infundibulum

I really like commentaries on films… in some ways, I think they’re as interesting as the film itself. Usually, I will watch the movie and then immediately watch the commentary. Right now I’ve got Francis Ford Coppola rambling along with The Conversation. I also liked the commentary to Stephen Soderberg’s Solaris quite a bit, and there are many more.

But one thing stands out from watching all these things: movies are mashups.

When you see a film in a theater, what you see is the final product of someone, usually but not always the director, sitting down and deciding on the final cut. They’re working with a bunch of footage, and the impression I get from watching these commentaries is that very often, scenes are completely moved around. In the case of The Conversation, Coppola simply got frustrated with the publicity surrounding his film, and he cut it four days early.

Thus, the entire ending of the movie changed for an external reason. This is a fascinating idea to me, that you can take a bunch of footage and reshape it into endless variations.

Back when he was still being funny, Woody Allen made a hilarious film called What’s Up, Tiger Lily? , where he took an existing Japanese spy movie and redubbed it with completely new English dialog.

It’s pretty sad to see how grasping the movie industry has become with its history, because this kind of thinking is really the way toward originality: blockbusters aren’t making what they used to, and the movie industry is going to have to figure out new business models. Mashups could be one of them, but I think their lack of foresight will lead to Machinima absorbing all that energy.