Leonard is a philistine. Probably … I’m going by your excerpts (and I’m not likely to spend valuable time researching this point). The mass audience is in fact the enemy of the artist because it is mass. How is this not obvious?!? Giving the mass audience what it wants (in fact what it believes it wants) is inevitably to give it more of the same, i.e., more mass culture product. Leonard is correct as far as it goes that popular movies can be “done right” but those movies become popular by some process that is “not well understood” as geologists like to say.
The idea that movies are meant to soothe mass man and woman after a difficult day at the virtual coal face obviously serves the purpose of perpetuating the whole schema of work vs “free” time. Which time is not actually free because it is just as dominated by industry as work. Truly free time would offer the opportunity to do something other than the passive consumption of mass culture, with its obvious knock-on effect of brainwashed obedience. Elevating this into some kind of moral position is a sick joke that this state of affairs is playing on him (as well as J. Frantzen).
Leonard is a guy coming to this from the world of film and television production, and so he has sort of already "bought in" I think to a form of cultural production. I think he's a smart guy (as I said) but if you look into his work and where he's coming from you get to obviously see his biases. Of course he believes in a sort of market oriented approach because that is ultimately the form of cultural production he is familiar with and as spent his life working with. I doubt I will convince him because of that. But yes I ofc very much agree wrt what recreation time is actually "for" or should be "for" and it shouldn't be the consumption of soma.
And w/r/t the argument that mass culture trash is “harmless” consider the lack of response to the USA's latest bit of harmless fun, summary executions on the high seas in the Caribbean. The lack of outrage can be traced to the large numbers of culture consumers looking at it on TV and thinking “That is AWESOME dude!” Year after year of self-brutalization of reading comic books and playing video games and watching stupid movies has produced both sinister cartoon figures like Hegseth and his “fans”.
Now I’ve looked at Leonard’s site and I understand that he’s certainly smart enough to have devised a successful hustle, but is he smart enough to recognize how deeply ideological his “moral” argument is? It allows him to square the idea of himself that he would like to hold (I am an artist) with what advances his material interests. I hope for his sake he's not taking it seriously, but I imagine that he probably is.
Not that what I think matters anyway. I have always had an inexplicable aversion to this whole sphere of cultural production so Leonard would probably say that that disqualifies me from commenting on it. That aside I’m sure that the studios ave already seized that catalogue of cliche, that Aristotle’s Poetics for our moronic age (viz., the website TV Tropes) have set ChatGPT to work on it, and are even now “generating” fool-proof 100% guaranteed boffo hits, and doing it instantaneously and de minims cost. Leonard’s aspiring scriptwriters are teaching themselves how to do the equivalent of making buggy whips or bakelite telephones.
Well said. Juliana Hatfield, the singer, is good on this. Years ago, back when these things mattered to artists, she was accused of selling out when she moved to a major label. After they subsequently dropped her she made a song called “sellout” with the wonderful lyric: “it’s not a sellout if nobody buys it. I cant be blamed if nobody likes it.” Last year I asked her about selling out on her Substack and she still holds the same (correct) beliefs around art being vital for its own sake and how damaging it is when money starts creeping into the picture and compromising the vision/output. So keep fighting the good fight.
Effective marketing is filtering out and driving away as many people as you can so you find that core that really, really like what you do. Writing to satisfy as many people as possible is not good business. 1) It's lowest common denominator, and will be unsatisfying for most creators 2) you'll be in competition with everyone in the world who is doing that, 3) If by some chance you win that lottery, and you try to do something different next, you'll be back to square one anyway.
"Without a steady supply of scripts to make into those movies, the business will make less money. "
that is not how the studios in the "golden age hollywood" operated at all. but other than that, he is seeing film scenarios as a ready resource base which is similar to seeing a forest only as future lumber. he is looking at practice of writing from the perspective of the capitalists; only a businessman would worry about the potential scarcity of film scripts. personally, emotionally or concretely, his article has nothing to do with writing and its inherent, unavoidable contradictions. this reminds me some of the recent "philosophical" currents like effective altruism which "effectively" provides a justification to be a ruthless careerist. they want to have and then eat their portion of the cake. sure, be ruthless, ambitious and at heart, empty but don't also insist on being "right". live it up while you are alive and accept that you are going to hell.
Well, I must be a member of your choir. First off, I joined (I've since quit) Blacklist and submitted my novel, work in progress. I received the strangest result, a 'review' by someone who genuinely liked, even ... I don't want to say, 'praised,' but offered generous applause for it. (I had to pay for this review, BTW, maybe a hundred bucks or so. If I'm a little off, apologies, but it was not cheap.). But, despite their warm thoughts about my work, they awarded me three stars out of five, something like that. You needed, let's say, four or maybe five out of five to go on the 'list' where people would actually look at your work. So that was the end of the line for me. (You can have others review your work too, if you break out the credit card.) So for me, my little tryst with Blacklist was not very heart warming.
My brother and I liked to watch a movie together once a week. I have TCM, Turner Classic Movies, which I enjoy. I also stream Tubi among other fonts. What I've noticed is that a lot of what's been made since the turn of the century, is crap. It can't hold a candle to the glory days and works of old. Granted, every now and then something really worthwhile gets through. But now one of the first things I look at is the date that the movie was made.
And of course much the same is happening in Big Publishing. And as a novelist, this is close to the bone for me. I was last published in 2005. Since then I've written about seven novels and short story collections and have not been able to find a 'house' for any of them. I believe I know why. And even though it's true, I'm weary about saying it because I'll get the same stupid blowback, 'write a better novel,' or 'stop whining and find out what's selling,' that sort of thing.
But you really nail it as far as I'm concerned, in your lament about what happened to Canada Council. And this applies, as you know, in Hollywood, and as I know, in Big Publishing, namely how these organs, "now produces nothing but tepid hackery and condescending identity slop.'
I want to reiterate here, "condescending identity slop" is what Big Hollywood and Big Publishing now wants and sells. And if you ain't writing for that commercial market, (because "commercial means pro-audience”) you're SOL.
But I ain't ever pandering to that infantile audience. That would be artistic death.
It's worth noting that your insights here apply equally to another cultural arena: education. Among schools, colleges, and universities, it is now rote to claim and assume that new approaches and methods for teaching are now necessary to speak effectively to young people or any people whose sensibilities and attention spans have been transformed by electronic media and its ascendant ethos. Or at least that's what teachers have had hammered into them by consultants and professional development trainings for several decades. Naturally, these new approaches and methods cater to shortened attention spans and digitally scattered and shallowed sensibilities. Your point about making art and entertainment that effectively abets people's addiction instead of actually helping them is made here as well. Just accepting the problem, and more, embracing it, and even more, valorizing it and elaborating on it, and recasting this move as the acme of practical wisom, something that actually represents a wonderful advance on how things were before, would not seem to be a recommendable course of action. And yet here we are.
One need only look at the state of contemporary cinema to understand both how artistically bad morally bad it has been for artists to continue to sell out. Ppl rlly love to reify shit out here
At no point did I generalize anything beyond screenwriting.
My argument was and remains specific to the nature of a capital intensive art form like modern commercial film. If you don’t believe me, read it again.
But your argument is posed to people who feel squeamish about making commercial films, which implies that the alternative which they are interested in is non-commercial films, which together encompass just the category of "film" broadly, no? That makes your piece about "film" at large, not just commercial film.
Confirming this is in fact the first I've heard tell of this piece and that I did not edit/proof it.
Leonard is a philistine. Probably … I’m going by your excerpts (and I’m not likely to spend valuable time researching this point). The mass audience is in fact the enemy of the artist because it is mass. How is this not obvious?!? Giving the mass audience what it wants (in fact what it believes it wants) is inevitably to give it more of the same, i.e., more mass culture product. Leonard is correct as far as it goes that popular movies can be “done right” but those movies become popular by some process that is “not well understood” as geologists like to say.
The idea that movies are meant to soothe mass man and woman after a difficult day at the virtual coal face obviously serves the purpose of perpetuating the whole schema of work vs “free” time. Which time is not actually free because it is just as dominated by industry as work. Truly free time would offer the opportunity to do something other than the passive consumption of mass culture, with its obvious knock-on effect of brainwashed obedience. Elevating this into some kind of moral position is a sick joke that this state of affairs is playing on him (as well as J. Frantzen).
Leonard is a guy coming to this from the world of film and television production, and so he has sort of already "bought in" I think to a form of cultural production. I think he's a smart guy (as I said) but if you look into his work and where he's coming from you get to obviously see his biases. Of course he believes in a sort of market oriented approach because that is ultimately the form of cultural production he is familiar with and as spent his life working with. I doubt I will convince him because of that. But yes I ofc very much agree wrt what recreation time is actually "for" or should be "for" and it shouldn't be the consumption of soma.
And w/r/t the argument that mass culture trash is “harmless” consider the lack of response to the USA's latest bit of harmless fun, summary executions on the high seas in the Caribbean. The lack of outrage can be traced to the large numbers of culture consumers looking at it on TV and thinking “That is AWESOME dude!” Year after year of self-brutalization of reading comic books and playing video games and watching stupid movies has produced both sinister cartoon figures like Hegseth and his “fans”.
Now I’ve looked at Leonard’s site and I understand that he’s certainly smart enough to have devised a successful hustle, but is he smart enough to recognize how deeply ideological his “moral” argument is? It allows him to square the idea of himself that he would like to hold (I am an artist) with what advances his material interests. I hope for his sake he's not taking it seriously, but I imagine that he probably is.
Not that what I think matters anyway. I have always had an inexplicable aversion to this whole sphere of cultural production so Leonard would probably say that that disqualifies me from commenting on it. That aside I’m sure that the studios ave already seized that catalogue of cliche, that Aristotle’s Poetics for our moronic age (viz., the website TV Tropes) have set ChatGPT to work on it, and are even now “generating” fool-proof 100% guaranteed boffo hits, and doing it instantaneously and de minims cost. Leonard’s aspiring scriptwriters are teaching themselves how to do the equivalent of making buggy whips or bakelite telephones.
Well said. Juliana Hatfield, the singer, is good on this. Years ago, back when these things mattered to artists, she was accused of selling out when she moved to a major label. After they subsequently dropped her she made a song called “sellout” with the wonderful lyric: “it’s not a sellout if nobody buys it. I cant be blamed if nobody likes it.” Last year I asked her about selling out on her Substack and she still holds the same (correct) beliefs around art being vital for its own sake and how damaging it is when money starts creeping into the picture and compromising the vision/output. So keep fighting the good fight.
Effective marketing is filtering out and driving away as many people as you can so you find that core that really, really like what you do. Writing to satisfy as many people as possible is not good business. 1) It's lowest common denominator, and will be unsatisfying for most creators 2) you'll be in competition with everyone in the world who is doing that, 3) If by some chance you win that lottery, and you try to do something different next, you'll be back to square one anyway.
"Without a steady supply of scripts to make into those movies, the business will make less money. "
that is not how the studios in the "golden age hollywood" operated at all. but other than that, he is seeing film scenarios as a ready resource base which is similar to seeing a forest only as future lumber. he is looking at practice of writing from the perspective of the capitalists; only a businessman would worry about the potential scarcity of film scripts. personally, emotionally or concretely, his article has nothing to do with writing and its inherent, unavoidable contradictions. this reminds me some of the recent "philosophical" currents like effective altruism which "effectively" provides a justification to be a ruthless careerist. they want to have and then eat their portion of the cake. sure, be ruthless, ambitious and at heart, empty but don't also insist on being "right". live it up while you are alive and accept that you are going to hell.
Well, I must be a member of your choir. First off, I joined (I've since quit) Blacklist and submitted my novel, work in progress. I received the strangest result, a 'review' by someone who genuinely liked, even ... I don't want to say, 'praised,' but offered generous applause for it. (I had to pay for this review, BTW, maybe a hundred bucks or so. If I'm a little off, apologies, but it was not cheap.). But, despite their warm thoughts about my work, they awarded me three stars out of five, something like that. You needed, let's say, four or maybe five out of five to go on the 'list' where people would actually look at your work. So that was the end of the line for me. (You can have others review your work too, if you break out the credit card.) So for me, my little tryst with Blacklist was not very heart warming.
My brother and I liked to watch a movie together once a week. I have TCM, Turner Classic Movies, which I enjoy. I also stream Tubi among other fonts. What I've noticed is that a lot of what's been made since the turn of the century, is crap. It can't hold a candle to the glory days and works of old. Granted, every now and then something really worthwhile gets through. But now one of the first things I look at is the date that the movie was made.
And of course much the same is happening in Big Publishing. And as a novelist, this is close to the bone for me. I was last published in 2005. Since then I've written about seven novels and short story collections and have not been able to find a 'house' for any of them. I believe I know why. And even though it's true, I'm weary about saying it because I'll get the same stupid blowback, 'write a better novel,' or 'stop whining and find out what's selling,' that sort of thing.
But you really nail it as far as I'm concerned, in your lament about what happened to Canada Council. And this applies, as you know, in Hollywood, and as I know, in Big Publishing, namely how these organs, "now produces nothing but tepid hackery and condescending identity slop.'
I want to reiterate here, "condescending identity slop" is what Big Hollywood and Big Publishing now wants and sells. And if you ain't writing for that commercial market, (because "commercial means pro-audience”) you're SOL.
But I ain't ever pandering to that infantile audience. That would be artistic death.
Thanks for your instructive article!
It's worth noting that your insights here apply equally to another cultural arena: education. Among schools, colleges, and universities, it is now rote to claim and assume that new approaches and methods for teaching are now necessary to speak effectively to young people or any people whose sensibilities and attention spans have been transformed by electronic media and its ascendant ethos. Or at least that's what teachers have had hammered into them by consultants and professional development trainings for several decades. Naturally, these new approaches and methods cater to shortened attention spans and digitally scattered and shallowed sensibilities. Your point about making art and entertainment that effectively abets people's addiction instead of actually helping them is made here as well. Just accepting the problem, and more, embracing it, and even more, valorizing it and elaborating on it, and recasting this move as the acme of practical wisom, something that actually represents a wonderful advance on how things were before, would not seem to be a recommendable course of action. And yet here we are.
One need only look at the state of contemporary cinema to understand both how artistically bad morally bad it has been for artists to continue to sell out. Ppl rlly love to reify shit out here
At no point did I generalize anything beyond screenwriting.
My argument was and remains specific to the nature of a capital intensive art form like modern commercial film. If you don’t believe me, read it again.
But your argument is posed to people who feel squeamish about making commercial films, which implies that the alternative which they are interested in is non-commercial films, which together encompass just the category of "film" broadly, no? That makes your piece about "film" at large, not just commercial film.
Genuinely funny that an article that spends so much time litigating assumptions made so many of its own.
Did you ever even consider the possibility that selling out is in quotes for a reason?
Actual close reading is fundamental.