Friday, July 2, 2021

I Suggest This, Without Remorse

 h/t Old NFO

What's that, you say? Hollyweird stepped on their wedding tackle with their woketard adaptation of a Clancy novel?? That's never happened before. Stop the presses!









I mean, other than anything of Clancy's with Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck in it.

Clancy said they'd only get another novel of his over his dead body, after seeing what they did with those. So now, apparently, that's exactly what's happened.

As I noted at NFO's site:

Clancy had fun pissing himself over what The Biz did to his novels when he was alive, until the day he died. 24/7/365. It was his second career, after writing.

He finally realized that a writer's job, once he sells the rights, is to spend the check, and STFU.

That dawning realization is when he stopped selling them rights to anything further. His estate is clearly only interested in the money. (Like anyone reading the phoned-in novellas concocted since his death with Clancy's name pasted on couldn't figure that out in a New York minute.) QED

Of course Hollyweird fornicated Without Remorse; Clancy refused to sell them any more novel rights after he saw what they did with everything after Hunt For Red October book of his they got sort of right).

Hollywood screws the pooch with published works because they can.

Anyone unaware of this should write it on their hand in laundry pen as a memory aid. Particularly published authors.

OTOH, not being a Lee Child book fan myself, Cruise's movies of same have been raging successes, no matter how diehard Child fans feel about that (and I get that). When you can find someone with Cruie's box office who happens to be 6'8" instead of 5'5", and built like a meat packer who juggles cows for fun, or an NFL middle linebacker, talent agents in Hollywood are awaiting your call.

The fact that Matt Damon looks like a spastic kid having a seizure during an acid trip when he fights hand-to-hand has done nothing to diminish the ongoing success of the Jason Bourne franchise, and for similar reasons. He brings box office, and he gets story. He didn't win his screenwriting Oscar on a fluke. So his shortcomings in MMA can be largely forgiven, and hidden with recourse to scene editing by a kid with ADHD, downing energy drinks by the six-pack, and out of ritalin for a month.

At root, the business part of "show business" is to put butts in seats. if they could cast Warwick Davis or Danny DeVito as Jack Reacher, and pull $300M in box office, and tell a good story, I'd still buy the ticket.

Where they throw the "business" out the window is when they not only screw the pooch on story, but deliver a badly-adapted one, and then compound the error by carpet-bombing it in "wokeness" as if it was liquid fertilizer sprayed from cropdusters.









When they avoid this error, the "business" model works.

When they don't, they lay turds the size of the Rocky Mountains.

Ask Disney about putting kathleen Kennedy in charge of memory-raping the entire Star Wars franchise (she'd need the entire SAS as bodyguards if she ever showed up in person at any Fan Con, and will until she dies); bring up Jar Jar Abrams' work with pounding the Star Trek tentpole all the way into the ground; mention Sam Mendes' dismantling of 007, driving that series right over the cliff without a parachute.

That sort of stupidity is what's burning Hollyweird to the ground, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of woketards.

If you're going to do this right, either show the same circumspection J.R.R.Tolkien's family did with Lord Of the Rings and The Hobbit; or else do what Stan lee did: insist on final production approval of anything made, with an iron-clad guaranteed kill switch in your contract.

Or else, take the check, cash it, and STFU.

And given Hollyweird's compulsory penchant, I would watch Without Remorse even if they strapped to a metal chair, and cut off my eyelids.

The way to beat them at their own game though, is to make a faithful adaptation of it, sith stellar production values, and without permission, then let the internet bootleg it, a la China for the last 40 years, and then sit back, and watch Hollywood play whack-a-mole when your version goes viral, and pops up 200 times a day everywhere, forever.

It could be done in a month or two, for under $100K, all in.

And the producers of the horrible "official" version would be eating a 10-foot party sub sh*t sandwich for decades.

These are bigger bombs that what we dropped on Japan in 1945.
It's the only cardinal sin in Hollywood.








That alone makes doing the bootleg version a moral imperative.

It's the only way they'll ever learn.


9 comments:

Stealth Spaniel said...

God Bless You. Your time spent in Hollywood was educational, and you've managed to distill those lessons into a one column Masters Class. I have always said, if the public saw those winos, weirdos, and wimmen in their native dress, without makeups, camera, and a director like Coppola, they would save their money. However, when enough truly brilliant show up at the corner-it IS magic. Bravo!

C said...

"The way to beat them at their own game though, is to make a great faithful adaptation of it, with stellar production values, and without permission, let the internet bootleg it, a la China for the last 40 years, and then sit back, and watch Hollywood play whack-a-mole when your version goes viral, and pops up 200 times a day everywhere, forever.

It could be done in a month or two, for under $100K, all in.
And the producers of the horrible “official” version would be eating a 10-foot party sub sh*t sandwich for decades.

That alone makes doing the bootleg version a moral imperative."

This thought has crossed my mind several times. If I didn't have original scribbles to nail myself to a chair and work on I'd take up the pen. Of course I'm my worse critic and it's why I've torched/deleted everything I've written that got anywhere close to 90% finished.


My first choice would be Point of Impact. No diddling with source material to get a younger character. Plenty of other source material and room for younger main characters with leading roles (Earl and Ray). It could be a great series bootlegged on brochure and the bay. Even if I did though it begs the real question: where do I get 100k for something with little to no profit?

5stonegames said...

Tom Cruise or not, the Jack Reacher movies were fantastic, far better than the excellent John Wick franchise. YMMV and as for a casting a big guy, six six leading men other than Fred Dreyer who even if he were 40 like in the 1980's not 75 like now lacked the charisma.

The last good movie I saw was The Ice Road with Liam Neeson in the lead.

It was UAE funded so Hell Mouth morality was kept in check even though it was on Nextflix (not by sub BTW, saw with a friend)still quite a good film.

Survivormann99 said...

I was pleased to see "Without Remorse" appear on Netflix's lineup, so I began watching it with great expectations.

While I didn't know exactly how bad the script was until I had watched more of the movie, those prior expectations were quickly dashed. This woke version with a black substitution for the lead character was something that I could barely swallow. It's my understanding that black Navy SEALs are as rare as hen's teeth, but given what we see in this woke age, I could accept it if it meant an enjoyable movie otherwise.

Once I saw the black, female SEAL team leader, however, it was "Game over, Dude!" A black, Lesbian team leader? A black female SEAL? How effing stupid do these Hollywood people think that viewers are.

I suppose that rewriting the story so as to include a black Lesbian was Hollywood's way of "empowering" minorities and women. You constantly see this effort on the screen today. Women are no longer the characters who shrink in the corner while the hero engagesin mortal combat with the bad guy. Women use martial arts, hand-to-hand fisticuffs and such, and they wield swords like Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in their prime. No shrinking violets today, no sirree, at least not on the screen. Young women now feel more empowered when they watch these fictional heroines perform their derring-do, saying to themselves, "That could be ME!" Dream on, Karen.

To add insult to injury, the actress playing the black, Lesbian team leader is a Brit. Wha-a-a-t? No American black women could play this role? (I have heard that many Brits adopt an American accent and work for less on these productions in order to break into the lucrative US market.) In Britain, black characters are commonly worked into the cast of a project, even when it is strikingly out of place. Even in sleepy, out-of-the-way villages in the hinterlands, there is no shortage of black characters playing friends, spouses, or storekeepers.

Think that "Without Remorse's" casting is bad? The same actress playing the black team leader is playing Anne Boleyn in an upcoming Brit series. Anne Fricking Boleyn.

In "Mary, Queen of Scots" with Margot Robbie, Queen Elizabeth I's emissary to Mary Queen of Scots, Lord Randolph, was played by a black actor. Unless it was in an alternate universe, the only thing that a black man would have been doing at a Tudor Queen's court would have been emptying chamber pots. Brits now demand more"inclusiveness" and that history be damned. (I am anxiously waiting for a film portrayal of a black, gay Winston Churchill.)

If you want to win a BAFTA Award (the Brit Oscar equivalent) your movie must include a sufficient number of women, minorities, sexual deviants, etc. Art is not rewarded unless the proper categories are checked off.

Someone said, "Each man dies a stranger in his own land." I am not sure if every man does, but what I am seeing today sure as hell isn't the land/country/world that I grew up in.

Ransom said...

Point of Impact was so good. Even the sequels were usually decent. I'd throw this project some money for sure.

Beans said...

I call it the Disney Effect. The Names and the Places are the same, the Plot and everything else has been changed to protect the bottom line.

Like, well, "The Little Mermaid." A damned good tale about not climbing up out of your social level and thinking you're better than you are. And that pining after the local prince when you're nothing is just worthless, as he's sure to marry the rich, entitled chick next door.

But what did Disney do? Yeah...

Or, well just about everything they're doing now, making the villains and villainesses to be the heroes and heroines and the real heroes and heroines be the villains and villainesses. Screw that, won't watch any of that dogsqueeze.

It's bad enough they added content to Lord of the Rings that wasn't there, the bastards, but they cut out stuff that explained so much. Like, where'd the hobbits get the good weapons, eh?

But now they've gone all wokenista with the upcoming Middle Earth mini-series.

Gah.

Just look at what Hollyweird has done with Edgar Rice Burrough's books (and the one time they get it right, it flops in the box office - that would be "John Carter.")

Or Robert Heinlein's books. What was done to "Starship Troopers" should have resulted in a mass execution, but, sadly, no, that didn't happen. What should have been a wonderfully introspective movie about why we fight turned into interstellar bug butt bombs. (At least Avalon Hill's game based on the book actually followed the book for source material and only 'added' some things that just made sense.

Argh! It has been said Hollywood could f-up a wet dream.

Writers, never sell your works unless you don't mind your works being gang-raped. If you do sell, enjoy the money and shut up.

John said...

My friend, a die-hard Clancy fan was so excited that this would be a movie.

Then he saw it. His text to me: "Don't watch this. It's a mess."

Matthew W said...

"Waterworld"
I happen to like that movie.
I remember when it was being filmed and the talk was how over budget it became. Yes, it "failed" at the box office but made money overall worldwide.
I first saw the movie maybe 10 years after it was out. I was not impressed. I have seen it now maybe 10-12 times and have become a fan of it. Yeah, some silly plot holes and some better writing would have made it better.
BUT !!
For me, what makes the movie work is all of the actual action shot on open water. That will always stand up unlike CGI that becomes dated.
Also, it had the correct ending.

Aesop said...

Sorry, but no.
Waterworld lost about $218M overall.
Hollywood, as a rule, spends double the budget, once you add in PR/promotional costs.
So its $175M production budget means they actually spent circa $350M.
The worldwide gross was $264M.
But half of that goes to the distributors, movie theaters, etc. Only the other half comes back to the studio.
IOW, if you double the budget, and halve the gross, for any movie since about 1980, you can suss out why a lot of so-called big deals don't bring smiles and acclaim like you might have thought.

So they spent $350M, and recouped $132M of that on Waterworld.
That's a ROI of -$218,000,000 to Universal.
(That was back when losing over $200M on one flick was considered a lot of money.)
He then went on to lose $152M on The Postman for Warner Bros right after that.
(And they both stunk like dead fish rotting in the sun.)

See if you can figure out why Kevin Costner has only been a nominal producer since those back-to-back twin bombs, and only directed one other time in the last 20+ years, on Open Range. As anything but an actor, after losing well over $1/3 of Billion, Hollywood has blackballed him. If he wasn't a box office draw as an actor, he'd have disappeared entirely by 2000, and would now be known as "Kevin Who?"

Studio execs talk to each other, and they tend to get a little pissy when you lose more money than they spent on 10 other pictures, combined.

If it had been Wall Street instead of Hollywood, he'd have been found floating face down in his pool. Next to his agent.