Hollywood can be a harsh, cruel place indeed. You know the phrases: ”Last week’s hero is next week’s zero” or ”You’re only as good as your last picture.” And the flint-hearted producer who bankrolled your career-making debut isn’t likely to be swayed by reminders of how rich you once made him, especially if your last two pictures stank up both the joint and the joint’s toilet.
Believe me, there’ll be no favours coming your way. All you’ll hear from him, as he deigns to return your calls from a waterraft in the pool he purchased with the profits from your last hit, are the words, ”Yeah, that was then, but what have you done for me lately?”
And it’s likely to be a lot more gruelling and disillusioning if you once happened, however briefly, to redefine the prevailing cultural zeitgeist. Thanks to the video generation’s high levels of cine-literacy, low boredom threshold and its internet-derived savviness on all things movie-related, the Hollywood treadmill now has to turn about three times as fast just to keep up. Which means in short: ”So what if you once shook up the ground we stand on, along with all our low expectations and high hopes? Things change, pal.”
Things have certainly changed for people like Kevin Williamson in the few short years since Scream, and for Quentin Tarantino since Pulp Fiction. Each in his different way was once top of the Hollywood heap. Whilst Tarantino managed to transform modern movies with his multi-referential scripts for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, he was very soon swamped by a Gaderene rush of pale imitators and micro-Taranteenies.
In the short term these Xerox-artists did as much damage to American film-making as imitators of the late Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver did to the modern American short story. Every idiot who could heft a copy of Syd Field’s knuckleheaded scriptwriting guide – or pony up the scratch to be berated by story-structure guru Robert McKee – got in the act.
And Tarantino certainly didn’t do his own reputation any favours. Originally he’d wanted to be an actor and once he’d hit the jackpot as a writer-director he indulged himself insanely. There were guest appearances in disasters like Destiny Turns On the Radio (and John Patterson Flings it Out the Bloody Window), and the rank-pulling decision to essay the second male lead in From Dusk Till Dawn.
With his immobile, banana-shaped visage and his reedy, characterless speaking voice, a movie would stop dead in its tracks once Tarantino walked from behind the camera and into the shot. Once you become as powerful as in Hollywood as Tarantino suddenly did, you will find the talent banging on your door and telling you everything you want to hear. And no one will ever, ever tell you that you’ve produced a canine flick that deserves nothing better than the vet’s Big Needle.
Obviously there was no one around who was prepared to say anything like that about the slack, gormless Jackie Brown, which looked for all the world like the rankest kind of self-plagiarism. Hollywood lawyers have yet to find a means of extracting legal and financial penalties from those who shamelessly steal from themselves, but they’ll figure it out one day and once they do, the ex-video store clerk from Manhattan Beach will find himself robbing Peter to pay off, uh… Peter.
Let me ask you, until you started reading this, when was the last time you heard the words ”Quentin Tarantino”? Been a while, hasn’t it?
Not so Kevin Williamson, who despite being associated with a string of abject box office failures, has maintained his reputation as the new first tycoon of teen TV. Keeping one foot in the cinema and the other on network television has enable Williamson to keep his career on a slow simmer, but things have been getting pretty ropey of late.
His script for The Faculty, which, like From Dusk Till Dawn, was brought to the screen by fellow faded indie kingpin Robert Rodriguez, felt like Kevin-by-the-numbers all the way. Audiences stayed away in their proverbial droves.
The same was true of Williamson’s directorial debut Teaching Mrs Tingle, whose title was changed from Killing Mrs Tingle in order to put a million miles of daylight between it and the Littleton High School massacre in Colorado. As long as he wasn’t involved with the Scream series, the IKWYDLS duo, and his TV series Dawson’s Creek, Williamson couldn’t get arrested.
This was recently confirmed with the cancellation of his heavily promoted TV series Wasteland (the title was the show’s own best review) which features one representative dialogue sample so nauseating I feel compelled to reprint in full.
Anthropology professor to twentysomething virgin grad student: ”And your thesis will discuss the reason your generation is lost and inactive?”
”Sure. Take me for example,” says our virgin. ”I’m 26 today. I’m profoundly lost as a human being. I’ve spent my entire life in school. My parents still support me. Relationships baffle me and I’m acutely self-aware to the point where I’m clueless and slightly suicidal.”
”And you represent today’s generation?”
”Yes. Absolutely.”
What the hell does ”slightly suicidal” mean? The best definition I can come up with is the feeling of inner death I experienced as this crap soiled my eardrums and retina.
Williamson’s only involvement in Scream 3 was a 20-page outline, and there were no press screenings in the US, so all signs pointed to a likely nadir of creative shittiness. Thus it’s a pleasure to report that Scream 3 is the best of the trilogy, an absolute riot, jammed with spicy cameos from Carrie Fisher – ”no, no I just look like her” – Jay and Silent Bob, Roger Corman, Heather Matarazzo and Lance Henriksen, among others), dozens of zingers (”Wow! Deja Voodoo!” or ”Ah yes, very Hannibal Lecter, very Seven”), and a cast that thinks it knows exactly what’s coming.
It’s set against the filming of Stab 3, the now waning hack’n’slash series derived from the events in Scream 1, and the killer’s knocking off the cast in the order they die in the script (‘cept there’s three different drafts …). As one character says, ”In the last part of a trilogy, all bets are off.” Against all the odds, a wonderful capper to a clever series, well deserving of the stunning $32m it earned.
Thanks for everything Kev. Now go away.
Scream 3 opens in South Africa on Thursday April 20