Disclaimer: I am nothing more than a devoted fan having fun; playing with my digital watch, moving little pieces of green paper around to amuse myself… and writing. Writing is good too. That said, I am in no way, shape or form connected with Douglas Adams, due, in part, to the fact that he is dead. I'm not getting any money from this, though Belgium! that would be great too!
Ladies and Gentlemen...
Today's addition of The Hitchhiker Monologues is a guide entry...enjoy!
Movies
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about movies: Movies used to be good. Really good. In fact, they used to be so good that, shockingly, for a while, creative-development people actually had the authority to tell the money-management people to go and sit under the backside of a gastronomically-challenged elephant if the money-management people interfered in the creative-development peoples' job of creatively developing a movie. This was, of course, when movies exceeded money-making expectations (due mainly to the authority that the creative-development people had over the money-management people) and studio heads told accountants to stuff it and actually trusted the creative vision of the creative people rather than the creative vision of a 40-year-old, obese, socially challenged accountant who worries only about his retirement pension. Now, of course, things are different.
In a time when creative ideas are running dry, in a time when the creative people deserve to have the most power, it is the accountants who run the show. Due to increased need for "fiscal conservatism" within major movie studios, the movie making process now goes somewhat like this: The creative people come up with a great new idea, ask the accountants for money and the accountants say no. The accountants then try to appease the creative people by taking the worst bits of their ideas, pitching them to the studio heads as attempting to reach a broader demographic, and in short, tell the creative people to sit under the backside of a gastronomically-challenged elephant. This angers the creative people, but from their position under the backside of the above mentioned gastronomically-challenged elephant, there is little that they can do about it.
The irony, of course, in all this is that the whole reason for the need for "fiscal conservatism" is that the accountants in charge are making bad movies, causing fewer people to actually see them. It is an odd, but strangely true fact that fewer people will actually willingly pay nine dollars to see a bad movie than a good movie. The accountants staunchly strike this up to creative-people propaganda and continue to make really bad movies. They really are, in fact, astoundingly bad. This is due to the lack of creative-development that currently takes place in the movie industry. It's a vicious cycle; the accountants make really bad movies which don't make money, forcing the studio heads to give the accountants even more power to stop this sort of thing from happening again. The creative people shake their heads in despair, but again, from their position under the backside of a gastronomically-challenged elephant, they are more-or-less powerless, if not extremely mucky by now. The studio heads, on the other hand, remain patiently clueless, and serenely oblivious to the real solution, which is to put the creative people back in charge. Some of the galaxy's finest minds have suggest that this could be the most dramatic case of completely oblivious idiocy in history…but the accountants beg to differ, pointing out that everyone's pension plans are, for the moment, in good hands.