It's getting on my nerves, to be honest.
For one thing, it immediately indicates the speaker's general ignorance of the history of story telling and film in Hollywood. Many of the movies we consider to be all time classics now were remakes themselves. Other movies that we hold up to be great films are simply filmed plays, slightly changed to be appropriate for the silver screen. What producers and directors didn't take from the stage and previous movies, they took from books. When you start naming former Oscar winners and AFI's Top 100 films, you're going to have quite the list of remakes and adaptations.
Also, I think the general bitching has something to do with a real disconnect between what Hollywood values and what the audience values. People who actually write and direct and act for a living know there's no original stories to tell. There just aren't. All of the stories have been told by the ancient Greeks. Sorry, there's nothing to be done about that. But that doesn't stop people from being creative, because it's not the plot that matters, it's how you interpret it. That's why the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho was so pointless. That's not the kind of remake anybody wants or needs, and it wasn't successful. He should have realized that by virtue of the fact that nobody had bothered to do it before. Hollywood values originality in dialogue (see Tarentino, who tells very basic plots ripped off from all kinds of movies, but he has a phenomenal understanding of dialogue and humor), directing, cinematography, etc. In other words, Hollywood wants originality in the language of film not in the plot of stories. So find something else to bitch about, will ya?
Comments
The Great old movies were usually based on successful plays or very successful books. (Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, West Side Story, Arsenic and Old Lace, Dracula, Maltese Falcon, The Godfather, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc.) The original ideas were fairly rare back in the Golden Age and even the post studios days. There have always been exceptional original screenplays and idea but it is not as bad or different as people think.
The Casablanca's and Citizen Kane's have always been the exceptions.
As you can imagine, I am really not cool with this.