I’m descended from a long line of union-busting industrialists. But the battle of the Writers Guild of America vs. Media Fat Cats is turning me into a Bolshevik.
Perhaps it would be helpful for Mr. Long to take a step back and look at the product that he and his industry are turning out. This article reminds me of the complaints from union auto workers in the 70’s who, for decades, had been turning out increasingly bad cars yet getting increasingly higher pay. And then came the Japanese to take market share from the invincible unionized Big 3. The industry opened the door for its own demise.
The entertainment industry, of which Mr. Long is a 30+ year veteran, has been turning out an increasingly bad product for decades. Humor is not funny. Drama is mostly politicized. Love stories must bend all the multiple gender boxes. What the hell does the industry expect when they have clearly lost touch with their consumer?
The demise of his profession has nothing to do with fat cats. My guess is that Mr. Long knows very well the problem but he can’t say it for fear of being ostracized. The entire industry does not make money for basic business reasons because they hate their customers. It’s the same as the news media. Turn out a bad news product and - Voila, Bari and the Free Press are born.
Excellent point. So much of what is released today is virtually unwatchable because "socially or politically correct" characters and subplots have been jammed into what otherwise might be an OK series or story.
Don't you find it interesting that every Saturday Night Live episode features a sketch on Donald Trump, but nothing is ever said or done to lampoon Joe Biden? Imagine if Biden was a Republican -- they'd be having a field day!
I am sure nepotism has some play here. But I also think it is just a case of like hiring like. Creative types already tend to lean a certain way. Add all of the social pressure to either conform to certain ideologies or potentially never get to work in your field, even the minority of more conservative writers are likely to at least appear to tow the line. And any true believers are likely to do their level best to hire more people that are like themselves. So the writers rooms are likely increasingly devoid of actual discussion and debate. So even if some writers think changing yet another male character into a flawless superior female character isn't a great idea, they are unlikely to speak up.
That was also my reaction. I particularly noted the irony of Mr. Long bringing up the failure of Amazon's Rings of Power, as if that failure was somehow magically caused by studio execs instead of bad writing.
Because that was the universal complaint among LotRs fans who actually watched the show: the writing was bad, the dialogue was stilted. (I enjoyed the show, regardless, but I have to agree that the dialogue was not the strongest point.) I'm cynically inclined to believe that the color-blind casting fiasco that blew up ahead of the premiere was promoted not merely for ideological reasons, but also to give the producers a way to cast the blame elsewhere (specifically on those "racist" right-wing Tolkien fans) for the failure of an expensive show they must have realized was just not that great.
My point is that WRITERS wrote that bad dialogue. That fact seems to have escaped Mr. Long.
I read The Hobbit and LotR 50 years ago, when I was a teen. Read it several times. Saw the films in the theatre and then purchased all 3 Extended Box Sets which we watch annually. Terrific.
But they lost me when they made The Hobbit into *3* movies!? to sell a video game?
I subscribe to Prime but never even considered clicking on the prequel inclusive crap WBs claims was "inspired by Tolkien".?? More like inspired by, "we have no new ideas, but own this property . . . "
Give me a 1980's irreverant comedy with gratuitous nudity and racial/sexual humor, a film noir, or a pre-code film anyday. I will gladly accept the Coen Bros.
The basic problem Amazon was facing with Rings of Power was that they ONLY had rights to the appendices of LotR. Anything that appears only in The Silmarillion or other works was not available for them to use. So they more or less had to write 1955-to-1977-era fan-fiction about the Second Age.
I'm not sure how they thought that would go over well. True Tolkien fans (of the books) could not help but be somewhere between irritated and offended at the mangling of book canon (I was on the irritated end of that spectrum). Their potentially favorable audience was fans *solely* of the movies who never bothered to read the books. And then they insisted on color-blind casting...without ever daring to *call* it color-blind casting (because people are not supposed to say anything about being blind to color anymore).
So they started out with a limited potential audience, which they then proceeded to offend with illogic and disappoint with bad writing. I'm not sure who decided that investing $1B in such a project was a good idea.
Plus I am sure that writers got a cut of that $750,000,000 budget. I watched all episodes and it was mildly amusing but nothing more than that. It’s a type on genre that is overused now and does not appeal to everyone. Personally, I think that there is both a concept and execution problem. Very few good ideas and those that surface are poorly made.
I am part of the 60 plus percent that stopped watching. It seemed like the engine moving the show was special effects. With great scripts and good actors, it is easy to believe that the actor is that character and become colorblind. With bad dialogue everything is awkward.
I felt like they were trying too hard to imitate Tolkien's High Fantasy language without having a genuine feel for that kind of language.
Decades ago, Ursula K. LeGuin wrote an essay ("From Elfland to Poughkeepsie") insisting that fantasy HAD to be written in high formal language to be any good. There has been an avalanche of books in the years since proving how wrong she was.
I can't help but be reminded of people at Renfaires who randomly throw "thee" and "thou" around without any idea of the proper grammar. RoP was not quite that bad, but the writers did not know how to write in that mode without sounding stilted.
Every other word is the F bomb, every casual meeting ends up with sex scene, and anyone remotely religious is either gay, cross-dresser, serial killer, or a pedophile. (HBO gilded the lily with a pastor who was a cannibal pedophile.)
1st line , 7th paragraph, "Clearly something is not working in Show Business". Too much Virtue Signaling, Too Much WOKE, too much FEAR-OF-OFFENDING, LACK of genuine HUMOR, Etc. The Quality of Hollywood Work Product amd Output has turned away the vast majority of us. When I begin watching a movie, a Series, any type of Content these days, and I experience those things aforementioned- I turn it OFF , not to return again. So- bottom line- you are looking for answers in all the wrong places.
I agree. I currently don't own an actual television; I'm strictly streaming and mostly documentaries. I can't remember the last time I watched a network show; the characters are horribly written. At least Norman Lear had terrific actors and inserted humor. Sorry, it's all woke garbage preaching woke garbage.
Writers write what they are paid to write. They are not responsible for management and production decisions. As is pointed out, there is a lot wrong with the Hollywood business system (or model) and almost all of those problems are not within the ability of writers to fix; now a broken plot line is another matter. You don't see endless reboots of TV series and movies because writers think it's a good idea.
A dozen "producers" overseeing 3 writers is your first clue as to a much bigger issue. The biggest monster in the biz is the one that showed up in the recent TFP essay, Shut Up and Drive. Hollywood is highly risk averse. Complicating that is the reality that Hollywood is also a very insular closed loop of people who reinforce each others' views of the world.
Remember your favorite show or movie, the ones you could watch again and again. The words which came from the actors' mouths were put there by writers.
Everything you say is true but the article writer seemed to blame his declining fortunes on rapacious management does not see him and his fellow writers as part of the industry as a whole. I appreciate good writing but that is rare now. Whether that comes from management decisions, writer compliance with management decisions or lack of writing talent is beyond my ken. The first step to salvation is looking at the actual product. The writer just wanted to rearrange the chairs on the Titanic. If instead he had talked about management restrictions on what topics are allowed and disallowed I would be more sympathetic. My understanding is that writers have similar cultural, educational and political backgrounds now. Maybe that is part of the problem too.
Yes they were. But now they are terrified of the mob attacking them if they utter a word not allowed by that closed loop. They killed creativity by going along to get along. I feel no pity with their self-imposed destruction.
The idea that the crappy US cars from the 70’s were the fault of the *auto workers* is simply propaganda pushed by the auto executives who were actually at fault. The charge made no sense then and it makes even less sense now.
The reason that the AMC Gremlin, Chevy Vega, or Ford Pinto were destroyed by Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas *was not* because of the *auto workers*. That’s a ridiculous claim. None of these cars, even if flawlessly assembled by a team of neurosurgeons, would have been competitive. Because they were badly designed by auto execs lazily resting on their past successes rather than pushing for constant innovation. The US cars lacked front-wheel drive, dual overhead cams, and were heavy…and so the Japanese competition were price competitive, more technologically advanced, and got significantly better gas mileage.
Again, none of this had anything to do with the auto workers - they didn’t design the engine, didn’t decide it should be rear wheel drive, and weren’t responsible for it being SOHC.
US manufacturers have been pushing this narrative for 45 years. I understand why they do it. But it’s dishonest nonsense and people should be smart enough to see through the propaganda.
I guess there were no union work rules that hampered manufacturing innovation and distracted them from paying attention to their market and customers? Both the unions and management took to buyer for granted.
If you show me a union rule that you believe led to the bad designs of the Nova, Gremlin, and Pinto, I would be happy to consider the argument.
But in your original post, you put all of the blame on the unions. Which, as I pointed out in my response, is ludicrous. The unions didn’t chose to produced these cars with these specs, and they didn’t design or market them either. A perfectly manufactured Gremlin with no defects is still a Gremlin.
I don’t want to completely absolve the union of blame - but I put the blame at something like management 90%, union 10%. The management *runs the company*.
Even if I were to believe that it was 100% not the fault of the 'workers', demanding pay raises in a poorly run business is a sure fire way to help it sink faster.
Maybe it was the perfect storm? An industry that refused to notice what consumers wanted and design to meet that need. Union leaders who also failed to recognize the downturn of the auto industry along with their inability to keep the mob out of the union.
If you believe that the union workers were not in any way culpable for the product, then you clearly weren't paying attention to the propaganda when the product was "good."
Look, major advances in euchre and time-clock management and security are clearly related to the efforts of the UAW.
Of course management was also culpable, to to pretend that labor was "simply following orders" is laughable.
Do you believe that the union designed the Nova? Decided to market it? Decided it should be rear wheel drive?
Of course not.
The union is, of course, responsible for certain errors in manufacturing.
But the real problem with the Nova, Pinto, Gremlin, etc wasn’t reliability. It was the bad design, which is 100% the responsibility of management.
You have to suspend your disbelief to put the blame on unions for the bad cars of the 1970’s.
If Amazon started losing money and marketshare and tried to blame this on their “lazy warehouse workers”, people would laugh them out of the building. That’s the appropriate response, and it’s the appropriate response to blaming unions for badly conceived 70’s cars.
The union also did not design the model T, the Mustang, the corvette or any of the successful vehicles.
Unions have been supplanted by either Chinese labor or OSHA and Fed laws. Of course the real reason they thrive in certain areas is that they are the cesspools of marxists and the heirs of the bolsheviks, both of whom and their associates can rot.
Unions destroyed much of the US middle class after helping to create it. Tragic. But the unions learned what their hosts already knew, excessive profits bring ruinous competition. Damned shame.
It seems to me that all TV shows have to have homosexuals and minorities. To paraphrase Dave Chapelle, "Have you noticed that all commercials have black actors , mixed couples and no whites." I am not a racist nor a homophobe but if the homosexual communities is only 7% or less of the population can't these shows reflect that demographic?
There are two TV series that portray upper crust England in the 17th and 18th centuries and mixed in the aristocracy and upper class are black actors freely mixing with the English upper class at dinner parties and dances.
I have nothing against minorities in TV shows and I know with the PC/Woke jerks, I will be labeled with their favorite slur as a racist. However, these shows taking place in the 17 and 18 hundreds are complete fantasy. Not just the English but all of Europe were xenophobic, racists in the 18 and 19 century. Minorities were not allowed into society and if you married a black person back then it was social suicide.
I am merely pointing out historical fact and as we all know the left hate history and facts. It makes them uncomfortable.
The whole point of my post is the PC/Woke assholes have taken over the film industry and shoving their fantasy agendas on all of us. I am not for industry or government censorship but I censor these programs by not watching them.
I think this point brings up one of the issues with Unions in general; they don't filter. In this case, if you are a writer in Hollywood, you are part of the union. Whether you are have written multiple award winning shows and movies or everything you have done was garbage. So when the union currently does something to help 'writers' they are helping a small number of people who are good at their craft and a whole host of people who the consumers would probably be happy to see go.
I do have to wonder...do the writers in Hollywood not get to advocate on their own behalf? Meaning, if I am applying to write on a new show, and I have worked on several successful shows and well respected show runners speak well of me, can I not use that to get a raise or better options or whatever?
On the opposite end, if I am a new writer who has not proven I have the chops. Or worse, I have mostly worked on failures, why should I get to stand on the shoulders of good writers so that I can demand better pay for my unproven or poor work?
I do agree with some of his points. If you have more administrator types than creative types working on a show, there is a problem. And if this is true for every writer no matter their skill, talent, or output then you have a BIG problem. And writers are not the sole reason a show can suck. A showrunner may reject great scripts. A director can butcher a well laid out scene. And an actor can hack up good dialogue. So a bad show can have many possible bad causes. For all we know the scripts for LOTR, were fine but some producer or executive demanded certain things that dragged it down.
All of that said, based on my rapid decline in watching scripted TV of late (Marvel, Star Wars, Netflix in general, etc) and finding that the indie productions on Youtube being more diverse in content, quality, and passion I don't have a ton of support for the writers guild this time around. With some of the stories I have heard from some writer rooms, I feel like quite a few need the boot. They don't understand basic character, plot, or the premise of actually entertaining your core audience, let alone doing justice to someone else's creation that they are now writing about. So maybe this bomb needs to go off so Hollywood will rebuild better.
"an increasingly bad product for decades"? You must be a teenager, or so old that you stopped watching TV. The Golden Age of Television began more than 20 years ago, and there is now more quality content than anyone can keep track of, let alone watch. However, amid the growing quantity, there is also plenty of crap, and plenty driven by ideology. As the Soviet Union had Socialist Realism, perhaps we can call today's aesthetic Woke Realism.
Living in Russia for many years, I used to advise Russians learning English to listen to English-language music. Then, with the rise of the quality TV series, about 20 years ago I switched to TV series. Unlike movies, each episode of a series lasts about one academic hour, they repeat (with continuing characters!), and they get you hooked. I would "prescribe" a series according to a person's profession (e.g. House for medical people, Damages for lawyers, Mad Men for salespeople, Weeds for drug dealers...). I got tired of writing people lists, so I began maintaining one at IMDB:
It eventually became pointless, and I gave up. There are far too many good series, and Russians know about Breaking Bad like everybody else. My 13-year-old daughter in Moscow wears a Rick & Morty T-shirt.
Occasionally I do recommend somebody a specific series, e.g. when someone complains that everything with superheroes nowadays is Woke, I suggest The Boys or Invincible.
I now live in Germany, and here I try to follow my own advice and watch German series. The list is much shorter, but I do strongly recommend Babylon Berlin, Deutschland 83, and Weissensee.
Almost everything you listed is old. No one is saying there isn't good stuff out there. Just that there seems to be less and less of it, which is why people keep going back and re-watching older stuff.
That's my point--I specifically listed old content, because it is what I was recommending 10+ years ago. I said, "It eventually became pointless, and I gave up," because good content was exploding and I couldn't keep up. I can't know what exists, let alone watch it all. For a quick list, look at IMDB's top TV shows, and note that the year listed is when the series started, not when it ended (if it did):
Just a quick look. 1 show from this year, 7 shows from last year. Of those 7, 4 of them are from outside of the US. And of those 8 total, only 3 interest me (with 2 of those being admittedly absolutely fabulous!). Seems to me that this list simply reinforces what others have said....not much good stuff being made by Hollywood of late. Especially since a 'show' no longer means ~26 episodes, but instead seems to mean 8-10.
I would add that part of the issue isn't just lack of good content. Its how spread out the good stuff is. I don't want my life to be constantly moving from one service to another to watch the 1-2 good shows that service makes in a year. But that is a separate issue.
This is NOT a defense of current output, but I do think some decent stuff gets made. For me personally Ted Lasso and Severance both scratched that itch for me recently. And then I went back to watching youtube. I have been a Netflix subscriber since before they had streaming. I just canceled my account a few days ago from the combo of boring stuff mixed with shoving politics into stuff (like race changing a historical figure in a DOCUMENTARY).
Perhaps Hollywood is just out of touch with the reality of real everyday working people so that the entertainment you produce isn’t worth our time (which is precious).
Well, it's pretty easy to tell you why you're circling the vortex, Rob. (I'm using "you" here in the collective sense to describe the whole Hollywood/show biz ecology.) You're not producing movies or television shows. You're producing "content."
Here's the deal about narrative: It's strongest when it reflects a singular vision. There's a reason why "Yellowstone" and "Curb My Enthusiasm" are the two strongest shows in the vast streaming wasteland: They reflect a _singular_ creative point of view.
Yeah, yeah, yeah—writers' rooms are necessary to connect the dotted lines, to fill in the blanks. It's virtually impossible to know if jokes work if you don't have a sounding board, so yeah—you need a writers' room for that. Great dialogue kinda works by the same rule. And I suppose storylines, too, to some extent, since once a storyteller is finished with the characters in his or her own head, it can be difficult to envision what comes next.
But narrative by committee? No, no, no.
My understanding is that according to the 2020 Schedule of Minimums, even the lowliest of low writers can anticipate making $4,000 to $5,000 a week. That might be chump change in the Hollywood ecology, but it's serious bank to some of us.
All of which is a roundabout way off saying even if I had access to the world's tiniest violin, I wouldn't play a sad song for you on it.
I believe I am in the same demographic as Rob and I would just comment: "Top Gun Maverick" anyone?! The middle class in this country - the majority the Left wants to crush - simply wants good-guy/gal movies and shows that push some limits but reflect our values.
Cheers, Seinfeld, Sons of Anarchy, Jackass, Friends, The Office, Breaking Bad, Braveheart, The Patriot, We Were Soldiers, Beverly Hills Cop, Alien, Reacher, etc are the shows our kids are drawn to and it isn't because we watch them.
“Maybe instead of mini rooms with fewer writers, the studios should be sending out more emails from HR to more executives.” - bureaucracy in every damn corner of our lives is killing us. Im with Mr. Long and relate to his pivot. Same. Great piece and thank you for the laugh too ( Equinox - lol)
This was supposed to be a good essay? This was one of your recommendations for essay of the week? Very disappointing. This essay contained nothing of interest nor was it thought provoking.
Mr. Long's essay only served to confirm what most of us who have been paying any small amount of attention have observed over and over again for years. Hollywood is failing. It is rare that movies and shows produced and released these days are any good at all. We consumers are looking elsewhere for our entertainment, and we have plenty of options.
Mr. Long complaining about the failures of the industry and only focusing on a small part of that failing and not a more honest evaluation of the whole modern Hollywood culture made for a week and pointless essay not worth the time read.
This was a failure both by Mr. Long and the Free Press.
The Hollywood is already Bolsheviks in their ideology, concepts and practice, so does not need to “become” one of them.
That is how socialism looks like- a bunch of communists have everything and the other are the slaves… I lived through that, ran from it, and now see it here…
Sure, be a better Bolshevik than your boss is a great option!
Dear Hollywood: I have been totally turned off by the wokifying of the classics and changing history. I hate reality shows. I want to be entertained and not depressed. I miss witty dialogue and laughter. Give me true stories of perseverance. Many great stories of marginalized people are waiting to be written for the screens, small and large. I love Yellowstone and its spin-offs.
None of the writers on Amazon's LOTR can compete with Tolkien for writing ability and for his breadth of knowledge. I don't want "inspired by Tolkien". I want Tolkien and if he isn't available, I'll take only what he wrote. Hollywood needs to turn out new stories without all the cursing, PC comments, woke ideology, racially correct - for right now casting, etc. All of these things will age projects and they will never be classics.
I’d settle for ditching the obligatory sex scene and the obligatory chase scene. Like when the cops are going to question someone and yell across the way at them so they run and then can be chased instead of going up to them and not speak until very close.
And I agree, are there really that many interracial couples in America other than in commercials?
You're right I forgot about those aspects. No there aren't that many interracial couple in America. Only 15 % + or - of the population in America claims to be black, but in commercials the percentage of interracial couples is far higher. They make it seem like there are more interracial couples than black or white couples.
This gets ever weirder when they do genre work. Showing me an isolated group of not hobbits who look like they have members who came from all over the world does break immersion.
It seems the Free Press is devolving to just essays that could be featured on NPR. I’d prefer news. And news that affects real people doing real things and not arcane elitist topics.
But the difference is that you can reply to the writer publicly here and not on NPR. Big difference, I think. Instead of NPR “educating “ the masses the masses can educate the elite here.
I want to be sympathetic, but it's hard when Hollywood cranks out garbage. New ideas are as scarce as hen's teeth. I spend as much time cruising all of the apps on my Firestick looking for something worth watching as I actually do watching and when I do watch, I am almost always disappointed.
I can't remember when my wife and I have made it through a Hollywood movie all the way that was made in the last twenty years. They all seem to be formulaic crap. Yet we watch a lot of movies. Mostly indie or foreign. I maintain a list of the ones I particularly like that goes back to the seventies. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of these movies were written by lone writers. Maybe it's the process of writing by committee that is the problem?
If it’s a great product why is the point of the article that the industry is losing money? The great content of 20 years ago is, well, 20 years ago. How many good shows like Sopranos or Breaking Bad have come out recently? Sales with movies.
I do believe that in some cases the writers are bulldozed by execs and such. No doubt. But I also believe that is some cases, they are hiring the wrong writers. Bringing in writers who outright state they don't like the source material (Witcher) or have never really read it or don't care about it (Many Marvel projects) is also the fault of the writers filling those positions.
Perhaps it would be helpful for Mr. Long to take a step back and look at the product that he and his industry are turning out. This article reminds me of the complaints from union auto workers in the 70’s who, for decades, had been turning out increasingly bad cars yet getting increasingly higher pay. And then came the Japanese to take market share from the invincible unionized Big 3. The industry opened the door for its own demise.
The entertainment industry, of which Mr. Long is a 30+ year veteran, has been turning out an increasingly bad product for decades. Humor is not funny. Drama is mostly politicized. Love stories must bend all the multiple gender boxes. What the hell does the industry expect when they have clearly lost touch with their consumer?
The demise of his profession has nothing to do with fat cats. My guess is that Mr. Long knows very well the problem but he can’t say it for fear of being ostracized. The entire industry does not make money for basic business reasons because they hate their customers. It’s the same as the news media. Turn out a bad news product and - Voila, Bari and the Free Press are born.
Excellent point. So much of what is released today is virtually unwatchable because "socially or politically correct" characters and subplots have been jammed into what otherwise might be an OK series or story.
Don't you find it interesting that every Saturday Night Live episode features a sketch on Donald Trump, but nothing is ever said or done to lampoon Joe Biden? Imagine if Biden was a Republican -- they'd be having a field day!
Who watches SNL?
Might the problem be nepotism? I would like to see a list of the current Hollywood elite whose parents were the Hollywood elite years ago.
Nothing else can explain how dreadful, say, "Saturday Night Live" is.
I am sure nepotism has some play here. But I also think it is just a case of like hiring like. Creative types already tend to lean a certain way. Add all of the social pressure to either conform to certain ideologies or potentially never get to work in your field, even the minority of more conservative writers are likely to at least appear to tow the line. And any true believers are likely to do their level best to hire more people that are like themselves. So the writers rooms are likely increasingly devoid of actual discussion and debate. So even if some writers think changing yet another male character into a flawless superior female character isn't a great idea, they are unlikely to speak up.
Everything old is new again, Mad magazine went to it's grave still replaying Watergate jokes ... 50 years after the fact.
That was also my reaction. I particularly noted the irony of Mr. Long bringing up the failure of Amazon's Rings of Power, as if that failure was somehow magically caused by studio execs instead of bad writing.
Because that was the universal complaint among LotRs fans who actually watched the show: the writing was bad, the dialogue was stilted. (I enjoyed the show, regardless, but I have to agree that the dialogue was not the strongest point.) I'm cynically inclined to believe that the color-blind casting fiasco that blew up ahead of the premiere was promoted not merely for ideological reasons, but also to give the producers a way to cast the blame elsewhere (specifically on those "racist" right-wing Tolkien fans) for the failure of an expensive show they must have realized was just not that great.
My point is that WRITERS wrote that bad dialogue. That fact seems to have escaped Mr. Long.
I read The Hobbit and LotR 50 years ago, when I was a teen. Read it several times. Saw the films in the theatre and then purchased all 3 Extended Box Sets which we watch annually. Terrific.
But they lost me when they made The Hobbit into *3* movies!? to sell a video game?
I subscribe to Prime but never even considered clicking on the prequel inclusive crap WBs claims was "inspired by Tolkien".?? More like inspired by, "we have no new ideas, but own this property . . . "
Give me a 1980's irreverant comedy with gratuitous nudity and racial/sexual humor, a film noir, or a pre-code film anyday. I will gladly accept the Coen Bros.
The basic problem Amazon was facing with Rings of Power was that they ONLY had rights to the appendices of LotR. Anything that appears only in The Silmarillion or other works was not available for them to use. So they more or less had to write 1955-to-1977-era fan-fiction about the Second Age.
I'm not sure how they thought that would go over well. True Tolkien fans (of the books) could not help but be somewhere between irritated and offended at the mangling of book canon (I was on the irritated end of that spectrum). Their potentially favorable audience was fans *solely* of the movies who never bothered to read the books. And then they insisted on color-blind casting...without ever daring to *call* it color-blind casting (because people are not supposed to say anything about being blind to color anymore).
So they started out with a limited potential audience, which they then proceeded to offend with illogic and disappoint with bad writing. I'm not sure who decided that investing $1B in such a project was a good idea.
Plus I am sure that writers got a cut of that $750,000,000 budget. I watched all episodes and it was mildly amusing but nothing more than that. It’s a type on genre that is overused now and does not appeal to everyone. Personally, I think that there is both a concept and execution problem. Very few good ideas and those that surface are poorly made.
I'm sure the writers were well-paid.
I was only able to enjoy the series by taking it for what it was: fan-fiction written without access to the full Tolkien canon.
I am part of the 60 plus percent that stopped watching. It seemed like the engine moving the show was special effects. With great scripts and good actors, it is easy to believe that the actor is that character and become colorblind. With bad dialogue everything is awkward.
I felt like they were trying too hard to imitate Tolkien's High Fantasy language without having a genuine feel for that kind of language.
Decades ago, Ursula K. LeGuin wrote an essay ("From Elfland to Poughkeepsie") insisting that fantasy HAD to be written in high formal language to be any good. There has been an avalanche of books in the years since proving how wrong she was.
I can't help but be reminded of people at Renfaires who randomly throw "thee" and "thou" around without any idea of the proper grammar. RoP was not quite that bad, but the writers did not know how to write in that mode without sounding stilted.
Every other word is the F bomb, every casual meeting ends up with sex scene, and anyone remotely religious is either gay, cross-dresser, serial killer, or a pedophile. (HBO gilded the lily with a pastor who was a cannibal pedophile.)
100 % CORRECT-
1st line , 7th paragraph, "Clearly something is not working in Show Business". Too much Virtue Signaling, Too Much WOKE, too much FEAR-OF-OFFENDING, LACK of genuine HUMOR, Etc. The Quality of Hollywood Work Product amd Output has turned away the vast majority of us. When I begin watching a movie, a Series, any type of Content these days, and I experience those things aforementioned- I turn it OFF , not to return again. So- bottom line- you are looking for answers in all the wrong places.
I agree. I currently don't own an actual television; I'm strictly streaming and mostly documentaries. I can't remember the last time I watched a network show; the characters are horribly written. At least Norman Lear had terrific actors and inserted humor. Sorry, it's all woke garbage preaching woke garbage.
Writers write what they are paid to write. They are not responsible for management and production decisions. As is pointed out, there is a lot wrong with the Hollywood business system (or model) and almost all of those problems are not within the ability of writers to fix; now a broken plot line is another matter. You don't see endless reboots of TV series and movies because writers think it's a good idea.
A dozen "producers" overseeing 3 writers is your first clue as to a much bigger issue. The biggest monster in the biz is the one that showed up in the recent TFP essay, Shut Up and Drive. Hollywood is highly risk averse. Complicating that is the reality that Hollywood is also a very insular closed loop of people who reinforce each others' views of the world.
Remember your favorite show or movie, the ones you could watch again and again. The words which came from the actors' mouths were put there by writers.
Everything you say is true but the article writer seemed to blame his declining fortunes on rapacious management does not see him and his fellow writers as part of the industry as a whole. I appreciate good writing but that is rare now. Whether that comes from management decisions, writer compliance with management decisions or lack of writing talent is beyond my ken. The first step to salvation is looking at the actual product. The writer just wanted to rearrange the chairs on the Titanic. If instead he had talked about management restrictions on what topics are allowed and disallowed I would be more sympathetic. My understanding is that writers have similar cultural, educational and political backgrounds now. Maybe that is part of the problem too.
Rob Long was the writer and producer for Cheers and a couple of other big sitcoms. He can probably live off royalties for the rest of his days.
Yes they were. But now they are terrified of the mob attacking them if they utter a word not allowed by that closed loop. They killed creativity by going along to get along. I feel no pity with their self-imposed destruction.
Exactly right. I get enough woke/progressive nonsense shoved in my face daily that I don’t need to buy more from Hollywood.
Currently I’m enjoying chess championship commentary - free (with ads) on YouTube, no woke proselytizing, no “writers” necessary, great content.
The idea that the crappy US cars from the 70’s were the fault of the *auto workers* is simply propaganda pushed by the auto executives who were actually at fault. The charge made no sense then and it makes even less sense now.
The reason that the AMC Gremlin, Chevy Vega, or Ford Pinto were destroyed by Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas *was not* because of the *auto workers*. That’s a ridiculous claim. None of these cars, even if flawlessly assembled by a team of neurosurgeons, would have been competitive. Because they were badly designed by auto execs lazily resting on their past successes rather than pushing for constant innovation. The US cars lacked front-wheel drive, dual overhead cams, and were heavy…and so the Japanese competition were price competitive, more technologically advanced, and got significantly better gas mileage.
Again, none of this had anything to do with the auto workers - they didn’t design the engine, didn’t decide it should be rear wheel drive, and weren’t responsible for it being SOHC.
US manufacturers have been pushing this narrative for 45 years. I understand why they do it. But it’s dishonest nonsense and people should be smart enough to see through the propaganda.
How many "lemons" were there? How often did you have to take your car to the repair shop? Surely there is responsibility at all levels.
I guess there were no union work rules that hampered manufacturing innovation and distracted them from paying attention to their market and customers? Both the unions and management took to buyer for granted.
If you show me a union rule that you believe led to the bad designs of the Nova, Gremlin, and Pinto, I would be happy to consider the argument.
But in your original post, you put all of the blame on the unions. Which, as I pointed out in my response, is ludicrous. The unions didn’t chose to produced these cars with these specs, and they didn’t design or market them either. A perfectly manufactured Gremlin with no defects is still a Gremlin.
I don’t want to completely absolve the union of blame - but I put the blame at something like management 90%, union 10%. The management *runs the company*.
Even if I were to believe that it was 100% not the fault of the 'workers', demanding pay raises in a poorly run business is a sure fire way to help it sink faster.
Maybe it was the perfect storm? An industry that refused to notice what consumers wanted and design to meet that need. Union leaders who also failed to recognize the downturn of the auto industry along with their inability to keep the mob out of the union.
If you believe that the union workers were not in any way culpable for the product, then you clearly weren't paying attention to the propaganda when the product was "good."
Look, major advances in euchre and time-clock management and security are clearly related to the efforts of the UAW.
Of course management was also culpable, to to pretend that labor was "simply following orders" is laughable.
Do you believe that the union designed the Nova? Decided to market it? Decided it should be rear wheel drive?
Of course not.
The union is, of course, responsible for certain errors in manufacturing.
But the real problem with the Nova, Pinto, Gremlin, etc wasn’t reliability. It was the bad design, which is 100% the responsibility of management.
You have to suspend your disbelief to put the blame on unions for the bad cars of the 1970’s.
If Amazon started losing money and marketshare and tried to blame this on their “lazy warehouse workers”, people would laugh them out of the building. That’s the appropriate response, and it’s the appropriate response to blaming unions for badly conceived 70’s cars.
The union also did not design the model T, the Mustang, the corvette or any of the successful vehicles.
Unions have been supplanted by either Chinese labor or OSHA and Fed laws. Of course the real reason they thrive in certain areas is that they are the cesspools of marxists and the heirs of the bolsheviks, both of whom and their associates can rot.
Unions destroyed much of the US middle class after helping to create it. Tragic. But the unions learned what their hosts already knew, excessive profits bring ruinous competition. Damned shame.
It seems to me that all TV shows have to have homosexuals and minorities. To paraphrase Dave Chapelle, "Have you noticed that all commercials have black actors , mixed couples and no whites." I am not a racist nor a homophobe but if the homosexual communities is only 7% or less of the population can't these shows reflect that demographic?
There are two TV series that portray upper crust England in the 17th and 18th centuries and mixed in the aristocracy and upper class are black actors freely mixing with the English upper class at dinner parties and dances.
I have nothing against minorities in TV shows and I know with the PC/Woke jerks, I will be labeled with their favorite slur as a racist. However, these shows taking place in the 17 and 18 hundreds are complete fantasy. Not just the English but all of Europe were xenophobic, racists in the 18 and 19 century. Minorities were not allowed into society and if you married a black person back then it was social suicide.
I am merely pointing out historical fact and as we all know the left hate history and facts. It makes them uncomfortable.
The whole point of my post is the PC/Woke assholes have taken over the film industry and shoving their fantasy agendas on all of us. I am not for industry or government censorship but I censor these programs by not watching them.
With trepidation, I post this.
I think this point brings up one of the issues with Unions in general; they don't filter. In this case, if you are a writer in Hollywood, you are part of the union. Whether you are have written multiple award winning shows and movies or everything you have done was garbage. So when the union currently does something to help 'writers' they are helping a small number of people who are good at their craft and a whole host of people who the consumers would probably be happy to see go.
I do have to wonder...do the writers in Hollywood not get to advocate on their own behalf? Meaning, if I am applying to write on a new show, and I have worked on several successful shows and well respected show runners speak well of me, can I not use that to get a raise or better options or whatever?
On the opposite end, if I am a new writer who has not proven I have the chops. Or worse, I have mostly worked on failures, why should I get to stand on the shoulders of good writers so that I can demand better pay for my unproven or poor work?
I do agree with some of his points. If you have more administrator types than creative types working on a show, there is a problem. And if this is true for every writer no matter their skill, talent, or output then you have a BIG problem. And writers are not the sole reason a show can suck. A showrunner may reject great scripts. A director can butcher a well laid out scene. And an actor can hack up good dialogue. So a bad show can have many possible bad causes. For all we know the scripts for LOTR, were fine but some producer or executive demanded certain things that dragged it down.
All of that said, based on my rapid decline in watching scripted TV of late (Marvel, Star Wars, Netflix in general, etc) and finding that the indie productions on Youtube being more diverse in content, quality, and passion I don't have a ton of support for the writers guild this time around. With some of the stories I have heard from some writer rooms, I feel like quite a few need the boot. They don't understand basic character, plot, or the premise of actually entertaining your core audience, let alone doing justice to someone else's creation that they are now writing about. So maybe this bomb needs to go off so Hollywood will rebuild better.
Cue James Carville “Old School”:
“I have no response……..That was perfect.”
Well said!
… times are changing… add influencers for audio/ video and now AI tools will rule.
"an increasingly bad product for decades"? You must be a teenager, or so old that you stopped watching TV. The Golden Age of Television began more than 20 years ago, and there is now more quality content than anyone can keep track of, let alone watch. However, amid the growing quantity, there is also plenty of crap, and plenty driven by ideology. As the Soviet Union had Socialist Realism, perhaps we can call today's aesthetic Woke Realism.
https://reason.com/2014/10/01/the-new-face-of-television/
"more quality content" -- can you give some recommendations?
Living in Russia for many years, I used to advise Russians learning English to listen to English-language music. Then, with the rise of the quality TV series, about 20 years ago I switched to TV series. Unlike movies, each episode of a series lasts about one academic hour, they repeat (with continuing characters!), and they get you hooked. I would "prescribe" a series according to a person's profession (e.g. House for medical people, Damages for lawyers, Mad Men for salespeople, Weeds for drug dealers...). I got tired of writing people lists, so I began maintaining one at IMDB:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000673635/
It eventually became pointless, and I gave up. There are far too many good series, and Russians know about Breaking Bad like everybody else. My 13-year-old daughter in Moscow wears a Rick & Morty T-shirt.
Occasionally I do recommend somebody a specific series, e.g. when someone complains that everything with superheroes nowadays is Woke, I suggest The Boys or Invincible.
I now live in Germany, and here I try to follow my own advice and watch German series. The list is much shorter, but I do strongly recommend Babylon Berlin, Deutschland 83, and Weissensee.
Almost everything you listed is old. No one is saying there isn't good stuff out there. Just that there seems to be less and less of it, which is why people keep going back and re-watching older stuff.
That's my point--I specifically listed old content, because it is what I was recommending 10+ years ago. I said, "It eventually became pointless, and I gave up," because good content was exploding and I couldn't keep up. I can't know what exists, let alone watch it all. For a quick list, look at IMDB's top TV shows, and note that the year listed is when the series started, not when it ended (if it did):
https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/?sort=us,desc&mode=simple&page=1
But I'd agree that there is also a lot of expensive, inexcusably flawed stuff.
Just a quick look. 1 show from this year, 7 shows from last year. Of those 7, 4 of them are from outside of the US. And of those 8 total, only 3 interest me (with 2 of those being admittedly absolutely fabulous!). Seems to me that this list simply reinforces what others have said....not much good stuff being made by Hollywood of late. Especially since a 'show' no longer means ~26 episodes, but instead seems to mean 8-10.
I would add that part of the issue isn't just lack of good content. Its how spread out the good stuff is. I don't want my life to be constantly moving from one service to another to watch the 1-2 good shows that service makes in a year. But that is a separate issue.
This is NOT a defense of current output, but I do think some decent stuff gets made. For me personally Ted Lasso and Severance both scratched that itch for me recently. And then I went back to watching youtube. I have been a Netflix subscriber since before they had streaming. I just canceled my account a few days ago from the combo of boring stuff mixed with shoving politics into stuff (like race changing a historical figure in a DOCUMENTARY).
Perhaps Hollywood is just out of touch with the reality of real everyday working people so that the entertainment you produce isn’t worth our time (which is precious).
Well, it's pretty easy to tell you why you're circling the vortex, Rob. (I'm using "you" here in the collective sense to describe the whole Hollywood/show biz ecology.) You're not producing movies or television shows. You're producing "content."
Here's the deal about narrative: It's strongest when it reflects a singular vision. There's a reason why "Yellowstone" and "Curb My Enthusiasm" are the two strongest shows in the vast streaming wasteland: They reflect a _singular_ creative point of view.
Yeah, yeah, yeah—writers' rooms are necessary to connect the dotted lines, to fill in the blanks. It's virtually impossible to know if jokes work if you don't have a sounding board, so yeah—you need a writers' room for that. Great dialogue kinda works by the same rule. And I suppose storylines, too, to some extent, since once a storyteller is finished with the characters in his or her own head, it can be difficult to envision what comes next.
But narrative by committee? No, no, no.
My understanding is that according to the 2020 Schedule of Minimums, even the lowliest of low writers can anticipate making $4,000 to $5,000 a week. That might be chump change in the Hollywood ecology, but it's serious bank to some of us.
All of which is a roundabout way off saying even if I had access to the world's tiniest violin, I wouldn't play a sad song for you on it.
How many mini writers' rooms does it take to write yet another serial killer series? Asking for a friend.
I like crime and forensic shows, but I never watch serial killer shows. Serial killers and school shooters should not be given the light of day IMO.
I believe I am in the same demographic as Rob and I would just comment: "Top Gun Maverick" anyone?! The middle class in this country - the majority the Left wants to crush - simply wants good-guy/gal movies and shows that push some limits but reflect our values.
Cheers, Seinfeld, Sons of Anarchy, Jackass, Friends, The Office, Breaking Bad, Braveheart, The Patriot, We Were Soldiers, Beverly Hills Cop, Alien, Reacher, etc are the shows our kids are drawn to and it isn't because we watch them.
“Maybe instead of mini rooms with fewer writers, the studios should be sending out more emails from HR to more executives.” - bureaucracy in every damn corner of our lives is killing us. Im with Mr. Long and relate to his pivot. Same. Great piece and thank you for the laugh too ( Equinox - lol)
This was supposed to be a good essay? This was one of your recommendations for essay of the week? Very disappointing. This essay contained nothing of interest nor was it thought provoking.
Mr. Long's essay only served to confirm what most of us who have been paying any small amount of attention have observed over and over again for years. Hollywood is failing. It is rare that movies and shows produced and released these days are any good at all. We consumers are looking elsewhere for our entertainment, and we have plenty of options.
Mr. Long complaining about the failures of the industry and only focusing on a small part of that failing and not a more honest evaluation of the whole modern Hollywood culture made for a week and pointless essay not worth the time read.
This was a failure both by Mr. Long and the Free Press.
What mr.Long is thinking???
The Hollywood is already Bolsheviks in their ideology, concepts and practice, so does not need to “become” one of them.
That is how socialism looks like- a bunch of communists have everything and the other are the slaves… I lived through that, ran from it, and now see it here…
Sure, be a better Bolshevik than your boss is a great option!
Dear Hollywood: I have been totally turned off by the wokifying of the classics and changing history. I hate reality shows. I want to be entertained and not depressed. I miss witty dialogue and laughter. Give me true stories of perseverance. Many great stories of marginalized people are waiting to be written for the screens, small and large. I love Yellowstone and its spin-offs.
None of the writers on Amazon's LOTR can compete with Tolkien for writing ability and for his breadth of knowledge. I don't want "inspired by Tolkien". I want Tolkien and if he isn't available, I'll take only what he wrote. Hollywood needs to turn out new stories without all the cursing, PC comments, woke ideology, racially correct - for right now casting, etc. All of these things will age projects and they will never be classics.
I’d settle for ditching the obligatory sex scene and the obligatory chase scene. Like when the cops are going to question someone and yell across the way at them so they run and then can be chased instead of going up to them and not speak until very close.
And I agree, are there really that many interracial couples in America other than in commercials?
You're right I forgot about those aspects. No there aren't that many interracial couple in America. Only 15 % + or - of the population in America claims to be black, but in commercials the percentage of interracial couples is far higher. They make it seem like there are more interracial couples than black or white couples.
This gets ever weirder when they do genre work. Showing me an isolated group of not hobbits who look like they have members who came from all over the world does break immersion.
It seems the Free Press is devolving to just essays that could be featured on NPR. I’d prefer news. And news that affects real people doing real things and not arcane elitist topics.
But the difference is that you can reply to the writer publicly here and not on NPR. Big difference, I think. Instead of NPR “educating “ the masses the masses can educate the elite here.
You assume the writers read the comments. Besides, if the topic is arcane, who cares?
Mr. Long, your replacement is here: ChatGPT will rule the mini-rooms.
Nah, ridiculous demands from collectivists will block this. It always works! Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go bury my head back in the sand.
I was going to point that out, thanks.
I want to be sympathetic, but it's hard when Hollywood cranks out garbage. New ideas are as scarce as hen's teeth. I spend as much time cruising all of the apps on my Firestick looking for something worth watching as I actually do watching and when I do watch, I am almost always disappointed.
I can't remember when my wife and I have made it through a Hollywood movie all the way that was made in the last twenty years. They all seem to be formulaic crap. Yet we watch a lot of movies. Mostly indie or foreign. I maintain a list of the ones I particularly like that goes back to the seventies. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of these movies were written by lone writers. Maybe it's the process of writing by committee that is the problem?
If it’s a great product why is the point of the article that the industry is losing money? The great content of 20 years ago is, well, 20 years ago. How many good shows like Sopranos or Breaking Bad have come out recently? Sales with movies.
Or Frasier. Now that’s comedy.
I think that may be Mr. Long’s point. The reason the Content has been so awful lately is because of how writers are being treated.
It shows the importance of good writers. They are the heart and soul of good content worth watching.
Or, just maybe the writing sucks. I know that I anticipate the reboot of a reboot coming out soon.
I do believe that in some cases the writers are bulldozed by execs and such. No doubt. But I also believe that is some cases, they are hiring the wrong writers. Bringing in writers who outright state they don't like the source material (Witcher) or have never really read it or don't care about it (Many Marvel projects) is also the fault of the writers filling those positions.
Rob Long at The Free Press, my worlds are colliding.