Reply To: Time Frame on next book

Trust the ancient one in the room.

They made a LOT of crappy stuff in the old days. In particular before my time, there were tons of really amazingly bad science fiction movies.

See MST3K if you doubt this. (yes even that is old now days) Same for Horror.

I think the important thing to keep in mind is that SF/Fantasy stuff goes in waves. It was really huge in the post world war II, pre-Vietnam era as people looked to the future optimistically and fearfully thanks to the bomb. And they made a ton of stuff. Most of it horrible. It was also done on the cheap.

During the 70’s and 80’s they did far less, but what they did, they did better. But there were still plenty of crappers. Logan’s Run, great story so so show. Then lots of bad sequels etc. (Star Trek: The Search for God–or whatever it was called)

And now days, they do more than ever before, both due to huge box office and huge gaming audiences, but also due to Netflix and Amazon, you can get movies out their cheap. Same with game distribution on the Internet vs a software store.

The problem is there are only so many good stories, good writers, good directors to go around. With time you can cultivate more and train them, but in the meantime you have a mad rush to cash in on something that’s popular and you get a lot of mediocrity.

This applies to big box office and to independent things. I don’t think budget is so much the issue other than too big or too small. Too big a budget and there get to be too many Chef’s in the kitchen, too small a budget and you can’t pull off the vision or hire good people to do it.

Anyway, I am losing track of my theme. The reason that there is so much “crappy stuff” today is that there is just so much more of it than there had been for the 70’s 80’s and 90’s. But go back before that and there was massive amounts of schlock.

The talent pool for good stuff is only so big at a time, if demand exceeds the size of the talent pool, lesser qualified people get involved, and this may very well be at the higher levels who over manage/destroy talented people at the lower levels.