What’s Hidden in Hollywood

A reporter once asked Alfred Hitchcock after Vertigo premiered, “what was it like to make a perfect movie?” Hitchcock chortled in response, “You think that was perfect? You should have seen the movie in my mind.”

I couldn’t find the exact quote, but that was essentially it. If only we could have seen the movies of the mind. Reality is quite harsh against the liminal space our dreams live. If Hitchcock only made things that were perfect (to him) he would have never made anything — nothing would have been good enough.

When I worked in Hollywood I worked at Universal Pictures and hangout a lot with the guys in the Story Department. They essentially wrote coverage on the scripts that came in so the execs had something to say on the calls — awesome guys. I had just read a script for “The Huntsman” the sequel to “Snow White and the Huntsman” but this was going to star Chris Hemsworth. It was dark, gritty, and had such a unique way into it. It was written by Frank Darabont who did Shawshank and it slapped me upside the head with how good it was. I ran to the Story Department guys to gush about it and they said it’s a beautiful script, but it’ll never get made. And I was flabbergasted, “How?” Just listen in on the notes call tomorrow.

And I did — and the execs destroyed everything great about the script on that call. It’s like they took the wolf by the head and ripped every tooth out of it.

I remember talking to the guy that had worked there the longest, forlorn after the notes call where they butchered this beautiful beast of a script and he just said, “Your favorite movies. The things that made you love them and want to write them. They are miracles and chances are — they aren’t as good as what they were trying to be. You’d never believe the amount of extraordinary things that never got made or were completely gutted by the process.

And he handed me a stack of scripts to read — Guillermo Del Toro’s Mountains of Madness with his drawings. The unproduced Coen brother script that was 90 pages and had almost no words in it about a person having to survive after being stranded in the middle of the ocean. The 50 scripts that were written over 50 years of the Louis Zamperini story that eventually became the okay film that was “Unbroken.” Spoiler alert: he didn’t break.

And the list goes on and on and it was honestly the equivalent of seeing all the lives and effort that was never fulfilled from my heroes. These beautiful diamonds forged in sheer passion and artistry cast aside. It was a sobering experience being on calls where execs wanted to outbid another studio for a hot script even though they had no intention of making it.

My time there taught me a lot about how people’s dreams could fuel a dying machine that has outlived its promise of those that made it. If you want it to remain perfect and untouched keep it to yourself, but if you dare to want others to see it? To have a chance to feel a morsel of what it felt tucked into your mind. Then you’re going to pay the price of it growing in a harsh environment. And it won’t be perfect, but it will be real.

Every year I watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” and it gets better and better. And everyone who made it are mostly gone, but the dreams they had for it aren’t. We have to be daring with that which is precious to us if we have any want of it to be carried and cherished beyond us.

My hope is that one day those lost studio scripts become real. I hope the advances in movie making help those stories be real. The promise of the dreams of what is currently in its infancy is to be able to make whatever image your mind can conjure and it will get better and better — there is no doubt about that — and just maybe — someday we will see all those stories in some form and the Hitchock’s of today will never have to sacrifice the movie in their mind from the movie that we see. I promise you it’s going to be mind-blowing.

That is my hope for things like Runway and Odyssey and what the AI tools can bring to the world. I know a lot of people drag them because they are scared of them, but the promise is so great and I know what is buried in the depths of Hollywood and this tech could bring all those stories to us from a past industry that would never allow it.

And let me tell you, it’s going to be best shit you’ll ever experience.