House of Eratosthenes

So my blogger friend Cassy linked from her Facebook page (somewhere) to a Buzzfeed article about 43 things that will make you feel old. The content of the list didn’t impress me that much, and truth be told it was awhile before I clicked it open & actually went through it. Cassy, who’s pretty much a whole generation newer than me, griping about feeling old was good enough to get the job done.

Things make me feel old all the time nowadays. So I didn’t think too much of it. Then I saw an ad for this:

Something terrible has happened here. I haven’t said anything about it because my first instinct with things that are entirely outside my knowledge limits, is to keep my mouth shut. No, quit laughin’, it’s true. Once I learn a little bit about it, I start to sound off with the questions, at least the ones I have a trace suspicion won’t sound entirely idiotic, and that’s most of what you see here. I’m not there yet with the Fast & Furious franchise, but I think I’m there with the overall “sequel” phenomenon.

Its beginning can be legitimately debated. And we should have that debate: A case can be made that it comes from decades and decades before my time, but this starts to deteriorate a bit with some more definition. And as we recognize the problem, which I’ll get to in a bit — this is a rant you’re reading, let’s be clear about that — our sample set starts to shrink. From Russia With Love, sequel to Dr. No, is the earliest big-box-office example that comes to my mind. Yeah yeah, it’s a sequel only in movie land, where the order was reversed from the books with “Russia” coming before “Dr. No,” let’s get that out of the way. But it works as an action/adrenaline-junkie vehicle, at least within its own time.

But there are no numbers in the title until The Godfather: Part II. Apart from the number, here we find a meaningful event in that the significance has shifted: The movie has appeal because the audience wants to find out what happened to all these characters. So why would we not consider this to be the ignition-point of what we’re seeing today. Well, I do have some reservations about that. There is no book, so far as I know, called “the Godfather Part II.” But the literary format of the story continued afterward to flourish, with its own set of plot points that seem to have at least occasionally inspired what happened in the film. So while the producers of the sequel were motivated by profit, the supply-demand equation for story delivery is different; the story is there, waiting to be told. This sets it apart from what I consider to be the actual start of the problem, Jaws II. This would be the beginning of the era of: Huh, that made quite a bit of money, let’s see if we can make some more.

Superman II would arguably fall outside of this…although Superman III does not. So let’s firm up the definition a bit: At the time the decision is made to “green-light” the sequel, the story & plot are not firmed up as well as the recognition of the audience that has already demonstrated its interest. Shortening it somewhat: The decision to go ahead is driven by, or at least made easier by, the reduction in financial risk due to the prior creation of this new franchise. Ramifications: Creating the sequel becomes less of an expression of creativity, than an expedition to go “round up” some dollars that are known to be out there. We did not see this problem in the early days because back then, it was done with flair, quality, class, and a sincere desire to entertain. There was a built-in audience for Rocky II, but given that its predecessor enjoyed any success at all, how could there not be? The producers were simply giving the audience what it wanted.

By this time, we come to an era in which the most profitable and quick way to make a movie, was to make it a date movie, and the best way to make a date movie was to make it about horny and drug-addicted teenagers getting hacked to pieces by crazy people. So the Roman Numeral phenomenon completely exploded with the Big Three: Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the Thirteenth. Revived, lately, in Scream and Saw.

And this is where the dry rot starts to set in. We come now to my complaint:

Like any old geezer looking down his withered old nose with disdain on what the newer generation is doing — I understand, I’m not the first — I am full of worries about something I realize isn’t actually any of my business. I am worried about these roman numerals. I’m fretting over their true purpose. I fear that purpose has been whittled down to nothing more than serialization. As in, without the number there, people might wrongly assume they already saw the film that’s just coming out. This would mean we’re living in this strange resurgence of what I saw in my youth. Not the movies, but the commercials on Saturday morning during the Bugs Bunny Show, in which the narrator would urge us to “collect all of them!” (In my house, that was a complete non-starter, as “collect all of them” was something those rich kids did, across town. But anyway.) I’m worried that is the only point left to these title-numbers, so the audience can make sure they’ve collected/seen all of ’em.

The installments, from what I can tell, are not immortalized by key plot points like “Apollo Creed dies in Rocky IV,” or “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the only James Bond movie without a happy ending.”

The installments, in other words, have become fungible. Just like vegetable oil, one gallon being indistinguishable from another.

Or maybe I should say, Mountain Dew. The roman numeral simply says, “Yeah we got more,” and little apart from that. You need Mountain Dew case #6 if you’re done drinking Mountain Dew case #5.

I recall that chubby kid in the photography class I flunked back in ’83, monopolizing the conversation to try to beef up his nascent social skills…I suppose he was a bit further along there than I was…expressing his sense of wonder about a promotional shot of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader riding an elevator together. “Whoa,” he said…”I’VE GOT TO SEE THAT MOVIE.” So, yes. There’s certainly a shift taking place here. It’s a big one, big enough we should be taking note of it, whether we like it or not. And no, I’m not happy about it, although I suppose there’s no need for me to be.

I don’t know this subject matter very well because I’m not following Fast & Furious. I could be wrong about this “fungible” thing in that context. In fact I know there are some caveats to this, at least. Six is supposed to be “the one with The Rock in it,” right? And I’m sure some of the stunts are new. But that was true of the Expendables sequel as well, and…well ya know, I’m thinking it takes a bit more than that to justify a sequel. At least in my mind.

Take it for what it’s worth. I’m just an old coot who was around at the beginning of it (I think). But I’m a sad old coot. I think, across the decades, I’ve seen something start out as an honest and fine art form, and wither down into something like a grocery delivery of something sweet, sugary, loaded up with caffeine and calories and not much else.

Meh. I think the problem may be you are not old enough. This seems to hearken back to the days of “On the Road with Bing and Bob”. You could even argue it’s a return to sanity, that after years of poisoning the well with “Important Films” (you know, the ones nobody actually watches except at gunpoint, like Broback Mountain), they are returning to the mindless, enjoyable films that pay the bills.
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 05/17/2013 @ 07:47
I think the road pictures and the endless “Abbott and Costello Meet Random Character” films probably meet an intermediate standard… something between what Morgan observes here and the earlier serial adventure pictures like Flash Gordon (and their hyperactive cousins, short films like Laurel and Hardy). For those, there was the idea that of course we love these guys and want to see more of them – the characters or performers were the whole point. The formula didn’t have to change because the plot didn’t mean beans, it was all about who it was happening to.

There were multiple Thin Man movies; shortly after Bond became a movie franchise there was the classic Spaghetti Western trilogy with The Man With No Name (For a Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good the Bad and the Ugly). Are those more modern sequels, where the idea isn’t just the protagonist, but the new adventure itself?

This is where a hobby in writing fan fiction actually helps. If I’m starting a story, the first thing I really need to ask myself is, does this story require these characters? Is this something that loses in the telling if it happens to somebody else? I’ve found that some of what I write gains a lot if I make it purely original and not set it in someone else’s pre-existing fictional structure; a few times I’ve found that there’s no way to get to the story otherwise, so it happens to these poor unfortunate characters who likely only wish to be left undisturbed by amateurs such as myself.

Producers of movie franchises don’t really have that background, I think. Their aim is to earn money, not tell a compelling story. The story might be better-served as its own thing, but not the bottom-line, so I think that a lot of weak plots and situations are served up to the regretful public when they could actually be something decent and entertaining if given a proper chance – they don’t go through the draft/critique/edit process nearly enough to be fully-baked as sequels, and especially if the pressure’s on to follow up a big hit. I think of the Matrix as a big example. I don’t care what the Wachowski’s say about it now, it looks plain to me that they wrote one self-contained story, and it turned out that they needed to write more of them because that story was a big seller; the next two really feel tacked on and unnecessary. (Likewise, I think that Tim Kring probably intended to kill Sylar at the end of Heroes’ first season, and found the actor and character too popular to follow his original plan; that plus the writer’s strike meant a bizarre, underdone second season that permanently knocked the trolley off the rails.)
- nightfly | 05/17/2013 @ 10:26
I don’t know how to decide that emerging question of “Does it count when the audience wants to see Elvis Presley’s face over and over again?” On the one hand, it seems a departure from what I’m complaining about here, in which the audience wants to find out what happened to the characters, not the actors. On the other hand, what I’m complaining about here, seems almost like the completion of a full revolution back into exactly what’s been brought up with Abbott/Costello, Crosby/Hope, et al.

Alright, fair enough. The “While we’re looking for something to do, let’s go see the new [blank] movie, and I forget if it’s number five, eight or ten” thing — is timeless within the history of cinema. And so, I suppose, going through the motions of following an arcing story that isn’t really there, is what’s new. And perhaps I’m just reading that into it. Maybe my standard of comparison is not reasonable. I’m accustomed to having to wait three whole years to find out if they killed off Han Solo. Seemed like torture at the time, but now I’m perplexed that the newer generation isn’t having the same experience.
- mkfreeberg | 05/18/2013 @ 06:14
Back when I was a TV/film major, one of my screenwriting profs told us to avoid anything with three or more writers. Not 100%, but still a good rule of thumb
- leelu | 05/18/2013 @ 11:25
OK, so I was off track there. Sorry.

I think Elvis, Hope and Crosby, even the Bowery Boys (I saw them in re-release, I think), were the characters. The term is “playing themselves”. I don’t for one minute believe that, in “real life” Hope was a bumbling fool who got by on silly plots and luck. I saw a couple of the last “Road” pictures, and “Call Me B’wana”. They were all (to me) about “What’s gonna happen, and what’s he going to do next?”

I can’t speak to “franchises” like Fast & Furious or Police Academy. Bobcat Golthwaite may your point when he said “We had to make P.A. x, because there were so many unanswered questions in P.A. x.”

I guess the reason for making the film will drive the quality of the story of said film. Following up on unanswered questions (Han in Corbomite) vs “Call Me B’wana” (funny and entertaining, but not necessarily an all-time classic) are two examples that come to mind. The Eastwood Spaghetti wessterns weree not really sequels in the sense of the Star Wars films. There was really no over reaching arc above the three. I saw them out of order, and don’t think it made any difference.

But, I could be wrong… 😉
- leelu | 05/18/2013 @ 11:39

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Friday, May 17th, 2013