By Pavita Millimuff                September 22, 2089

Briggs Woodmonk used to be somebody in the American film industry. Not somebody the casual film-viewer would know about, but somebody nonetheless. As a screenwriter, he spent his days working on an endless series of scripts, sending the completed ones to his agent, who would market them to dozens of mid-level studio executives across town. Because a few of them had sold and turned out moderately successful hits like The Typhoid Bunny of Glasgow and Look, It’s an Alcoholic Centipede!, he was a known commodity and could actually count on a few of his scripts being read instead of immediately thrown in a slop annihilator. Still, he typed up around a dozen scripts each year, increasing the likelihood that at least one would draw the interest of someone with money to spend. Occasionally, studios would come to him, offering a deal to help rewrite a film stuck in development hell or adapt a successful book or video game. It was a far cry from the manic genius and high artistry we tend to associate with authorship, and it certainly brought little fame, but it was an honest living. Woodmonk had carved out his little space in Hollywood, and so had hundreds of other writers who were the genesis of many of our most beloved films and shows. But about ten years ago, Briggs Woodmonk and all the other writers like him came to the realization, not all at the same time, but all eventually, that Hollywood had decided it didn’t need them anymore.

As he recalls, it began at first when work on rewrites and adaptations dried up. When his agent asked around for producers in need of an experienced pen to help push a stuck project forward, the responses were increasingly, “Thanks, but we’ve got this.” Interest in original scripts began waning as well, until on one Thursday morning, he unexpectedly received an email from a major studio saying that screenwriters need no longer submit scripts to them, and that they would move forward producing films by their own methods. “Their own methods” didn’t mean a team of in-house writers, they had all been laid off years before and the studio had been working with writers exclusively on a freelance basis ever since. The announcement was met more with derision and confusion than shock: how was a film studio supposed to make films without writers? Yet months went by and turned into years and the studio’s output churned along with no interruptions. That initial email was soon replicated by all the other major studios over the next few years, and before long screenwriters had been basically entirely phased out of the major motion picture machinery.

The fact that major studios now all have a process by which they generate ideas and concepts for movies is now much more public, but our picture of what is actually going on is scarcely any clearer. Every studio now has some snappy name for their idea-birthing method: Pepsi-Huawei-Tampax-Applebee’s-Charmin Studios calls theirs “The Process”, Real Human Not a Robot Pictures calls theirs “Formula X”, Compliance Studios calls theirs “The Dreammaker.” We have no idea what these things actually are. Are they lists of guidelines and beats every movie has to follow? An AI program? A collection of old scrolls found in the ruins of one of the cities firebombed in the Saturnian War? We have no clue. Hollywood is a place where rumors and secrets spread faster than spaghetti sauce flu, and yet every studio has been unflinchingly tight-lipped about these methods. The studios sell these methods as their secret ingredient, the thing that makes their films special. Since no one seems to know what the methods actually are, there is no one who can verify such a claim. But it’s hard to see what exactly the special element in these films is that the studios are attributing to their secret methodologies.

If there truly are a few recipes that have been responsible for the output of the major studios for the past several years, the results do not reflect well on those recipes. What we have gotten has become only more and more homogenous, to the point that on multiple occasions in the past year I have wondered at advance screenings of films not even released yet whether or not I had seen them before. Of course, the studios do not care what I think of their films, or for that matter any evaluation of their artistic merit. As long as they continue to make steady profits, they will make the same vapid films free of any risk or personality through their obscure methodology. They cite their methods as the magic pixie dust that provides their brand, but this romanticism is all a front. Whether or not Formula X is actually a mathematical formula or computer algorithm, it effectively functions like one. Creativity and artistry are wild card variables; nobody can predict how employing them will turn out. Best to just get rid of them, then, and make the equation simpler. Make the equation one where the result will be guaranteed every time. Quality is a negligible sacrifice. Movies have been commercial machines for as long as there have been movies, but at least for most of cinematic history they were born out of some genuine human’s idea. The opportunity for human intervention in the film industry grows thinner by the day.

Perhaps readers will label me an outdated idealist who cannot accept that film is a business, and businesses need to make money. They may be right, and indeed it has always been true that films are not just art but not intellectual property. But what these “methods” represent is the studios trying to turn filmmaking into their intellectual property. The filmmaking process has always been special for its democracy; scarcely can a single individual construct by themselves a film beyond the barest scale. But by privatizing their methods and shutting them behind locked doors, the studios turn democracy into oligarchy. There is no room for any new artists to train and grow. Blind to the ways films are made, we become less perceptive and literate audiences. Who’s to say the studios won’t begin suing individuals for infringing on their copyrighted filmmaking methods. These studios are not merely claiming ownership over works of art. They want ownership of art itself.            

Briggs Woodmonk eventually found a new career as the manager of a Chico’s Dank-Ass Candles, a scented candle store chain in Southern California specializing in candles that, according to their website, “accurately provide the aroma of the thug life.” He has managed to land on his feet, which makes him lucky among the thousands of writers who got ousted from their industry. He has mostly moved past his resentment of the film industry, admitting that the battle for artistic freedom is probably already lost. But he does still have one lingering desire. “I just want to know what replaced me,” he tells me, “If the studios want to do things their own way, fine, but they should at least be transparent about how they’re making their movies.” It’s probably a pipe dream, he admits. But he has a point. We can’t fully understand where the film industry stands until we uncover the studios’ secrets. And if the studios are always going to force feed us the same sludge, they can at least have the decency to tell us what we’re eating.