[bexsella]

>The writing for new shows is predicable and boring. Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same

I would argue this is a symptom of the money men exerting too much control over entertainment. Everything has to be safe and neutered, every investment has to be as sure as possible. This isn't down to writers, there's interesting writing going on, you just won't see it come out of the big studios unless it's a smaller subsidiary.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Eventually the money men become so risk-averse that they give up on originality entirely. Hence the endless stream of remakes, adaptations and formulaic additions to existing series.

[slg]

It is always the businesspeople at fault for it. Creatives don't naturally want to create bland and uninteresting work any more than software developers want to naturally build CRUD apps for ad-tech companies. The employees go where the businesspeople and their money lead because working class folks need to make a living and most Hollywood creatives are working class.

[atchoo]

> Creatives don't naturally want to create bland and uninteresting work

Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness. Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such. Once directors get the "make whatever you want" power it's not always a happy outcome. Same thing with authors - they get famous with a tightly edited 300 pages and use that to release a 1200 page barely edited brick.

Sometimes the balance of the two really works - the money man is the only representation of the audience and can cut out that nonsensical 45 minute dream sequence. I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.

[slg]

There are of course good businessperson led movies and bad businessperson led movies. The same is true for creative led movies. Maybe the "explore the liminal space of boredom" movie is bad, but that description certainly sounds more interesting than a bad version of Transformers 7 or whatever.

Creative led projects are at least personal and that gives them a unique quality even if the project is an overall failure.

>I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.

Editors would generally be considered creatives and not businesspeople. There is also no such thing as "an objective source of improvement" when it comes to art.

[mschuster91]

> Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such.

If there is a project that literally and perfectly matches your description, it is "Paint Drying", a 2016 protest film against censorship and classification mandates in the UK [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Drying

[ghaff]

I generally am not a big fan of the CGI-dominated action film catering to international audiences. But I'm mostly not a huge fan of art house fare either.

[pessimizer]

> Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness.

This is what happens when the money men also think of themselves or their buddies as creatives. Extremely high production values on extremely stupid movies.

[lacrimacida]

It’s normal to have creative flops too, but generally the landscape looks much better and healthier than now. And some of those dreamscape flops are likely low to mid budget or self funded projects.

[thworp]

Hah! They might be low-paid and on a salary, but they snub their noses at the "working class" and share none of their values or beliefs.

[cafard]

HN is definitely where I go to get a finger on the pulse of the working class.

[shoubidouwah]

Add a /s so nobody's confused. That's inclusivity!

[JimtheCoder]

Well, most of HN probably does interact with the working class often, seeing as everyone here loves public transit...

[Timon3]

How many of them have you talked to or worked with? The ones I know don't "snub their noses at the 'working class' and share none of their value of beliefs". But I have a feeling that you're not looking at the whole working class, only a subset.

[suoduandao2]

Anyone who complains about “toxic fandom”, particularly for a franchise they inherited (which includes all of marvel and Lucas film) is thumbing their nose, you can call it what you like but the behaviour is evident. It used to be, when an adaptation was bad, writers and execs would blame each other and audiences would sorta side with writers. Then game of thrones proved it was possible to make an adaptation that was both faithful and good cinema, so now writers and execs blame audiences when they fall short.

[Timon3]

> Anyone who complains about “toxic fandom”, particularly for a franchise they inherited (which includes all of marvel and Lucas film) is thumbing their nose, you can call it what you like but the behaviour is evident.

A bunch of people who didn't inherit a franchise also complain about "toxic fandom". What's the problem with saying that? Do creatives have to butter up their fans?

I know the cases you're referencing, and I don't disagree with you that "toxic fandom" was a fake complaint in those specific cases. But it's not the writers who use this to deflect from criticism, it's the investors behind the scenes. The writers (the ones that are part of the normal work force) want to write good stuff and create good entertainment.

But, say, the actress of Rose from Star Wars? She has every right to complain about a toxic fandom. Christ, they sent her death threats because she performed as asked for by the studio!

[pjc50]

Some of the fandoms are toxic, although that's more an internet/social media issue and those involved tend to be teenagers more than "working class".

> Then game of thrones proved it was possible to make an adaptation that was both faithful and good cinema

.. up to the critical point where they couldn't be faithful because GRRM hadn't written the ending, so they wrote one which everyone got mad about.

[danaris]

If you'd been paying attention to what the writers and actors on strike right now are saying—including some of the A-list ones who are genuinely quite rich and famous—you'd see that, at least as a class, they do not, in fact, snub their noses at the working class.

The idea that Hollywood actors and writers are arrogant elitists who look down on "regular" working folks is, to a large extent, propaganda, specifically intended to destroy solidarity in moments like these.

[kristopolous]

Reminds me of a movie from the 1960s, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, I was watching recently.

I couldn't help but notice how the wild artistic risks taken in the movie would likely never happen today unless the artists paid out of pocket for both the production and distribution

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Na1h7ozW9VQ

Putting money behind stuff like this is dead.

[toyg]

Actually Munchausen was remade by Terry Gilliam in 1988. The same Gilliam in 2009 made The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, which was also pretty wild.

> the wild artistic risks taken in the movie would likely never happen today

Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan would disagree. And there are plenty of brave films out there, just not necessarily from big Hollywood studios.

[jwestbury]

Not really a remake, though -- both were based on the 18th century German book.

[kristopolous]

You really see the two versions comparable in execution?

Here it is in full if you'd like to compare https://archive.org/details/the-fabulous-baron-munchausen

[_trampeltier]

Also Monty Python. I think it never would be possible today to release such movies to theaters.

[ctippett]

Funny that you mention Monty Python, they almost had to cancel the production of The Life of Brian since their original financier was apprehensive about the the film's content making fun of religion.

George Harrison of Beatles fame ended up funding the movie, I believe almost entirely out of his own pocket. This was back in the 70s.

[angus-prune]

The same was true for the holy grail too. Other financiers included (iirc) led zeppelin and other British rock greats.

The top marginal rate of income tax was ~90% and this heavily encouraged investments like this. It meant that there was more space for creative risk taking as well as more commercial/industrial capital investment.

[pjc50]

The Beatles funded some very weird stuff. Ringo Starr in The Magic Christian is probably the best example, an extremely on-the-nose set of satirical sketches.

[blarg1]

Recently they were doing a Life of Brian play, where they wanted to cut out a certain scene.

[dspillett]

There was no one suggesting that the scene but cut, it was a clickbait-like appeal to the reactionary press to get some extra awareness of the project out there. And it worked.

It wasn't “someone has suggested/demanded it be removed, and we have refused” but “if someone did suggest/demand it we wouldn't”.

[flyinghamster]

Monty Python was only ever possible with something like the BBC. There's no way a commercial network would have taken a risk with it, and even more so in the USA. Its popularity in the States began underground, with PBS affiliates getting the ball rolling in the 1970s. There's no way that major networks would have run the show, even in a late-night slot.

Back then, the short late-night voiceover, "Portions of the following program may be unsuitable for younger or more sensitive viewers," was the hallmark of Quality TV.

[rob74]

Yeah, over the last years (at least according to my impression) 90% of movies have been either remakes, sequels or comic/video game adaptations...

[HillRat]

Studios are essentially big piles of cash to fund movies; rights to scripts, stories and IPs to make movies; and contracts to distribute movies (and, since everything old is new again, they now also own streaming services rather than movie theaters). So it makes economic sense to lock down as much IP as possible that can then be used to generate an endless torrent of remakes, sequels, adaptations, secondary media, adaptations of secondary media, remakes of adaptations of secondary media, and so on; much more cost-effective than hunting for new screenplays in the slush pile, and much more comforting to the investors to see the next two years of movies on a PowerPoint slide at the shareholder meeting, even if you have no idea what those movies are beyond a title and some executive producer's vague plan.

[detourdog]

I'm stuck watching old black and white movies. I find it easier to escape into a forgotten past full of previous cultural symbols.

[throwawaysleep]

They print money though. That is what the customer has demonstrated they want.

[uoaei]

Very often the money printing is more a function of how many eyeballs you can get your product in front of, and reducing friction of consumption to a minimum, rather than their real preferences in a flat hierarchy of all the options out there.

"Market logic" is very easy to misunderstand. For instance, do people in food deserts really want cheez-its and ice cream for dinner? Or do they just not have sufficient access to healthy options that they prefer?

[juujian]

The only thing that baffles me about that is that there are so many people who want to watch that.

[dspillett]

Sometimes it is as much because there isn't something better so people default. And there often isn't much better because it is more financially rewarding to get a “not bad” reaction from a large audience than it is to produce something that only appeals to a smaller one.

Sometimes people actively want something that allows them to, even requires them to, shut off parts of their brain.

[watwut]

I don't think it is entirely. Even with safe and neutered, writing could have been much better then it is. The butchering that happened in Witcher or Game of Thrones was purely on writers. It is not just money men.

It is that contemporary screen writing is unable to engage with characters and complexity outside of, like, 5 stereotypical tropes. That they internalized set of rules about how to simplify things and just can't comprehend any slightly realistic psychology of adults or set of events.

The money men did a lot of damage and are the ones who set the rules. But the bad writing we see now is because writers insist on cproducing bad writing even having choice. Maybe all the good writers left, maybe it is something else, but they screw it up even when having freedom.

[drunkenmagician]

Yes, this exactly - the quality of writing on a lot of shows these days is absolutely abysmal. Not just dialogue, the plots - so much 'tropes copying', pointless or stupid 'reveals' or just plain dumb twists to make things edgy and exciting. I feel like the average IQ in Hollywood writing departments as dropped significantly in the last 20 years ... sad

[lacrimacida]

Well, it could get a level of magnitude worse with AI. And Im not necessarily blaming AI but how the industry will recycle the successful tropes and cheap out on everything else.

[nottorp]

Netflix series are already indistinguishable from each other. I don't think AI can make it any worse.

[mst]

One could argue that there's a selection effect during the up and coming phase that means a different subset of writers are the ones who make it to the top these days.

(I hear tell that as adaptions go The Expanse was relatively well done, though I haven't watched it myself as yet)

[watwut]

Personally, I liked the series. I never read the books, so I do not know whether it was faithful or not.

[ryandrake]

Another problem is that everyone is aiming for the broadest international market, so any dialog must be easily translate-able to Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, and so on. No more clever wordplay, double entendres, puns, regional dialects... It all has to be vanilla and the themes need to be simple and straightforward (not to mention politically uncontroversial) so it can be palatable across the entire globe.

[jbm]

Was this ever REALLY a problem?

I've seen Japanese subtitles before (I mean Japanese language subtitles) and almost all subtext is lost regardless. Far worse than the english subtitles on anime.

You might as well make the movie you want, the end result abroad will be bland regardless. The translation issues are just an excuse.

[aikinai]

Agree Japanese subtitles are absolute garbage—I once made the stupid mistake of using Japanese subtitles watching a comedy on a date with someone that didn’t speak English.

However, the dubs are the complete opposite. They pack in a ton of the original subtext and nuance, character quirks, etc, even making new jokes when necessary to convey something similar when the original is impossible. And of course the voice actors are great.

Japanese subtitles being terrible isn’t necessarily a natural state. It seems to just be where things landed in that industry.

[fomine3]

Yeah Japanese sub is too much omitted. It's designed to just understand meaning quickly. People understand emotions from original actors' voice (though I doubt is it precise). Movie on theater can't be paused, so very long annotation like anime fansub isn't possible. Drama translation is done by same culture.

Over the half of people (including many non movie enthusiasts) prefer dub, but sub is very popular in the internet because such people is verbose. I like sub for English (that I can understand a bit and good for learning), dub for the rest.

[red-iron-pine]

125 million Japanese, or 1.4 billion Chinese? No one cares if it translates well in Japan, producers are trying to get that Chinese market.

Ditto for India.

[ctrlp]

Can you recommend interesting "unsafe" shows that, but for the money men, you think would/could be made today? Or are being made but on smaller subsidiaries?

[NovaDudely]

A lot of shows on Adult swim. I have seen many folks that have worked with the network basically say they have near 100% creative control. Mind you it is about 90% animated stuff.

You see absolutely crazy stuff like The Eric Andre show get 6 seasons. A talk show that is basically just out to torment all their guests. 'Off the air' while only a few episode every few years, is much more of an art experimenter than anything you would consider a show, it is wonderful.

Every few months there is something new and twisted that comes along, it feels like Adult swim is that TV studio that the main company complete forgot exists and that head corporate hasn't checked on since the late 90's.

But the budgets also show, there are no million dollar budgets here.

[ctrlp]

What counts as "new and twisted" these days? I guess I'm wondering what sort of thing is being held back from wide audiences because of studio money men rather than just current tastes.

[sandworm101]

The Young Pope. It is new and different. It is edgy and definitely not like other stuff these days. (The young pope, not the new pope which is the second season.) It was made in europe and couldnt be made in north america, not today.

The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. It only existed because of a special relationship with the late show. Without worry about ratings, he did some great stuff that wouldnt get past the moneymen today.

The older seasons of Top Gear. It was wildly popular but got its energy from an old form of "blolky" male-dominated humor that just doesnt fly these days. The Grand Tour continues but is a pale comparision of the previous energy.

Note that all of these are dominated by male protagonists, a rare thing in recent years.

[red-iron-pine]

> The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. It only existed because of a special relationship with the late show. Without worry about ratings, he did some great stuff that wouldnt get past the moneymen today.

Man did he flirt with the beautiful actresses he had on the show.

[sandworm101]

What makes is more, or probably less, creepy is that he was friends with many of their parents. Hollywood is full of family structures.

[OO000oo]

Where to begin? The Criterion Collection pretty much exists to preserve and make such films available.

[mcpackieh]

Haven't they been botching a lot of color grading recently? I've heard they've fallen for the "it's on bluray so it needs to be tinted blue" meme.

[OfSanguineFire]

Two recent Criterion releases that have got criticized for colour grading were the Wong Kar-Wai boxset, and the Kieślowski “Three Colours” 4K re-release. But the Wong Kar-Wai colour grading was the director’s own choice and simply handed over to Criterion, while crew on the Kieślowski pictures claim that the 4K re-release colour grading is more faithful to the original celluloid than the earlier Blu-Ray release.

[OO000oo]

What? That sounds so ridiculous, but I would not be a bit surprised.

[mst]

Modern film colour palettes is why when I saw That Dress breaking the internet my first thought as "you're both wrong, it's teal and orange" and -lolsob-

[detourdog]

The problem with Criterion is that they have no idea how to catalog things or like everyone else they make a Byzantine system for good engagement/enragement.

I believe media should be arranged by at least the following categories. Year Studio Director Genre Country of Origin

After that they can do whatever they want. I hope I"m wrong but I can't do this with iTunes, Netflix, HBO whatever, Criterion, TCM.

Criterion has newer films once they are released to the home market.

Also Criterion just edited "The French Connection" to make it more appropriate for viewers.

[ctrlp]

"more appropriate for viewers" is a funny euphemism for "censored"

[detourdog]

I wanted to capture the absurdity that the original won 5 Academy awards but was dangerous or confusing to the subscribers of Criterion.

[ctrlp]

The Criterion Collection has new films? What I see on their site is only classics. Is there a list of newer movies?

[not_the_fda]

Yes, they have new films under "premieres" and "20th century cinema".

[ctrlp]

https://www.criterionchannel.com/exclusive-streaming-premier...

[OO000oo]

I didn't realize the question was about newer films. My mistake.

[nntwozz]

Primal (basically no dialogue).

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10332508/

[ctrlp]

that has some cool animation and looks like stuff from when I was a kid or comic books, but what is "unsafe" about it? From the clips online it seems like just the sort of thing that can be made today without ruffling any feathers. Is there something controversial about it?

[nntwozz]

No dialogue I think.

[WeylandYutani]

Entertainment is made for money. It wouldn't exist without it.

Nobody is giving 200 million dollars to a director just to break even.

[bambax]

Yes and no. Entertainment is made for money, yes. But many of the best / most original movies are the ones that cost the less.

As the budget increases, more and more people get involved; and decision by committee is a terrible system.