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The analogy I like to draw is the legal drama. I asked my father-in-law -- a well-respected attorney in my small town, who served a term as judge -- if he watch

The analogy I like to draw is the legal drama. I asked my father-in-law -- a well-respected attorney in my small town, who served a term as judge -- if he watched any of the Law & Order-type shows on TV. He just laughed. In that moment, I was enlightened. Hollywood has just as many lawyers working on scripts as they do programmers.

anigbrowl 10y ago
It's funny you mention this, because I went to law school for a while and love law in the way that mathematicians love theorems. Hollywood does have quite a lot of lawyers working on scripts - or rather, the ownership and business development of them. Lawyers have high standing within the professional film community; in fact the best way to get a producer to look at a script is to have it sent in by an entertainment lawyer, and quite a lot of lawyers write fiction because they're professionally trained to analyze and explain complex narratives insofar as they do trial/appeal work. My thesis is not that Hollywood doesn't know stuff or won't hire experts, but that Nerds (in various fields) don't appreciate the business necessity to dumb the story down for the widest possible audience. Nerds are very interested in their specialist subject and often lose sight of the fact that too much detail is boring. stories are ultimately about emotional identification, and too much intellectual detail can be just as boring as too much action (eg Michael Bay's Transformers films are often criticized for fight scenes that are so long and intense that people lose track of who's winning and after a while stop even caring, because it's just one big explosion after another). If I made an accurate movie about lawyers at work, lawyers and paralegals would love it, and I might even have a small indie hit on my hands if the other elements were good. But most people would be bored to tears because they don't have all the background knowledge and experience to fully appreciate it, and they want to be entertained more than they want to be educated.

anigbrowl 10y ago

It's funny you mention this, because I went to law school for a while and love law in the way that mathematicians love theorems. Hollywood does have quite a lot of lawyers working on scripts - or rather, the ownership and business development of them. Lawyers have high standing within the professional film community; in fact the best way to get a producer to look at a script is to have it sent in by an entertainment lawyer, and quite a lot of lawyers write fiction because they're professionally trained to analyze and explain complex narratives insofar as they do trial/appeal work. My thesis is not that Hollywood doesn't know stuff or won't hire experts, but that Nerds (in various fields) don't appreciate the business necessity to dumb the story down for the widest possible audience. Nerds are very interested in their specialist subject and often lose sight of the fact that too much detail is boring. stories are ultimately about emotional identification, and too much intellectual detail can be just as boring as too much action (eg Michael Bay's Transformers films are often criticized for fight scenes that are so long and intense that people lose track of who's winning and after a while stop even caring, because it's just one big explosion after another). If I made an accurate movie about lawyers at work, lawyers and paralegals would love it, and I might even have a small indie hit on my hands if the other elements were good. But most people would be bored to tears because they don't have all the background knowledge and experience to fully appreciate it, and they want to be entertained more than they want to be educated.