Fuck You Studio

When I was a kid I wanted to make MASSIVE Hollywood movies.
"Lawrence of Arabia" "Gone With The Wind" "The Longest Day"
Epics.
Those days are gone, and I can live through Christopher Nolan.
These days, the tastes have changed. And I'm not necessarily clued in on any of it. Films I loathe, many people love. Films I love, people loathe. So perhaps my gauge of quality is off. Or society is. I can only go by my barometer of films that have influenced me.
Many will believe this is progress. In other words, the next evolution of story telling requires you...not tell a story or have any common sense or logic. Which is true for pretty much ever film. Time needs to compress. But that extension for unique is also aggravating, since unique isn't story telling, it's weird for the sake of weird. For instance this year "The Disaster Artist" was made about the story of a man who made the silliest dumbest movie in the history of movie making. Let me repeat, it was the making of a making told as a...story. It was fascinating as "Ed Wood" since it had...you know...Bela Lugosi in it. But this were two nobodies who sort of became somebodies in Hipster circles. The event is irony at its finest. Done the same as "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." And I'm not sure I get the joke. It's like that party you weren't invited to, but everyone has to tell you about it. Does that mean it's bad or good...no. But a moment at the Golden Globes summed it up. When James Franco sandbagged the actual guy he made the movie about. In other words...he was done with him. And most likely moving on.

The Hollywood of that era of epics of which I wanted to make the films in are gone. And, though it's more convenient to make movies, I find it near impossible to care to want to work for studios who've turned it into...well the very thing they fight for. Freedom of speech. Many of these studios, specifically Disney, have a very strict policy of playing by their rules. Which is the antithesis of...creativity. To their credit, they have boiled it all down to a formula you can readily follow. But it seems somewhat wrong not to have the voice of the filmmaker in their. Every time I look at a movie poster now, I see...a unknown director's name, and shrug. There will be no style. No footprint. Even in "The Shape Of Water" seemed like a factory product spit out an arthouse picture (ripoff of "Splash" if you ask me).
It actually feels liberating that I'm not chasing Hollywood standards anymore. I probably was never satisfied attempting to follow any template anyway. Ever. I think this is the contempt that I hold for the factory these days (which, by the way, I know it was MORE of a factory back then, but there was still craft).
Given our choices of movies now...I know what to expect. Sub-par filmmaking. Which is why I am grateful for Steven Spielberg. He still makes movies that actually feel like well crafted films. The rest?...take it or leave it.