FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
7hr ago
I don't think your examples really support the argument you're making. @MaiqTheTrue's argument, as I understand it, was similar to one made by Kevin Mims here: writers in the past tended to have some kind of life experience outside of writing which they could draw on in order to tell compelling stories, whereas modern writers tend to study writing itself, and hence have nothing to draw on other than other stories they've read by other people, resulting in their novels/stories/screenplays giving the impression of palimpsest. I did not interpret their argument to mean that "if you have a liberal arts education, your stories will suck".
Per the narrative above, Jonathan Hensleigh obviously falls into the former category, not the latter: he practised law for seven years, unambiguously professional experience outside of writing itself. Likewise David Mamet: he variously worked as a busboy and taxi driver in Chicago (imagine the kinds of crazy characters he must have met) before taking up writing full-time. Ed Solomon I'll grant - but if your first example to illustrate your point that "you don't need life experience to tell a compelling story, you can just go straight into writing professionally" is the dude who wrote the Charlie's Angels adaptation and Super Mario Bros. with Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper, it doesn't strike me as a terribly compelling one. (Obviously Solomon has written more commercially successful and critically well-received screenplays than those two, but it seems worth pointing out that the latter is widely considered one of the worst films ever made and one of the worst cinematic adaptations of a video game - and there is some seriously stiff competition for the latter accolade.)
So of the three examples you provided of successful Hollywood screenwriters, two of them did, in fact, have some kind of professional life experience outside of writing to draw on when writing their screenplays, which seems to affirm @MaiqTheTrue's point rather than contradict it.
I'll concede the point that studying film in college before going on to being a director seems to be a pretty normal career progression, and has been for decades - but given that this thread was about the poor standard of writing (as opposed to directing) in modern Hollywood films, that observation doesn't seem especially relevant. At no point did @MaiqTheTrue argue or even imply that films are worse now because directors study film in college instead of getting life experience first. While I don't doubt that having life experiences to draw on is valuable as a director, directing a film is an intrinsically more technical craft than writing one - the director needs to have at least a passing understanding of lighting, lenses, shutter speed, depth of field etc. in a way the screenwriter doesn't, and hence are well-served by studying these elements in a formal setting.
True. I get the impression that this tendency is bleeding over from soap operas into ostensibly prestige television and standalone films, two media in which the audience's undivided assumption was traditionally assumed.
FtttG
13hr ago
He neither directed nor wrote the screenplay for ESB. His only role was a "story by" credit.
Everyone knows that sheltered people exist. Everyone knows that echo chambers exist.
Even many people who are aware, in principle, that echo chambers exist seem to have a remarkably poor time recognising when they've found themselves inside one. Echo chambers, like "biases", are things that happen to other people. I'm actually not persuaded that the average person with an undergraduate degree would be better equipped to recognise that they're in an echo chamber than the average person without an undergraduate degree. Kind of reminds me of the cowpox of doubt: if you've been told that uneducated people get sucked down the rabbit hole of far-right echo chambers, you might think to yourself "phew, good thing I have a degree, that'll never happen to me!" Which might make you even more susceptible to ending up in an echo chamber - perhaps not a far-right one, but an echo chamber of some description.
You’ve got the George Lucases of the world: studied film at USC. No interesting life experiences. No ability to write human dialogue. Clearly capable of making a movie anyway.
Your use of the singular indefinite article is very appropriate. George Lucas is capable of making a movie. As in, one. Which he did fifty years ago, and has been coasting on ever since.
Then there’s the Wes Andersons, whose ivory-tower philosophy degrees don’t appear to have prevented them from writing competent films.
I don't know if you have other people in mind of the same ilk as Wes Anderson, but as for the man himself, I've seen two of his movies and found them both insufferably annoying and precious throughout.
FtttG
21hr ago
Sure, you can rewatch it to pick up all the clues you missed the first time round, but that's more like doing a crossword puzzle
I made the exact same comparison in my review of Memento, which is not a good movie. I think one of Nolan's major weaknesses is that he loves plots, but hates the fact that there have to be characters in them doing things.
I know we recently had our disagreements about the future impact of technology on human brains, but for what it's worth, @Butlerian's description also fills me with a profound despair.
FtttG
21hr ago
One of the most alien and disconcerting things is that Millenials will text while having sex. I now give a standard warning to Millenials: "No texting during sex or we are done. I don't care how hot you are."
Ted_Kaczynski_mugshot.jpeg
FtttG
21hr ago
I mentioned before that my mother once said to me that she finds herself enjoying movies and TV shows that aren't in English more than ones that are. Why? Because if it's not in English, she has to give the show her full attention to read the subtitles. If it's in English, she can spend half the movie looking at her phone. Netflix are acutely aware of the "second screen" phenomenon and have urged screenwriters not to bank on the audience's undivided attention, and to stuff their scripts with lazy expository dialogue so that audiences can still follow the plot even if they're watching "Family Guy funny moments" or similar on their phone at the same time.
I wonder if this is a big part of why (per the OP) modern movie writing is so bad - if the screenwriters are thinking to themselves "well, this is a boring talky scene, where people will be staring at their phones. Even if I do my best to make the expository dialogue realistic, lively and entertaining in its own right, no one's going to look up at the screen until something explodes, so why bother putting in the effort?"
Some touring musicians are insisting on audiences putting their smartphones into little black bags which they can collect at the end of the gig because they hate performing in front of a sea of people on their smartphones. I would happily pay an extra euro for a phone-free cinema screening, and I reckon that, while people would initially grumble about it, they'd most likely end up enjoying the movie a lot more.
FtttG
1d ago
You seem hellbent on attacking an argument I've never made and a worldview I've never endorsed.
FtttG
2d ago
Something like "the cost of reducing fraud to zero is too high to be worth it" would be more accurate
The two phrases scan as synonymous to me, no different from "men are taller than women" vs. "the average man is taller than the average woman".
FtttG
2d ago
In the case of scams, all it means is that they have to put more effort into appearances of legitimacy.
I think we might be talking past each other. I've been using "high-trust society" and "high-trust country" kind of interchangeably, but I think more specificity is called for. What I'm really arguing (and what I take Davies to be arguing) is that fraud can only take place within a high-trust community. That is, a country might be low-trust on the whole, but there might be enclaves within that country in which the members enjoy a presumption of trust with one another (social clubs, religious communities, voluntary organisations etc.). It is within these communities in which fraud and scams will occur in countries which are otherwise low-trust. This, I think, is what you're getting at with "putting more effort into appearances of legitimacy": scam artists must consciously infiltrate these high-trust communities, and this may be more difficult in a low-trust country than in a high-trust one (as the members of a high-trust community within an otherwise low-trust country will be doubly suspicious of outsiders).
Fair point. I do, however, feel reasonably confident that even if we devoted 100% of a country's budget to preventing e.g. premature violent deaths of children in that country, we wouldn't be successful and the side effects unrelated to premature violent deaths of children would be disastrous.
Your smallpox example reminds me of an old post by Scott:
See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”
Eliminating a deadly microorganism is a piece of piss. Eliminating the fact that people will sometimes tell other people things that they know to be untrue, and be believed? I don't even know where you'd begin.
FtttG
2d ago
shoplifting isn't theft, insurance covers it, the big stores expect it and price it in, and besides we're striking back against the big fatcats of capitalism
By definition, shoplifting isn't fraud, and hence isn't relevant to this debate.
FtttG
2d ago
I think you really aren't understanding the argument I'm making. I'm not saying "we need a certain amount of fraud to happen, otherwise there would be economic stagnation"; I'm saying "a certain amount of fraud is unavoidable, and the price we pay for a functioning economy". Claiming that the latter is equivalent to the former, or that the latter is an encouragement to defraud people, seems to me tantamount to saying "a small number of car accidents every year is an unavoidable byproduct of widespread car ownership" or "carbon emissions are an unavoidable byproduct of an electrified society". No one would say that by acknowledging that you can't create electricity without producing carbon dioxide, you are therefore encouraging the production of additional carbon dioxide - likewise with the argument I'm making.
FtttG
2d ago
But in our conditions, you get a high-trust society by cracking down on fraud, teaching kids that fraud and stealing is bad and that honesty is the best policy (yes, all the old saws), punishing fraudsters when you catch them, instructing people to be vigilant about scams, and the likes.
In the book, Dan Davies cites numerous examples in which fraud became common in a particular community (whether that's a religious affinity group or a website for trading drugs), the community dutifully responded by implementing anti-fraud protections, but because these protections imposed some kind of cost (typically monetary, but potentially also an opportunity cost in terms of time and effort), some of the people in the community elected not to use the anti-fraud protections and instead take their chances without - and because most people in the community were trustworthy, this gamble paid off most of the time. There comes at a point at which the cost of protecting oneself against being defrauded exceeds the expected return.
Consider how much documentation you have to provide when applying for a mortgage. Now imagine if you had to go through that process every time you were buying or selling something through a webshop (e.g. eBay). With such a policy in place, it would be nearly impossible to defraud someone (or be defrauded) via this webshop: but because the process is so onerous, no one would use this website and it would go out of business, departing for competitors with less rigorous protections against fraud - which, inevitably, unavoidably means that some of the people who use the competitors' websites will get ripped off.
FtttG
2d ago
Aren't low-trust societies the ones riddled with fraud and corruption?
In the sense of people voluntarily parting with their money or goods in the expectation of being paid back at a later date, no, I think this is a common misconception. You can't defraud someone without an expectation of trust, which means that fraud only happens in societies in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy, which means that bad actors in low-trust societies are forced to resort to cruder methods (theft, armed robbery etc.) to extract money from their victims.
FtttG
2d ago
You could make the same point about "it is highly unlikely the optimal level of murder/rape/beating children to death is zero".
yes_chad.png. See this sketch: there comes a point where the marginal cost of further investment in child protection is greater than the expected return, and those resources would be better allocated elsewhere. No one thinks that spending the entire annual budget to ensure that not a single child dies a premature violent death is a sensible way to allocate resources, which implicitly means that there is some amount of premature violent death of children we are collectively willing to tolerate as the price of doing business. Alternatively, a country in which child murder literally never happens probably curtails its citizens' liberties so aggressively that it would be profoundly undesirable to live there for other reasons.
Maybe you think this point is so trivial and obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, but I actually don't think it is. During Covid, I encountered plenty of people who really did claim to believe that there was no amount of economic hardship they didn't think it was worthwhile enduring if it meant a few people in their eighties got to live an extra year or two.
FtttG
2d ago
I get the point about trust being necessary, but if everyone is so trusting they can be plucked like pigeons, then eventually there won't be any trust.
Yes, and as described in the book, this is exactly what happens without sufficient protections against fraud.
The optimum is to have as little fraud as possible. No fraud at all may be impossible to achieve, given human nature, but surely trying for "as close to zero as possible" is the better option than "eh, shit happens, let the fools who fall for scams be weeded out by natural selection, it's nature's way".
"as close to zero as possible" sounds pretty much like Dan Davies's preference for how much fraud there should be in an economy.
FtttG
2d ago
This hasn't been my experience coming from a low-trust society, where everyone quickly learns to keep their hand on their wallet, and grow extra eyes all around their head.
And in this society, if a stranger approached you, introduced themselves as an entrepreneur, and offered to let you in on the ground floor of their operation for a small loan of million dollars, would you consider taking them up on the offer? Of course not - you'd assume they were a scam artist trying to rip you off. The only place someone would take them up on the offer is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy, which in turn means the only place a scam artist would attempt it is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy: in other words, fraud is impossible in a low-trust society.
Did this happen, by any chance, because there was very little fraud in Montreal in years prior, and people were much less cautious with their money because their priors about trustworthiness were outdated? Did they start being more cautious about fraud specifically after it turned out that the expected cost of preempting fraud is lower than the expected cost of falling victim to it?
Of course, and the book catalogues many examples of boom-bust cycles of the type you're describing. A high-trust society (or subculture, or community) is founded -> scam artists get wind of this and exploit it for all the alpha it's worth -> after a few successful frauds, people start getting a lot more cautious and risk-averse -> realising that it's no longer a high-trust society, the scam artists depart for greener pastures. None of this even seems counterintuitive to me, it just seems like basic economics.
No, and the book quite lucidly explains why this counterintuitive assertion is actually true. Fraud is only possible in a society in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy. Montreal was for years known as the scam capital of the world, specifically because the number of trusting investors eager to invest in promising new startups made it catnip for scam artists. By contrast, in a society where nobody trusts anyone else, people are famously unwilling to lend out their money, which results in low rates of fraud but also sluggish economic development.
Well, now you're just straight up putting words in my mouth. I never claimed that volunteering in a foreign country doesn't count as meaningful life experience. Nor did I ever claim that working as a lawyer is exciting or meaningful, merely that it's clearly something distinct from writing.
I'm sure they have - but if it's significantly less common for successful screenwriters to have cleared that bar than it used to be, that could be one contributing factor towards the decline of writing quality that is described in this thread.
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