I don't believe I'm attempting something this ambitious in just a few paragraphs. Please be forgiving. I'm not an historian and I'm just winging this without benefit of book or Google search. OK, here goes...It's hard to imagine but a little more than a century and a half ago the modern adventure story didn't exist. Oh there were stories about Ulysses and King Arthur and Tom Jones and the like but they were long and padded and the highlights were scattered islands in a sea of words.
So far as I know the lean, modern adventure story began with Alexander Dumas, maybe with "The Three Musketeers." That book must have gone off like a bomb in a tea shop! Imagine it, a story consisting of all highlights and almost no filler! A rush to publish followed. Every 19th century writer wanted to try the new technique and whole genres were invented in just a few decades. Poe, Verne, Scott, Doyle, and Sabitini became household words. The public couldn't get enough!
The phenomenon that interests me were the penny dreadfuls and dime novels that sprang up in Dumas' wake. In America they began with Westerns, then the Westerns morphed into short crime stories bundled up into pulp magazines. The public went nuts over the stuff! Cheap, illustrated stories that really delivered the goods; in the days before electronic media the impact must have been enormous!
It wasn't long before the pulps developed colorful covers with bold offset printing. Newsstands sprung up everywhere! Adventure, sex, sci-fi, romance, horror...all for just a few cents! Then, just when story consumption was at its peak and nobody thought it could go any farther....radio and film weighed in. That meant even more venues for stories! It must have been a heady time for writers!
Now in a general way the story revolution was positive but there were some casualties. Short, silent comedies gave way to long, feature-length comedy with disastrous results. It wasn't sound that killed the shorts, (look what The Three Stooges did with sound) and it wasn't problems with exhibitors. It was the public's taste for long-form stories!
The pulp-reading, novel-buying, penny dreadful-excited public craved long-form stories! Long-form comedy was inferior but it didn't matter. The public voted with their dollars!
I'm running out of space so I better wrap this up. Where do stories stand now? Interesting question! In a word the 150 year story explosion has run its course. Story magazines have folded and only Harry potter novels seem to get lines around the block. Theater attendance isn't what it used to be (though it's getting better) and even television is worrying. Amazingly shorts, whether fiction or non-fiction, are back with a vengeance. Electronic media dominates and shorts are its favorite child...
Oddly enough, maybe for reasons only Marshal McLuhan understands, television now demands personality intensive stories. In the new media story exists as an excuse for performance. That's why the Oscars are so popular. Actors are more popular than presidents.
The immediate future of animation in my opinion favors acting-intensive shorts, anywhere from 6 minutes to half an hour in length. In animation that means short scripts with plenty of room for virtuoso performances by artists.
The immediate future of animation in my opinion favors acting-intensive shorts, anywhere from 6 minutes to half an hour in length. In animation that means short scripts with plenty of room for virtuoso performances by artists.
ReplyDeleteI so want to believe you, but I'm afraid. I am a tender lad, and I've been hurt before.
Hi Eddie. Long time reader, first time commenting.
ReplyDeleteI for one would welcome a return to 6-minute shorts that have focused premises with no room for pointless meandering filler. Today's mainstream animation stretches itself too thin in order to fill out a long time requirement, and the performances suffer for it.
I hope you're right about a return to virtuoso cartoon performances; I'm sick of seeing pop culture references being used instead of interesting situations.
Finally, Eddie has said something that I disagree with! (My world is shattered! Life makes no sense! Help!!) Seriously though, I find the idea that the 150-year story explosion is about over hard to swallow. Human beings have from time to time done without science, without the state, without God, and without theories -- they've even gone without sex for short periods of time -- but they have never, and never will, do without stories. It is true that the public treats stories almost as a platform for performances, but this has been true since the days of Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks. The actors have always been, well, the stars. Throughout Hollywood's Golden Age, there were only ever two star directors (Capra and Hitchcock), while there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of star actors. Back in the thirties, people thought of The Prisoner of Zenda, not as an adventure story, nor as a swashbuckler, but as "a Ronald Colman picture." I'm not sure I can explain it, but the popular visual media have always been dominated both by story and by the screen personalities of the actors. I don't think this is going to change any time soon. (I might add: Unfortunately. I've always found people's fascination with actors primitive and cult-like but ... there it is!)
ReplyDeleteWhat we're seeing with television today is the "ultra-long" form. A story with a beginning middle and end in 90 minutes is "old fashioned" - now we have things like "Deadwood" "Lost" "Rome" "Ugly Betty" etc - And then in the Spanish language market there are epic "Telenovelas" that unfold over 30 hours or more. Erich Von Stroheim with his 12 hour movies was a piker compared with the sagas we have today.
ReplyDeleteI like your ideas on animation in this post!
ReplyDeleteSome genius development exec will now 're-imagine' Eric Von Stroheim's pictures in mo-cap CGI.
ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting post. It's one that made me think. You're right about novels - the only one that really gets the buzz is Harry Potter novels. The only other novels that get sales and "mini-buzz" are novels that have:
ReplyDeletea) been endorsed by Oprah
b) had a block-buster movie made about it
c) been mentioned during a major incident that made the national news
You're right that shorts are making a comeback, but I'm not sure if the shorts are acting-intensive yet.
Paradox Press has a great line of books that are filled with tons of different short stories, all drawn and written by different artists and writers. They're usually historical tales of well...whatever...from Paranormalish stories to tales of the old West. The short story format works well for the books. Its very relaxing because I can sit down and read one or two stories, and not feel like I have read the whole damn book in one sitting.
ReplyDeleteI miss when shows used to be able to tell a good story from start till finish in an hour. Its cool to see long stories play out over time, but it means I miss one episode, and forget it.
Shorts for cartoons would be great, because then people would get to see the smaller funny things in life. No need for a moral or lesson, just good ole silly fun.
IDRC: I don't blame you for being wary but what I'm saying isn't really that drastic. Television and radio always favored short (half hour or less) formats. Movies dropped shorts and TV picked them up.
ReplyDelete11 minute short cartoons are popular on TV. Me, I prefer three six or seven minute shorts per half hour like Rocky and Bullwinkle. Ren & Stimpy had a great format: two 11 minute shorts or one half hour cartoon when the story seemed to need it.
I wasn't really sticking my neck out when I predicted acting-intensive cartoons because live action has been acting-intensive for years. Modern viewers have a taste for it. It's "in the air."
Lester: Actually I agree with most of what you said. Stories will always be with us, though some eras might put more emphasis on them than others.
I think of humans as story-making creatures. We stereotype, pigeonhole and fictionalize because that's how our minds understand the world. We think by making a quick and dirty model of reality, a sort of story, then another part of our brain slowly becomes aware of facts that don't fit the model and we create a new story. I think we create new stories all day long.
I do think films and stories are more about ambience and personality nowadays but I can't defend that notion here because I'm getting restless and can't bear to stare at the computer screen any more!
Kent: True! I still think TV favors shorts but there's a lot of mini-series out there. Of course the mini-series has to be fragmented into parts to make it digestible.
>>I do think films and stories are more about ambience and personality nowadays <<
ReplyDeletepersonality? Which films?
You sure you didn't mean plot?
I thought you wanted more personality...
The immediate future of animation in my opinion favors acting-intensive shorts, anywhere from 6 minutes to half an hour in length. In animation that means short scripts...
ReplyDeleteEDDIE HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED AND REPLACED BY A STEPFORD WIFE CARTOON WRITER!
See ya
Steve
I confess, I snuck into Eddie's blogger account and wrote this post. FORGEEVE ME!!!
ReplyDeleteNext week Eddie will be posting his favourite gangsta rap songs, he just doesn't know it yet.
Muahahaha!
Actually, I like Eddie's theory that humans are story telling creaturs. That's why I loved the movie 300, it was a biased stroy as told through the eys of a facist-leaning roman soldier. All that stuff about how it's glorious to die for your country and how great Sparta was and how evil and fierce the Persians slave warriors were wasn't the film's thesis, it was what the narrator character's viewpoint was.
John: Hmmmm. "Personality" does seem to need more explanation but I'll have to address it later. My mind is on the next post.
ReplyDeleteSteve: You're right, I slipped into the common way of speaking about cartoon stories which is in terms of scripts. My bad. As we both know there are better ways to write these things.
There has been an explosion in the number of reality tv shows, perhaps adding credence to the saying "truth is stranger than fiction". On the other hand, we have not seen a proportionate increase in the number of documentaries in theaters or television.
ReplyDeleteFodder like Harry Potter and quasi-factual tell-alls like "Running with Scissors" and "A Million Little Pieces" dominate contemporary "literature". The trend is to write meek protagonists with wacky upbringings who reach transcendant knowledge with the help of special friends.
Literary critics favor politically correct tales of the oppressed poor that moralize. Amoral literature has been under an unspoken ban for the past twenty years, thanks to white guilt. The great modern storytellers like John Le Carre, Cormac McCarthy, and Patrick O'brian are consigned "genre" bin and are not read as much as they should be.
Why?
We are retarded. We are entering the age of the great american dummy.
Nate: I've read Le Carre and O'Brian and I have MaCarthy's road book on hold at the library. I now you don't like Running and Million Pieces but do they have any redeeming value? .
ReplyDeleteEddie: You're asking me? Good question. I don't know! A lot of people liked those books. I didn't. (I did however like the first couple Harry Poopshoot books). It's pretty well known by now that both 'memoirs' contain a significant amount of fabricated material. RWS is probably libelous (see http://www.vanityfair.com/fame/features/2007/01/burroughs200701)
ReplyDeleteMy big problem with Burroughs and Frey is that they are selling lies as truth. This is intolerable in history or science texts. Why is it acceptable in a memoir or biography? I cringe every time I think of a young person with a substance abuse problem reading "A million little pieces", too. It's got a terrible, irresponsible message.
The Road is great but extremely dark. If you like it I highly recommend "Blood Meridian" which is a western. I hope people continue to write stories this good!
>>Literary critics favor politically correct tales of the oppressed poor that moralize. Amoral literature has been under an unspoken ban for the past twenty years, thanks to white guilt.<<
ReplyDeleteWhat literature is considered amoral, exactly? Most of the famous novelists from the past wrote stories that were humane -- such as Dickens, Steinbeck, (F. Scot) Fitzgerald, Twain, etc. Even the cautionary tales of Huxley and Orwell are steeped in empathy for mankind's struggle against oppression. Are these the authors you meant when you said that critics have championed politically correct stories against oppression? If so, then thy've been doing so for more than 20 years.
As far as I know, schools and colleges are still teaching the works of Homer and Shakespeare, rather than Alice Walker.
>>Most of the famous novelists from the past wrote stories that were humane -- such as Dickens, Steinbeck, (F. Scot) Fitzgerald, Twain, etc. Even the cautionary tales of Huxley and Orwell are steeped in empathy for mankind's struggle against oppression.<<
ReplyDeleteI'm talking about contemporary literature.
The weak protagonist, overcoming his own foibles, is popular these days because of the role of Daytime TV Talk Shows in selling books. Late night TV talk shows tend to get the big stars hyping movies, and a band, while the daytime Talk Show is terribly dependant on the loser guest, so that some Doctor Phil/Jerry Springer/Oprah can Cure/exploit/ glorify them. As they plug their book.
ReplyDeleteAnd fiction generally doesn't get ANY TV exposure.
But sure, more six minute and 15 minute stories would be great. These days however, TV seems to want some episodic cliff hanger (more story arc related stories than stand alone episodes) to keep a loyal viewership.