Hollywood used to be called Tinsel Town.  I think it should be renamed Ripoff Town.  Hollywood has changed, you see.  It once was the place where dreams were born.  It was a collection of the world’s finest creative talents.  People with expertise in every task necessary for the production of motion pictures were brought in by the movie studios to make movie magic.  The finest actors from the Broadway stage and from  Europe, directors and cinematographers arrived from all over the world.  Musicians were hired to build studio orchestras.  Warner Brothers had an orchestra made up of classically trained musicians, talented enough to play for any big city symphony orchestra.  The Warner Brothers symphony recorded the soundtracks for Warner’s feature pictures, and even for cartoons.  I knew that the Bugs Bunny and other Looneytunes  cartoons contained pieces of famous classical music.  Until recently, I never knew that the full Warner Brothers’ orchestra specially recorded every musical clip featured in every cartoon.  The object was to make every release the very best it could be.  And the writers, oh the writers.  In the golden age of Hollywood, hundreds of pictures were produced.  Far more movies were debuted each year than nowadays.  They had to be.  Most theaters showed double features for one admission.  Creative writers could take a simple idea and come up with a screenplay in sort order.  Many of these pictures were forgettable, but some were masterpieces.  Take 1939 as an example.  These are just a few of the movie releases in that one year:  Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights, The Women, Gunga Din, Young Mr. Lincoln, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Dark Victory, Of Mice and Men, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Roaring Twenties, Dodge City, Union Pacific, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Hound of the Baskervilles, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, The Man in the Iron Mask, Beau Geste, Another Thin Man, Gulliver’s Travels, and The Three Musketeers.  Today we just seem to get remakes and endless sequels.  There seems to be an alarming lack of imagination in a town which currently is dominated by the Disney Company, which made its fortune by employing creative geniuses, whom they named “Imagineers.”  Clearly, the same people who were able to build an audio-animatronic  robot, and make it climb stairs, are unable to find people who have an original idea for a new movie.  I’m not complaining about adaptations of popular books.  Some of them are great.  Gone With the Wind, and The Godfather come to mind.  The Godfather even made the only sequel that was perhaps better than the first.  The trick was that it wasn’t just a ripoff of Godfather I.  It was part of the story from the book that wasn’t covered in the original.  What I’m complaining about are the mindless sequels.  Rocky VI?  Superman whatever?  This, that and the other Batman, until you can’t stand it anymore.  Once Stan Lee is gone, and they’ve ripped off every superhero he created, where will they turn?  Remakes are even worse.  The Dudley Moore movie Arthur is one of the funniest movies ever made.  Why remake it, and who in Hell is Russell Brand?  The In Laws with Peter Falk and Alan Arkin is an absolute masterpiece, and uproarously funny.  “Serpentine!”  It simply could not be any better, so why did Michael Douglas remake it.  His remake wouldn’t be that bad if it stood alone, but compared to the original, what’s the point? Gary Cooper as Mr. Dodds was perfection.  Adam Sandler as Mr. Dodds? Please.  The only reason I can think of for the obsessive repetition in Hollywood is that the denizens of that particular swamp simply lack the ability to come up with a new story.  In point of fact, it seems to me that an original thought and a drink of cold water actually might kill them.  It could be a function of our educational system.  Screenwriters of the golden age were steeped in Western culture.  Today’s screenwriters know only diversity, victimization and the Kardshians.  Too harsh an assessment? Maybe, but when we reward a movie, shouldn’t it be rewarded for being something exciting and new?  Apparently not.  This year’s winner for Best Picture is a case in point.  The Shape of Water was given the Academy Award for Best Picture this year.  It’s a picture about a monster who falls in love with a woman.  It’s been done.  Remember King Kong, feeling up Fay Wray?  The non-human character in The Shape of Water is being held in a water tank.  Ever seen Splash?  Then, and this is the best part, the monster itself also is nothing new.  This is the creature from The Shape of Water –  

 

Now here’s the 1950’s Creature From the Black Lagoon –

Notice a resemblance?  I rest my case.