A personal hero of mine, and source of encouragement when times are tough for those of us loopy enough to dream we could make money out of ideas, is the legendary screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, the man who intimately acquainted an entire generation of movie-goers across the world with Sharon Stone in the hugely popular thriller Basic Instinct.
Joe is notorious for more than this in-itself immense feat. He champions – with the cojones of one who really does not care either way – the role of screen writers as core, not peripheral, to the quality and success of movies and TV shows. And he walks the talk. The man sold a four page treatment – a sketched idea for a movie – for several million dollars to a studio. Deliciously, the film was I gather never made. Joe is also – perhaps understandably given the context and history of his career – very tetchy about changes to his script … along the lines of, if you change one word, I pull the script and the movie is no longer.
Joe, therefore, knows the secret of life on and behind the screen. The only way to win and keep winning in Hollywood (at least at his Olympian level), is to be crazier than anyone who may imagine themselves more powerful than you are, and never, ever, ever, back down.
Perhaps the influence of Joe Eszterhas was finally felt, as the writers of many of the world’s most valuable shows took to the streets.
You can read the ins and outs of the writers’ strike elsewhere of course. But let me point out an interesting set of coincidences that played out around the same time across the globe.
France, as we all know, has been the cultural nemesis of America’s cultural products for the better part of a century, and it’s here that industrial – indeed cultural action – was getting mighty lively. Hollywood may do entertainment better – at least bigger – than the rest, but the French give great social mayhem. And it was the controversial (of course …) French philosopher Jean Baudrillard who pointed out that the true role of Disneyland was not to provide a childlike escape from the reality of life, but to persuade us that the utter fantasy of modern American life is in fact, real.
Moving away from strikes, let’s talk about the other end of the content pipe, and a debate that affects the very core of medial value. Those darn free papers! In London you can’t walk 50 yards without having a chunk of semi-adequate news thrust – literally – into your hands by beaming distributors. I can’t help feeling they suspect every passer-by to be the corporate equivalent of a mystery shopper, checking on levels of enthusiasm and aggression in this guerrilla distribution, this “pushy” media. Along with the “HELLO! Spare a minute for the children of the blind postmen sir!” maniacs who appear to occupy the meagre remaining pavement space left unoccupied by the free paper pushers, I’m afraid really wish THESE people would go on strike. Forever.
What am I on about, what’s my point? My point, or my main point at least, is that all these concurrent phenomena invite us to speculate about – to reconsider – the meaning and value of media content.
What was being withheld from us when Hollywood’s writers of dreams held the studios and stations to ransom? When the greatest television shows in the world … dried up? Was it the fantasy world of our after-dinner flop in front of the telly that suffered? If that’s all it is, then why do we feel this frisson of panic, at the unlikely closure of THE dream factory?
What is the effect of this determined thrusting of news into our hands, not to mention these “attention muggings” resorted to by worthy causes? We know that all of Big Newspaperdom is wondering – right this minute – whether a zero cover price is the only way to go, to sustain the consumer attention that feeds the ad sales that drive the presses. But there seems to be more here than simple commercial imperative.
And what, as stiff-upper-lip Saxons, do we feel when confronted – again via the news media – by those Ballardian images of French rioting?
It’s all about the fight for our attention of course. The French strikers – like it or not – commanded the attention of the authorities and the public – now worldwide. The paper pushers insist – on behalf of their own bosses – that all this selective content-browsing and ad-dodging has got to stop. Back on your heads, as the joke goes. And those patient geniuses behind the folks behind the cameras? They’re just reminding us – like Eszterhas, like Baudrillard, and like the French strikers – of the reality behind the fantasy of modern mediated life.
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