Producing : Creative Zeitgeist Recap by Daniel Stuelpnagel

How do people see cinema now? Does it depend strongly upon age and demographics?

Flash back to the turn of the millennium:

In 1998, I jumped from a corporate career (eight years as a stockbroker and branch manager running a hundred-million-dollar-a-year mutual funds office in Washington DC USA) to being a painter and visual artist, I had studied painting in college and saw a pathway from working in galleries and art spaces to making paintings and selling work in a specific geometric visual aesthetic with a definite commercial intent. In twenty years I've made and sold most of a thousand paintings and participated in more than a hundred exhibitions nationwide.

Back then, to wear that hat and that label of "artist" seemed kind of rarified, people reacted as if it was a really crazy adventure to take on, and it was. From Burning Man to the Galápagos Islands, Bologna to Barcelona and beyond, I didn't let much hold me back.

I was fortunate to jump in just when it became fairly easy to design your own web site. The aesthetics of art, fashion, journalism, film and graphic design, in short all of arts and culture around the world, accelerated at light speed with the subsequent availability of that increasing internet bandwidth and functionality, digital photography and video, exponentially cheaper better equipment, smart phones and social media; by 2007 we were all living in a new and different world, and then by 2008 the recession came along and forced everyone to rethink careers, finances and side gigs real quick.

Millions of art school graduates were informed correctly that the MFA was the new MBA, artists multiplied and increased our efforts and helped to transform visual aesthetics in mainstream corporate careers such that by 2010 there was a sharper, more color-saturated array of visual influences which continues to this day throughout all media.

Various creative booms and busts and revolutions helped the film and entertainment industry inhabit the leading edge and as Gen X and Millennials rode the Boomers' wave of innovation and expansion, production values grew so rapidly that the shock of the new has become a requirement, yes the ancient properties of the previous millennium are lovely and valuable in many cases, but now we tend to want to focus on what's next as always and perhaps even more than in the past.

Stories remain a fascination, but the need for instant gratification and marketable entertainment have brought us to a kind of division between formulaic high-budget material that is created to be dependable in the marketplace and palatable to a wide range of demographic groups versus indie cinema that is filled with great personal auteur-type stories that are so prolific it can be tough to find a market and viewership, there's a lot out there and the competition level in the attention economy of post-quarantine shows us that almost everyone is an artist and a filmmaker now.

I believe these shifts have stratified our generation gaps further to the point where the distance between demographic cohorts creates severely differing expectations and opinions about what makes good entertainment, we are all individuals yet we are all products of our times.

We're maybe a bit jaded now in terms of visual aesthetics and production values, velocity-of-story expectations, yes the classic elements of character and the things that fascinate us about the core elements of story may remain similar, but we're looking for things that strive for higher goals and appeal to us on a deeper and more sophisticated level, while also fulfilling all the requirements that it takes to get a property through production and onto screens, from the simplest TikTok and YouTube production pathway to the mid-range cinematic films to the studio-level epics.

Which is to say that, as a new screenwriter with some art experience and some life experience, and being someone who is easily bored and for whom slow-moving films have little appeal, I am a Gen X person over 30 with the attention span of a ten-year old, so I'm striving to satisfy all of my own imperatives and I think it helps me consider a wide range of potential audiences. And as an artist I'm conscious of the need for a contemporary look and feel in a fast-moving moment where yesterday's success is tomorrow's failure. That might seem cynical but despite my relentless optimism I am also trying to be realistic.

(Thank you in advance for reading this diatribe).

Funny thing is I still feel like Galaxy Quest is / was one of my favorite movies, ambitious, adventurous, funny and full of surprises yet strongly grounded in the "refreshingly-familiar" zeitgeist required by the industry. Formulaic? Yes and no (to be continued).

I loved the 2006 Kurt Wimmer-directed ULTRAVIOLET with Milla Jovovich, what a banger! Super-influential, kinetic and fast-moving yet still with a literary sensibility and dark tragic tone. Uncluttered, slick and sexy, memorable and radical, maybe I need to just stay with sci-fi?

I keep coming back to The RunDown as well, partly because I love to see multifaceted icon Dwayne Johnson demonstrating all of his joyful abilities on screen, not to speak of the sparkling diamond of a performance by naughty Christopher Walken, and also it's that this film is a true adventure, with yes a comic tilt and comic elements, but does not try too hard to be a "comedy."

It's the script, the concept and the story that are the foundation of such a unique cinematic experience that utilizes the true core elements of cinema, visual action movement and travel on screen, not just exotic locations but real story and character movement and transformation in all aspects, woven into an organic tapestry where the writer and the director and the scaffolding disappear in service of the medium.

As opposed to a bunch of joyless talking heads sitting around having a depressing sausage-fest argument at CIA headquarters, or scowling Liam Neeson getting crushed by falling buildings and rescuing his teen daughter from international gangsters for the seventeenth time on his way to his next hair transplant.

Harsh? Hey, who the fuck am I to say this crap. Right?

I'm just trying, striving, struggling to get clarity on what I want to see and how to do it.

But one of the reasons we loved Tarantino (and maybe still do) was that he delved into killing and death and violence in cinema as metaphors for the parts of our own psyche that we carve away as we grow and transform and reinvent ourselves in life, and he also made it organically joyful and fun and risky and artful instead of formulaic and boring as so many "thrillers" end up to be.

And at the same moment just before the turn of the millennium, The Blair Witch Project showed us that some of those same things could be accomplished for a hundred and fifty bucks.

It's weird that our collective expectations for innovative cinema have simultaneously risen so high but been forced so low. "Every scene is an argument" was not meant to be taken so literally. It's a fucking metaphor. Do the work. Take it a lot further.

We yearn for auteur-style innovation but settle for studio production by committee with twelve different groupthink story lines bolted together and a set of characters that still seem to be predominantly white men over fifty with a few token "others" thrown in. It makes me sad.

The time is now. If I have to go the indie route and produce my own pieces, then I will work through that.

Or maybe it's just writing the novel again that gets me through my own personal catharsis; an old white guy for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration, John le Carré (aka David J.M. Cornwell), arguably the greatest spy novelist of all time, with nine of his more than twenty novels made into some incredibly influential films, mentioned in one of his forewards that he asked another writer friend of his why he wrote novels, and was told "It's so that I'll have something decent to read in my old age." We're all writing novels now.

I'm not angry. Not any more. I'm hungry. Hungry for more. Be your own chef, right?

#danielstuelpnagel