paris in Besson’s. Neither move works, in my opinion.

Germany is basically next door to Transylvania. It’s less than a thousand miles, and it’s all black forest Überwald-type land of mystery in between. Besides the fact that the last voyage of the Demeter makes no sense (there’s no sea between the two countries), the general vibe of the count’s new and old homes are basically indistinguishable. The whole “crossing from the west to the east” sensation is gone.

And in the latest film, substituting Paris for London isn’t much better. So much is made of the protestant Harker trying to understand the Orthodox peasants in the novel. But Paris is Catholic (Besson even makes Van Helsing a priest), so again, the religio-cultural divide is a distinction without a difference. Besson’s Harker is an atheist, but “I just don’t believe in anything” doesn’t work as well as a Protestant (a relatively modern religious development) returning to the more ancient forms of Christianity practiced in Transylvania.

All of which is to say, I think these movies miss something by changing the location but retaining the time period.

If I Had a Million Dollars

If I had a million dollar(s) budget and an assignment to adapt Dracula, here’s what I’d do. I would do the exact inverse of the above—set the movie in the present, and move the location further west, not east.

Take the epistolary format of the novel and update it with modern communication technology—video blogging, texts, etc. Make Harker a Houston realtor with a YouTube channel. Transform the Demeter into a private jet, whose crash landing is caught on live stream. Translate Dracula to a pre-Columbian Aztec noble, living in the ruins at Monte Albán.

Just as Stoker was reckoning with his ancient past, a modern retelling of Dracula ought to do the same. That would be my contribution to the mythos, anyway. What do you think?

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5

Along the way, we’ll see some short films, movies about movies (always a favorite), and a bit of cinema history. So sit back and relax as I take you on a winding path called memory lane…

The Worst Film Festival Ever

Back at USC, students held a competition called the Ed Wood Film Festival. The rules were simple: you have 24 hours to make a short film. That’s pretty much all there was to it. This was back in the late 90s and early 2000s,1 when decent digital cameras were only just becoming affordable, so simply finishing a movie in a day was an accomplishment.

Being the lover of meta humor that I am,2 I convinced my friends to shoot a parody of the then-popular 24. Taking it to an extra layer of meta, the protagonist was a student filmmaker trying to complete his Ed Wood entry.

That night, we wandered around campus, looking for other teams filming. We’d set up a hidden camera, then our lead actor would run into the middle of their shot, demanding to know where his leading lady was. We were very annoying and everyone hated us until the night of the festival, when they saw themselves up on the big screen. It was a pretty fun way to start the night.3

But why was it the “Ed Wood” contest, you may be wondering? And why is the title of this post about Orson Welles? I’ll get to those questions in a moment, but first…

Shameless Self-Promotion

Nowadays, similar make-a-movie-in-a-short-time-frame contests have more convoluted rules, requiring certain props, dialogue, genres, or whatever. The Collaboration Filmmakers Challenge (a one-week competition) gives you a theme, but also requires you collaborate with other filmmakers on their project.

It’s a neat concept, and I’ve met some nice people participating over the years. This past year, I decided to make a silent film, “How to Talk to Ladies.” Here, for the first time, you can watch it on YouTube!

We tried our best to make the cinematography, editing, and performances reflective of the silent era. (By the way, you can read the script over on my other Substack.) What did you think of it?

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CFC always takes me back to the Ed Wood contest, but why was a student-run contest at the most prestigious film school in the world named after a notoriously bad director?

Ed Wood, the Man

Before Uwe Boll, before Tommy Wiseau, Ed Wood was known as the worst filmmaker of all time, the auteur of such cult classics as Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Wood made these films outside of the studio system, on tight schedules and shoestring budgets. His independent spirit would be admirable if the films weren’t so… bad.

Still, he’s the kind of outside that director Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp are attracted to. Together, they made an $18 million period biopic about his struggles (and ultimate failure) to gain mainstream recognition. You know, because his movies were so bad.

As Tim Burton put it, it was “as if he was making Citizen Kane,4 you know, whereas other people perceived them as, like, the worst movies ever.” But the film Ed Wood didn’t start with Burton; it was actually the brainchild of a pair of screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who sympathized with Wood’s struggle. And where did those meet? The University of Southern California School of Cinema.

The Ed Wood Contest began in 1996, two years after the release of the movie, partly in honor of those two alumni. I can’t find any official history of the competition,5 but as I recall, the the spirt of the passed down from upper classmen to freshman was to embody Wood’s can-do attitude. Spend as little money as you can; none, if possible. Use props and locations you already have access to. Shoot with your own camera (much easier now than in 2001), cast your own friends. It doesn’t matter if the movie makes sense so long as it’s made, much like Wood’s oeuvre.

I remember the experience fondly, even if my entry 256 has since been lost to time. (Hey, if any of my old USC friends are reading this, do you still have a copy?)

But here’s the strange thing—I never actually watched Ed Wood at the time.

Orson Welles, the Character

You see, finding old movies wasn’t as easy back then as it is now. Ed Wood wasn’t exactly obscure, but it bombed at the box office. Arguably, it was harder to find a five-year-old flop than a fifty year old classic. Netflix didn’t exist yet. Amazon had just started selling things other than books, but as a broke college kid, I wasn’t about to spend 20 bucks on a DVD I might not like. So I just… didn’t watch it

But as I said, the CFC got me reminiscing about my old film school days, so I finally got around to streaming it. It was enjoyable, although I understand why it wasn’t a hit; Ed Wood the character was just too weird.

About three-quarters of the way in (the low-point of the story), Wood encounters his hero, Orson Welles—

I kinda wish I had known about this scene at the time, because one of the guest judges the year I participated in the Ed Wood Fest was none other than (in)famous director Bryan Singer. It would’ve felt relevant in 2001, but in retrospect, it was kind of a weird situation.

Anyway, in Ed Wood, Orson Welles was played by Vincent D’Onofrio, who did a pretty good impression of the great director. At least, so I thought, until I read the film’s Wikipedia page and discovered his voice was re-dubbed by Maurice LaMarche.

Peas and Quiet

You may not recognize LaMarche’s name, but if you’re a millennial, you definitely know his voice. Among his many, many voice-acting credits, he played Brain on Animaniacs and its Pinky and the Brain spin off.

I remember that clip from when I was a kid, but I had no idea it was based on a real event. “Frozen Peas” was an audio clip of outtakes from a real commercial for which the real Welles recorded a voice over. He corrects the ad copy, berates the engineer, and generally behaves like a pompous ass. This audio somehow went viral before “going viral” was a thing.

If you want to hear the actual Welles, someone made an animation to go along with the conversation here—

Animaniacs wasn’t even the first time Maurice LaMarche parodied “Frozen Peas.” He also did it on The Critic—

Basically, LaMarche could’ve made a whole career just doing Orson Welles impressions, but Ed Wood was probably the strangest iteration. Vincent D’Onofrio had spent two weeks preparing Welles’ look, mannerisms, and voice, but Tim Burton was underwhelmed by the performance. So Burton hired LaMarche to re-record the whole thing (probably the only time he’d played Welles straight) without telling D’Onofrio.7

D'Onofrio was so mad (either at Burton or himself is unclear), he wrote, directed, and starred in a whole “short”8 film just to prove he could play Welles better.

The film is about Welles preparing for a scene in the noir classic, The Third Man. (Which, if you haven’t seen, I also highly recommend.)

Make Something

I don’t have any big conclusions here other than to say this: sometimes the quality of the end product is as much a result of budget, time, and luck as it is skill and talent. Whether the audience likes something you made is largely out of your control, but whether you make something at all is. So I’m glad I finished my short film.

I do hope you liked it, too.

What to Expect When Fictional Characters are Expecting

For context if you haven’t seen these movies, here’s a quick rundown, with some mild spoilers. (But if you cared about spoilers, you probably would’ve seen them already anyway.) Then I’ll get into why this matters.

28 Years Later

Towards the end of the film, a zombie1 gives birth to a baby. Set aside for the moment that this totally flies in the face of the rules set up in the original 28 Days Later, where a single drop of blood can infect someone in moments. You can say something about the placenta protecting the baby or whatever, but the actual birth process is messy, and that kid definitely infected.

But forget about that; that’s the zombie stuff. The actual problem is what a medical doctor says after. The young protagonist is tasked with taking the baby back to his village, and the doctor tells him he can just give the baby drops of water until they get there. In a day or two.

This is manifestly untrue; a newborn needs to eat every couple of hours. It’s why new mothers get so little sleep! The baby would literally starve to death before they got back.

Fantastic Four: First Steps

When Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) learns his wife Sue (The Invisible Woman) is pregnant, he goes on a planet-wide campaign to eliminate crime everywhere on Earth, just to keep his baby safe.

Then, the Silver Surfer announces Galactus, a planet-eating giant, is on its way. So, our heroes decide to fly up into space to confront it. Remember, space travel is dangerous generally, and in this situation, they don’t even know what they’re going to find out there. And they decide to do this when while Sue is nine months pregnant.

The Fantastic Four are a team, fine. They work well together, okay. Sue is a smart scientist, alright. But she’s also nine months pregnant. There’s absolutely no reason she has to go with them, and with Reed’s absolute bonkers reaction to her pregnancy, there’s no way he would take her on the trip.

And here’s the thing—it’s a really easy solve. Something about the wormhole or whatever requires Sue’s force field ability. One line, boom.

But there’s no such line. They just take a pregnant woman into space, where the stress might induce labor and, oh yeah, it does.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Towards the end of the movie, Ronal, a pregnant Na’vi woman, goes into battle on a flying dragon. This is even more irresponsible than Fantastic Four, where at least no one was actively trying to kill them (as far as they knew). And yeah, Ronal is killed in the fight, but not before giving birth on the battlefield.

Now the Na’vi aren’t people, but come on, they’re basically large people with blue skin and cat ears. No creature would intentionally get into a fight while pregnant. Yes, they’ll fight back when attacked, but they won’t consciously choose to go into danger like this.

Some nerds argue that it’s a cultural thing with the Na’vi, because Ronal was some kind of tribal leader. Here’s the thing… no. No civilization would last more than a generation if pregnant women led battlefield charges. Besides the danger for the baby, a society needs females who can reproduce; males are far more expendable.

We Bury the Dead

Towards the end of the film, a zombie gives birth to a baby.

We Bury the Dead features more traditional zombies (i.e. dead people come to life), which raises entirely different questions. According to the exposition news broadcast at the beginning of the film, an experimental bomb blew up over Hobart, Australia, a week prior. It killed everyone in town, but also, some people are coming back to life as zombies.

Why didn’t the bomb either kill or zombify the baby? Who knows? Magic placenta. But a baby can’t survive for a week inside a dead mother any longer than it could outside, without extreme intervention.

Why This Matters

You might be thinking, “Well yeah, but these are movies about zombies, aliens, and superheroes. They’re not realistic.”

That’s true, as far as it goes, except there’s a very basic storytelling rule that underlies almost everything we read and watch: everything is “like reality, unless otherwise stated.”

So yes, Sue Storm can turn invisible. That’s the fun comic book stuff we want to see. But we still assume her reproductive system works the way most women’s do.

And it’s those kinds of assumptions that can actually be dangerous in the real world. There are all kinds of scientific and historical “facts” we, the general public have gleaned from popular culture.

A lot of people think, for example, that you have to wait 24 hours to report someone missing to the police. This is absolutely untrue, and in fact, police want you to report missing persons as soon as you know they’re missing. Or consider the CSI Effect, where jurors expect explicit forensic evidence, and weigh it more heavily than other forms of evidence.2

We Can Do It!

I’m not suggesting pregnant women are helpless or babies can’t be resilient. My wife went to work up until the day she gave birth to our daughter. But she’s a PE teacher, not a warrior queen, so neither of them were in any real danger. And she did need extra help when our daughter was a newborn.

What I am saying is that the way we portray mothers and babies affects the way we think about them in real life. Babies need protection and pregnant mothers need assistance. It’s just the way the world is. Saying otherwise, even in sci-fi or fantasy settings, can lead to mothers feeling undue pressure to perform feats they’re not capable of, and the rest of us to not feel compelled to give the aid they need.

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I’m happy that a popular movie, Sinners, actually seems to be the front runner. It’s exactly the sort of big-budget crowd-pleaser I’ve been advocating for for years.

Of course, that might not be why the Academy gave it 16 nominations…

Speaking of racial politics, my recent post on House of the Dragon got some nice responses that bear addressing, but first, some self promotion…

Mark Your Calendar

A short film I’ve been working on for… a long while is finally available on my other Substack, but only for paying customers. Everyone else will have to wait a couple of weeks. It’s a romcom, so appropriately, it’ll premier on Valentine’s Day. Click on the link and set a reminder to join us on the live stream!

A Reply to the Replies

In response to my post about the race-bending of House Velaryon in House of the Dragon, pointed me to his article Racebending—What It Is and Why It Should End.

He does put forth a thorough and forceful argument against “race-bending.”

Racebending isn’t just an arbitrarily taboo practice. Nor is it some potentially permissible tool to ham-fistedly force diversity into a narrative. It’s very much predicated on pernicious ideas about identity and groups. As we established above, many defenders of racebending think that certain groups don’t have meaningful identities at all, and that it’s therefore fine to racebend them.

This reminds me a bit of Hamilton. Every major production uses “colorblind” casting… with the exception of King George. At least so far, from Broadway to the West End to touring companies, the founding fathers are a Colors of Benetton ad, but the villain is always a white guy.

That being said, I do think Quinn overstates his case in parts. Which is understandable, because he’s pushing back against what seems to be intractable cultural momentum. You gotta push hard if you want the pendulum to swing back. But I have some minor points of disagreement.

“Best actor for the job? There are countless actors of all ethnicities who are equally talented.”

This argument implies that there is a dearth of available people to fit these parts, when anyone who’s spent any time in a casting call or in pre-production knows the exact opposite is true. A film like Logan needed a pre-teen actress who spoke English and Spanish, could do stunt work, and who looked like she could plausibly be Hugh Jackman’s daughter. They spent months auditioning dozens of little girls—they had options! Let’s stop with the disingenuousness.

I want to contest this a little, and stand up for small productions. A big superhero movie has options, but an indie film doesn’t always have the time or money to continue searching. You have to make do with the cast you have access to.

And to be perfectly fair, to counter my own counterargument, the producers and I did do exactly what Quinn suggests on Other Halves. Kelly Morr and I had written all of the parts with no particular races in mind, to leave our casting options as open as possible. In the end, we wound up with five white actors, a mixed race actress, and an Asian actress.

But a little before production began, the Asian actress backed out. Suddenly, in this movie about a tech startup set in San Francisco, we only had half an Asian character. It just didn’t make sense. So to replace her, we had to go back through our casting videos to find another Asian actress.1 We did eventually, and it turned out for the best.

But it was a real hassle, and I hesitate to make it a requirement except under specific circumstances like ours.

Quinn goes on—

Since many incredibly skilled actors of all ethnicities exist, the reality is that good ones are always overlooked, it’s a necessary reality when casting is a subjective art in itself. It’s also true with almost any job in most industries.

Here I think he contradicts himself. Because casting is inherently subjective, we have to allow for racebending, at least when it’s done in good faith. Once again, I point to The Shawshank Redemption. If it weren’t for colorblind casting, we would’ve missed out on one of the greatest performances of all time.

I don’t agree with it 100%, but I still highly recommend you read the full article over at the —

Journal of Free Black Thought

Racebending—What It Is and Why It Should End

Race and media…

Read more

a year ago · 27 likes · 32 comments · Free Black Thought

Crude Knight

This next bit is very vulgar. Mom, if you’re reading this, skip this section. Seriously.

The comment sections to The Worst Cut in Knight of the Seven Kingdoms seemed to agree with me that the intended meaning of the poop cut didn’t work the pilot. There’s still not one person who read it as intended, as far as I’ve been able to discern.

Most people just thought it was a gross way to start an episode. And, well, it happened again in the second episode—

pointed me to an interview with the showrunner—

I felt bad for Ser Arlan at some point. He was the only person who's ever looked out for Dunk and really stuck with Dunk. And he died on a muddy road in the middle of nowhere, was buried without ceremony, and now Dunk is going around trying to find somebody who just even remembers him — people that he served for, people that he bled for, these knights and these lords. They can't even remember his name. I felt the need to give him his one special thing, to channel a little Boogie Nights, I suppose.

This time, I think the issue is that the flashbacks don’t appear to be lying or even misleading in any way. I don’t think anyone took them to be Duncan’s rose-tinted vision of the past. The scenes just seem to depict literally what happened. Especially in the absence of Dunk himself, I didn’t get the sense that this was his view of his hero Arlan. Maybe that’s just me. If you’re watching AKotSK, what did you think?

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I can’t wait to see what crude imagery comes before the title of episode 3.

And to be fair, it can be helpful to identify techniques used by the greats in the past, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you step behind a camera.

The flip side is, having this glossary of technical jargon in your head can fool you into thinking you know stuff you don’t know, make you believe in theory that doesn’t function in practice.

Soviet Montage

In the early days of cinema, the primary American school of thought was that film captured reality as it was. Even in fictional narratives, Yankee directors sought verisimilitude, reproducing the real world on the screen, while keeping their filmmaking technique as invisible as possible. You can contrast this with the German Expressionists, who externalized internal conflict with lighting, set design, and innovative camera angles.

Russian filmmakers took a different tack entirely. To them, film was less about the composition and content of a shot, as the interaction of the shots themselves. They would experiment with juxtapositions to create meaning between shots that otherwise didn’t exist within shots, in what eventually came to be known as “Soviet montage.”

The most famous such experiment was carried about by Lev Kuleshov. He filmed a shot of a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a beautiful woman reclined on a couch. Between each image, he cut in a shot of Ivan Mosjoukine, staring into the camera with a neutral expression. According to legend, viewers believed they could read into his expression hunger, sadness, and desire, depending on the alternating images shown.

You can watch it for yourself—

I don’t know about you, but to me, this is unconvincing. It appears to be another example of folk film history, where filmmakers greatly exaggerate the effect their movies had on the audience. Like the famous “Arrival of a Train” incident—the first audiences were (supposedly) terrified that a train would crash through the screen. This almost certainly didn’t happen.

That being said, the Kuleshov Effect is real. Hitchcock, the great storyteller, explains it in his own words, with himself as an example—

Notice that he doesn’t have a neutral expression. It may be slightly ambiguous, but it’s not neutral. What this demonstrates is that, yes, context matters, but so does the actor’s performance.

Which brings me to the latest television series in the Song of Ice and Fire franchise, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

The Poop Cut

In the pilot episode, Duncan (the protagonist) buries the knight he had squired for his entire life. Unsure of what to do with himself now that he no longer has a father figure telling him what to do, Dunk1 notices the dead man’s sword. He picks it up, realizing that he, too, could become a knight. The heroic theme from the original Game of Thrones swells on the soundtrack, the camera pushes in, and then this happens…

According to series series co-creator Ira Parker:

Like so many of us, when we have those feelings of greatness that call to something else and it’s going to be really difficult and challenging, we are soon then hit with the reality of doing that. The dream falls away and we get butterflies in our stomach, that feeling of nervousness, which Dunk then finds himself very quickly in an unheroic, crouched position.

That’s the ultimate call. That’s what he aspires towards. But he’s not that yet. He’s not the hero. He’s not capable of that yet, and he knows that inside of himself. So that’s why his body reacts the way that it does.

It’s that last line that gets me. In another interview, Parker said, “The reality of doing this, how difficult it is, how scary it is — that turns his guts to water. Because he’s not a hero yet, you know? All we’re trying to say here is that Dunk is not a hero yet. He’s just a nervy kid with a nervous stomach.”

So the showrunner is attempting to use the Kuleshov Effect to show how nervous Dunk is. Cut from the brave hero to the nervous pooper. The juxtaposition should lead the audience to conclude the one causes the other. Except…

It doesn’t.

I’ve talked to a lot of people about the show, I’ve read a lot of discussions online. I’ve yet to come across a single human being who understood that was the intent. Just about everyone interpreted the cut as a joke, somewhere between simple bathos2 and disrespectfully (and literally) shitting on the legacy of Game of Thrones.

The problem, I think, is simply a matter of performance. Duncan just doesn’t look that scared; he certainly doesn’t look like he has a nervous stomach. He’s slightly unconfident, at worst. So instead of encouraging the the audience to seek a logical connection between the shots, it reads as a simple time cut.

It’s Not Logical

Scenes aren’t clearly demarcated in film and television; the audience has to infer when a change of time or location has taken place. With the now-infamous poop cut, viewers just thought one scene had ended and another had begun. (And it should be noted in that scene, Dunk still doesn’t look like he’s anxious; he looks like he’s pooping.)

Again, the Kuleshov Effect is real. Audiences do look for a connection between shots, but most of the time, for most cuts, it’s merely the passage of time—whether we’re watching simple continuity editing, or POV shots, or even scene transitions.

That’s the problem with this opening to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The writer, director, and editor all had this concept in their head: Duncan got so scared, he nearly shit himself. But the audience never made that leap. They didn’t look for a deeper, emotional, character-driven connection. They just saw a poop joke and moved on.

It’s not uncommon for a filmmaker to have a great idea that just doesn’t make it across to the audience. It’s why we have test screenings. not to blunt the artistic vision, but rather to resolve issues we didn’t even know we had.

And just to clarify, I’m really enjoying AKotSK so far, and having read the books, expect to continue liking the series. But every movie, show, piece of art in general has it’s flaws.

But maybe it’s just me. What did you think of the nervous poop?

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But sometimes, occasionally, there’s an actual narrative reason to change a character’s appearance. Today I’m not only going to tell you about one of those times, but also a precedent that was set nearly 60 years earlier.

Size Matters Not

When it comes to adaptations, comic books are different than… book-books because they’re a visual medium. It’s not just a mental image that every reader pictures slightly differently; we can just look at the page. That’s what the character looks like.

In the X-Men comics, Wolverine is a short king at 5’3”, while Hugh Jackman stands almost a foot taller, 6’2”. But nobody, not even the prickliest, pickiest comic book nerd cared because Jackman perfectly embodied the character’s attitude and style.

The reverse is true with Jack Reacher. The titular character is 6’5” in the novels, but Tom Cruise, who played him in two films, is a mere 4’7”.1

This isn’t just a matter of aesthetics; it’s integral to the character. In the books, Reacher often has difficulty blending in and going undercover because of his bulk. In the first of the Tom Cruise films,2 he does this…

Alan Ritchson could never get away with that on the TV version of Reacher.

He’s huge, and it affects the the story at a very basic level. (Although he’s not cartoonishly large, like Goliath in the David animated movie.)

Changing a character's height usually only gets noticed by the superfans. But there is another immutable characteristic that, when changed, will almost always get critics and the general public talking...

A Touchy Subject

Race is a… complex topic in America.

So it should be unsurprising that race-bending a character can sometimes illicit strong emotions, regardless of which race the character was in the source material and what the actor portraying them is. It can be viewed as anything from culturally insensitive whitewashing…3

…to shoving identity politics down the audience’s collective throat…4

…all depending on the viewer’s perception of the author’s intent.

This isn’t a new phenomenon; in the 1990s, it was called “colorblind casting.” Back then, as long as the best actor was chosen, few people minded. And Morgan Freeman is always the best actor in any movie he’s in.

Unfortunately today, some in the audience get upset at colorblind casting and/or race bending no matter what, even if there is a sound, narrative reason for it. Which brings me to House of the Dragon, and the decision to cast black actors as family members of House Velaryon.

For a quick primer on all these funny names, follow this footnote.5

The Old, the True, the Brave

The Song of Ice and Fire franchise6 is based on Medieval England, and so naturally author George R.R. Martin describes most of the characters as white. On the other hand, the Velaryon family hails from a distant continent, which is known to be much more multiracial. So who’s to say they can’t be black?

I mean, other than the books of course, which describe Corlys Velaryon as having “skin as pale as winter snow” and the characteristic “silver hair and purple eyes” of Old Valyria.

Steve Toussaint, who plays Corlys in the series, looks like this—

Let’s be honest, he does look awesome, and Toussaint is great in the role. But changing the race of the family patriarch has effects on the story downstream, because central to the plot of House of the Dragon is the parentage of certain children.

Inglorious Bastards

Bastardy isn’t just a question of marital fidelity (although that’s an important part of it); it’s also a matter of inheritance. Women have always been confident their children were their own, but prior to the invention of Maury Povich, men had to take it on faith that they really were the fathers of their children.

For certain men, the question always lingered, whether they were working hard to feed, clothe, and house someone else’s kids, and would those kids inherit all they saved up? This issue loomed much larger for royalty, when matters of state hinged on the answer. The difference in certainty is why male and female fidelity were historically regarded as different.7

And so, heredity has always been vital to the Song of Ice and Fire. In the book (and first season of the series) Game of Thrones, it’s a major plot point that all of the Baratheon kids have dark hair, up until the current generation. Robert Baratheon’s children are all blond, like his wife and, ugh, brother-in-law.8 Essentially, that’s how hand-of-the-king Ned Stark figures out the kids aren’t really Robert’s, but bastards and incest babies.9 The blond hair implied they weren’t Baratheons.

As much as I liked Game of Thrones, especially in the early seasons, I have to admit this particular story point is… kinda dumb. Sometimes kids have different color hair. Even in a fantasy world with magic and dragons, that’s just how genes work sometimes.

The House of the Dragon casting department solved this problem in their series, with a little inspiration from, of all places, The Dick Van Dyke Show…10

When Appearance Matters

Laenor Velaryon, son of Corlys, looks like this—

His wife Rhaenyra Targaryen and “his” kids look like this—

Returning to the start of this post, the only thing harder than casting actors who look like the source material is casting child actors who look like the actors playing their parents.

It’s one of those things that we, as viewers, just tend to accept; if the kids don’t resemble the adults, we understand it to be an artistic compromise, prioritizing acting talent over appearance. The unfortunate byproduct of this suspension of disbelief is that it’s no longer “obvious” to the audience when a child isn’t the legitimate offspring of the marriage. If none of the child actors particularly look like their fictional parents, who’s to say which are bastards and which aren’t?

By introducing obvious racial differences between House Velaryon and the rest of Westeros, the question of legitimacy is immediately, visually obvious (which is useful in a visual medium). Aegon Targaryen spells it out quite clearly—

“Just look at them.” Everyone knows, not just the characters but the audience. Those pale kids do not belong to Laenor Velaryon, and it’s that visibly obvious fact on which the whole story turns.

Crazy as it might seem, this exact story device was used nearly 60 years earlier…

Dick’s Bastard?

Yes, it’s a domestic sitcom and not an epic fantasy, but the writers of the Dick Van Dyke Show had to solve a similar narrative problem—the question of paternity—and used a similar solution.

Due to a series of comic mishaps (nurses switching up paperwork, gifts delivered to the wrong delivery room), Rob Petrie has come to the conclusion that the hospital switched his baby with another family’s. Coincidentally, the Peters family gives him a call—because of the aforementioned misplaced gifts—and offers to bring them over. Rob plans to tell them about the baby swap, after he convinces his wife Laura that the baby they brought home isn’t theirs.

The whole episode is available for free on YouTube, but here’s the climactic scene—

Unlike HotD, DVDS couldn’t leave the possibility of bastardy hanging over Ritchie for the rest of the series. The writers had to make sure the audience knew and accepted the baby was legitimately Rob and Laura’s, immediately, decisively, and (hopefully) comically. I’d say they succeeded. The episode, “That’s My Boy,” is still remembered as a seminal moment in television history because racial stereotypes weren’t used as a punchline. Skin color served only to resolve the plot in a simple and conclusive way. The Petries were white, the Peters were black, and that’s it.

But it’s also funny. Apparently, it was longest laugh break on the series (they really recorded in front of a live audience), but it had to be cut short for broadcast.

A White Lie

Okay, so I exaggerated a little bit. The House of the Dragon writers probably weren’t “inspired” by The Dick Van Dyke Show. Although, wouldn’t it be hilarious if they were? I have no idea if the producers of either show intended to make a political statement (feel free to argue about that int he comments).

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What I find fascinating is that two very different series, separated by more than half a century, solved a narrative problem with the same creative casting choice. Colorblind/race-bending/whatever-you-want-to-call-it casting doesn’t have to be a STATEMENT. Sometimes, it’s simply a bit of visual storytelling.

Of course, not everything I show her is quite so low brow. We’ve also watched 2001: A Space Odyssey together. For no reason other the my daughter’s and my own amusement, I mashed those together—

Imperfect Recall

Sometimes childhood favorites don’t turn out to be quite the way you remember them…

2001 is as good as you remember, though. And if you’ve ever wondered how they did all those upside-down scenes, you should watch this video essay I made a while ago:

Cartoons vs Animation

Some people use “cartoon” and “animation” interchangeably, and that’s usually okay. Trent Horn, a Catholic apologist and cultural commentator, draws a distinction though. Animation is the medium, whereas cartoon implies exaggeration, usually for comic effect. Because of this, he has a small problem with the recent film David, specifically it’s portrayal of the biblical figure Goliath.

About seven minutes into the video, he mentions my friend ’s Christmas movie, The Star. Horn uses it as an example of a cartoony film that is nevertheless respectful of the Holy Family. Basically “the Nativity story crossed the Secret Life of Pets.”

Tim was happy with this interpretation. He told me, “Our tonal reference was Muppet Christmas Carol, which walks that line so deftly. Michael Caine’s performance is totally committed and genuine amongst all the insanity.”

I interviewed Tim on my podcast a long time ago. Here’s a clip about his Oscar nomination:

Christian Cartoons?

In contrast to Tim’s movie, Horn also mentioned that doesn’t approve of VeggieTales, because the series takes Biblical figures themselves and turns them into cartoon characters. It’s an interesting take.

For another contrarian take, read Justin ’s article, “The vegetables on VeggieTales are not Christian.”

Kuiper's blog

The vegetables on VeggieTales are not Christian

Every so often, someone goes viral for observing that in the VeggieTales canon, none of the vegetables are Christian, the latest being Isaac King…

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8 months ago · 170 likes · 22 comments · Kuiper

The follow-up comments are equally interesting:

Kuiper's blog

Highlights from the comments on "The Vegetables on VeggieTales aren't Christian"

[Original post here…

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8 months ago · 35 likes · 5 comments · Kuiper

Put Away Childish Things

Are they overthinking movies meant for kids? CS Lewis didn’t think so.

agrees, as explained in their post, “How to Awaken Your Imagination.”

The Culturist

How to Awaken Your Imagination

If your childhood was anything like mine, you often found yourself lost in Narnia: the stories that took you beyond the four walls of your bedroom, through the wardrobe in the attic, and into an exhilarating world of magic, prophecy, and mythic beasts…

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8 months ago · 351 likes · 13 comments · The Culturist

And be sure to check out ’s “The Furry Folk Horror of Watership Down.” I’ve read the book twice (on my own years ago and with Amelia fairly recently), but I’m now very interested in the film version.

Agent of Weird: Exploring the Write Fantastic

The Furry Folk Horror of Watership Down (1978)

Presented with what was ostensibly a cartoon about talking bunny rabbits, the British Board of Film Classification declared in 1978, “Animation removes the realistic gory horror in the occasional scenes of violence and bloodshed… while the film may move children emotionally during the film’s duration, it could not seriously trouble them…

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2 years ago · 55 likes · 23 comments · Alec Worley

And speaking of weird English artifacts, here’s a funny video about title changes between US and American versions of kids’ movies—

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond…

Both Sides

The YouTube algorithm randomly served up two videos from a comedy channel called “Softcore History.” (Presumably a play on Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast.)

I was surprised at how deftly they teased both sides of the American political divide, which is extremely difficult…

Wisdom of Crowds

Finally, on the subject of comedy, apparently “crowdwork” has become the latest fad in standup. Here’s a great example—

It can be fun, but this video from Paul Platt explains why it can be a problem.

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Share Too Much Film School

I had always assumed that this was a matter of etiquette. Actors are, after all, human beings and artists, who want to participate creatively and not ventriloquist dummies with the director’s hand stuffed up their... backside.

But there’s actually a little more to it than that.

Seven Words, Seven Meanings

It’s amazing how much intonation and emphasis can change the meaning of a sentence. There are a few famous examples to demonstrate this principle, but my favorite variation is this: “I didn’t say she stole your money.”

Probably seems straightforward, but consider which word you stress—

• I didn’t say she stole your money. [Someone else said that.]

• I didn’t say she stole your money. [The most straightforward interpretation of the sentence, with extra oomph.]

• I didn’t say she stole your money. [I merely implied it.]

• I didn’t say she stole your money. [Someone else stole it.]

• I didn’t say she stole your money. [She merely borrowed it.]

• I didn’t say she stole your money. [She stole someone else’s.]

• I didn’t say she stole your money. [She stole something else of yours.]

In isolation, the sentence could be read any of these seven ways. In the context of a scene or a script, the meaning would likely be more clear. But even so, it’s the actor’s job to make that meaning clear.

And it’s the director’s job to make sure the actor makes that meaning clear. Which is why so many are tempted to give a line reading.

Theory vs Practice

Despite the well-known “rule,” every director I’ve ever worked with/for has, at some point in a long shoot, given a line reading. I’ve done it myself. Hell, I’ve seen actors ask for a line reading.

So I figured it wasn’t a big deal, so long as you observed the norms of professional courtesy in general, until I witnessed first hand the real problem with line readings.

I was working on a commercial, and the ad copy was complex and dense. The voice over actress has having a hard time getting her mouth around it. The director was getting frustrated, and eventually said, “No, no, emphasize jousting, not raccoon. Like this...”1

The actress still couldn’t get it right, and we ended up just doing 15 takes with the intention of Frankensteining it together in the edit bay. It was only when playing it back that I finally understood what her problem was. The script was full of technical jargon, and the actress literally didn’t understand what she was saying. She couldn’t put the emphasis in the right place because she really didn’t know what the words meant.

The issue is that the director knows what she wants to see/hear, but the actor has to start internally, and then externalize the intention. It’s like how a painter has to start with sketches that the museum patron will never actually see under layers of paint. A painter can’t start on the outer layer, and an actor can’t begin with emphasis and work downward towards meaning.

Exception to the Rule

Very few filmmaking rules are immutable, as I’ve said before. Once you’re sure the actor understands the intention of a line, but it still doesn’t sound quite right, sometimes a line reading is just the nudge they need to get them going in the right direction.

After all, every seen, every line, has nuance. There’s very likely some hidden subtext that you, the director, aren’t even aware of, until you say the line out loud. That’s something a good actor can pick up on. Giving a line reading, even a “bad version” read, can help.

You just shouldn’t start there. They’re a last resort, to help color a performance, not create it. Line readings can be a tool in the tool box, but they need to be kept in the bottom drawer.

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Post Script

Today’s post is an addendum to my previous posts on the best and the worst directing advice I’ve ever gotten. It didn’t quite fit in either, so I made it it’s own piece.

And if you hadn’t notice, the thumbnail for each of these three posts are all from the same movie, Living in Oblivion, a 90s indie flick about the making of a 90s indie flick. If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend giving it a watch. It’s very meta (which you know I love), but it’s also one of the most accurate portrayals of a film set I’ve ever seen.

One of my favorite director jokes is:

How many directors does it take to screw in a light bulb?

I don’t know, what do you think?

Everything I wrote in part 1 about directing actors, the crew absolutely hates. Responding to a question with, ”What do you think?” elicits nothing but eye rolls from anyone below the line.

The crew are artists,1 but they also tend to think hierarchically. The camera PA answers to the 2nd camera assistant who answers to the 1st AC who answers to the operator who answers to the cinematographer who answers to the director. They want clear orders that they can execute practically.

Put more bluntly, they want to do their job and go home. What they don’t want to do is stand around talking about their feelings.

Crew ≠ Cast

Now, you could say that that’s a bad attitude for the crew to have. You might want them to take ownership of the end product, to engage with the material and bring their own creativity to it.

There’s two reasons this isn’t going to happen the way it usually does with actors. First, they’re not getting paid enough to deal with your bullshit. Sorry. Anyone who’s been around long enough to be a department head (or even a first) knows how much this industry runs on bullshit. Their primary goal is earning their paycheck and getting enough union days to qualify for insurance.

The second reason, again differing from the cast, is that they know they’ll never truly get credit or recognition. The actor’s faces are right up there on the screen, and the director gets the “film by” credit.

So when the DP2 asks where you want the camera, and you say, “What do you think?”, you’re pushing against every instinct, natural inclination, and layers of hard-won cynicism. They’re not going to feel like you’re inviting them to participate in the filmmaking process; they’re going to feel like you have no idea what the heck you’re doing. Worse, they’re very likely to work independent of, or even against, your actual artistic intentions.

The best way to handle the crew, both for their comfort and your sanity, is to invert your method of dealing with the cast. Start with clear, firm direction. “I want the camera here. Put a 35mm lens on.”

Then tell them why. “It gives the character room to move around, without having to cut.”

Only then do you invite them into the process: “Unless you think there’s a better way of doing that.”

Ask for their input on your plan, but tell them the plan first. They very likely have better ideas. They certainly will be able to see practical issues, in terms of time and expense, that you wouldn’t think of yourself.

And a director has to actually be open to the crew’s suggestions. If you shoot down every idea, eventually they’ll stop contributing. You’ll be functionally on your own, with a crew of automata that follow your instructions to the letter, but contribute nothing and offer no help in avoiding pitfalls in your blindspots.

The flip side of this coin is, you have to know when to push back against the crew’s pushback, like with my elevator shot in Other Halves. I had to insist, no, we’re doing it this way. And now it’s one of my favorite shots in the movie.

An Officer and a Gentle Parent

In short, the crew is not the cast, the cast is not the crew.

When dealing with crew, a director must give them a firm vision, and be open to their contributions (and corrections). With cast, that same director has to be more gentle. Start with their interpretation, and guide them, with gentle questioning, towards your vision.

It’s not always easy. Sometimes you have to switch gears instantaneously and continuously, like when at a wardrobe fitting with an actor and the costume designer.

Just remember, an actor is using their body and emotions as their medium, and they need your approval, not unlike a parent/child relationship. The crew are soldiers on a battlefield, ready to follow orders and charge once more unto the breach...for the right commander.

That’s my experience, anyway. How about yours?

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