Thread by @mangiotto

This is what the head of the studio says to the Holly Hunter character in BROADCAST NEWS and her response is incredibly on point. I know I don't always know better, I know I'm not always the smartest guy in the room - it makes the disappointment larger.

https://twitter.com/garymwalters/status/1451122201550278656

Mr. Walters here is a producer - Nicolas Wendig Refn's for one, w/credits on DRIVE and THE NEON DEMON so he/you obviously understand subtext & more, you get what it's like to have your work massively misunderstood and rejected financially by the public. His latest is the American

remake of THE GUILTY which, I'm not the first nor only person to observe, takes the ambiguity of the original and turns it into exposition. The ending - oblique and haunting in the original - is spelled out now in dialogue & V/O in case you missed it. When that happens, the pop

wisdom is that remakes are terrible, especially American remakes of foreign properties. I think a lot about how the first Harry Potter book is titled "and the Philosopher's Stone" in the UK, but not here because it was judged that Americans were too stupid to know what philosophy

is. There's a difference between stupidity and ignorance, though. If Americans were taught philosophy, they could understand it. But there's a certain stigma attached to matters of the mind here - a reason why the KKK's leader is the "Grand Wizard" & not the "Head Philosopher."

We are taught early that what you don't understand is magic. Most grown-ups don't believe in magic unless it's religious magic - and so we get stuff like "Midnight Mass" that says, hey, if I told you this vampire was an angel, would you believe me? Americans? Sure, if you say so.

Anyway, when I write about stuff like THE GUILTY, I tend to blame the dir/screenwriter when really it's the producers, right? It's these notes that say "what happens to him at the end?" and these notes are born of fear that being oblique will lead to the same kind of nasty snark

my comment about people being culturally illiterate attracts. "So elitist! ew!" Julia Roberts agreed to MONA LISA SMILE, a distaff DEAD POETS SOCIETY on the strength of one line of dialogue. It goes something like "Even Persephone got three months off a year." Don't remember that

line? It was cut because producers decided that it would make the people going to see MONA LISA SMILE feel stupid and then enraged for feeling stupid. "Americans: Don't You Dare Tell Them Stuff They Don't Know" is the motto where "What Would Lubitsch Do?" used to hang. So, I'm

well aware that Hollywood is a business and there's a lot of money involved - so I'm very grateful to Mr. Walters for films like DRIVE and NEON DEMON - even NIGHTCRAWLER which I didn't love but it's good, right? He must've known they wouldn't make a lot of money and he trusted.

He's in it for the art. For THE GUILTY, some bad advice got through, I think, because no matter how obvious you make it - how much like a screed - it's not going to make more money than it was going to make. I was talking to someone once about NIGHTBREED and how for the longest

time there was this mythical Clive Barker cut of it and he wondered why they didn't just release that cut to begin with. I said that they probably just worried about its box office - but that people going to see it were going to see it and it didn't probably have a lot of draw

outside of that, and that watering down the Barker-ness of it would only piss off the only people who were going to make it a thing. I believe that about a lot of these projects - that I understand why you're making it real stupid, but the people who regard film as product are

not its audience now, nor ever. Easy for me to say, it's not my money. Anyway - because it's a business, people are terrified to say stuff like this to very powerful men like Mr. Walters. But he needs to hear it sometimes. Americans aren't stupid, but we also don't have easy and

affordable access to education. Our textbooks are printed in Texas, we're passing laws restricting minority voices and uncomfortable history, & our level of discourse has fallen to hating people who have read a book and worshipping people who beat up people who have read a book.

There's no easy way back. But taking a shot at someone saying that there's value in not just taking something at face value (I mean, I know that guy in the stand-up said he wasn't saying bad things, but I don't entirely believe him) - & that Moby Dick isn't just a New England

whaling history - is falling in with the mob which, frankly, doesn't need any more help than it's getting. Okay! Back to discussing the delicate nuances of "Squid Game" which, I'm led to understand, is some kind of subversive commentary on Capitalism.

Here's my review of THE NEON DEMON: filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2016/10/th…