My Thoughts on Film

I just read http://priceonomics.com/the-economics-of-a-hit-tv-show/, and it got me thinking about this whole film/tv industry, and how tough of an industry it is, and whether it should really be so hard to succeed in.

Basically, my conclusion was that the film industry doesn’t do too good a job of satisfying our wants, and that it could be a much better industry if it made a few changes. The following is a list of thoughts on what I think they could do better.

Better material

This is the simplest one, and it’s also the biggest and most important one: the content simply isn’t very good. I’m thinking about how often I watch films, and how often I really enjoy them. There are a handful of films that I really enjoy watching: Matrix, Batman, Good Will Hunting, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Pay it Forward, Hotel Rwanda, John Q, Remember the Titans. This is the tier of movies that I really enjoy watching. Under that is a tier of movies that are nice to watch. And under that, movies are usually just “something to do”.

No wonder the industry is so tough: the content really isn’t that good. I know that some people might be more satisfied with the content than I am, but still… I still get the sense that most films motivate viewers to watch them just because “it’s something to do”, a chunk of films motivate viewers to watch them because “they’re nice to watch”, and a handful of films motivate viewers to watch them because “they’re amazing and they’re a true immersive and emotional experience to watch”.

Being profitable in the film industry is tough. I thought hard about how it can become a more profitable industry, and I couldn’t think of any ways that don’t involve it solving it’s core problem: mediocre content.

How to be better

The obvious next question is, “well how can the film industry improve it’s content?”. Here’s how — I’ve got 3 ideas:

• Have insightful/thought-provoking messages
• Broaden our horizons
• Teach us

Insightful and thought-provoking messages

I read things on the internet a lot. I read Hacker News every day and usually find my way to various interesting posts on various interesting blogs. I’ve noticed that popular content tends to be insightful and thought-provoking. The ideas don’t necessarily have to be new for them to be insightful and thought-provoking. They could be ideas that we know, but that we ignore. Or they could be ideas that we “know”, but that we don’t “really know”. And these ideas should probably be useful to our lives, or at least important for the world.

I think that films should emulate this. Most films have “messages” that are pathetically cliche. The messages are rarely useful lessons to us.

Consider Chapter 19: Delayed Gratification as an example of an audiobook with a useful and insightful message (HPMoR in general is full of useful and insightful messages, but I liked this one in particular). This chapter makes the point that you have to “learn how to lose”. Meaning, if you chose to assert your ego instead of losing, you often times won’t get what you want. We all sort of know this, but the story in this chapter made it more viscerally apparent (at least to me). I enjoyed it because not only was it a compelling story, but I felt that I truly learned a very important life lesson while listening to it.

I think that part of the reason why Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld are so successful, is because in a way, they’re insightful. Not in the sense of “important life lessons”, but insightful doesn’t really have to be about important things. Larry David is really good at articulating the things that happen to us in our everyday lives, like the chat-n-cut, and how ridiculously loud some toilets are. We’re familiar enough with these things that we recognize them and can relate to them, but not enough that we would think to recall them. That’s what makes it insightful.

Again, most films are just way too cliche, and lacking of insightful ideas. We still watch them because the writers do a good enough job of compelling us emotionally to the story and to the characters. But if they could just pair that with more ideas in the films that are genuinely insightful, I think films would be much more fun to watch.

Broaden Our Horizons

I don’t know about you, but I enjoy learning about different things. I like to learn about how people of different cultures, backgrounds, careers, locations, and time periods lived. And what different aspects of their lives are like. I like learning about different industries work. And I like learning about important events.

For example, I liked learning about the genocides in Africa from watching Hotel Rwanda. After watching it, I read up on the Hutus and Tutsis and stuff and about where the disagreement originated and what ended up happening and stuff. It was also cool watching Blood Diamond and getting a sense of how the whole diamond mining stuff works, and different peoples perspectives on it (the kid who gets taken into slavery, the dad, the smuggler, the army general, the journalist, etc. etc.).

I think that I like learning about all this stuff more than the average person, but I also think that the average person likes learning about this stuff a good amount. And I don’t think that this fact is utilized by writers enough. Films should do a better job of expanding our horizons, and introducing us to new things. Note that this doesn’t even have to mean “teaching”. It could also mean “imagine what the future would be like if this happened”, like in 1984.

Teach Us

There are documentaries, but I think that a blend of a documentary and a film would be interesting.

I was talking to my friend once about whether schools should have english literature as part of their curriculum. He made the point that you pick up a lot of little things about life and stuff when you read a story. I never really thought about that before, and I think it’s very true.

A blend of this story telling with some explicit teaching/explanations would probably make for an interesting movie. Malcolm Gladwell basically takes this approach. Most nonfiction authors are much more about explicitly explaining things to you, but Gladwell does a great job of telling you a captivating story that somehow gets the point across by the time its over. Again, I think that this approach of teaching via a combination of story telling and explicit explanations should be explored in film.

I’m not exactly sure how it would work. For example, it would be sorta tough with the hard sciences. But not impossible. For example, things like recursion could be illustrated in various ways (see Godel Escher Bach). And so could ideas in probability and math, like the law of large numbers.

I could definitely see things other than hard sciences being made into a story. For example, lots of psychological phenomena could easily be made into a story. Like the Stanford Prison Experiment. Lessons in business, journalism, economics, law, education etc. could all be made into stories.

Pandora for film

In addition to making better films, I think that there are other things that would improve the film industry, by improving the experience of viewers.

One of these things would be to give the viewer better recommendations of films to watch. Right now, as a person in the target market, I struggle to find films I’m interested in. Basically, it’s a matter of what’s on tv, recommendations from my friends, and what I happened to stumble across on the internet or from watching trailers. Surely there’s a better way of matching the viewer to films he’d want to watch.

Another thing that would improve the experience of viewers is better navigation and browsing of films. This is sort of along the same lines as giving the user good recommendations. What I mean by this specifically is letting them navigate by nested categories and stuff.

Other thoughts

Aspiring writers/directors have a tough time. If you read the priceonomics article at the top of this page, you’ll see how small a chance any given script makes it to a big audience is.

One reason that it’s tough is because there’s so much competition relative to how many things you could actual develop and show people. The amount of film that people watch is likely to be rather fixed, and the fact that there’s competition is healthy.

What’s unhealthy (economically) is the fact that it’s so difficult to identify “catches”. From what I understand, it’s basically reading scripts. 1) It’s tough to really get a good sense from a script. 2) People read through so many scripts, and it’s tiring, and they’re likely not to give any given one their full attention.

I think it would be wise for aspiring writers to adopt the Minimum Viable Product approach. The two key words are “minimum”, and “viable”. The idea behind “minimum” is that you shouldn’t waste too much time building something before you know whether or not it’s worth building. The idea behind “viable” is that it has to be good enough in order for it to be representative. If it’s not, you might show people something that isn’t representative, they won’t like it, and you’ll mistakenly assume that what it would actually represent is something that they don’t like.

Scripts surely satisfy “minimum”, but I’m not sure that they satisfy “viable”. I’m not sure if you could get a good enough idea from just a script. Some ideas: 1) make an audiobook, 2) make cheap youtube videos, 3) make rough animated videos.

These all have the advantage of 1) more indicative of the final product, and, more importantly, 2) they’re testable!!! You could show these to people to see if they like it. You could make it into a series, and accumulate a following. Use your college/high school/town as an audience. This allows you to make a little bit of a name for yourself, and make it easier for you to get recognized by someone with the resources to develop your idea into something truly big.