Even Grandma Riley has watched a sneak preview of "Courage, New Hampshire." It's actually rough cut right down to the final scene, and it looks pretty good in my over-exposed way of thinking about these things. This editing process has re-affirmed a new lesson over and over again. Yes, I hate Hollywood. You can certainly deposit a great deal of our society's cynicism right at its doorstep, but I do have to give credit to the art directors. When you watch a major motion picture, in one sense you're seeing a rolling montage of stunning post-cards. Every frame of the movie has that lush, complex simplicity of a dramatic photograph. Think of the backgrounds in the hobbit's lair in "Lord of the Rings" or the flock of sheep grazing on the English country estates in "The Duchess." Sometimes, the beauty of the images hold you, even when the dialogue is just unloading freight and moving the story from here to there.
Of course, art direction is just one of the many hats a film wears. I have new respect for sound men, lighting crews, hair-dressers and casting directors. The question before the story-telling world, as I see it, is whether the new technology will make it possible to break the hide-bound largesse of the average film production. I believe even small film these days is defined as something that costs less than $3 million. Could a dramatic TV show, worth watching, be made for $50,000 an episode?
Dunno. I guess we'll find out. Years ago, the "desktop publishing" promise seemed to hold that everyone would be able to publish their own books and newspapers--and of course they can, but much of it isn't worth reading. John Updike correctly predicted that the "information highway" would be mostly roadkill. Quite a bit of YouTube, and even Cable television, bears this out. In an age where literally anyone can create their own daily news show, the world is still subscribing to the shrill preening of Keith Olberman and the school girl posturing of Rachel Maddow. Why? Because it's slick. There's good theme music, studio lighting, writing-teams, and the weight of network legitimacy behind it. The key will be mastering budget-lean versions of those production assets if we are really to see a content-rich transformation of programming. Certainly, there are departments (lighting & sound) that can't really be cut, but years ago I was watching a commercial film shoot here on the farm. There was a dolly-grip assigned for the day, with no dolly-shots planned, and no dolly on site. In some European countries, you have to hire a native cinematographer, even if you don't use him, to please the unions. (People wonder why we're having a global economic crisis?)
Most industries that become wildly profitable during the firsts, second, and third generations wind up accumulating fat. The American auto, steel, and film industry come to mind. Whole systems will need to be re-thought in order to keep making products that really meet human needs, without making consumers pay a ransom for jobs that are no longer (and perhaps never were) required. I hope the starry-eyed kids in the Obama Administration learn that lesson: it's not about protecting "jobs."
It's about making something worthwhile. Our economy, and our story-telling, will recover when we start thinking more about serving the needs of the market, and less about protecting our careers.
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