Is Originality Lost in Hollywood?

I just finished the article "Hollywood keeps recycling" by Peter Hanson. He certainly has a point. It seems that originality is out of style these days in Hollywood, But after all, the name of the game is the bottom line of profit. When one of these blockbusters movies comes to screen, you can bet the amount of expense needed to produce it is phenomenal. So, once the "stage is set" the others to follow will incur a fraction of the expense to produce. If fans went for the first one, they will certainly head out with great expiations for the sequel-or in many cases today, the sequels. I remember one of the first series to hit the big screen was the Star Wars trilogy. We called them trilogies back then because there were only three in the series.

I certainly can understand the excitement over these sequels of big blockbuster, "action-paction" films being a connoisseur myself, but I can also relate to what Mr. Hanson is saying. Just because the first one was a hit does not always follow that those to come will be as good. Sometimes they are, of course. A prime example of this is the Alien movies.

I am an avoid Sci-Fi freak and love those space adventures that take me into exciting and imagined places throughout the universe. I guess that is the scientist in me. And when Aliens came out, I thought it was the best movie I had ever seen. I was enthralled with all the aspects of it. It was my favorite movie of all time-that is, until Aliens came out. I couldn't even imaging a script better than the first one, but I was over whelmed by the second sequel. It had everything that the first one had and took me to even higher levels of excitement, without being gaudy. So naturally, when the third sequel came out, I was overjoyed to run to the theater to be brought to even higher levels of excitement. What happened was a great disappointment. I hated it. How could that great script be so ruined by such a failure? It is too long and boring. And then, of course, the fourth come out and was even worse. All those producers should have let the glory stand with the first two movies, because the last two were as if they rushed out to make money riding on the wave of the first two. As a result, they just destroyed the whole theme.

As far as the Spiderman series, I liked all of them, even the third in the series. So now a fourth is in the wind, but with a new Peter Parker. Why don't those movie executives get it?. How often does a person change himself and become someone else entirely? Peter Parke may just be a character in a comic book series, but in the movies, the audience relates to the actual actor as being that character. And changing that actor changes the entire aura of the film. It is not the same. So why get someone else to become Peter Parker? After all, the movie is a series of the daily life of a character-a fictional hero we like to associate with. And this particular actor/character is who the audience relates to. If the main character is changed, it is usually just not be the same.

Another example is the Harry Potter series. Here the audience views the adventures of a young boy and watches him grow through the years. Would it ever be the same if the actor changed with each movie? Not at all. Of course, if the main character, played by Daniel Radcliff in the first movie, was played by different actors in each of the sequels, these others would no have the same impact on the audience. We viewers like to associate with the main character. In Harry Potter, we watched him grow into his roles thought his education years, and when we think of Harry Potter, we immediately see the face of Daniel. If Hollywood had changed the actor, the entire theme would not be the same.

There is one movie I would like to add here that has exactly what I am writing about. The movie is Fantastic Planet. It is a foreign film produce in the early 1970s and won an award for best movie in the Cannes film festival in 1973. (You can google it and come up with a trailer.) The copy I have has French Subtitles. The first time I saw this movie was at an outdoor drive-in movie theater. (Remember those? You could take a car full or just the kids and watch on the giant screen inside your own car. The speaker system was much to be desired, however. That is until the theater began broadcasting over the car radio and in stereo!)

This is an original idea and it is still my all-time favorite movie, which I consider the most original film script ever written. The animation is old compared to that of today, but the story is what is so original. It is timeless. What we need is more of this type of originality in our films

Movies are probably one of the best means of escape for us mere mortals. They bring us out of our daily mundane lives and, for a brief time, take us to new places where adventure, excitement, or just the problems of another, push our own troubles and problems aside. We become someone else for that time and experience a feeling of life we normally would never have.

Hollywood and all of its subsidiaries - computer games, novels and television, etc. - all bring that something into our lives that we normally would never experience, all within the safety and comfort of our theaters and homes.

Since the public demands such high expiations from the multimillion-dollar industry, why not give us something we crave different from what we already experienced? There are hundreds or scriptwriters out there, all with new stories that usually get turned away by those moguls putting up the cash. Surely, there must be new and original ideas out there for us enthusiasts to get lost in. So, Hollywood get it together and start looking for originality for your next script.