September 2009: Other Stories

For the last few weeks of the year, I'm going through stories I saved, but never posted. Today's stories are from September 2009:

* The really big news in September was the Disney purchase of Marvel. But here's a gem that barely drew any notice:

Best of all is this potentially terrific news: Iger was asked about the possibility of a collaboration between Marvel and Pixar, to which he answered that Pixar's John Lasseter had recently met with Marvel executives and "the group got pretty excited pretty fast" — "sparks will fly," Iger said.

Pixar + Marvel = ???

* Another big story this year is the supposed decline of star-power at the box office. Hit this link to a Guardian article by Mark Lawson for more:

Recession has led entertainment producers to favour material with proven audiences. In theatre, this desire has brought a firestorm of revivals; in Hollywood, the equivalent insurance is remakes and sequels. Batman, Spider-Man and Superman have all changed performers (in the manner of Doctor Who and James Bond) without losing viewers. The brand is the star [emphasis added].

But the desire to read the last rites of the film star is ultimately a result of the present economic tensions, in which all employees are being studied to see if their product justifies what it costs.

I once asked John Travolta in an interview how any actor could possibly be worth $20m per film, his rumoured base fee at the time. His impeccably free-market answer was that studios wouldn't pay that kind of money unless they believed it was justified and that, as they seemed happy to go on writing these cheques, we must assume that the transactions worked for them.

It was a neat but disingenuous answer. Studios bankrolled the multi-zero fees not from a hard-headed economic calculation, but because they bought into the legend that this was what a star was worth. The cheques were bets on a roulette wheel. Now the studios have seen that they can play with lower stakes.

* I continued to read a lot of Carl Jung in 2009. Here's an interesting quote I found:

“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.”

As far as movies go, I think this is at the heart of the very concept of Protagonist transformation -- the character goes on some sort of journey (literal or symbolic, most often both) in which the events that happen in the Plotline (External World) force / cause the Protag to engage key aspects of their core essence which they have been repressing or denying -- i.e., their shadow. And oftentimes, the Protagonist's shadow is reflected in the attitudes and behavior of the story's Nemesis. So in a way, the story's Final Struggle between the Protagonist and Nemesis is, while threatening to the Protagonist's very existence, the climactic moment in the P's interaction with their shadow self. If they succeed, they get a taste of Unity; if not, then destruction, both physically and psychologically.

* Finally this interesting interview with actor John Malkovich. Note particularly his comments at the end re screenplays and what he looks for in a character:

You wanted to make him unlikeable?
I don’t think about stuff like that very much. I don’t think about people that way.

Which way?
That these are unlikeable, these are likeable. These are good. These are bad. I don’t see the world that way. How we’re told to approach the world doesn’t meet up with my experience of the world. Which is that people whom I quite like -- maybe not to the extent Will Rogers liked them, but not so far either -- are simply more complicated than they’re purported to be.

We’re definitely putting you in the complex category.
I don’t know about that. See, I don’t say, "Do what I do or you’ll suffer eternal damnation." But I’m only 55.

They’re a reflection of what I find in human behavior. My own baffles me sometimes. But so does everybody else. They’re just as baffling as I am to myself at least.

Where does that come from in you?
I don’t know. My analyst spent seven years on that. I think I always had some impulse to try and understand how people viewed the world. How their interior life worked. One could say that’s because my own bored me, or because I didn’t want to look at my own. I don’t know why. I always had that.

When I look at a really good script I think, when this character wakes up in the morning: what do they see? Is it beautiful? Is it precious? Ephemeral? Is it just one nightmare or one missed opportunity after another? Is it a series of missed connections. How do they view the world?

Good literature, which can include good screenplays, that’s evidence on the page and it's sometimes discovered in the playing.

More tomorrow - from October.