"Hollywood Originality:There is a Recession On!"

Yesterday in class, one of my socially conscientious students asked boldly “Why is there a lack of originality in films and television today. Now being the almighty, (yes some of my students believes this, and who am I to argue), and taking a tip from the congressional book of interview replies I said, “Because there is a recession on.” To which the student looked at me with an expression that resembled one given by a silver-backed gorilla given a frozen dinner and a coke.
As I drove home that night, skillfully piloting through traffic like an eagle, I reflected the question with renewed curiosity, not unlike Sherlock Holmes deciphering the Case of the Blue Carbuncle or Indiana Jones on The Last Crusade. Upon my return home, I kissed my wife and t my daughter then immediately went to my office and sought the repository of all known human knowledge, GOOGLE.COM. I had formulated my course of action in solving this mystery; feverishly I typed in my search question,

Hollywood, originality

The little spinning circle in the toolbar spun fast, then slow, then fast again and then it paused. I held my breath, the pause meant it had found something; would my quest be this simple? The screen erupted with a huge list of sites all asking the same question; what I believed was a small mystery was more like a global conspiracy! I clicked on sites and read the ideas and hypothesis of the noted professionals and theologians. Each had reviewed the problem and had their answer, but none had gotten to the heart of the issue.
So I then moved onto sacred ground and dug deeper into the darkness of the pit and unearthed truths that were frightening and terrible. I had called a friend at a major studio, I will refer to her as Dark Angel, and she agreed to meet me. We met in a parking garage near Santa Monica, and she arrived at the appointed time. She stood behind a concrete pillar and spoke in a low gravely tone, (she had a cold and she didn’t want me to catch it), I asked her the question once more. She told me that the reason for the lack of original ideas in the entertainment industry is that those in power are the rebels of the seventies and were taught to believe that they could do better than those who had gone before. But they had one tragic flaw, their Achilles Heel to use a classical metaphor, was that they were the first of the T-Generation, (the “Television” generation, children born in the years 1958 to 1968. I read about in Newsweek), and thus that had become their template.

I shuddered; my generation had created this monster. We who created the internet and Napster, we who perpetuated the desktop computer age – we had wrought this!
I pressed her for clarification. She coughed and blew her nose like a jazz musician; then she went on to tell me that since the seventies the American entertainment industry was in a rut creatively, and to pull itself out it “borrowed” from one of our allies from the Great War, (the one with the Nazis and Japanese, remember?). They would borrow the show concepts, change the names and call them new. This cunning plan worked until the shows they borrowed were shown on PBS. Now their secret was revealed!

But retribution never came, instead a mutual agreement was signed and the cross pollination began without a hitch.
“But how does this explain what is happening today?” I asked as she once again trumpeted. “Like any drug you become addicted, you can’t stop!” her voice clearing slightly. It seems that now they wait until a property, (industry term for a show, idea, Las Vegas hotel, etc), has gone through a full cycle of re-runs or showings on cable television, the idea can be used again. But the rattlesnake inside this concept is that the American entertainment juggernaut has been programmed to believe it can do anything better because we are Americans! Thus the explanation as to why shows created overseas are better than those we copy over here, they are vastly more intelligent than we are, (This is proved by the I.Q. scores of European children and anyone living in the middle of the country).

Dark Angel coughed again and then rushed off because she was out of Kleenex. But I had my answers, and it wasn’t hard to take it from there, oh no, I had the tools to finish my quest. I returned home, sat down, did more research into the industry, and learned what had been going on for the last two decades. Once a year the American film and television industry sends representatives to a convention in Great Britain, where they show all the television shows and concept shows from around the world. After the convention, the representatives return home and inform their superiors of what they have seen.

Now that the original shows from the convention are appearing on cable television networks: SciFi Channel, A&E, USA, HBO, Spice Channel, the Entertainment machine has devolved to the basest form of life, CANNABLISM. This is where the television generation aspect rears its myopic head – it uses those shows from the seventies as the food for its huge profit hungry desire. And not just for television, much worse, for major motion pictures! Scooby Do, The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, and more on the way. And it doesn’t stop there, the now gluttonous beast has moved to another form of media loved by the T-Generation – comic books! But the latter was for purely monetary purposes. The reasoning is that if you look at the average printing of a comic book, (X-Men sells 500,000 a month at roughly $3.50 each) times that by the price of a movie ticket = a trip to the Caiman Islands for some lucky producer and his mistress.

So as I power down my computer and wander sleepily out to the living room where House is just coming on, I sit and wonder – is this original or Marcus Wilby, M.D. on prescription drugs?