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I don't think writing is special compared to other arts. Sure, there are many editors and cinematographers, but there are very few who can actually make an interesting edit, or interesting cinematography. Similarly, there are many writers in the world, but only a handful of really great ones, even fewer great writers who know how to write for film (being a great novelist doesn't mean you'll automatically be great, or even good, at writing a great screenplay).

> Similarly, there are many writers in the world, but only a handful of really great ones, even fewer great writers who know how to write for film

There's cool editing and shooting on reddit filmmaking subs not to mention the super competitive music video market for cinematographers and editors

> Similarly, there are many writers in the world, but only a handful of really great ones, even fewer great writers who know how to write for film

I feel like this is what I indicated as well.

> There's cool editing and shooting on reddit filmmaking subs not to mention the super competitive music video market for cinematographers and editors

There's cool writing on reddit writing subs as well. Nice snippets do not a great whole movie make, in any part of the art form.

What makes the writers more special than cinematographers, audio engineers, set designers, editors.

Each of these skills can be learned and each of these also have some level of personal creativity and discovery that can't be learned and is intrinsic to a person.

If you have a bad writer, no amount of good other stuff can salvage your movie.

Not true for the other roles.

>If you have a bad writer, no amount of good other stuff can salvage your movie.

no, if you have good actors they can make your bad writing in some ways standable.

There is the whole "so bad it's good movie" which is generally because the actors manage to make the badness bearable.

Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.

Yeah, good point. I don't disagree with that. On the flipside, bad acting will ruin any movie too, no matter how good everything else is.

That goes for every role. Bad lighting will kill thr movie, bad audio mixes will kill it and on and on.

> Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.

I mean we can expand the scope of the conversation and lower the bar, but the article writer's scope seemed to be one of being "on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience" to which I was responding to the dearth of such.

Are Jerry Bruckehimer movies really one-in-a-hundred experiences?

I mean I get where you're coming from: I loved and still love Starship Troopers but I'm not gonna assert its high-value cinema or on the level the article writer is seeking.

Friends is some of the most mindless television I've ever seen but its basically the most popular and successful TV show ever, so what do we want to measure?

I’m still not sure what Starship Troopers even was. Was it a comedy, satire or just a flat, wide-eyed warning about war and nationalism in the vein of WW1? It’s a movie that starts in a regular high school, dating, and (spoilers ahead, NFSW ahead) continue with most of the crew being eaten alive, slowly, in full view of the camera, while begging to be killed. The seriousness of the nationalism in the movie and the following / preceding carnage, the apparent lack of irony and the characters basically having the acting skills of cardboard cutouts sort of make it into … something I’m not even sure what.

It’s like an army recruitment movie for a losing war except this one continues to film after the cadet signs the papers, and then and follows him on camera to his horrible, painful, slow death. Then unironically waves the flag at the end and with a number to call for more info.

It’s either so good that the entire movie is a hilarious deadpan parody about horrors of war, or it’s so bad it’s inadvertently become that. In either case, it’s definitely something. It reminds me of the Wilfred Owen poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decoru...

I think all of your criticisms of the movie were aimed at the book too. The movie followed the book pretty closely except for the mecha-suits.

>The movie followed the book pretty closely except for the mecha-suits.

There's a surface similarity but the tone is completely different. To me, the film is pretty obviously a largely satirical retelling of the book's story.

I heard the movie was basically ready to go when someone noticed how similar the story was to Starship Troopers. They had to get the rights just to avoid a lawsuit. I'm not really sure I agree on how similar they are.

There was an interview with the scriptwriter (can’t find it though) who said they wanted to make a film about nazi germany and the young people who bought into the cause. If you look at the costumes I think it is not so far fetched that was one aspect of it.

The director, Paul Verhoeven, has been very interested in World War 2 and has in fact made multiple movies set in WW2. The satiric elements in Starship Troopers and its parallels to Nazi Germany (and especially the propaganda elements) were definitely intentional.

>and the characters basically having the acting skills of cardboard cutouts

Neil Patrick Harris!

>It’s like an army recruitment movie for a losing war except this one continues to film after the cadet signs the papers, and then and follows him on camera to his horrible, painful, slow death. Then unironically waves the flag at the end and with a number to call for more info.

This is quite likely the intent. The same style that makes Robocop to be understood as a classic action movie even if the intention was to subvert.

The director said they used cardboard actors so you wouldn't feel bad when they died.

The same director made Robocop which had similar satire and themes.

yeah, 1 in a 100 movies I don't know - not sure I put Sorkin at 1 in a 100 as a writer. Also one person's 1 in a 100 is another person's pretentious piece of whatever.

I think for a lot of people Star Wars is a 1 in a 100 - if so, to quote Harrison Ford: "George, you can type this shit, but you can't say it!"

on edit: I had missed that he was looking for a 1 in a 100 movie originally so I went back and reread, he says "Perhaps worst of all is the realization that the movies you like are very rare, and as you dive deep into film, you’re on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience." so it is not that he is looking for an objective 1 in 100 movie, but rather the 1 in a 100 he likes, thus Con Air and The Rock could stand for someone as those 1 in a 100 - for example I like both those movies but I hate everything else Michael Bay has ever done (don't know who directed Con Air - hmm Simon West quick google, yeah looks like I hate all those too)

There is an old US crime show, which nobody in the US liked, but was a hit in Germany - the people tasked with translating and dubbing realized how bad the original was and decided to rewrite it into a comedy.

I can't remember the name of the show, but I read about it in a reputable newspaper, so I hope I'm not spreading an urban legend.

Nope, confirmed. Dubs were done by ZDF and they did that with Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill movies. Also the Persuaders (die Zwei).

Now I finally understand why they are always raving about those crappy old westerns on a German image board I often visit.

Where the Spencer and Hill movies originally in English or Italian?

I have stopped watching German dubs long ago, but I watched a lot of the German dub of Scrubs during its original run, and much later came across the original English version. It's incredibly striking how the dubbing changed the character of Dr Cox: In the German dub, he's portrayed in a high-pitched voice, rendering him a maniacal goofball, whereas McGinley's original performance uses a deeper flatter voice that made him appear much more psychopathic (though admittedly I only saw one episode in English, so that may be cherry-picking).

You're 100% correct.

> old US crime show, which nobody in the US liked, but was a hit in Germany

LOL, by some reason this phrase causes search engines to reduce ad hitlerum

Hilariously, both Aaron Sorkin and Tarantino worked on The Rock, although they are not credited.

A movie doesn’t have to be cerebral to be good. The Rock is a good movie for the type of movie it is. There are bad movies in the same basic genre as The Rock or Con Air, many of which also starred Nicolas Cage.

You can come up with the best story you have but if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger.

If the cinematographer has constant camera shakes in every shot - even a dialogue scene - then also you can salvage the movie.

For some not so extreme examples think about what happens if the actors are shit - The Room is a good example. The story is good but the acting is what made it into a "so bad - let's troll this" movie.

>You can come up with the best story you have but if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger.

But we're talking about basic competency now, not what makes a movie the very best it can be.

> If the cinematographer has constant camera shakes in every shot - even a dialogue scene - then also you can salvage the movie.

I wonder if you had Paul Greengrass movies in mind

>For some not so extreme examples think about what happens if the actors are shit - The Room is a good example. The story is good but the acting is what made it into a "so bad - let's troll this" movie.

I never thought I'd see someone praise the writing of The Room. The acting is bad, but the dialogue is so completely inhuman that I can't imagine anyone doing it well.

> if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger.

Tenet? No one I know in the US could watch that film, but my international friends liked it, presumably because they had subtitles.. the theater had to blast the sound to make the audio vaguely discernible

That is a Christopher Nolan signature trait.

Honestly, Nolan's audio cacophony generally works for me (though it is distressing, which is the point). Tenet in particular worked great.

The theater I was at reached a point of nearly physically hurting. It doesn’t really work when it’s distressing during passive explanatory scenes. I didn’t even get the chance to be confused by the technobabble

It's possible to get everything wrong and still keep making movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asylum

Z Nation is possibly the best zombie show to date. Low budget doesn't mean it has to be bad.

I basically stopped watching movies a long time ago—I was never much of a cinephile to begin with—but last week, out of either boredom or curiosity, I streamed a Hollywood blockbuster from the 2000s that I had read about somewhere.

What struck me most was how the action scenes, editing, costuming, sets, casting, and acting all seemed—to my nonexpert eye—to have been carefully and professionally done, while the storytelling was horrible: implausible, unnatural, and full of obvious holes. The story didn’t need to be great literature, but it should not have been hard to make the pieces fit together in a way that made sense.

I don't know whether to blame the writers, the director, or the commercial motivation for making the film. This particular movie was obviously intended to lead to spinoffs in video games and other forms of merchandising, and that may have influenced the editing in a way that garbled the story.

There has been huge trend from the audience towards overanalysing plots and story details. Specifically, to analyse them independently from the emotional and storytelling aspects. Jump onto reddit and you see everyone ripping apart the details of Star Wars, the Marvel Universe, Chris Nolan films, etc.

I think that this is a mistake. The point of the plot is to support the story. It doesn't matter if it's logical if it makes you feel something powerful. The plot needs to be strong enough to hold up during the running of the film when the viewer immersed in the story.

> I think that the real ceiling for quality content, film or no, is the writing and there's no way to generate more high-quality writers on demand.

Pretty sure there's a decent number of writers out there in the world beyond the handful you mentioned, and plenty more trying to break in. For example, somehow you failed to mention any women writers.

Almost anything can be learnt, including writing well. Unfortunately, today’s incentive for anything is money, and Hollywood is no exception. And so we've fed a diet of trite, banal, and contrived writing because it fits the now-established recipe for box office returns.

Agree 100%. There are only so many good writers out there. Notice who the writers are on your favorite TV shows and then what happens to the quality of said TV show when the writers switch to other projects.

I think the bottleneck you're describing isn't "writing" but creators who will be trusted with a $X0 million budget without excessive oversight.

Sorkin or Tarantino get the leeway to create something without executives second-guessing every little decision, most people, even very talented people won't.

There are tons of talented writers producing things, but in a less expensive medium. The cost to produce a novel is literally 0.1% of a Hollywood movie. There is a lot more freedom to work there than when you're spending tens of millions of dollars.