J. Neil Schulman
@ Agorist.com
@ Agorist.com
Make a movie titled The Invention of Lying which is marketed as a romantic comedy then have the plot be how the lie is the invention of God, Heaven, and moral codes. This will play well with audiences who believe in God, Heaven, and moral codes.
Make all the American-produced major motion pictures that have the subject matter of U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan always make Muslims noble victims and always make the top Americans in charge schemers, liars, torturers, and murderers. This will play well with military families, veterans, and 9/11 victims.
Why tell an original, never-before told story, when there are so many classic movies that can be remade, with the added benefit that you can shit all over the original?
Make children’s animated features about cute robots living on earth after the human race has turned it into a garbage dump. This will convince children either to clean up their rooms or to steal their dad’s gun and shoot up their school if they think living in garbage is their future.
You can’t lose with a movie about a couple deciding on their wedding day that they’re marrying the wrong person and someone they just met is their true love. This works especially well with date movies for young married couples paying extra for a babysitter.
Any white character from the American south is a redneck and a racist. The southern American accent is a hallmark of stupidity. There are no Atticus Finches. No popcorn to be sold south of the Mason-Dixon line anyway, right?
Cowboys are also always racist morons, unless they’re gay.
If by some odd chance you’re a Republican trying to make fun of people who think not every American war has as good casus belli as World War II, be sure to call Neville Chamberlain a cowardly appeaser. Make sure to leave out that he was the first leader to declare war on Hitler, and that by doing so two years before America joined the war there was a really good chance Germany would defeat his country.
Always make young people getting married or having babies an unmitigated disaster. After all, it’s to the benefit of society that women not even think about trying to get pregnant until they’re so close to menopause they’re likely to find it difficult if not impossible.
Make every movie that has scenes taking place in the 1950’s — when many of today’s parents grew up — be about the poor victims of Senator Joe McCarthy’s investigation into communists in the U.S. State Department and U.S. Army. Always leave out the part where the Soviet KGB really was infiltrating the U.S. State Department and U.S. Army with paid spies.
Make sure that any time the subject of owning a gun is raised on a network TV show (especially a trendy sitcom like How I Met Your Mother), one of the characters tells another character in an authoritative tone how all the statistics show it’s more dangerous to keep a gun in the home than the benefits of possible defense against home invaders. This will play especially well with the 80 million Americans who know the real statistics on gun defenses and keep guns in their home.
Make movies and TV cop shows in which homosexuals are always victims unless they’re Republicans or Catholic priests. This will play extra well with Republicans and Catholics.
Make TV shows where noble district attorneys figure out how to twist laws around to prosecute anyone they find personally offensive. But treat any defense lawyer who cites the constitution to defend his clients as slime.
Most audience members will identify with movie characters who are hit men, drug-dealers, addicts, thieves, and misfits. Oh, wait. That’s just the studio people who make movies, isn’t it?
Shake the camera and make everything dark so no one can follow what’s going on. Have the actors mumble so no one can figure out how dumb the dialogue is. Keep on cutting back and forth to flashbacks so no one can follow the story. And always have it turn out that the person audiences like best in the movie turns out to be the murderer.
Make movies where businessmen are always the problem and feds are always the solution. After all, nobody who watches movies or TV shows are in business.
Make sure any character wearing a U.S. military uniform always has a back story where they did something God-awful while in combat, or they’re racists, or they’re unstoppable killing machines … and their lines of dialogue belong in a high-school locker room. Never show a military officer with an IQ above room temperature, unless he’s going AWOL.
The purpose of making biographical movies about any famous person is to show what scumbags they really were. Great inventors always have to steal their inventions from someone we never heard of. Great composers treat everyone around them like shit. Make sure to treat any famous industrialist as a ruthless gangster or just whack-job insane. Leave no historical American figure as someone a child today would want to grow up to be like.
American families must always be shown as dysfunctional. After all, the families of the Americans who make the movies are, right?
Villains are always unstoppable, all-knowing, and all-powerful. Dispose of any heroic characters off camera in between other scenes, to make it obvious they were fools to think they could make a difference.
If an independent filmmaker makes a movie the heartland audiences would actually enjoy, make sure there’s not a chance in hell it will ever show up at a multiplex, which has 30 theaters all showing the same half dozen overpriced studio movies with the same dozen stars. After all, it’s all about the bottom line … right?
And one more thing:
All this works better in 3-D!!!!
My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available for sale or rental on Amazon.com Video On Demand. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!
April 13, 2010 - 11:28 am
You make a good case that the US movie industry is collectively fucking stupid.
Of course, it’s easy to make a good case if you leave out the fact that the 1.414 billion paid admissions to US theaters in 2009 represented the biggest numbers since 2004, and that 2009 box office grosses were the highest ever ($10.6 billion), even though home viewing just keeps getting cheaper and easier.
April 13, 2010 - 3:26 pm
With a blockbuster approach that requires nine money losers for every movie that breaks even. And while Blockbuster and Hollywood Video are going under, replaced by Red Box. The number of releases being offered movie viewers by the majors reduces every year.
April 13, 2010 - 10:45 pm
Well, that’s pretty comprehensive, Neil.
Is there anything you actually do like to see? {sigh}
Or is pretty much all popular culture (that you didn’t create) irredeemable trash?
Serving up a steady diet of what revolts you, rather than what inspires you, may very well be how to lose readers and alienate inquirers.
While you think about that, I’m going to try to divine just how “Julie & Julia” can have anything to do with McCarthyism. Yoicks.
April 15, 2010 - 2:03 am
Dude, what am I going to do with you? I’ve spent plenty of these columns writing about stuff that inspires me. In fact, I serialized an entire new book here about stuff that inspires me … Unchaining the Human Heart — A Revolutionary Manifesto. But, nooooo! You want to pull one article out of context and act all, “Oh, you’re so negative!”
I’m sick of being Charlie Brown with the football, thinking I’m watching entertainment and it turning out to be adulterated with hostile propaganda.
If I buy a movie that’s advertised as a romantic comedy, I don’t want it to be a vicious attack on people who have a belief system not shared by the filmmaker. Leaving fraud aside, it’s fucking rude.
If I’m watching a TV sitcom which I’ve enjoyed up until then, I don’t want some goddam ignorant Hollywood screenwriter who knows fuck-all about real-world crime statistics ramming a lying soundbyte from the Brady Campaign down my gullet. It’s bullshit propaganda and fucking rude.
And if I’m watching a movie about Julia Child living in Paris with her husband who worked for the State Department, I can do without the obligatory bellyaching that he was questioned about whether he’s a paid agent of the Soviet Union — a country whose secret police was in fact infiltrating the U.S. State Department with spies to weaken the foreign policy resolve of the United States to wipe those mass-murdering cocksuckers from the face of this planet. It’s out of proportion whining from people with no historical sense and fucking rude.
So yeah. If these shitheads are going to continue to infiiltrate their lousy propaganda into movies and TV shows that I’d otherwise get a kick out of, I’m going to call them on their shit once in a while.
That okay with you, Pilgrim?
August 24, 2012 - 9:58 am
I’ve recently come to the realization that *ALL* TV and Film coming from Establisment-Media is at this point literal PROGRAMMING.
Cogitate for a moment or three on how many hours the average American spends sitting slack-jawed and drooling, staring at the idiot-box and chuckling on cue along with the laugh-track.
Before you – dear reader – relegate me to “The Tinfoil-hat Brigade” do yourself a favor and search you-tube for:
(1) “Derren Brown Giraffe” – wherein he subtly influences a woman to not only pick the one toy he wishes from over 250,000 scattered over 5 stories but also to name it “Frank”!
(2) “Derren Brown” Something Wicked This Way Comes” – Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing – the simple fact is that his “tricks” truly had to work on every person present for them to be able to work at all!
Now that you’ve seen just a part of what’s led me to my conclusions, can you REALLY believe I’m bound for that tinfoil hat? Can you see why I avoid TV?
Ever notice how the more “aware” someone is, the less TV they seem to watch?
Ever wonder if there’s a REASON for that apparent correlation?