FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
49m ago
That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us.
Which strikes me as an intrinsically quixotic goal. As you note yourself, even the richest man on earth can't stop people making jokes about his drug problems. Even the leader of the free world can't stop people making jokes about his tiny hands, as much as he'd obviously like to. When I see trans women in floods of tears and rending their hair about how strangers don't see them the way they see themselves, all I can think is - buddy, join the club.
FtttG
12hr ago
I've now finished 18 books this year out of a goal of 26.
I'm one behind you, out of the same target.
FtttG
17hr ago
I have little hope that a future Oblivion remake would be anywhere near as good because they will simply sand away all the interesting parts
It's crazy that this was announced and released literally a week after you posted this comment. Did your prediction come true?
FtttG
19hr ago
Still on The Secret of Our Success, after getting no reading done over the weekend. It's still fascinating, but I miss reading fiction. Going to read an Agatha Christie next just to cleanse my palate.
FtttG
19hr ago
My girlfriend has noticed ChatGPT's predilection for em-dashes, and now she can't unsee it. Whenever she sees a passage of text which uses them, she assumes ChatGPT was involved in the text's creation, up to and including Teams messages sent by her colleagues (which is honestly not an unreasonable assumption, in my view).
But my concern is the same as yours: I do use em-dashes a fair amount (mostly in fiction rather than non-fiction or blogging), and with exactly one exception I've never used ChatGPT as a writing aid. I'd hate to be accused of doing so without cause.
Occasionally you'll encounter albums where the liner notes include a notice specifying that no pitch correction (e.g. AutoTune) was used on the album, or no synthesizers (more common in the seventies and eighties, less common nowadays). I wonder how soon it'll be before the first novel is published which includes a notice in the front matter to the effect of "No generative AI was used in the creation of this novel".
FtttG
2d ago
people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism
The first time I encountered this term was someone making a similarly derisive comment about women who dye their hair in unnatural colours (blue, purple, pink etc.), who in my limited experience do tend to be headcases.
FtttG
4d ago
It's not quite the same thing, but the article by Kevin Mims I linked above contains some fairly detailed statistical analysis of novelists whose novels get nominated for the National Book Awards. He argues that, contrary to the National Book Foundation's claims that its nominees are increasingly diverse, they've actually become less diverse over time, in the sense that the majority of nominees are people who studied English lit at undergraduate level before completing an MFA in creative writing - whereas many earlier winners and nominees for the award had no formal training in creative writing and in many cases no third-level education. It'd be interesting to see if this is also true of screenwriters.
FtttG
4d ago
Well, now you're just straight up putting words in my mouth. I never claimed that volunteering in a foreign country doesn't count as meaningful life experience. Nor did I ever claim that working as a lawyer is exciting or meaningful, merely that it's clearly something distinct from writing.
Is a stint working as a busboy really that unusual? Is speeding? Surely someone in today’s Hollywood has cleared this bar.
I'm sure they have - but if it's significantly less common for successful screenwriters to have cleared that bar than it used to be, that could be one contributing factor towards the decline of writing quality that is described in this thread.
FtttG
4d ago
I don't think your examples really support the argument you're making. @MaiqTheTrue's argument, as I understand it, was similar to one made by Kevin Mims here: writers in the past tended to have some kind of life experience outside of writing which they could draw on in order to tell compelling stories, whereas modern writers tend to study writing itself, and hence have nothing to draw on other than other stories they've read by other people, resulting in their novels/stories/screenplays giving the impression of palimpsest. I did not interpret their argument to mean that "if you have a liberal arts education, your stories will suck".
Per the narrative above, Jonathan Hensleigh obviously falls into the former category, not the latter: he practised law for seven years, unambiguously professional experience outside of writing itself. Likewise David Mamet: he variously worked as a busboy and taxi driver in Chicago (imagine the kinds of crazy characters he must have met) before taking up writing full-time. Ed Solomon I'll grant - but if your first example to illustrate your point that "you don't need life experience to tell a compelling story, you can just go straight into writing professionally" is the dude who wrote the Charlie's Angels adaptation and Super Mario Bros. with Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper, it doesn't strike me as a terribly compelling one. (Obviously Solomon has written more commercially successful and critically well-received screenplays than those two, but it seems worth pointing out that the latter is widely considered one of the worst films ever made and one of the worst cinematic adaptations of a video game - and there is some seriously stiff competition for the latter accolade.)
So of the three examples you provided of successful Hollywood screenwriters, two of them did, in fact, have some kind of professional life experience outside of writing to draw on when writing their screenplays, which seems to affirm @MaiqTheTrue's point rather than contradict it.
I'll concede the point that studying film in college before going on to being a director seems to be a pretty normal career progression, and has been for decades - but given that this thread was about the poor standard of writing (as opposed to directing) in modern Hollywood films, that observation doesn't seem especially relevant. At no point did @MaiqTheTrue argue or even imply that films are worse now because directors study film in college instead of getting life experience first. While I don't doubt that having life experiences to draw on is valuable as a director, directing a film is an intrinsically more technical craft than writing one - the director needs to have at least a passing understanding of lighting, lenses, shutter speed, depth of field etc. in a way the screenwriter doesn't, and hence are well-served by studying these elements in a formal setting.
True. I get the impression that this tendency is bleeding over from soap operas into ostensibly prestige television and standalone films, two media in which the audience's undivided assumption was traditionally assumed.
FtttG
4d ago
He neither directed nor wrote the screenplay for ESB. His only role was a "story by" credit.
Everyone knows that sheltered people exist. Everyone knows that echo chambers exist.
Even many people who are aware, in principle, that echo chambers exist seem to have a remarkably poor time recognising when they've found themselves inside one. Echo chambers, like "biases", are things that happen to other people. I'm actually not persuaded that the average person with an undergraduate degree would be better equipped to recognise that they're in an echo chamber than the average person without an undergraduate degree. Kind of reminds me of the cowpox of doubt: if you've been told that uneducated people get sucked down the rabbit hole of far-right echo chambers, you might think to yourself "phew, good thing I have a degree, that'll never happen to me!" Which might make you even more susceptible to ending up in an echo chamber - perhaps not a far-right one, but an echo chamber of some description.
You’ve got the George Lucases of the world: studied film at USC. No interesting life experiences. No ability to write human dialogue. Clearly capable of making a movie anyway.
Your use of the singular indefinite article is very appropriate. George Lucas is capable of making a movie. As in, one. Which he did fifty years ago, which he's been coasting on ever since.
Then there’s the Wes Andersons, whose ivory-tower philosophy degrees don’t appear to have prevented them from writing competent films.
I don't know if you have other people in mind of the same ilk as Wes Anderson, but as for the man himself, I've seen two of his movies and found them both insufferably annoying and precious throughout.
FtttG
4d ago
Sure, you can rewatch it to pick up all the clues you missed the first time round, but that's more like doing a crossword puzzle
I made the exact same comparison in my review of Memento, which is not a good movie. I think one of Nolan's major weaknesses is that he loves plots, but hates the fact that there have to be characters in them doing things.
I know we recently had our disagreements about the future impact of technology on human brains, but for what it's worth, @Butlerian's description also fills me with a profound despair.
FtttG
4d ago
One of the most alien and disconcerting things is that Millenials will text while having sex. I now give a standard warning to Millenials: "No texting during sex or we are done. I don't care how hot you are."
Ted_Kaczynski_mugshot.jpeg
FtttG
4d ago
I mentioned before that my mother once said to me that she finds herself enjoying movies and TV shows that aren't in English more than ones that are. Why? Because if it's not in English, she has to give the show her full attention to read the subtitles. If it's in English, she can spend half the movie looking at her phone. Netflix are acutely aware of the "second screen" phenomenon and have urged screenwriters not to bank on the audience's undivided attention, and to stuff their scripts with lazy expository dialogue so that audiences can still follow the plot even if they're watching "Family Guy funny moments" or similar on their phone at the same time.
I wonder if this is a big part of why (per the OP) modern movie writing is so bad - if the screenwriters are thinking to themselves "well, this is a boring talky scene, where people will be staring at their phones. Even if I do my best to make the expository dialogue realistic, lively and entertaining in its own right, no one's going to look up at the screen until something explodes, so why bother putting in the effort?"
Some touring musicians are insisting on audiences putting their smartphones into little black bags which they can collect at the end of the gig because they hate performing in front of a sea of people on their smartphones. I would happily pay an extra euro for a phone-free cinema screening, and I reckon that, while people would initially grumble about it, they'd most likely end up enjoying the movie a lot more.
FtttG
5d ago
You seem hellbent on attacking an argument I've never made and a worldview I've never endorsed.
FtttG
6d ago
Something like "the cost of reducing fraud to zero is too high to be worth it" would be more accurate
The two phrases scan as synonymous to me, no different from "men are taller than women" vs. "the average man is taller than the average woman".
FtttG
6d ago
In the case of scams, all it means is that they have to put more effort into appearances of legitimacy.
I think we might be talking past each other. I've been using "high-trust society" and "high-trust country" kind of interchangeably, but I think more specificity is called for. What I'm really arguing (and what I take Davies to be arguing) is that fraud can only take place within a high-trust community. That is, a country might be low-trust on the whole, but there might be enclaves within that country in which the members enjoy a presumption of trust with one another (social clubs, religious communities, voluntary organisations etc.). It is within these communities in which fraud and scams will occur in countries which are otherwise low-trust. This, I think, is what you're getting at with "putting more effort into appearances of legitimacy": scam artists must consciously infiltrate these high-trust communities, and this may be more difficult in a low-trust country than in a high-trust one (as the members of a high-trust community within an otherwise low-trust country will be doubly suspicious of outsiders).
Fair point. I do, however, feel reasonably confident that even if we devoted 100% of a country's budget to preventing e.g. premature violent deaths of children in that country, we wouldn't be successful and the side effects unrelated to premature violent deaths of children would be disastrous.
Your smallpox example reminds me of an old post by Scott:
See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”
Eliminating a deadly microorganism is a piece of piss. Eliminating the fact that people will sometimes tell other people things that they know to be untrue, and be believed? I don't even know where you'd begin.
I don't think the Birkenhead drill only applies if the women in question aren't barren.
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