New Ideas in Hollywood, NYC

Here's an idea for my young readers: there's a movie coming out soon, a remake of Spielberg's early 80's film, Poltergeist. Don't go see it. If you haven't yet, don't see the Mad Max movie either. Stop spending your entertainment dollars on rehashed ideas, tired to the point of exhaustion. The people in charge in Hollywood, and the book publishers in NYC for that matter, are paralyzed by the fear of failure. They really don't know a good idea from a bad idea. They can't see a trend until it's mowing them over. So, they keep going back to the same well. "This worked before," they reason, "so it will work again." These gatekeepers are standing in the way of the natural tendencies of artists to move their art in new directions. Alan Jay Lerner, the Broadway lyricist responsible for My Fair Lady, said, about the change in trends and styles in art and literature: "What causes the change? It is not the desires of the audience. It is the restlessness of authors for new forms of expression, which audiences then discover to be exactly what they were unconsciously looking for." (Quoted from Lerner's book The Street Where I Live.) The only way we'll get new ideas into the marketplace is to stop funding the old ones. If a few of these remakes are utter failures, maybe, just maybe, a few of us underground rebels will pop up and start to flower.