Saturday Hot Links
Time for the 366th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.
Oscars: A Guide to All 87 Foreign-Language Submissions.
Next Gen Talent 2018: Hollywood’s Rising Young Stars Revealed.
At the 2018 AFI Fest, the spotlight is on women from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Mary, Queen of Scots.
Academy Museum Fundraising Stalls as Opening Date Nears.
I Am Not Gone: Finding Hope at the Movies in 2018.
Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey Team Up for ‘The Color Purple’ Movie Musical.
Stacey Snider on Life After Fox: ‘My Job for the Last Year Has Been Chairman of Human Emotions’.
‘A Quiet Place’ Producers Reveal A Dialogue-Filled Flashback That Was Cut & How John Krasinski Became Director.
Paramount’s ‘A Quiet Place’ Reverses Plans, Entire Cast to Compete as Supporting.
How Gary Whitta Turned an Unproduced Screenplay Into ‘Oliver’ Comic.
In her own words, Diablo Cody reveals how writing ‘Tully’ saved her.
Scott Derrickson’s Issue With Some ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Bad Reviews Starts an Online Debate About Film Criticism.
Jason Blum Gets Booed Off Stage At Israel Film Festival While Giving An Anti-Trump Speech.
Alfonso Cuaron Had to Abandon His Safety Net to Make ‘Roma’.
Are There Movies That Can’t Be Remade?
The Unique Struggles of Making a Career Being a Monster.
Raven Capital to Acquire Open Road for $87.5 Million After No Other Bidders Emerge in Bankruptcy Auction.
Ben Silverman’s Propagate Teams With Authentic Talent & Literary Management to Produce Content.
New Holographic Content Push Planned by Endeavor Partnership.
MoviePass Parent to Spin Off Cinema Subscription Service.
Moviegoers Aren’t Yet Sold on Theater Subscription Services.
Could More Consolidation Loom: AMC and Viacom Are Rolling Up Leadership to Better Compete.
Disney Smashes Earnings Expectations Ahead of Fox Acquisition.
Bob Iger Talks Disney+, Hulu Plans and His Vision for Enlarged TV Studio.
Disney’s Fox Deal Gets European Union Clearance Subject to Divestments.
Disney Takes $157M Write-Down on Vice Media Investment.
Pixar Co-Founder Ed Catmull to Retire.
Lionsgate Earnings Beat Expectations After Strong Starz Growth.
Nickelodeon Taps ‘Boss Baby’ Producer Ramsey Naito to Lead Animation.
Discovery Stock Hits 52-Week High as Earnings Miss, Analysts Cheer U.S. Ad Growth.
Save FilmStruck: Barbra Streisand, Guillermo del Toro and More Urge Warner Media to Reconsider.
We’re Not Mad Enough About the End of FilmStruck.
As Streaming Wars Escalate, CBS May Not Need to Beat Netflix — Just HBO.
David Simon Fascism Drama ‘The Plot Against America’ a Go at HBO.
Netflix Plans to Raise $2 Billion in New Debt to Fund Content Spending.
As Netflix Adds More Debt to Get Even Bigger, the Streaming Wars Enter Turbo-Charge Mode.
Scorsese, Soderbergh & More Could Be The Next Directors To Receive Exclusive Theatrical Runs From Netflix.
The Satanic Temple Sues Netflix For $50 Million Over ‘Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina’ Statue.
How David Mackenzie Salvaged ‘Outlaw King’ After the Netflix Oscar Hopeful Crashed and Burned.
Jennifer Salke Details Amazon’s Global TV “Sweet Spot”: “I’m Here to Compete”.
Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Sexual Misconduct Claims After Employee Walkout.
Facebook Suspends 115 Accounts for ‘Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior’ Before Elections.
Digital Platforms Boost Documentary Financing.
Has Augmented Reality Pioneer Magic Leap Fallen Off a Cliff?
Screenwriting Master Class tip of the week
More than just the moral or premise of the story, theme can best be understood to be about what a story MEANS.
Beginning November 19, I will be teaching the one-week online class Core VII: Theme, one of eight courses in my Core curriculum which focuses on writing theory. On Day One, we consider various takes on how to define theme and end up with my writing principle:
Theme = Meaning.
Here is an excerpt from Lecture 1 in which I analyze the Coen brothers’ remake of the movie True Grit:
Generally, I am not a fan of remakes, but what Joel and Ethan Coen did with True Grit represents powerful filmmaking, not the least of which how they interweave the story’s central theme throughout. Indeed, this theme is revealed in the first few seconds of the movie. Over opening credits in the soundtrack, we hear a piano version of the old hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”.
That melody is repeated over and over again in the movie, underscoring the importance of the emerging dynamic between Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn. It is paid off dramatically in the Final Struggle, where Cogburn takes Mattie, who has been bitten by a rattlesnake, on an arduous journey to save her life. On horseback until the horse breaks down, then…
IN HIS ARMS! Carrying her for miles and miles until he finds a house in the wilderness. So she is literally leaning on his (Cogburn’s) everlasting arms.
It’s a beautiful end point of Mattie’s innocence-to-experience journey: She starts off cocksure and assertive, lots of head-learning but minimal knowledge of the ‘real’ world. She leaves the Ordinary World of her family’s Arkansas farm and ventures into the New World, represented by the wilderness of the hunt for her father’s killer. Over time she opens up — slowly — to the assistance of others. In the end, she actually needs help, and help she gets from Cogburn who symbolically becomes her surrogate father.
Here are the lyrics of the hymn, which by the way is the song that’s sung when the end credits roll:
What a fellowship, what a joy divine,
leaning on the everlasting arms;
what a blessedness, what a peace is mine,
leaning on the everlasting arms.
Refrain:
Leaning, leaning,
safe and secure from all alarms;
leaning, leaning,
leaning on the everlasting arms.
O how sweet to walk in this pilgrim way,
leaning on the everlasting arms;
O how bright the path grows from day to day,
leaning on the everlasting arms.
(Refrain)
What have I to dread, what have I to fear,
leaning on the everlasting arms?
I have blessed peace with my Lord so near,
leaning on the everlasting arms.
How perfectly those lyrics fit Mattie’s hero’s journey. In the External World (Plotline), she pursues her conscious goal: find and kill Chaney, the man who murdered her father.
In the Internal World (Themeline), Mattie’s journey is about her metamorphosis from fierce independence to dependence on others, going from the disconnect of her existence as an adult-child, separating her from anyone else, to finding a connection, then ultimately trust with Cogburn. In a way, Cogburn becomes the Christ figure of the hymn.
That is why when Cogburn goes to the extraordinary lengths he does to save Mattie’s life at the end of the movie, we see the theme played out not in an intellectual way, but a powerful emotional fashion. During that three-minute series of scenes, there’s hardly any dialogue, almost all visuals, primarily of Mattie leaning into Cogburn’s shoulders (on horseback), then hanging from Cogburn’s arms (on foot).
It is the perfect resolution of this central theme. You can see a lovely video here featuring the saga in brief accompanied by the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”
The ironic thing is that Mattie, as an adult, does not change, at least discernably. As we see in the Denouement, she is still the fierce, independent woman she was as a 14 year-old. She might well have moved from her position of disconnect to other people to connection had it not been for the fact that her experiences on the trail with Cogburn [especially] as well as LeBouef were so profound, they became these sort of archetypal ideals to which no other humans could possibly compare. Who could she meet in life who could personify wisdom as much as Cogburn (Mentor) or cut as romantic a figure as LeBouef (Attractor), each representing aspects of her own psyche?
For the rest of her life, Mattie need only look at her missing forearm to be reminded every moment of every day of those pivotal experiences, so deeply seared into her consciousness. She had found a connection, all right. It was, however, with two powerful figures who dwarfed everything else that followed in her life.
It’s that type of texture, those kind of multilayered levels of interpretation and emotional meaning we think of as arising from a story’s themes.
We could choose to look at True Grit with the idea of theme as premise. Perhaps this: “Revenge takes a toll.” Or theme as DNA. Maybe this: “Mattie begins as an adult, then becomes a child.” Those are true in their own way.
But at its core, this story is about a relationship between Mattie and Rooster, the metamorphosis arc from their contentious beginning to her salvation as he carries the girl in his everlasting arms. That is a theme rife with emotional meaning.
All too often, writers approach theme as an intellectual exercise whereas it works best when we think of a story’s meaning — and specifically its emotional meaning — the various layers of psychological interplay between characters.
If you want to learn much more about the important subject of Theme, consider enrolling in my one-week Core VII: Theme class which begins Monday, November 19.
