| | | | | | Hollywood is a dangerous place to be. Professionally, what it promises a large canvas, the lure of great talent, absolute control of technique cannot be matched anywhere in the world. The film will be slick and money will not be an issue. And then there is the glamour that goes with movie making. There will be meetings and lunches, press releases and interviews, limos and parties. There will be premieres, film festivals, and the Academy Awards. No wonder the package has proven irresistible. Generation after generation, filmmakers have made the journey to Los Angeles, full of ideas and projects, energy and optimism, but few have managed to achieve what they wanted. There are simply too many compromises to make and Hollywood, in the end, has gotten the better of all of them. It is thus truly foolish to believe that you alone will buck the trend and avoid the corruption that has contaminated everyone else. I cannot repeat it loudly enough: stay away from Los Angeles. Do not live here, do not study here, and do not shoot here. Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola have done well while managing to live and work elsewhere: learn from them. | | | | | | | | | At a recent lunch organized by the Los Angeles Times, five successful writers and directors compared notes. 1 The main complaint involved the packaging of movies before a script even exists. Another issue entailed the endless duplication of material in action movies: "hostages, terrorists, car chases, fist fights, a scene in a bar with strippers, and buddy cops one black, one white."2 Faced with multiple sequels of successful movies, the | | | | |
