Origin Stories

This is from the Bordwell blog - The link is on this page under Movie Matters. David Bordwell, for those who don't know, is one of the premiere film professors in the world, and author of books like Film Art: An Introduction.

The piece talks about Hollywood's new(?) fondness for origin stories. Here's the link

Here's what I find interesting, in discusiing explanations for the industry's turn toward origin or "year one" type stories:

"...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. ..."

It's not the acutal content of the piece that's interesting, i.e. "origin stories", but the applicability of the analysis to most media stories about the industry trends. Pay attention to the rejection of the (1) in touch with the psyche of the nation, and (2) loss of creativity in the industry arguments, because you'll see them both pop up over and over in reading about trends. By the way, neither of these ideas are universally wrong, but are often used sloppily. What Bordwell and his disciples do is work for a more complicated industry based explanation, as exemplified in this story. We'll see this approach in our class as well.