Reply #95: I have to disagree in part

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

There is some truth in what you say about there being mediocrity in any period of film-making.

But in my case, I could watch the old movies on TCM all day. I think there was a greater consistency in the quality of the storylines in older movies than today. Maybe it was because writers were retained in-house under the old studio system, ones who had proven their abilities in coming up with stories that were solid.

After I received my Master in screenwriting from the UCLA film school, I worked for DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, a minor-major studio back in the 1980s. I sat in on development executive meetings and I can assure you that the executives judging film scripts were barely literate, most of them having MBAs or coming from the ranks of talent agencies. They didn't care about the story but were instead looking for gimmicks or high concepts. The major concern among them was how well the movie would play to young people, teens and young adults.

I think there's no question that the movies made in the earlier days of Hollywood were targeted for the most part to an adult audience. Attending movies was one of the major ways in which adults sought entertainment. More and more, films have become oriented towards a younger demographic in most cases. I remember at DEG that I tried to arrange a pitch meeting for a friend of mine, a two-time winner of the Sam Goldwyn award for screenwriting in his younger days. He had a great story idea on a mature subject matter that didn't involve special effects, mass killing, auto crashes or other visual spectacles. Unfortunately, he was in his late 40s. I was so embarrassed over the fact that he was treated like a dog. No one wanted to give him the time of day because he was old. Besides my work at DEG I also read for NBC and some minor producers. The almost universal attitude back in the late 1980s (and I assume it continues to be prevalent today) was that young screenwriters were capable of understanding the youth culture of the day and that old writers were not. Maybe there's some truth to that, but the result is that stories have tended to become less sophisticated, less involved with profound aspects of the human condition, and involving shallower characters. Visual special effects, quick cutting of action scenes with spectacular blood-letting, and two-dimensional characters have become the norm. Cartoon characters brought to life on the screen don't require deep motivations. I doubt that a director and auteur like Alfred Hitchcock would be able to find much success in today's marketplace making the types of films he made in an earlier Hollywood.

I remember when Dino DeLaurentiis bought the film rights to the Dean Koontz novel Phantoms. I read it and presented my ideas to Dino and the development staff on what I felt could be done with it. I was amazed that they wanted to completely re-do the novel, turning it into something else. I got on the phone with Koontz and asked if he would consider writing the screenplay himself, making the changes the studio wanted to make. He was appalled. They could have hired a veteran screenwriter to write a first draft, based on the book. Instead, they lined up a series of very young writers to come in and pitch ideas, writers who had very questionable track records but who qualified as being very young. They ended up hiring a guy and paying him $150,000 because he had crazy ideas about fantastic visual effects that could put some "umph" into the property, which the executives thought was too dull. What he produced turned out to be incoherent crap that made no sense. Finally, DEG got rid of the property and it ended up being made by another studio.