They Made a Movie Out of It
The Baffler,
by
James Pogue
Original Article
Posted By: StormCnter,
1/10/2020 11:38:41 AM
IN EARLY 2018, I was spending a warm West Hollywood Sunday evening on the balcony of a young director of film development, drinking a beer and hoping for an early night[*]. I had planned to sleep on his couch, but when I suggested we turn in, he said, “Nah, just take my bed, I’m probably not sleeping tonight.” I asked why not, and he looked momentarily surprised, as though it was strange I wasn’t aware of the impending event that had a small but important segment of the film and publishing industries alive with anticipation at the two ends of the great book-to-film pipeline connecting agents, assistants,
Reply 1 - Posted by:
StormCnter 1/10/2020 11:41:35 AM (No. 284443)
I'm reading Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon" and am gratified to learn a movie is in the works.
3 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
zephyrgirl 1/10/2020 12:05:53 PM (No. 284470)
This article explains the tripe they turn into movies these days.
8 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Enoch Powell 1/10/2020 12:25:21 PM (No. 284486)
This article got me to thinking. It turns out I've gone to a theater to see a movie 4 times in the last 20 years: Master & Commander, Lincoln, Darkest Hour, and Downton Abbey. And I watched Dunkirk on my I8! Apparently I'll watch some of Hollywood's trash but I certainly won't pay for it.
3 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
DVC 1/10/2020 12:29:33 PM (No. 284489)
Some friends recently published a great adventure book, and this article was interesting for a while, but I finally got bored and quit.
Strange business.
6 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
texaspast 1/10/2020 12:35:07 PM (No. 284501)
Ditto on "Killers of the Flower Moon" - great read, previously unknown (and important) history. But what this young writer is whining about is that publishers are only buying stuff that people want to read. Imagine that! That's not what she wanted to do when she graduated from college in 2010. She wanted to write politically-relevant 'literature'. Ain't it a sad thing when REAL reality gets in the way of what millennial snowflakes want reality to be? Her point seems to be that those people who buy what writers write want to tell the writer what kind of material they want, rather than buy what the writer wants to write because that's what the writer thinks they should buy.
6 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
earlybird 1/10/2020 12:48:09 PM (No. 284524)
Had never heard of this site. From its About:
The Baffler is America’s leading voice of interesting and unexpected left-wing political criticism, cultural analysis, short stories, poems and art. We publish six print issues annually, as well as online content every day of the cursed workweek.
1 person likes this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Clinger 1/10/2020 1:04:09 PM (No. 284542)
The Mrs and I haven't gone to the movies except for taking the grand kids to Lego Batman since 1992. It was a birthday party and we were called in to offset the odds a bit. I chased a two year old most of the time.
2 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
StormCnter 1/10/2020 1:18:54 PM (No. 284554)
It's ok, Poster. There are no snowflakes on Lucianne.com. We can handle it.
7 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
earlybird 1/10/2020 3:03:13 PM (No. 284650)
I quit a book club, whose members were very nice ladies, because their selections were always - predictably - formulaic, commercial books that were destined to be made into something - television, a movie… They had no interest in anything challenging or any story that would not have fit onto a movie or television screen. They preferred not to think too much. Need I say that I was the only Conservative in the group?
Pogue’s article is quite interesting, albeit long and very insider baseball. His close:
But I personally can’t help feeling alarmed and enraged by the ways writers are now driven by incentives to fill the needs of creative executives working in Amazon’s film studio. It feels wildly dispiriting to see how much my friends and I casually accept the idea that we should craft our work to fit a commercial imperative—the entire system of our writing and reporting now being market-tested and data-driven and robbed by financial forces of much of its lasting value. There is a part of me that wants to grab all the rewards that come from this system, but it’s the part of me good writing is meant to kill.
Amen, Mr. Pogue. And I have already looked at a preview of your book Chosen Country, which sounds very interesting ….
3 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
Tennman 1/10/2020 4:14:50 PM (No. 284696)
Read a plot recap. Recalled this as a plot line many years ago in the FBI Story with Jimmy Stewart.
Guess that makes me old.
1 person likes this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
earlybird 1/10/2020 5:10:38 PM (No. 284732)
Here’s the nonfiction version of the Osage Murders:
https://www.osagenation-nsn.gov/news-events/news/did-you-know-osage-murders
0 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
HHFi2 1/10/2020 5:36:31 PM (No. 284755)
As a professional writer myself, I find it amusing that this person who graduated college in 2010 is aghast to learn that writers are under pressure to write things that sell, as if it were a new development. Samuel Johnson famously said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," and he died in 1784.
1 person likes this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
cat2 1/10/2020 5:58:16 PM (No. 284781)
I haven't gone to a movie in years, but still found this interesting. Reminds me of the old saw, "you don't want to know how sausage is made".
1 person likes this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
cat2 1/10/2020 6:07:01 PM (No. 284790)
Didn't modern fiction pretty much get its start with serialized stories published in Penny Dreadfuls, the writer's income dependent on drawing readers to buy the newspapers every week? How different is that from this? The writers, the disseminators all want money, and the way to get money is to appeal to the audience.
1 person likes this.
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