Is Predictability Hollywood’s Strength?

5Feb/090

Is Predictability Hollywood’s Strength?

In these trying economic times, sometimes I just want a burger and fries. I don't particularly like burgers and fries. I know they are bad for me. But it's cheap and I know exactly what I'm getting.

Hollywood entertainment is a lot like that. We know the Hero's Journey like the route home from work. There's the place you have to get into the left lane, the place where all of the hero's friends abandon him and he has to go it alone, and there's the burger place. Mmmmm... a burger would be nice. Can I get a false ending with that?

People often lament Hollywood's lack of originality, the 'sequel-itis'. But ask yourself, would you like every filmmaker to be as random as Stephen Soderbergh? Lots of the classic directors found their niche and exploited the hell out of it: Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Billy Wilder.

If you look at the second tier of indie filmmakers, the ones who make a comfortable living making movies just how they like, you'll notice something. They deliver a consistent product. You know what you're getting with a John Sayles movie; you know what you're getting with a Bill Plympton Plymptoon.

I think a lot of independent filmmakers, myself included, want to re-invent the wheel on every project. But sometimes there's just as much to be gained by going deeper as there is by going further. The Coen Brothers didn't do anything they hadn't done before with No Country For Old Men, they just did it deeper.

This strategy has the advantage of being accumulative. You can be building an audience. Until I went to a ski town, I had no idea who Warren Miller was. (He makes skiing documentaries, like a billion of them.) If I've enjoyed Miller's ski movies before, there's almost zero risk that I won't enjoy another. I know what I'm getting.

Most of us, for evolutionarily obvious reasons, like watching beautiful people have simulated sex, underdogs overcoming obstacles and tense action sequences that climax in explosions. It's not hard to understand why Hollywood continues to tell stories that are workshopped ("developed") to hit those sweet spots, and why the patterns of successful movies are imitated endlessly. A burger goes down easy.

Photo credit: VirtualErn. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-2.0 license.