"Hollywood has no new ideas." So what? STFU!

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Every time there's news of a remake or a reboot or a re-imagining, people will inevitably bitch that "Hollywood is running out of ideas!" They bemoan that it shows the general lack of creativity in Hollywood, and whine about how there are no new ideas anymore. Often, these people won't add anything else to the thread, as though their observation is worthy of posting on its own--as though it were an original thought.

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.

For another thing, Hollywood has never valued originality. Which is fine. It stems from theater, and while there are a lot of wonderful truly original stories, many are just "re imaginings" of other plays and classic tales. Shakespeare never told an original story and nobody expected him to. Nobody said "Well, quite frankly, I'm tired of the story of King Lear. Why can't playwrights do something original for once?" Well, okay, they might have, but if they did, nobody noticed or cared.

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

I don't have anything clever to say but I agree completely. This has always annoyed me.

Quote Originally posted by pepperlandgirl View post
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.
I would say this is a general value in entertainment and not one only restricted to film. All of those classic plays that highlight Shakespeare's genius are simply re-tellings of older stories. His language and methods were where the genius was at, not the plot. This is not a new thing.

Movies cost a lot to make with a very few exceptions like Clerks or Blair Witch so Hollywood needs to make a lot of money on nearly every project.

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.

Well, I read today that NBC is remaking The Rockford Files.

As you can imagine, I am really not cool with this.

Quote Originally posted by pepperlandgirl View post
For another thing, Hollywood has never valued originality.
This is a good point, and Jim's post is also good. By my count there were ten film versions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde before the 1941 Spencer Tracy version. The iconic Humphrey Bogart film The Maltese Falcon was the third movie based on Dashiell Hammett's book. Even The Wizard of Oz had been done before.

A little more on Oz. Beside the 1910 movie, there was a terrible one from around 1925 I saw on TCM and a Broadway play based on the extremely successful book.

It's not that Hollywood is remaking movies, it's that they're remaking movies that don't need to be remade. Red Dawn worked in the 80s because the Cold War was a real threat. But in the remake the Russians and Chinese invade the US for....some reason. Some movies have a time and a place, just because it worked once doesn't mean it will work again.

Some recent updates have worked better than others. IIRC The recent Manchurian Candidate had a nice modern spin on a Cold War tale and that's part of what the best rethreads do, they tell an old story in a modern context, with a different spin. I think the "Hollywood has no new ideas" concept comes from the fact that time to time cinema seems a bit tired. If EVERY summer blockbuster is a sequel or some other form of franchise vehicle it can be a bit disheartening, even if you enjoy one or other particular series of films.

Quote Originally posted by Revs View post
It's not that Hollywood is remaking movies, it's that they're remaking movies that don't need to be remade. Red Dawn worked in the 80s because the Cold War was a real threat. But in the remake the Russians and Chinese invade the US for....some reason. Some movies have a time and a place, just because it worked once doesn't mean it will work again.
But people could have made the same argument about a lot of movies that got remade in the past century. Red Dawn was a product of Cold War fear, but now we're living under the threat of a different fear. Sure, we don't hear about terrorism every single night anymore, but our country is still at two wars in the name of stopping it. We may not have the same fear of Russians and Cubans invading, but we do have a generalized fear of our home soil being attacked, and unlike the 80s, we actually know for a fact it's possible.

Well most of (though not all) of Pixar's stuff has been fairly original, at least by Hollywood standards. Every year there are examples of original new movies, just not usually the blockbusters. I don’t see as many new movies as I use to but recently we had the Wrestler as a great example of something different and new. Maybe the 70s stood out for original movies before the success of Jaws and Star Wars but I think that 6 year period was an exceptional exception and not the norm.