Kristin here–

In the November 6 issue of Newsweek (also online), Devin Gordon comments on the recent trend in franchise series to throw in a prequel covering an earlier period in the main character’s life.  “So-called origin stories—how fill-in-the-blank became fill-in-the-blank.”

At first David and I wondered whether Gordon, like so many film journalists, would go for the easy answer.  There are at least two easy answers in the context of popular films, and especially blockbuster franchise films.  One, their stories reflect something about the current psyche of the nation.  Alternatively, they are symptoms of Hollywood running out of creativity and backbone and going for the tried and true.

The public psyche theory may sound profound at first, but it’s basically a quick way to write a story without knowing much of anything about film history or how the film industry works.  There may be all sorts of reasons why a given kind of movie is made at a certain time.  We all know about genre cycles.  But society is vast and multi-faceted, and it isn’t hard to make any given film seem to “reflect” some aspect of it.  Might the vogue for origins stories mirror a widespread desire to return to a more innocent era before 9/11?  Bingo, you’re got your hook and can make your deadline.  (Don’t get me started on the fact that most big films these days are negotiated, greenlit, planned, and in production for years before they appear, thus presumably reflecting not our own Zeitgeist but one that has come and gone.)

As to Hollywood running out of creativity, there are plenty of people in Tinseltown with great scripts and the desire to make them.  We’re living in an age, though, when the big studios are owned by conglomerates.  More than ever, the studio decision makers and the investors who buy their stocks keep an eye on the bottom line.  Variety’s October 23 front-page story, “Less Dream, More Factory,” is on the layoffs and other cost-cutting measures that the big studios face.  (By the way, we aren’t putting links to stories in Variety.com, since it’s a subscription-only site.)  So the tactics of producers now must be to focus on exploiting the most popular characters and story premises for their tentpole projects.

Gordon recognizes this and puts his finger on a major reason for the vogue for “origin stories.”  The studios have to prolong their most lucrative franchises, which are essentially their owners’ big brands. Yet those franchises can grow formulaic.  One way to renew their energy can be to leap back in time.

Gordon opines, too, that “Ironically, playing it safe financially also provides studios with the cover to take creative chances.”  He points to the fact that Peter Webber, who is directing Young Hannibal, has only the indie hit Girl with a Pearl Earring to his credit.  Similarly, art-house darling Christopher Nolan gave one big franchise a new respectability and audience with Batman Begins and will try to continue to do so with The Dark Knight.

Linking origin stories to the hiring of such filmmakers is perhaps a bit of a stretch.  The new Bond film, Casino Royale, the earliest in the order of Ian Fleming’s original novels, shows a younger agent.  Much of the flashier high-tech props of recent entries in the series are apparently gone, with a grittier feel to the film.  Yet it was directed by Martin Campbell, who also had made an earlier entry, GoldenEye, as well as both the Zorro films.

It’s true that recently Hollywood studios have shown a strange propensity to hire independent or foreign directors to helm entries in franchises.  In the wake of his hit Once Were Warriors, New Zealand’s Lee Tamahori was imported and made Die Another Day and xXx:  State of the Union. Warner Bros. brought in Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también) to make the third Harry Potter film, presumably because many critics had dubbed the first two, by Chris Colombus, too bland.  Perhaps the studios simply see franchises as needing shaking up at intervals.  Yet this is part of a larger trend of indie directors suddenly boosted to blockbuster assignments, as when Doug Liman went from Go to The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

An “origin story” in the sense that Gordon is using the phrase is a type of prequel that jumps back far enough to show the protagonist distinctly younger and different from the way he is in the original film or series.  It then explains how he changed into that protagonist.

Hong Kong filmmakers are adept at prequels of this sort.  God of Gamblers: The Early Years, shows us the source of the protagonist’s lucky ring and his taste for gold-wrapped chocolate, both of which are major motifs in the original God of Gamblers.  The case of A Better Tomorrow is more complicated.  John Woo and Tsui Hark had intended it to be a stand-alone film, and they made the mistake of killing off the most charismatic character.  The film was such a hit, largely on the basis of Chow Yun Fat’s performance as Mark, that A Better Tomorrow II gave Mark a twin brother, Ken, and put Chow back in action.  That film’s success led to a prequel to the first film.  A Better Tomorrow III traces how the Mark character acquired his fighting skills and his signature costume and habits.

Origin stories are not entirely new to Hollywood, either.  As far back as 1974, The Godfather Part II wove in flashbacks to a time well before the first film’s action, tracing Don Corleone’s rise.  In 1979, there was Butch and Sundance: The Early Days.

Origin stories can be thought of as expansions of a basic convention of mainstream storytelling: the flashback to crucial formative moments in a character’s life. In that sense, perhaps the quintessential origin story is Citizen Kane. Today, when everything is potentially franchisable, such an early-days sequence can create a series. The prologue of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade shows young Jones launching upon an adventure that prefigures the man he will become. (In what surely is an inside joke, River Phoenix even acquires Harrison Ford’s chin scar.)  That sequence in turn spawned The Chronicles of Young Indiana Jones TV series (“Before the world discovered Indiana, Indiana discovered the world”) and four cable movies.

As a term, “origin stories” was coined by students of mythology, who use it to refer to various ethnic groups’ accounts of the origin of the world.  In that case, it didn’t have anything to do with what we now call prequels.

Then the term got taken up in discussions of comic books to identify the sort of thing that Gordon is talking about.  Before television, comic books were the ultimate franchise form of the twentieth century.  In comic franchises, particularly those centering on superheroes, a book or short series of books might be devoted to an origin story.  (Dave Carter’s blog has a lengthy entry on comic-book origin stories, giving examples.)  It’s not surprising that one of the main origin films, Batman Begins, came from the comics.

Gordon does not mention another reason why studios might want to continue a franchise by jumping back to the hero’s origins:  actors can age too much to continue a role.  It’s been over 14 years since The Silence of the Lambs, and Anthony Hopkins could probably not be convincing in another turn as Lecter.  Possibly we’ll get a chance to see whether a 60-something (or 70-something at the rate things are going) Harrison Ford can bring audiences in for the on-again-off-again Indiana Jones continuation.  Or actors may exit the franchise, as Jody Foster did before Hannibal.  Or grow up too quickly, as the Harry Potter kids are doing before our eyes.  Or die, as Richard Harris did in the same series, forcing Warners to substitute Michael Gambon as Dumbledore.

But origin stories don’t have these problems.  Just get new actors.  One thing tentpole franchise films have taught us is that, as strongly identified with a character as a star may become, if the character and premises are even stronger, a new actor will be accepted.  It’s happened with Batman, Superman, Bond, and almost did—and could yet–with Spider-Man.

Such stories, however, have their dangers as well.  If the audience is devoted to the character as he (and it’s mostly he so far) is, will they care about seeing him as a very different person?  If Hannibal Lecter is the middle-aged psychopath we love to hate, do we want to learn that he was once a vulnerable, suffering youth?

Kristin here—

Our friend Brian Rose kindly send us a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern’s “Set the DVD Player to ‘Random’” (28 October 2006, p. 10; the WSJ website is by subscription and wouldn’t let me link to the article). In it Morgenstern claims that iPods playing songs in random order, video games offering constant choice, multi-tasking, and all the supposedly distractive aspects of modern life are wrecking movie logic. The latest evidence? A new release called The Onyx Project, an inexpensively produced interactive movie starring David Strathairn that allows its viewer to wander through the narrative in random order.

According to Morgenstern, The Onyx Project is just further indication that “The entire entertainment industry is beset by fragmentation, both economic and perceptual. Kids who used to turn out for movies every weekend now devote themselves to videogaming, instant messaging, MySpacing and YouTubeing, sometimes simultaneously, while movie executives, pacing studio corridors, worry rightly that they no longer understand how kids’ minds work.” (Haven’t studio execs always paced and worried about how to understand spectators’ minds?)

Morgenstern even cites Pauline Kael’s essay, “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” where she cited the “creeping Marienbadism” in modern cinema. If only! Yes, I can just see today’s teenagers lamenting the fact that Last Year at Marienbad is out of print on DVD and searching eBay for it. Morgenstern simultaneously cites Marienbad as having brought fragmentation into the movies and praises such art films as Breathless, L’Avventura, and Caché, as well as sophisticated Hollywood storytelling in The Matrix and The Godfather Part II. But again, if fragmentation is what kids want, why aren’t they watching Caché?

It’s hard to know where to begin.

For a start, the makers of The Onyx Project declare on its website, “But NAVworlds are not movies.” (NAV stands for “Non-Linear Arrayed Video.”) Further, “They are not ‘interactive movies.’” The site compares these NAVworlds, quite logically, to videogames, but there’s a difference: “Video games present worlds. We love video games. But video games are programmed. NAVworlds are written, directed, acted and edited.” It’s a subtle distinction, but the point is, The Onyx Project is probably closer to a game than a movie. The fact that it is available only as a piece of software playable in computers but not in DVD players should be a clue.

But whatever we call The Onyx Project, is it really totally fragmented? Richard Siklos’ more temperate New York Times review, “In This Movie, the Audience Picks the Scene” (2 October 2006) points out that The Onyx Project retains some of the traits of a Hollywood narrative. “One idea behind the venture,” he declares, “is that no two viewers may see the movie unfold in the same way, yet its basic facts, characters and message will permeate the experience.

Sounds like a type of unity to me. Moreover, “The mystery at the center of the story is not revealed until the end.” Suspense and curiosity are maintained, controlled not by the viewer/player but the makers.

Let’s go back to that “The entire entertainment industry is beset by fragmentation” claim. One of the reasons that The Onyx Project is creating a little stir is that it is so atypical. These kinds of experiments in time shifting are often used specifically for mysteries, traditionally the genre where the story starts the latest in the action and then backtracks for the final reveal. Think Memento, The Usual Suspects, or any of the neo-noir follow-ups to Pulp Fiction.

In 1985 when Hollywood attempted to introduce a mild form of forking-paths storytelling into theatrical filmmaking, they chose Clue, not only a mystery but a game. Then viewers simply saw one of three possible endings. Presumably the spectator was supposed to be intrigued by this gimmick and see the film three times. Few proved willing to sit through it even once, and the film flopped. Naturally all three endings were included in the video release, giving the viewer a mild dose of interactivity. Now the technology has caught up to make this approach far more sophisticated and intriguing.

More important, though, is the fact that most movies that young people see in theaters are not fragments or shuffled in challenging ways. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest may have been too long, but its cause-effect flow wasn’t fragmented, and it has earned over a billion dollars worldwide. Look at the most popular and/or lauded films of the past decade: Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Beautiful Mind, Spider-Man, Finding Nemo … the list could go on and on. These films are linear and causally tight for the most part, and when something is unclear, it’s a mistake, not a deliberate strategy. Even The Sixth Sense (another mystery of sorts) is easy to follow, and the twist, though genuinely surprising for most, is not baffling. A truly fragmented narrative is hard to find, in part because these sorts of films appeal to a very broad audience and have to be comprehensible if they are to succeed.

It’s easy to link the coincidence of the invention of gadgets like iPods with the trend toward Memento-like trickiness. As usually happens if one looks closely, though, complex narratives of this sort predate modern forms of interactivity. Even apart from the art cinema (whose main audiences from the end of World War II well into the 1970s and 1980s contained a large number of college students and graduates), there are Hollywood films that play with time in pretty sophisticated ways. In the 1940s there were the films noir, like Double Indemnity and The Locket, the latter with its flashbacks nested like matrioshki dolls. Later on but still in the pre-iPod era, there were playful films like Groundhog Day (1993) and Pleasantville (1998). MTV and the 1970s generation of American auteurs brought up on art cinema probably had more impact on story-telling than the iPod and similar devices have.

Moreover, even in traditional arts where interactivity would seem highly unlikely, one can find occasional works that offer choices. The Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books (1979 to the present) include numerous options about how to proceed. (Greg Lord offers an analysis of one of the books.)

Besides all that, the shuffle feature on iPods is usually used for songs, which are short, self-contained artworks. I doubt that people watching old episodes of Moonlighting on their video iPods skip among chapters randomly.

One thing most people tend to forget (if they ever knew it) is that in pre-television days, when movie theaters were a lot fuller than they tend to be now, there were continuous screenings. That meant the times when the screenings would start were not typically given in ads, and people just went to the theater, often standing in line until a seat became available. A lot of people ended up coming in in the middle of the feature and just sat through until they got to that point again. They didn’t seem to be much bothered by the fact that the film was “fragmented” in a random way. (In Storytelling in the New Hollywood I argue that comprehension was aided by a considerable redundancy in the flow of narrative information. David picks up on that idea in The Way Hollywood Tells It.) Notably, among the first theaters to list start times and sell reserved seats were early art houses, presumably because the more challenging films shown there were less easy to grasp unless seen beginning to end.

If The Onyx Project succeeds, it may usher in a new storytelling medium somewhere between films and videogames. If not, it will be the Clue of its day. Either way, most filmmakers in Hollywood and elsewhere will continue to try and make movies with stories that people can easily follow.

Kristin here—

As David has mentioned, I made a short trip to England to deal with inventorying the latest additions to the P. G. Wodehouse Archive. I got back last night to resume work on The Frodo Franchise and to hold up my end of the blog.

Having been in a lovely old farmhouse in the rolling hills of southern England the whole time, I don’t have any film-related experiences from the trip to report. Going and coming, however, was another matter.

For years now we’ve been hearing about the airlines installing these wonderful new systems that will allow bored travelers to choose from a long list of films (or music or video games) to view on personal monitors. It’s finally happening, and for the first time I was on a new plane that had these systems.

I have to say, they’re pretty neat. Definitely a big improvement on the old ways of watching movies on airplanes. When I started flying, movies were shown on 16mm, projected on screens at the front of each cabin. Naturally from most positions, you had to stretch your neck to see over the seats in front of you, and if you were way on the side at the front of the cabin, it was a lost cause.

Eventually video projection replaced 16mm, but that only made the picture fuzzier. The airlines then went for quantity, showing old sit-coms, documentaries, and, naturally, ads.

Business class cabins came to feature personal monitors, which emerged on a swiveling pole from a chamber under one armrest. These offered a choice of maybe half a dozen films on different channels. The screen was small, and these films were playing on a loop, on at the same time for everyone in business class. If you missed the beginning, you could wait a couple of hours until it started again, or just watch the beginning after seeing the rest of the film first. The movie rolled merrily along even while announcements were made or dinners served.

These new systems are somewhat like watching movies on a small laptop that doesn’t have quite all the controls that we’re used to. A remote stored in the arm of the chair navigates you through various help screens and menus. I didn’t count how many movies were on offer, but it must have been more than 30, ranging from The Devil Wore Prada to Fight Club to Sideways, with a sampling for kids as well.

You watch the film (or whatever) on a small screen imbedded in the seat in front of you. It’s a fairly decent size, given the circumstances, maybe six inches wide. (Didn’t happen to have my ruler handy.) Bigger than the little screens on the typical business-class monitor, anyway. The picture seemed sharper, though there was a tendency for ambient light to wash out the dark parts of the image.

The main thing, though, is that you have lots more control over the film. You start it when you want, and if there are interruptions, you can pause it. Meal service and other distractions don’t make you miss bits. I even could stare out the window as we passed over Greenland and then go back to watching Meryl Streep bullying Anne Hathaway.

I wouldn’t exactly recommend this new system for close film analysis, but apart from pausing, the remote does let you go fast backward or forward. I couldn’t find a way to go in slow motion or frame-by-frame, but I suspect there’s not a lot of demand for that sort of thing.

So, after years of not watching movies on airplanes—even on those lovely, rare occasions when I got to go business class—I now have that option again. I even watched Cars again. I enjoyed its narrative and wit, but it made me very glad I had seen it on the big screen already. Clearly one would do well to choose films to watch on this new system carefully. I feel fairly confident that The Devil Wears Prada didn’t suffer all that much, but I can’t imagine seeing Fight Club for the first time under such circumstances.

One other cautionary note: the films I watched weren’t letterboxed, and I suspect the others on offer weren’t, either.

I was traveling via Northwest on an A330. NW also has these systems on its 747-400s, and I presume other airlines have them on their newer planes. I don’t know if it would be possible to retro-fit older planes with systems this elaborate. It will probably be a long time before every flight will let us summon up movies according to whim.

Now, if they could only do something about those little headphones!

DB again:

A story in today’s New York Times highlights a point I’ve made elsewhere on this site (“Down in the Valleys”) and in The Way Hollywood Tells It. My claim is that scholars, journalists, and moviegoers have come to identify contemporary Hollywood with stratospherically budgeted blockbuster movies. Several films scholars have gone on to suggest that the megapicture has redefined moviemaking. If the studio era, pre-1960, was a “classical” filmmaking era, perhaps we’re now in a post-classical one, when principles of story and style have collapsed.

Now I don’t think that tentpole pictures stray much beyond the classical norms. But even if they did, the program pictures, released week in and week out, do so quite seldom. In addition, I argued that the programmers are more reliable as investments exactly because they’re easy to assimilate. A breakout midrange picture like The Devil Wears Prada is a good example. Did anybody out there find it fragmented, postmodern, or incoherent?

Today’s NYT story is about the rise of hedge funds and other investment instruments that are becoming more involved in film financing. The relevant quote is: “A result for moviegoers is that they could begin to see even more thrillers, comedies, and horror movies at the multiplex–the types of movies Wall Street favors because of their more predictable payoff.” The relevant player is Joel Silver, who has just signed on to make “a mix of horror, comedy, and action movies that will cost $15 million to $40 million apiece.” These are just the sort of midrange pictures that can yield the reliable profit percentages Kristin has talked about earlier this week, and that are likely to be quite directly linked to the classical Hollywood storytelling tradition.