Saturday, March 11, 2023

I Just Have a Few Notes

I got home late from Osaka last night and didn't feel like watching a movie. In the morning I watched the second episode of Robert Blake's YouTube series. Recorded within the last couple years, the episodes are just him at home going through boxes of old photos. So far he's talked almost exclusively about his roles as a child. Apparently he didn't think too much of Lost Highway at that point in his life, something seemingly confirmed by David Lynch in this interview:

Although, this interview from the time of the film's release shows him being more positive about it--and also somewhat derisive of his body of work previous to it:

I guess people change. Which is a pretty good summary of Lost Highway, actually.

I didn't realise Lost Highway, in 1997, was Blake's last movie. I wonder why. His arrest didn't happen until 2002.

Speaking of performers with strong personalities, lately I've been reading about how Jenna Ortega rewrote a lot of her own dialogue on Wednesday.

“There was times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense, where I just started changing lines … I would have to sit down with the writers, and they would be like, ‘Wait, what happened to the scene?’ And I would have to go through and explain why I couldn’t do certain things."

Ortega went on to give specific examples, quoting stereotypical “teenage” dialogue that clashed with Wednesday’s dark, brooding persona.

“Everything that she does, everything that I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” Ortega said. “Her being in a love triangle made no sense. There was a line about like, this dress that she has to wear for a school dance and she said, ‘Oh, my God, I love it. Ugh, I can’t believe I said that. I literally hate myself.’ And I had to go, ‘No, there’s no way.’”

Ortega even mentioned choreographing her own dance, the most iconic scene from the show, after discovering that Wednesday was originally meant to inspire a flash-mob, stating: “why would [Wednesday] be okay with that?”

Ortega implied that she had completely reshaped her character to give Wednesday more of an arc, saying, “I grew very, very protective of her, but you can’t lead a story and have no emotional arc because then it’s boring and nobody likes you.”

I don't agree that arcs are essential to creating good characters or stories but, for the most part, it sounds like she was definitely a better writer than the show's credited scribes. The fact that Tim Burton has just cast her in Beetlejuice 2 suggests it wasn't Burton she was clashing with, either, and that Burton had a relatively small creative role for a director on Wednesday. If they do another season, I hope they get better writers. Maybe they should just have Jenna Ortega do the writing.

Speaking of publicised rewrites, I've been amused by this ongoing story about Dave Filoni's supposed involvement in the filming of the Vader hallway scene at the end of Rogue One. Freddie Prinze Jr., star of Filoni's Rebels, recently claimed the Rogue One scene was 100% conceived and executed by Filoni even though Filoni himself claimed in an earlier interview that he'd never filmed any live action before his work on The Mandalorian. Then, finally, Gary Whitta, one of the original writers on Rogue One, said the scene was filmed by the film's original director, Gareth Edwards. It wasn't even part of the reshoots by the second unit director.

Which sounds a lot more plausible to me. I remember when Filoni imitated the sequence in the final episode of Rebels where it made absolutely no sense.

I bet at some point Filoni, or one of Filoni's people, told Freddie Prinze that story about Filoni making the scene for Rogue One, just like Filoni has successfully convinced people he created Ahsoka Tano. The guy's career is taking credit for things at this point. Meanwhile, what has he done since George Lucas sold Star Wars that wasn't running off fumes from Lucas and Jon Favreau? I suspect the upcoming Ahsoka Tano series will be the make or break point. When that show ends up sucking, everyone's going to stop buying into his PR except his most virulent stans. And that'll be yet another headache Disney can't afford.

I'm reminded again how Bob Dolman complained about Disney execs tampering in the writers room on the Willow series. And the stories going around about how the ending to the latest Ant-Man movie was changed to its current lame incarnation. And I'm reminded of the Disney Dark Ages of the 1970s and early 1980s, when a lack of a strong creative vision and too many unimaginative cooks in the kitchen nearly sunk the studio. And here we go again.

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