It takes courage to make movies like this-- for the studio, the actors, the director, the distributors. This is one movie I encourage you to watch. You'll enjoy it, and you'll show, financially, that movies with this kind of message can be economic successes too.Rob: Of course the Marvel Comics brand is built upon this kind of superhero and I know Disney spent billions to buy the brand, right?
Chris: That's certainly true yeah.
Rob: They're investing in maintaining that kind of hero archetype, but I wonder, this is a question I've been meaning to discuss with you and we haven't hit all the archetypes but I think we hit enough of them.
Chris: Yeah.
Rob: What's the chance of a major movie company doing something like this?
Chris: Well, I think that the very fact that you have so many of the certain kind of the elite team of the G.I. Joe's or whatever it is or exceptional heroes like Indiana Jones, the very fact that those have such dominance creates a hunger for the other thing, so then you can get back to more grounded collective things. And to be fair with Marvel Comics, the original idea of many of these things was more like the Spiderman model, where it's just a kid and he's put together a costume out of stuff from the junk store and old athletic equipment.
Rob: It's true and actually some of the commenters from my article observed that many superheroes start out as average people who are victims of chemical spills or radiation or things like that.
Chris: Yeah, that's a very interesting thing. Yes, there is some working out of maybe collective guilt about that or trying to show that there's an interaction between these environmental choices and what happens. They're very positive that way that usually the environmental change is positive. Not always, because some of the Batman villains, for example, are horribly deformed by it, like Two Face. It poisons their nature, but sometimes it brings out something good. Spiderman has these powers, but the whole point of Spiderman is the powers have to be used responsibly. So, if you've got this wonderful new tool of tablet computers and e-mail and so forth that has to be used responsibly as part of this hero contract.
Rob: When it comes down to making a blockbuster movie, underneath it there has to be a great story that people are going to care about and be able to relate to.
Chris: Um-hum.
Rob: Where the story will be able to lure them into the story trance.
Chris: Yes, that's true and a couple of things may happen along these collective lines we've been discussing. One is that you present the collective hero like a village or a tribe or a street or a family or something like that and then the audience picks one or two that they like the best or that they relate to the most and so they kind of turn those into the heroes of the peace. The other thing you can do, and I like this idea, is to really spend some time creating a character that is that village or that street or that family so that the filmmakers use their tricks and techniques to create the sense of the community as a real entity that has its own consciousness and its own goals and settings, and that those need to be adjusted a little bit and that can be a great movie of material; a great piece of material. Something that shows us, here's a microcosm of your society in one family or one street.
Rob: Has that been done?
Chris: Well, I think that this is what Spike Lee was after in "Do the Right Thing." He was giving you of a sort of Charles Dickens view of this is a whole array of different types of people in this one location. I thought that was a successful effort there and you could pick out certain people and say, "Okay, it was really this guy's story or that's guy's story." But I think he did the right job there of creating the sense of the collective and that that itself can be a character. So I like things like that. Or another example from far a field from that, there was a movie about U-boats, "Das Boots," and very clearly the intention there was the boat itself. The crew of the boat is a collective and this is the main character; not the captain, not anybody on the crew. It's that boat. So, I think there are plenty of examples that show how you can do that very effectively. John Ford did it during the war a number of times. He took movies like "They Were Expendable," where he was studying a certain unit and giving you the story that collective military unit. So, there's lots of precedent for this.
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