Years ago, on my first day in film school - never mind how many years ago; let's just say, a Republican was in the White House and he wasn't named Bush - a guest speaker addressed the class.
I honestly don't remember who he was, but it was someone big, someone powerful, someone with entertainment industry credibility.
It was a welcome speech, a cheerleading speech, and I can remember sitting there, listening intently, and thinking: "These are important words for me to hear. This is going to be one of those speeches that shapes a person. That changes a person. So listen carefully."
I can't remember what, exactly, was said. That's the trouble with talking to yourself: there's no one's voice that's easier to ignore. But I do remember this basic part. He told us to write with passion. Write what was inside of us. Write not only what we knew - that's the old cliché all of us have heard a thousand times - but also to write what we wished we knew. The key to success in Hollywood? Write to discover. Write what's in your heart and your bones and your blood.
Unless it's a Western. Nobody wants Westerns.
And that's what I took away from that rousing speech that undisclosed number of years ago: no Westerns. Nobody wants Westerns.
Which is sort of true, I guess, but every now and then someone makes a Western and if it's a good one, it makes a lot of money. And everyone in Hollywood braces for a screenplay market that will soon be flooded with scripts about cowboys and cattle rustlers and old-time railroad trains, and the movie theatre owners expect to be booked, in a year or so, with movies about ghost towns and shoot-outs.
But what's amazing is that when things like this happen - which they do, every few years or so, with dependable regularity - the people in Hollywood who decide these things don't say, "Oh, I guess we were wrong. I guess people do want Westerns now. Let's make more Westerns".
What they say is: oh, sure, that one worked, but that really wasn't a Western, it was a Clint Eastwood picture or a Morgan Freeman picture or a period drama or a something else.
It's not that people in the entertainment business have anything against movies about cowboys. It's just that they all have a huge amount of emotional and business capital invested in the ludicrous notion that audience tastes can be predicted. People in the entertainment industry, despite cascades of evidence to the contrary, won't give up their quite indefensible, almost religious belief, in their powers of audience soothsaying.
Here's what they forget: the entertainment business - and maybe every other business, too - is an industry governed by uncertainty and randomness. Whenever we try to hedge our bets - spending a lot of money on marketing, say, or paying a lot for a star-filled cast, or professing to know what audiences want (more superhero movies!) and what they don't (no more Westerns!) - we're at most barely improving our chances of having a hit. We are deluding ourselves that it's possible to "know" and "predict" the most fickle and irrational population group around, the moviegoing and television-watching audience.
When studios dump piles of money on stars and TV campaigns and McDonald's Happy Meal tie-ins, they're making a terrible business mistake by spending scarce resources on things that don't change the bottom line, rather than spending them on things that do.
Like making more movies. It's a cliché, I know, to say that studios would be better off, and a lot more profitable, by making more movies for less money, but clichés are clichés for a reason: they're true. The only way to win, in the casino of randomness called Hollywood, is to have as many rolls of the dice as possible.
In my experience in show business, nothing works until suddenly, unexpectedly, it works. The only way you ever really get a hit, is, first, stop thinking. Thinking leads to drawing conclusions and drawing conclusions is almost always a bad idea. When trying to put together a movie or television project, it's best to follow the old adage: "Do not attempt to grow a brain."
The best advice for writers - and anyone else with a real job - is to stop outsmarting yourself. Write anything you want.
Except a Western. But in a very real way, we're all here writing Westerns.
Which nobody wants. Until they do.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
