Robert McKee interiew: Part 2
Interesting 7-part interview between a young entrepreneur Sramrana Mitra and screenwriting guru Robert McKee. The questions have a business slant to them and yet McKee always pulls through them the commerce side of things and back to his central focus: Story.
Here is an excerpt from Part 2:
SM: The reason I am drilling down on this is that I see this as a business opportunity. You are telling me that there are great writers out there, they are just writing for television.
RM: It is definitely not a crisis of talent.
SM: Yet it is a crisis of story such that a whole market of consumers are going unsatisfied for whatever reason. I don’t get it.
RM: It has a lot to do with the politics of power. The reason that writers of high quality have left movies and gone over to television is for money and power. Let me give you an example. Alan Ball is a wonderful writer who won an Oscar for “American Beauty”. For the next year or more he could not get arrested. No one wanted anything that he wrote.
Alan Ball then went over to HBO, pitched them the series “Six Feet Under”, and created years of wonderful characters and stories. There is a major difference between television and movies. In television the writers are the producers. When you see an American TV series and you see all those producers’ names, they are all in fact writers. They are the writing staff of that series. They have gotten their titles because they can write. In television they have the power. The creator of the series becomes the executive producer, hires all the other writers, supervises and quality controls their work, and as long as that series is drawing audience it will continue. The money that writers make as writers/producers is 10 times what they would make in the movies.
We’ve talked before here about the quality of writing currently in television compared to movies. Indeed, articulating the same position as McKee, but with more venom is James Wolcott here in a Vanity Fair piece from September 2008:
In the 1960s (many of you weren’t around for that decade, but trust me — it was wild), one of the countercultural articles of faith was that you didn’t so much watch a movie as lean back and “let it wash over you.” It was still possible then to believe in the pore-cleansing powers of sensory overload and oceanic bliss, no matter how many Elvis Presley musicals gunked up the drive-ins. The movie screen was sacramental, the wide horizon on which Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, and David Lean played God. Compared with the puny portal of the television box, the movie screen bespoke a cool blank inscrutable mystique — a billboard-size tabula rasa ready to burst into tapestry. So much expectation hinged on that tingling moment in the theater when the lights dimmed and the curtains parted, revealing the screen staring back at us, virgin with possibility. “Let us pray,” Pauline Kael would sometimes mutter, not in a religious spirit (she was not a religious person) but in the hope that something wonderful was about to unveil, something that would make up for the lousy film the day before.
Today our prayers fly in different directions. We pray for the movie to finally get started after a face-blasting bombardment of ads and previews cranked up at full volume and, later, much later, after we’ve forgotten our reason for existence, pray for the film to finish already. Please, Mommy, make it stop. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was longer than Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, a callow affront to all that is holy. And as the film takes forever to burn off its budget, the fidgets in the audience flip their cell phones on to check for messages, gray lights going on and off like little refrigerator doors being opened and shut by obsessive-compulsives, or, worse, take an incoming call and start narrating what’s happening on-screen to the idiot at the other end. For me, the ideal time to go to the movies used to be the dead of the afternoon, when the empty seats outnumbered the lonely wayfarers. Now the ideal time to go to the movies is almost never. With home theaters going big, wide, and hi-def with digital cable, plasma screens, and sound systems, the aesthetic gap between multiplexing and couch-potatoing has never been narrower, but that doesn’t apply to me, since I don’t happen to have a wall-size plasma screen that hypnotizes. It’s content that provides the killer edge, that makes the choice between what’s at the movies and what’s on TV nearly no contest. Strip away the glitter and grandiosity and the truth is that most of what’s on the movie screen runs a ragged second to what’s available on television at a fraction of the aggravation.
I wonder whether one of the reasons television seems to offer better writing is that at the heart of so many of the notable series currently on air are great characters.
In other words, are there simply better — interesting, flawed, dimensionalized — characters on TV nowadays than in the movies?
To read more of Part 2 of the McKee interview, go here.
Go here for Part 1.
Tomorrow in Part 3, McKee gets into the universality of the human experience and draws a fascinating comparison between Indonesian storytelling and contemporary television.
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