https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wHqfL231qGc
Well, it’s I mean, purpose driven or theme driven storytelling is something that everybody does, right? So it’s not it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But when your purpose overwhelms the story, I noticed it for the first time actually, when I saw WandaVision. There was there were a few scenes in there when the writers stopped writing a story and they started to write a lecture. Yeah, it was really it was really annoying. It took me out of the story completely. And it shouldn’t have because that was such a experimental and weird. Kind of story that the WandaVision was, or at least it was trying to be I don’t think it ultimately succeeded. I don’t think it was very good. But one of the things that went against it was that they didn’t lean into the weirdness. The weirdness became window dressing for us for a very conventional story. That, you know, if I haven’t watched Dr. Strange, but I’ve read about it. And I know that that you were exactly right in your predictions about this being simply nothing more than self crowning like a kind of demonic apogee. Yeah. But it’s interesting to notice how the let’s say because I grew up in a in a kind of evangelical world and I wrote three plays that were within that context and had some evangelistic purposes. Like that’s not all they were. But they definitely needed to have that inside the play. Right. And every time I remember like I remember writing them and real and writing it and realizing, oh, I need to have that moment. And I was like, Oh, I’m going to write a book about that. That’s like that moment in the play. And I cringe every time I think of it. And now when I watch that’s why I find it so difficult to watch Christian movies. I had such a deep a deep experience with that because I wrote three of those myself and I produced them and we toured and we did all that. It’s like when I see it, I’m like, oh, this is so painful. But I never thought that I would see it in the Hollywood movies as much as I’m seeing it now. So it’s interesting to see that. Because it’s bad screenwriting and everybody knows it’s bad screenwriting. But there’s something going on in Hollywood. I don’t know if we want to talk about this too much, but it’s becoming clear more and more. And so this is something that came out in Barry Weiss’s podcast, or may have been her sub stack. But she talked about how, and I’m not quoting this, so if I’m getting it wrong, I do apologize. But she basically was quoting an insider who said that after the George Floyd riots, there was a mandate from heaven. Yeah. A mandate from not heaven that said, get rid of all the old guys and make sure you diversify your core. Now, the issue is, the problem is, and this insider was very open about it. And I think, I don’t know if it’s a he or she, I believe he was anonymous. Made it clear that the pool of possible screenwriters is small as it is, because the life of a screenwriter in Hollywood is absolutely miserable. You get paid almost nothing. And you’re working for these big shots that basically force you to do stuff and then put their own writing on top of yours. They put their own name on your writing, right? And that’s something that you accept if you want to live that life. But there’s not a lot of people that do. And of those that are already there, there’s not that great of a percentage of a diverse population. So in sort of shoehorning in the mandate, what’s happening is not that these people can’t tell good stories, it’s that they haven’t had the training and they’re put in positions of, you know, leader of writing room. And they’re trying to tell good stories, but they haven’t been trained in the absolute basics of storytelling. So they’re defaulting to what they’re seeing in The New York Times and in the cultural conversation, which is a top down speaking to wagging. But that kills the immersion in story within as soon as it happens. And it doesn’t matter what side you’re on. Even if you agree with it, you’re not in the story anymore. You’ve just been pulled out. Definitely. So it brings us to our major point, which is in this strange, topsy turvy times, when even those, let’s say that those that would portray even themselves as being the margin are now becoming more or less than finger wagging. What kind of story can we tell and how can we tell this story? Well, that was my thought, you know, and of course, as soon as I had that thought, I had to abandon the thought. Because if I start thinking like that, then the story I’m going to tell is not going to be story forward, but it’s going to be theme forward. So if I’m thinking I need to tell a story that’s going to embrace the margins, that’s it. I’ve lost the game. Right. So this is this is weird dance. And, you know, this, you’re creative, you understand, and especially creative within within, you know, within the tradition bound crafts, such as iconography, there’s always a dance between what you want to do and what the tradition tells you to do and what you hope you’re able to do in terms of your personal input, but also you want to add something new, just you. That’s also a dance with the tradition.