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[bryant]

Weird idea, while drifting off to sleep:

A Lexicon of Lost Hollywood. Each entry is a movie review of a movie that was never made; each movie review must refer forward and back to other movies. You can make up actors and directors and screenwriters if you like, but they cannot be entries: they will always be defined only by the reviews of their movies. Or, if you wish, you can use the stars that we know.

The slots are not alphabetical: they are chronological. 1940-1945; 1945-1950; 1950-1955; 1955-1960; 1960-1965; 1965-1970; 1970-1975; 1975-1980; 1980-1985; 1985-1990; 1990-1995; 1995-2000. 12 slots. The secret history of Hollywood (and Bollywood, and the BBC, and Hong Kong) is revealed slowly as the needle of time moves forward.

Comments

[bryant]

Decades are too big because actors tend not to stay in a phase of their career that long, that is.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

That's a fair point. Maybe best to stick to, say, pre-1980.

[bryant]

Maybe, yeah. I'd hate to lose 1999, the legendary best movie year ever, but perhaps it's inevitable.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

I disagree, and vote for decades rather than 5 year blocks.

Not sure why the phases of actors' careers is relevant here. The more salient fact, it seems to me, is that one might well have a sense of how 1940s movies and 1950s movies differ, but only true film geeks will feel strongly about how 1940-1945 movies and 1945-1950 movies differ.

(Different decades differ, of course. I admit there's a kind of break between early 70s movies and late 70s movies, but I don't feel the same kind of significant split in the 1980s for instance.)

Broad categories are also good because people are going to have to assign decades to movies based on the title alone when they create forward links.

If you've got a half dozen or more players, I'd say they'll cover the range of a decade and the kinds of movies made in that decade pretty well.

BUT it's your baby.

[kodi]

I'm of two minds on the matter. If I were tasked merely with "break the history of film into useful periods," I would go through and look for epochal events to serve as dividing features, like with arrival of sound from 1926-29, and the arrival of Technicolor in 1939. It's a nice, fast way to wrap your head around a period, by connecting it with something you're already familiar with.

The problem with that scheme for something like this, though, is that it's easy to go from using the events as landmarks to using the events as the defining element of the period. HUAC is a great dividing line - there were a lot of films made after 1947 that just would not have happened before 1947. But thinking of 1947-54 as "The HUAC Era" shoves Olivier's Hamlet and the first 3D films into a closet from which they might never escape.

On the other hand, trying to identify those epochal events is a really fun exercise. If I were dividing the history of film into roughly decade-sized chuncks, I would put my dividing lines at 1929, 1939, 1947, 1958, 1966, 1977 and 1991.

[bryant]

Hm. I had this half-formed idea that you might want to imply a history of an imaginary actor through his or her imaginary films. But maybe that's biting off too much.

I had, of course, being the snob that I am, been thinking about this for "true film geeks." Trainspotters. Otaku. What's the American English word for that? Geek has too much connotation, I fear. And did you ever notice that otaku means something different in English than it does in Japanese?

1920-1930
1930-1940
1940-1950
1950-1960
1960-1970
1970-1980
1980-1990
1990-2000
2000-present
pre-1920