Semester Project: Down in History

With my semester project, I wanted to dissect the motifs of the New Hollywood movement (rebirth of Hollywood in the 1970s with Scorsese, de Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola) in the aftermath of the failure of the film industry in the 50s and 60s. New Hollywood gave rise to the birth of independent filmmaking (apart from mass corporation regulation) as well as the idea of filmmaking as a creative art. Think of all the high-brow, vaguely art-house movies nominated for "Best Picture" today -- New Hollywood gave rise to modern Oscars elitism, and I wanted to examine how that standard came to be.

A massive disclaimer before you start reading: every single one of my characters is connected to a real person ("Stephen Spielberg" = Steven Spielberg, "Roger Cormann" = Roger Corman, etc.). Yes, everything is misspelled on purpose, and yes, every concrete piece of work mentioned is actually something they've accomplished. Even some of their dialogue is drawn from things they've said in interviews. That said, by no means is this work representative of what I truly think of these people -- as a film enthusiast, I have a deep, deep respect for most of these filmmakers and would never want to slander them (outside of this project, I guess). At the same time, I've villainized and cartoon-ified everyone included. From what I know of these filmmakers, George Lucas is not anything like the brat as I've made him out to be, Roger Corman is pretty damn cool, and Gary Kurtz quit Return of the Jedi for the opposite reason that I've written in here. (Mr. Mitchell -- I know New Hollywood is one of your favorite historical eras, so I just want to apologize in advance for the way I've twisted it.) 

Here's the link (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gUjxtj0UAvNQOOMfRcIqPKqRbSWQjBUToa74UXyJGkw/edit?usp=sharing). It's in screenplay format, so it looks a lot longer than it actually is -- don't be intimidated by the page count! It's a lot of empty space and dialogue. Thanks for reading :) 

Comments

  1. Grace JuhnMay 22, 2020 at 10:37 PM

    WOW Elisha. This was so fun to read. As someone who doesn't know a single thing about the production of movies, I thought that the following conversations would be confusing and hard for me to follow, but it was actually really fun to read. I grew to really like the character George and felt pity for him and started to lowkey hate Corman. Although I don't know much about these people or their relationships, this screenplay was still really engaging and interesting. I loved that you chose this specific format, it really fit with the style of narration you delivered through dialogue.

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