discussed<\/a>\u00a0in these pages recently. At Disney in particular, but also to a significant extent at Warner Bros. and elsewhere, good storytelling has essentially been forbidden so that the political- and social-policy obsessions of the likes of Bob Iger and Dana Walden can be jammed into every production.<\/p>\nThe writers should, of course, not have gone along with these developments. They should have realized that if every story were to follow the same plot, the same pattern, with the same wooden, off-putting characterizations and the same gimmicks, people would rapidly get tired of them \u2013 first those who found the politics and social messages offputting in themselves, then the people who got tired of heavy-handed lectures, then pretty much everyone except a few true believers who just couldn\u2019t get enough of having their own tedious predilections reflected back to them.<\/p>\n
More than that, though, these writers \u2013 who talk an immense amount of guff about artistic integrity and disrupting paradigms and breaking the mold and marching to the beat \u2026 blah, blah \u2013 might certainly have been expected to refuse to write the same things repeatedly on purely artistic grounds. What kind of artist is willing to write to someone else\u2019s politics or, even if they are shared politics, to write the same thing over and over again in slightly shifted guise? What kind of writer is satisfied with churning out the 18th<\/sup>\u00a0version of a frayed old story \u2013 but this time race-swapped! \u2013 or the 300th<\/sup>\u00a0installation of a\u00a0superhero<\/em>\u00a0franchise, of all things.<\/p>\nOh, that\u2019s right: a hack.<\/p>\n
That is the immutable problem for Hollywood\u2019s writers, one that a strike can\u2019t do anything to fix \u2013 and that a union, of all things, is about the worse possible organization to address. Unions by their nature discourage innovation, productivity, achievement, unique success. A union is the antithesis of an auteur, but also the enemy of originality, daring and striving, which are the only things that can save Hollywood \u2013 and particularly its writers \u2013 right now.<\/p>\n
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If Hollywood\u2019s writers were churning out original, exciting scripts that move in unpredictable ways to reach unexpected conclusions, audiences might return to theaters and actually watch the stuff thrown up on the streaming services, all of which would create more revenue with which more writers could be hired for more projects. But so long as all of Hollywood is just producing the same thing again and again \u2013 the same women protagonists who are so strong as to be inert; the same flailing men; the same extensions on the same exhausted franchises; the same predictable late-night \u201cjokes;\u201d the same political screeds in place of honest sports coverage \u2013 as long as that\u2019s it, there\u2019s not much need for many writers at all.<\/p>\n
The writers have voluntarily reduced themselves to the position of assembly-line workers, and so have handed themselves up for replacement by automation. Now the automation will follow. A strike can\u2019t change that. Only a return to the production of bespoke artistry can.<\/p>\n