“Memos to Hollywood”
Earlier this week NY Times film critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott posted a series of “memos” to Hollywood. It’s pretty priceless. Here are a few of them:
To: Every animation studio except Pixar and sometimes DreamWorks
Cc: Pixar, DreamWorks
From: A.O.S.
You can do all kinds of great things with animation these days, and it’s often fun to watch the results of your visual wizardry. But it’s also not enough, and the formulas are starting to get tiresome. Enough with the winking, tiresome pop-culture allusions, the self-conscious celebrity voiceovers, the knowing jokiness, the insincere moralizing. Try telling a simple story with conviction. The merchandising tie-ins will take care of themselves.
To: Filmmakers, especially under 40
From: M.D.
The tripod is your friend. Few filmmakers can pull off florid handheld camerawork because most aren’t saying all that much through their visuals, handheld or not. (Also: Shaking the camera does not create realism.) Though it’s a cliché of contemporary cinema, fiction and nonfiction both, handheld camerawork that calls aggressive attention to itself tends to make empty images seem even emptier. If you want us to notice your cinematography, make sure you have something to say, like the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Demonlover”), whose restlessly moving images convey a searching intelligence. He isn’t just waving the camera around; he’s saying something about the world and the people in it.
And here are two aimed directly at screenwriters:
To: Members of the Writers Guild of America
Cc: M. Night Shyamalan
From: A.O.S.
You may think that slipping a doozy of a third-act surprise into your screenplay — a shocking twist that no one could possibly see coming — might make you look smart and the audience feel dumb, but please consider that the reverse might actually be the case.
To: Screenwriters
From: M.D.
Enough with the dead moms: I appreciate that the Bambi Principle is one of the tenets of mainstream narrative cinema and a surefire way to make us feel something for your characters. Yet in the past few years, the dead mothers club has grown awfully crowded what with the additions of “Slumdog Millionaire,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Uninvited,” “Nim’s Island,” “The Secret Life of Bees,” “Sunshine Cleaning,” “Knowing,” “Then She Found Me,” “Shoot ’Em Up,” “The Kite Runner,” “Grace Is Gone,” “Smart People,” “Eastern Promises,” “Dan in Real Life,” “No Reservations,” “Hannah Montana,” “Mister Foe” and “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.” I’m sure it’s nothing personal about women (right?) and that you love your mothers (not that it’s any of my business), but some more time on the couch might be in order. (P.S. Does John Cusack not like being fictionally married? He played a widower in “The Contract,” “Martian Child” and “Grace Is Gone.” Just asking.)
What memos would you write to Hollywood?
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