>If you stay up long enough and watch enough 20th century fare -- TCM's
>catalog covers every decade of that fiery period -- you begin to
>notice something: a lot of movies weren't very special.
What's special is even the bad ones are grist for the mill. Cindy Sherman watched movies on tv all the time when she was a kid. 20 or 30 years later you get her Film Stills.
Trashy novels, trashy movies, anything's good in a pinch. Who loves reading product labels? Raise your hand!
>What was it RKO execs advertised after kicking Orson out of the
>studio? "Showmanship, not genius"? Yeah, sometimes that's the ticket
>jabrone.
Writers in Old Hollywood used to wax philosophical about creating a new art form. Somehow they forgot people had been writing a long time before the movies. The ones who were really creating a new art form were the execs.