Vanity Fair
© James C. Hess
As some readers of this effort know when I am not entertaining, enlightening, enraging, infuriating, and antagonizing with criticism and reviews of films and movies I can be found writing fiction in a variety of forms and styles, mediums and formats. As some readers of this effort know when I am not writing fiction I am involved in trying to determine why it is, increasingly, writers and would-be writers are not apparently capable of writing viable and receiveable stories audiences want.
Over the years, since I first began this particular crusade, I have compiled a massive laundry list of reasons for why this is, and over the years, when called upon to offer explanation for this particular demise, I have offered over-simplified answers. (Better to not confuse, I suggest, with complexity and hubris when making a case for a given rationale.)
Recently, when asked for an explanation for why it is both the Hollywood Machine and the traditional publishing industry are experiencing what is readily called 'diminishing returns' on respective investments I offered a simple answer:
Apocrypha: That is, producing material based on material--writings, specifically--that are of dubious authenticity. Simply: The making of films and movies from screenplays which carry the concerning disclaimer: 'Based on', 'Adapted from', or 'Inspired by true events'. Such euphemistic conveniences, I suggest, tend to raise justified concerns by those who would pay the price of admission to a film or movie, who want to be entertained, but who, more often than not recently, will meet with dismay and discouragement when they learn what they have witnessed is not what they expected.
Consequently, they decline paying the price of admission to films and movies thereafter. Consequently, the Hollywood Machine and the traditional publishing industry find their coffers reduced, or even bare.
So what to do to address and stem this on-going event of catastrophic proportions?
The over-simplified reply might easily be: Drag those responsible out behind the woodshed and give them the beating of their lives, with the hope doing so might impart some measure of reason and common sense by way of sheer physical brutality.
Of course, such tactics would no doubt be meet with: YOU DID WHAT? and legal action would no doubt result against those inflicting the well-intended blows.
So another course of resolution is required. But that requires a question which many ask and to which there does not seem to be a sufficient answer.
Or is there?
Over the years, since I first started on this particular crusade I have compiled a large number of possible solutions to the impending problem now facing the Hollywood Machine and the traditional publishing industry, and find, through a process of elimination, there is only one viable solution: Look to the past to find success in the future.
