If you have watched my little “cult classic,” The Terror Within, you have seen a moment where actor Starr Yelland, playing “Sue,” finds that she is the newest victim of the monster. Knowing her fate, she takes a step of great courage, and takes herself out of the game (a polite way of saying she kills herself to save the others).
"If you're worried about profit, well, you could always replace the executives with AI."------Brilliant. Money is the root evil here and so long as the executives have the leverage they will be the last to go.
“AI” is a triumphant name for something that’s basically supercharged plagiarism software. I agree with the “A” part but don’t believe that “I” nonsense for a second. And it’s not talent or inspiration, which are the things we pay to see.
that's what you or I might be paying to see, but I'm not so sure about the vastly greater numbers of viewers. I honestly don't think a lot of kids, for example, would know the difference or care much. but working for twelve years in a "middle school" (we used to call them Junior High, but now they tend to go from fifth through eighth grades, which is a terrible idea), during which I'd find myself talking to lots of kids about movies, I'm pretty convinced that most of them wouldn't know the difference. when we were growing up, we were fed a steady diet of old movies on TV. the prints sucked and most of the movies were badly cut, but a little bit of "The Bride of Frankenstein" or "Stagecoach" or "Notorious" or "All Quiet on the Western Front" or maybe a thousand others were still there to be seen. in how many years has that not been true? I used to make the mistake of asking kids what their favorite movies were, but when I kept hearing "Alien vs. Predator" or the latest dumb slasher movie or the execrable, fantastically expensive "Titanic," I realized we weren't in Kansas anymore.
which is to say that I don't think a lot of the "audience" would know what they were missing in an AI-generated entertainment world. shit, most of the new songs I've found myself trying to listen to all pretty much sound like they've been untouched by human hands.
but then, that IS what a crotchety old man would say, right? I remember a LOT of reviewers trashing "The Wild Bunch." and "Bonnie and Clyde" was a financial failure until Pauline Kael wrote her famous rave in "The New Yorker." if it had opened today, with that first weekend's grosses meaning EVERYTHING, it wouldn't have made a penny. and I'm not even an unqualified fan of "Bonnie and Clyde," but it's a perfect example of how movies used to be allowed to have "legs."
And of course "The Wild Bunch" was butchered from Peckinpah's original vision by the studio because it was "too long" - i.e., by cutting it they could include another complete showing, with a new audience paying up. It was only when Z Channel (the best movie channel EVER) here in Los Angeles worked with Peckinpah to restore the Director's Cut and then show it in 1988 that "The Wild Bunch" was able to be seen as the finest Western ever made. (Note: I just bought a copy of the Director's Cut and watched it on the Big New TV, and it's just as great as I remember. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."
I saw it first in London and a week or so later, in NY, it was missing a good fifteen minutes...the whole flashback with Thornton being caught was gone. what was a lot worse was what the studio did to "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," which I also love for very different reasons.
I watch the Director's Cut at least once a year. at least. the other special stuff in that DVD set are also great, including the entire walk to the machine gun after the Great Exchange "Let's go," followed by "Why not?"
I might actually love "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" just as much, but I don't consider it to be primarily a Western.
The final walk when they know what they have to do is just great. I love the beginning the "good guys" are revealed as the bad guys, the "bad guys" are far from good. The whole preshadowing with the kids and the scorpions and the ants. It's the greatest Western ever.
as soon as those credits go on, with the freeze frames and the drums, I can feel my physiology change.
did you read that Stratton book yet? I disagree with some of his weird speculations, but the stories about the shoot are priceless. it seems to have been one of the most horrifying shoots ever. Peckinpah made a work of genius, but geniuses are often very bad boys. we can keep this exchange going for a long time...I'm like that about "The Wild Bunch...
the thing about the "good guys" who turn out to be the "bad guys" is that once you see how bad they are, they're all bad beyond any kind of redemption. except, of course, for Thornton, who's there because it beats the fuck out of being beaten in jail on a regular basis.
I also think that Peckinpah pays homage at least twice to "Thje Treasure of Sierra Madre"...the big laugh over the stolen bags of washers and the end, when Ryan and O'Brien ride off together looking for whatever fun is left to be had. I think O'Brien's great performance was crafted pretty deliberately to remind us of Walter Huston in his kid's picture. I've read in lots of places that O'Brien was almost tedious in his conversations about great performances throughout the history of acting.
Yes, I did read it and passed it on to another Peckinpah fan. I thought it was excellent, all the stuff about how they pulled it together and got it to happen. Lee Marvin's involvement (which ended when he got hired for The Professionals) was very interesting.
I believe the youth and future generations would respond much as we would to the loss of the human touch without necessarily having to have been trained to detect or savor it because "catching" that brief flash of emotion is a very instinctual ability with survival value. It is likely an art to be able to project it and not over-play it, but catching it may be more connected to attention (there your middle schoolers might slip up) and the survival value of insight into others' motivations. The pleasure we feel when we catch that split second of signalling might be directly connected into social functioning and reward brain systems.
Robethics available on Amazon and soon to be offered from an Italian publisher provides a whole system look at what is coming. There is not a page that you would skip or feel bored reading. Disclaimer it is Written by my son in law Matteo Di Michele.
Saw Fran Drescher's interview on NBC - she made it clear what the Actors AND writers are striking about. And the statements of the "money men" made it really clear where their tiny little minds are.
The "one percenters" either never knew OR dont give a dam about anyone but themselves!
I saw her too. Her passion was so palpable, and I welled up and wished I could hug her! POW! She nailed it. And the executives don’t deserve the talent that that abounds in every aspect of the industry! If only we could decide who gets paid! After all, we’re the ones showing up (or not) at the box office...
One of the best ways to destroy a thriving company is to let someone with an MBA start running things…all these boardroom geniuses who never spent a day working on the production lines or service bays telling the workers and management how to run the company…into the ground. These geniuses with all the ideas and knowledge gleaned only from books and classrooms but lacking the wisdom about how to actually produce anything of value.
I didn't know you felt that way, Tom. but I'm right there with you. I once thought that in MBA school, people learned actual business skills. then I found out what they actually do, which is schmooze about "corporate strategies and, of course, make sure that the people with whom they schmooze are the ones who are "going places." it's vile.
I lived through the strategic planning process, run by name-brand consultants, at two large law firms. One was funnier than the next and I’m pretty sure that the methodology and results would have been the same if the client had been a candy store or a third-world country. B-school bullshit. The worst part was that supposedly smart people bought it, hook, line and sinker.
I was also privy to the results of consultants, who wasted huge amounts of money in two places I worked. I even have an old friend who managed to make a living as a "gender consultant" (she was even hired once by the USN, which struck me as really weird, since her competence and training consisted of waking up one day and deciding she had a "skill" she could peddle).
the consultant game is an amazing one, because it's ALL like that. people who think they know nothing (and might be right) hire people who know nothing to tell them that they started out knowing nothing, making them the same as anybody else. except that they started out DOING something, even if they sucked at it. I don't think I'm awake enough to continue, but the implications are vast, although they might not be.
Great column! Similarly, AI is never going to replace teachers. I learned about the Vikings in fourth grade. My teacher, Saran Morgan Hutchins, made them fascinating. The interest she planted in my brain persists to this day. Part of that was because I loved her, as I've loved most of my really good primary and secondary teachers. AI can't do that.
Once again I am in awe of your amazing memory, Tom, this time a detailed recollection of a brief scene in a 1999 movie, the moment when the actor shows his character's humanity to make your point that AI just cannot do that, whether in writing or acting or gaffing or whatever goes into making a film or creating art.
As a lawyer, I haven’t worried much about AI even though much of what we business lawyers do is driven by forms we have assembled over the years (shhh...don’t tell anyone). But you still have to sell to the other side why your words, your structure of the relationship, will work best for both sides. That’s not AI. It’s relationships, it’s sincerity, it’s emotion actually. You have to build a relationship and mere text does not accomplish that.
As for your union point, which you built to very subtly, and persuasively, I couldn’t agree more. I love movies. And plays (slightly off topic). I love the craft of them. From my days with the La Jolla Playhouse I know that serendipity is the life blood of the performing arts. Those unexpected, if not magical, moments, where actors, screenwriters and playwrights find inspiration is what makes it a “performing” art. They must be compensated for that inspiration. We cannot loose inspiration.
And sometimes it’s both. Bogart pitched an alternate last line for the Maltese Falcon to John Huston. Borrowing from “The Tempest” he suggested the answer to what is it should be: “The stuff that dreams are made of.” Huston, a screenwriter himself, loved it. And so have audiences ever since.
There’s a moment near the end of the Allman Bros Live at Fillmore East where Duane quiets the band down and plays an incredible series of licks which ends on an impossible deep throated bend, upon which the band re-engages to finish the song. Legendary intuition. The mind of a master
I just clicked on your link. When I moved the cursor to 6:55, up popped a bubble saying "Most Replayed". Don't worry, though, I'm listening from the beginning.
Well TC, you have now entered the rare atmosphere of writers who have coined great quotes that will live in perpetuity with your last line: "If you're worried about profit, well, you could always replace the executives with AI." Since most so-called "executives" fucking things up out there in TV Land are artificial assholes to begin with, most having risen to their lofty positions via the Peter Principle, it seems likely that AI replacing autocratic morons in the boardroom would have the ancillary effect of ensuring the rapid demise of the no longer thriving business in question, thus forcing the rank-and-file sentient humans to seek employment elsewhere amongst other sentient humans with the added benefit of renewed profitability based on the creativity and wisdom of the human heart, something no machine, no matter how well constructed by the MBAs, has a clue about unless it's programed by a real person. Of course, these are also the same people who make all these other "fine messes" you document so adroitly, leaving one to wonder if the intelligence of the God in-charge of all this buffoonery might be artificial.
"If you're worried about profit, well, you could always replace the executives with AI."
TC, great idea.
What a model your idea would be for all those corporate executives that make huge salaries 500 to 700% more than the average line worker that makes the profits possible.
So many things are just plain out of whack in the world.
don't you mean 500 to 700 TIMES what the average line worker makes? 700% is a mere seven times what that average line worker makes. I just started trying to do the arithmetic in my head, which is a waste of time, but you know what I mean...
I entirely agree. and when we were a lot younger, that kind of thing would've been considered aberrant and scandalous.
sometimes my "comrades" can say some pretty idiotic things, but the kind of really ugly monopoly capitalism that's "evolved" in this country these past four or five decades pretty obviously is going to end up with the kinds of insane "compensation packages" (and the oligarchy that is necessarily going to be the result) we're talking about. I have no problem with laws that mandate executives not be compensated to these insane levels which (also necessarily) isolate them from the prople who work for them.
one good thing about this particular strike is that it's gonna hit people where they live pretty quickly. which is to say, in front of the TV (and I'm not exempting myself).
I love your prophetic warning as the easiest to replace with AI just might be the C-Suite in moviedom. Would you bet that AI-Suite would look to find those human writers, actors, and grips to make the kind of product that really catches the attention and audiences for their movies?
"If you're worried about profit, well, you could always replace the executives with AI."------Brilliant. Money is the root evil here and so long as the executives have the leverage they will be the last to go.
Too true.
“AI” is a triumphant name for something that’s basically supercharged plagiarism software. I agree with the “A” part but don’t believe that “I” nonsense for a second. And it’s not talent or inspiration, which are the things we pay to see.
that's what you or I might be paying to see, but I'm not so sure about the vastly greater numbers of viewers. I honestly don't think a lot of kids, for example, would know the difference or care much. but working for twelve years in a "middle school" (we used to call them Junior High, but now they tend to go from fifth through eighth grades, which is a terrible idea), during which I'd find myself talking to lots of kids about movies, I'm pretty convinced that most of them wouldn't know the difference. when we were growing up, we were fed a steady diet of old movies on TV. the prints sucked and most of the movies were badly cut, but a little bit of "The Bride of Frankenstein" or "Stagecoach" or "Notorious" or "All Quiet on the Western Front" or maybe a thousand others were still there to be seen. in how many years has that not been true? I used to make the mistake of asking kids what their favorite movies were, but when I kept hearing "Alien vs. Predator" or the latest dumb slasher movie or the execrable, fantastically expensive "Titanic," I realized we weren't in Kansas anymore.
which is to say that I don't think a lot of the "audience" would know what they were missing in an AI-generated entertainment world. shit, most of the new songs I've found myself trying to listen to all pretty much sound like they've been untouched by human hands.
but then, that IS what a crotchety old man would say, right? I remember a LOT of reviewers trashing "The Wild Bunch." and "Bonnie and Clyde" was a financial failure until Pauline Kael wrote her famous rave in "The New Yorker." if it had opened today, with that first weekend's grosses meaning EVERYTHING, it wouldn't have made a penny. and I'm not even an unqualified fan of "Bonnie and Clyde," but it's a perfect example of how movies used to be allowed to have "legs."
And of course "The Wild Bunch" was butchered from Peckinpah's original vision by the studio because it was "too long" - i.e., by cutting it they could include another complete showing, with a new audience paying up. It was only when Z Channel (the best movie channel EVER) here in Los Angeles worked with Peckinpah to restore the Director's Cut and then show it in 1988 that "The Wild Bunch" was able to be seen as the finest Western ever made. (Note: I just bought a copy of the Director's Cut and watched it on the Big New TV, and it's just as great as I remember. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."
I saw it first in London and a week or so later, in NY, it was missing a good fifteen minutes...the whole flashback with Thornton being caught was gone. what was a lot worse was what the studio did to "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," which I also love for very different reasons.
I watch the Director's Cut at least once a year. at least. the other special stuff in that DVD set are also great, including the entire walk to the machine gun after the Great Exchange "Let's go," followed by "Why not?"
I might actually love "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" just as much, but I don't consider it to be primarily a Western.
Yeah, I like McCabe and Mrs Miller too.
The final walk when they know what they have to do is just great. I love the beginning the "good guys" are revealed as the bad guys, the "bad guys" are far from good. The whole preshadowing with the kids and the scorpions and the ants. It's the greatest Western ever.
as soon as those credits go on, with the freeze frames and the drums, I can feel my physiology change.
did you read that Stratton book yet? I disagree with some of his weird speculations, but the stories about the shoot are priceless. it seems to have been one of the most horrifying shoots ever. Peckinpah made a work of genius, but geniuses are often very bad boys. we can keep this exchange going for a long time...I'm like that about "The Wild Bunch...
the thing about the "good guys" who turn out to be the "bad guys" is that once you see how bad they are, they're all bad beyond any kind of redemption. except, of course, for Thornton, who's there because it beats the fuck out of being beaten in jail on a regular basis.
I also think that Peckinpah pays homage at least twice to "Thje Treasure of Sierra Madre"...the big laugh over the stolen bags of washers and the end, when Ryan and O'Brien ride off together looking for whatever fun is left to be had. I think O'Brien's great performance was crafted pretty deliberately to remind us of Walter Huston in his kid's picture. I've read in lots of places that O'Brien was almost tedious in his conversations about great performances throughout the history of acting.
but you probably knew the guy, knowing you.
Yes, I did read it and passed it on to another Peckinpah fan. I thought it was excellent, all the stuff about how they pulled it together and got it to happen. Lee Marvin's involvement (which ended when he got hired for The Professionals) was very interesting.
I believe the youth and future generations would respond much as we would to the loss of the human touch without necessarily having to have been trained to detect or savor it because "catching" that brief flash of emotion is a very instinctual ability with survival value. It is likely an art to be able to project it and not over-play it, but catching it may be more connected to attention (there your middle schoolers might slip up) and the survival value of insight into others' motivations. The pleasure we feel when we catch that split second of signalling might be directly connected into social functioning and reward brain systems.
Robethics available on Amazon and soon to be offered from an Italian publisher provides a whole system look at what is coming. There is not a page that you would skip or feel bored reading. Disclaimer it is Written by my son in law Matteo Di Michele.
Saw Fran Drescher's interview on NBC - she made it clear what the Actors AND writers are striking about. And the statements of the "money men" made it really clear where their tiny little minds are.
The "one percenters" either never knew OR dont give a dam about anyone but themselves!
I saw her too. Her passion was so palpable, and I welled up and wished I could hug her! POW! She nailed it. And the executives don’t deserve the talent that that abounds in every aspect of the industry! If only we could decide who gets paid! After all, we’re the ones showing up (or not) at the box office...
One of the best ways to destroy a thriving company is to let someone with an MBA start running things…all these boardroom geniuses who never spent a day working on the production lines or service bays telling the workers and management how to run the company…into the ground. These geniuses with all the ideas and knowledge gleaned only from books and classrooms but lacking the wisdom about how to actually produce anything of value.
I'm in favor of abolishing the MBA.
I didn't know you felt that way, Tom. but I'm right there with you. I once thought that in MBA school, people learned actual business skills. then I found out what they actually do, which is schmooze about "corporate strategies and, of course, make sure that the people with whom they schmooze are the ones who are "going places." it's vile.
I lived through the strategic planning process, run by name-brand consultants, at two large law firms. One was funnier than the next and I’m pretty sure that the methodology and results would have been the same if the client had been a candy store or a third-world country. B-school bullshit. The worst part was that supposedly smart people bought it, hook, line and sinker.
I was also privy to the results of consultants, who wasted huge amounts of money in two places I worked. I even have an old friend who managed to make a living as a "gender consultant" (she was even hired once by the USN, which struck me as really weird, since her competence and training consisted of waking up one day and deciding she had a "skill" she could peddle).
the consultant game is an amazing one, because it's ALL like that. people who think they know nothing (and might be right) hire people who know nothing to tell them that they started out knowing nothing, making them the same as anybody else. except that they started out DOING something, even if they sucked at it. I don't think I'm awake enough to continue, but the implications are vast, although they might not be.
Great column! Similarly, AI is never going to replace teachers. I learned about the Vikings in fourth grade. My teacher, Saran Morgan Hutchins, made them fascinating. The interest she planted in my brain persists to this day. Part of that was because I loved her, as I've loved most of my really good primary and secondary teachers. AI can't do that.
Once again I am in awe of your amazing memory, Tom, this time a detailed recollection of a brief scene in a 1999 movie, the moment when the actor shows his character's humanity to make your point that AI just cannot do that, whether in writing or acting or gaffing or whatever goes into making a film or creating art.
Well, it was *ny* movie. :-)
Hear, hear!!! You cut to the quick of the matter.
As a lawyer, I haven’t worried much about AI even though much of what we business lawyers do is driven by forms we have assembled over the years (shhh...don’t tell anyone). But you still have to sell to the other side why your words, your structure of the relationship, will work best for both sides. That’s not AI. It’s relationships, it’s sincerity, it’s emotion actually. You have to build a relationship and mere text does not accomplish that.
As for your union point, which you built to very subtly, and persuasively, I couldn’t agree more. I love movies. And plays (slightly off topic). I love the craft of them. From my days with the La Jolla Playhouse I know that serendipity is the life blood of the performing arts. Those unexpected, if not magical, moments, where actors, screenwriters and playwrights find inspiration is what makes it a “performing” art. They must be compensated for that inspiration. We cannot loose inspiration.
…it’s emotion actually…. But we have emoticons. 😝 HAHAHAHA
Sorry, you are so right…
Remember in "What Makes Sammy Run", when the guys
from Wall Street show up and
the Writer's Guild folds? In the end, if you think about it,
it didn't pay off for WS and the Guild came back stronger
than before.
You can't make a good movie
with AI or AI robots. None of
it is real and Tom has done a
masterful job in stating why
it's not going to work.
An aside: I feel Wall Street has way too much influence
in our daily lives where nearly
everything is concerned.
They drive the prices on nearly everything. Just watch
how they manipulate oil. Look
how stocks just boomed with
the state of the economy
yesterday. So I'm not
surprised they're pushing
AI in Hollywood.
And sometimes it’s both. Bogart pitched an alternate last line for the Maltese Falcon to John Huston. Borrowing from “The Tempest” he suggested the answer to what is it should be: “The stuff that dreams are made of.” Huston, a screenwriter himself, loved it. And so have audiences ever since.
There’s a moment near the end of the Allman Bros Live at Fillmore East where Duane quiets the band down and plays an incredible series of licks which ends on an impossible deep throated bend, upon which the band re-engages to finish the song. Legendary intuition. The mind of a master
https://youtu.be/0wsUNMSiIII
Listen from 6:55 to 8:47
Brilliance in every sense of the music
I just clicked on your link. When I moved the cursor to 6:55, up popped a bubble saying "Most Replayed". Don't worry, though, I'm listening from the beginning.
Its good all the way through
Tom, fantastic piece. Like Richard Pryor said in 'Silver Streak,' "Pay the man!!!"
Well TC, you have now entered the rare atmosphere of writers who have coined great quotes that will live in perpetuity with your last line: "If you're worried about profit, well, you could always replace the executives with AI." Since most so-called "executives" fucking things up out there in TV Land are artificial assholes to begin with, most having risen to their lofty positions via the Peter Principle, it seems likely that AI replacing autocratic morons in the boardroom would have the ancillary effect of ensuring the rapid demise of the no longer thriving business in question, thus forcing the rank-and-file sentient humans to seek employment elsewhere amongst other sentient humans with the added benefit of renewed profitability based on the creativity and wisdom of the human heart, something no machine, no matter how well constructed by the MBAs, has a clue about unless it's programed by a real person. Of course, these are also the same people who make all these other "fine messes" you document so adroitly, leaving one to wonder if the intelligence of the God in-charge of all this buffoonery might be artificial.
That's actually not me. That's Richard Rushfield, a very good Hollywood writer who started out as a journalist.
I like your last line here a lot. Agree totally.
"If you're worried about profit, well, you could always replace the executives with AI."
TC, great idea.
What a model your idea would be for all those corporate executives that make huge salaries 500 to 700% more than the average line worker that makes the profits possible.
So many things are just plain out of whack in the world.
don't you mean 500 to 700 TIMES what the average line worker makes? 700% is a mere seven times what that average line worker makes. I just started trying to do the arithmetic in my head, which is a waste of time, but you know what I mean...
Yup, that's what I meant.
Thanks, David.
On second thought, that should be against the law.
I entirely agree. and when we were a lot younger, that kind of thing would've been considered aberrant and scandalous.
sometimes my "comrades" can say some pretty idiotic things, but the kind of really ugly monopoly capitalism that's "evolved" in this country these past four or five decades pretty obviously is going to end up with the kinds of insane "compensation packages" (and the oligarchy that is necessarily going to be the result) we're talking about. I have no problem with laws that mandate executives not be compensated to these insane levels which (also necessarily) isolate them from the prople who work for them.
one good thing about this particular strike is that it's gonna hit people where they live pretty quickly. which is to say, in front of the TV (and I'm not exempting myself).
This triggered a memory of Connie Willis's excellent short novel Remake. You are correct, the one thing a computer isn't, is human
I think AI has already eaten the brains of many, or is it just old-fashion GREED. CEO pay tells the tale
I love your prophetic warning as the easiest to replace with AI just might be the C-Suite in moviedom. Would you bet that AI-Suite would look to find those human writers, actors, and grips to make the kind of product that really catches the attention and audiences for their movies?
It would if its purpose was to make money.