The Do It Yourself Movie?

Because the first movies owed their attraction to little more than the novelty of capturing images on film, no script and, therefore, no writer, was necessary to bring in the crowds.

However as the novelty of simple image wore off and greater sophistication developed in audiences, filmmakers found the need for coherent stories to hold people's attention. Writing for the movies began to blossom from more than a few pages of outline to tight direction of every facet of a movie.

Writers, once taken for little more than a nuisance, began to develop their craft aimed at the silver screen. Many who originally wrote for the stage had to hide their work for movies or risk being ostracized from writing for the theater.

As the craft of putting a movie together developed, moving from one reel shorts to full length films, the writer began to get a regular salary, two hundred dollars a week in 1904, a fortune for the time, which was not uncommon. Producers were glad to pay this sum, because the scripts were made for movies that people wanted to see.

Producers were pleased that writing and writers brought in crowds and money, but not all movies made money and no one seemed to be able to predict which movie would be a hit and which would be a flop. It isn't clear who originated the ideas of having the audience choose which subjects they would like to see on the screen or having them choose the ending of a movie they are watching, a phenomenon brought on by the interactive computer age. It was assumed this was a sure-fire way of making movies that would be a hit every time.

While it is paramount that the audience be at the core of any creative venture aimed at them, the heart of movie making is the development of individual craft that can sense what an audience wants and deliver on that want. This often takes the form of a filmmaker doing a film the way he or she wants and so intuitively being in touch with the fans that what ever comes out will please the crowds. Like all humans, though, sometimes the filmmaker is out of touch with what people want, or his or her work is so subjective that no one but the filmmaker understands it.

Even the vaunted pre-testing by sampling the opinions of the movie going public hasn't made for sure-fire hits. It wasn't that long ago that audience testing proved that a movie called Star Wars wouldn't fill theaters. Despite this failure of testing, some people still believe having the audience pick the elements of a film is the way to go. It is more like going to a restaurant and knowing you want good food but having to go to the kitchen and cook it yourself. In the entertainment experience, people want to be fed, not do the work themselves. It's been that way since the time of the Greeksm and it isn't likely to change any time soon.

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