The Reason Audiences Are Fed Up With Hollywood
As I’m editing my work in progress, Stephen King’s advice to “kill your darlings” comes to mind. This brutal but wise advice reminds me not to get attached to the way I’ve written the story in the first draft but to be open to different approaches.
King also got himself in hot water recently with a tweet about diversity and judging the quality of art. King is a voter for the Academy, and his tweet revealed the inherent bias that’s been nagging the Oscars in recent years. Art is subjective, right? So if you have gatekeepers who are all from the same background, then what you end up with is the same stories for the same set of tastes.
But the issue with the Oscars and diversity isn’t just demographics. It’s about investing in the future of art.
Take Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, a film that is up for at least 24 nominations this year. Though I haven’t seen it, I’m a fan of his work, but what I’m not a fan of is using CGI on Robert De Niro so he can play his character as a younger man.
Back in the day before CGI, they simply would have cast another actor to portray the main character as a younger man, and I’ll bet there are countless up-and-coming actors who would have loved to take a crack at that role. Imagine working your way up through the ranks of Hollywood and you get cast in a…
