|
[Jul. 15th, 2005|12:59 pm] |
MySpace girl and I have also been talking about movies. Since it's sort of kind of interesting (maybe), a bit of film history:
Back when film got started it was unhead of for a person in the industry to produce their own work. Everything was compartmentalized: the writer wrote it and gave it to the studio. The studio gave it to the director and he shot it and gave it back to the studio. The studio gave it to the editor, who edited it, and then gave it back to the studio. At no point did the writer, director, or editor have anything to do with one another. It's sort of amazing that anything remotely decent got made back then given this complete lack of creative collaboration.
Then in the early 30's a guy named Preston Sturges made the leap from writing to directing and his scripts were so good that he got special dispensation to produce his own work. That paved the way for later guys like Joe Mankiewicz and Billy Wilder, and then later directors like Scorsese, Stone, Lee, and a whole slew of young filmmakers today to produce their own work. I think studios have a habit now of seeking out people who want to produce their own work because it simplifies the process. Rather than paying a writer and a director (and potentially having them clash), they just get a guy to direct his own script. Funny that studios didn't see the wisdom of that back in the day.
This is totally fluff trivia, but when Joe Mankiewicz made his movie All About Eve he named the main character Eve Harrington. That name is a reference to a character in Preston Sturges' "The Lady Eve" who went by two different names - Jean Harrington and Eve Sedgwick. He did it, to my understanding, as a very subtle nod to the guy who had opened this special door in Hollywood, allowing people to produce their own scripts. |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2){kind=small}
erik's journal
