An excerpt from John Podhoretz:
The greatest piece of editorial advice ever given about a screenplay was offered by a comedy writer named Jerry Belson. Rodney Dangerfield wanted to make a movie in which his character would enter college as a 50-year-old freshman, but no one working on it could figure out how to get him there or why he would do it.
"Make Rodney rich," Belson said. For if Rodney's character were rich, he would not be acting out of desperation, or self-consciousness, or a lack of self-worth, but rather as a lark. And he would feel free to do whatever he wanted without fearing the consequences. He would, in other words, live the dream life of every college student--hiring a contractor to gussy up his dorm room, and hiring Kurt Vonnegut to ghostwrite a paper for him about Kurt Vonnegut.
Belson's three words were the salvation of Back to School, one of the most successful comedies of the 1980s. Belson understood that few things in life are as much fun as thinking about what you would do if you had unlimited resources. And that brings us to Iron Man, which earned $105 million at the box office in its first weekend and has, at long last, made the brilliant ex-con Robert Downey Jr. into a bona fide star. Its huge take ensures Iron Man will be a movie Hollywood will emulate.
But it will do so for the wrong reason, alas. Hollywood will think that the public loves Iron Man because it is a superhero movie, a fantasy in which an ordinary person finds himself endowed with supernatural abilities. In fact, the public loves Iron Man because it is a rich-guy movie--a type of movie that offers the same kind of fantasy fulfillment without the supernatural nonsense.
Comments