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Eliminate
the Cuss Words,
Car Crashes and Murders, and
it would be a Silent Movie
by Peary Perry | |
You
would think that the folks in Hollywood would have scouts or pollsters out here
in the hinterland to help them come up with movie plots that sell. Most of us
are tired of the talking heads on the news each night saying the same things over
and over about each other. ABC, CBS, NBC are opposite of Fox. CNN is somewhere
in the middle. Who knows who is correct at this point? Politicians stealing from
some program or another? That’s not news, that’s been going on since Noah built
the ark. Worthwhile television programming? What’s that? You’ll go blind watching
the stuff that is on the tube every night.
No, about the only other media
seems to be the movies, but what to do about the current trend? The other night
I was watching some old thing on the tube, made in the fifties with William Holden
and Jeannie Crain. Plot was simple enough, war veteran comes back to college,
gets married, no place to live, moves in with depressed, suicidal professor. Holden
and Crain obviously become the professor’s family and save him from killing himself.
You watch them go through the trials and tribulations of trying to raise a family
while getting an education. Great story, great ending, great moral.
So,
what happened since that film was made in the fifties and where we are today?
The majority of movies being turned out, or better said…churned out… today aren’t
suitable for most adults, much less children and certainly not our parents. To
me a challenge for any writer of screen plays in today’s environment is to draft
a script without the use of any four lettered words. I’ve seen movies, and so
have you that if they eliminated the cuss words, car crashes and murders it would
be a silent movie. Normal people don’t talk like this, or at least I don’t hear
them, do you?
Nearly every week we read or hear about the decline in attendance
at the movie theaters around the country. Is this news? What we are seeing now
is a rash of re-runs of movies made 15-20 years ago…The Dukes of Hazard, Herbie
the Love Bug…and on and on. Can’t the writers in Hollywood come up with anything
original that is worth our money and effort?
It was reported over the
weekend that theaters are beginning to adopt a ‘get your money back’ policy. If
you don’t like the film, you can walk back to the cashier and get a refund. Not
a bad idea, I’ve walked out of a lot of movies after ten or fifteen minutes. It
doesn’t take a mental giant to know when a turkey is on the screen. I’ll be curious
to see how long this policy stays in place. I bet we all can remember films we
wish we could obtain a refund for. Classics such as ‘Ishtar”, “Alexander the Great”
and “Kingdom of Heaven” should rate double our hard earned bucks back. Just for
wasting our time.
Actually what it seems like to me is that the entire
entertainment industry thinks they can dictate to us what we are to like and not
to like. Somehow they have developed this misguided notion that whatever they
turn out is going to be grabbed up by a willing public, no matter how terrible
it is. When you look back at films made years ago, as I mentioned earlier, you
know they didn’t have huge production costs, but they had a story and some originality.
Then you compare them to what is being served up to us today and it’s fairly obvious
that the movie moguls in La-La land view the general public as a collection of
village idiots.
With movie prices higher than ever and concession stand
costs higher still, it is small wonder that millions of us are choosing to stay
at home, play with the kids, read a book or take a walk. These are definitely
cheaper and much more rewarding than the pap coming from the movie industry of
today. Perhaps the producers might want to consider venturing out into our world
of reality to see why we aren’t enthralled with the silver screens anymore. |
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