Déjà vu all over again

This week I became an assembly line manufacturer of reviews. Place a movie in front of me and a review will be spit out in two-and-a-half hours flat. Mistakes in spelling will be almost entirely eliminated due to Microsoft's spell checker, while mistakes in grammar will pop up like software bugs that you couldn't catch in years because of the same idiotic spell checker. After the process of view, review, maybe critique is done I slap my own label of MADE IN USA (that is, written by James Brundage) on these articles and send them off into the world to become articles of mass consumption.

When making yourself such a slave to the robotic cause of film analysis, strange little things begin to pop out at you. You realize that Lola's shirt becomes tied and the untied again as she goes around corners in Run Lola Run. You ponder about the deeper meaning of headlines. You begin to think in metaphors, lenses, filters, mattes, tech talk. The electronica music playing out of your speakers becomes a constant movie soundtrack for the boring film known as your life, and suddenly it clicks: as white collar as you could ever get, you are nothing more than someone on the assembly line. The music you listen is just musak playing in the background.

Of course I'll have forgotten all of this by next week, when I enter into the realm of psychotic ranting once again, spitting out cynicism from my brain like a hypodermic syringe into the vein of the collective unconscious. Not even realizing the time, or that you write in rhyme, until it's too late to relocate to better place and time.

Of course, when you get to this point you realize that you really are going nuts. And a few seconds later last week, in which you had the exact same revelation but never bothered to put it down on paper, flows back to you, and there it is… déjà vu all over again.

You are part of the assembly line, the cycle. You are part of the machine.

Welcome to my world.

Of course, if public relations and Hollywood is all a machine, then one should really ask what exactly the machine is doing. What kind of machine is it? We all know its purpose -- to make cash -- and we all know how it makes the cash (through tickets and cross marketing), but what type of machine is it? If we had to attach a metaphor onto Hollywood, and we had to be secure in the knowledge that we were slaves to the machine, than what machine would it be?

After viewing three remakes all done within four years (La Femme Nikita, Black Cat, and Point of No Return), I can postulate as to exactly what type of giant machine this media conglomerate is… it's a copy machine.

Well, sort of. Hollywood isn't exactly a copy machine, per se. It's more of a sifting machine that copies what it likes. Take La Femme Nikita. Hollywood saw La Femme Nikita and loved the story line. It loved the translation. It loved the dialogue. It loved almost everything (except for the ending, which Hollywood made almost mind numbingly bright). And so, when Point of No Return came out, it was almost exactly the same movie… down to individual lines of dialogue. Of course Hollywood also saw Black Cat, the Hong Kong remake of La Femme Nikita that came out the following year, and decided to steal a few elements from there as well. A line of dialogue here and there, a bit of background here and there, and a plot twist or two.

Into the copy machine went La Femme Nikita, and out went Point of No Return. Shots were duplicated, acting notes were taken from other films, and people were cast to look like their European counterparts. The film stock changed and so did the cast and crew, but almost everything else remained the same.

The laser scans over the image, and a pretty fair duplicate comes out.

So if Hollywood is giant copy machine (which we all know it is), how do we fit in? As intelligent consumers we are the ultimate quality checkers. We are the people who are willing to get déjà vu all over again by watching what amounts to the same movie three times in three different languages, just to be able to list the differences. We are the shredder that sits at the end of the line, ready to pick up whatever scraps we wish and throw them in the trash bin, and we are also the collective demand that decides what should and should no go in the copy machine (yeah, you know who you are, you men and ladies who copy their asses on the machine when alone in the office).

Recently, the Yahoo! Club The Hollywood Camerata, a haven for screenwriters composed mostly of ex-members of the Black Dog Café screenwriting forum, which closed up shop on Yahoo! At the end of last month (although it can still be located online) have thrown around a question as to what materials they would like to remake. Answers have been all the way through the gamut, from one user who wants to remake The Thing for try number three to another who wants to remake Tron (both, as pointed out by members of the club, are currently optioned to be remade). Another thread concerns based on fact. Yet another common thread concerns adaptation.

The copy machine is growing. It is so large that at this point it occupies the minds of screenwriters across the country. So large that it has spread its tentacles into the realm of hip hop (which basically steals beats from R & B, Disco, and several other genres and the overlays the lyrics of even more genres). The entire entertainment industry is a giant copy machine, and we will face déjà vu all over again and again and again.

So what can we do? What should we do? In the land of the shot-by-shot remake of Psycho (that deviated by four shots), are we facing a creative Nihilism? Shall I be Nietzche, and say that Serendipity is Dead (or has Serendipity gone the way of Dogma, and has she given her two weeks notice to God and is now working in a strip club in Illinois)?

No.

In point of fact, the three versions of La Femme Nikita form a perfect example of exactly how creativity can coexist within the realm of creativity. Each movie has its slight differences, Black Cat (which does not even credit Besson's original screenplay for based on) deviates the most, yet elements from Black Cat pop up in Point of No Return alongside elements from La Femme Nikita (i.e. the bathroom assassination occurs during a festival in Point of No Return and Black Cat, yet Black Cat uses a knife where as Point of No Return and La Femme Nikita use a sniper rifle). And after all, isn't the devil in the details? Is the first rule of writing in the new age not "don’t steal" but "steal from the right sources?"

Stealing isn't sacrilege anymore… it's art. Having a prexisting story line gives a writer a chance not only to critique and tweak the original story line (lest we forget the line about remakes from "The Player": "We're doing it until we get it right"), but also to improve upon non-story line techniques. Tweaking dialogue, learning to self-edit. Sampling, a longstanding tradition in music that has only begun to find its way into the cinematic world (through the works of Craig Baldwin and Jay Rosenblat, who use found footage to construct entire movies) allows for none of creativity by the old textbook definition… all of the footage is not theirs, yet through recombining this footage a fully new product is formed. Furthermore, Balwdin and Rosenblat have become extremely accomplished editors of film, a skill that most filmmakers never master.

When you look at the world of music, where similar debates have been raging regarding hip hop, looping, and prerecorded beats, a good argument can be made for exactly why anything you do is copying. No matter what you play, it is a note, if a note is perfect it will sound exactly the same as another perfect note. Since there are a limited number of notes that can be played, and since all possible notes have been played, anything you do has at least partially been done before… it is all the degree of composition, of recombination.

When one transports this argument over to movies it holds considerably less water, as there are always new photographs to be taken, new images for the lens to capture. It holds even less water in the realm of the remake, because the remake itself is supposed to be only new images. Yet creativity is not dead in the remake. Instead, creativity comes in a different form that most writers never see: editorial creativity. Like their sampler counterparts, the remaker is forging old into new by adjusting, and is mastering a craft in the process. In writing a remake, or filming one, the creativity is like that of a DJ joining a tag team… how to become another cook without spoiling the stew and how to improve the stew in the process.

Of course there will still be the critics (not critics as in job, but as in people who dislike) of remakes, those who hold a special reverence for the original whether or not the product was inferior. But as we listen to rant and rant about how the remake was fickle, and the person invariably takes the unoriginal path out of saying "well, it's a remake"… well, you people know what we'll get. Say it with me: déjà vu all over again.

The column "20/20 Hindsight" comes out every Monday

URL of THE HOLLYWOOD CAMERATA:
http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/thehollywoodcamerata