How to fix Hollywood

If you haven’t noticed lately, Hollywood has sort of started to suck. There are a variety of situational explanations proferred, notably:

1. …that Hollywood has lost its willingness to take risks, opting for mediocre formulaics instead of boom-or-bust definitive works
2. …that Hollywood has lost touch with the new generation that expect their media to fit within a broader context: downloadable, modifiable, and with an online community built up around it
3. …that Hollywood has become irrelevant in the face of a globally connected media market, which sees foreign films on small budgets competing more evenly for exposure and hype

Personally, I would suggest that #1 above hits closest to the mark but to put it more succinctly – Hollywood needs to produce stuff that doesn’t suck. In that vein, then, I have done my part to help it along (towards rebirth or ruin I leave as an exercise for the reader).

The Best Movie Ever Made…

These points do not constitute a story board, I’m not good with stories, but they are the elements which I feel will contribute to an overall gestalt of awesomality.

• Opening credit bed should be a heist scene in which everything goes very smoothly and cool until some kind of catastrophe befalls the group. I suggest an explosion. The coolness of the heist is essential since it will set the pace for the rest of the movie. It should feature some previously-unknown quasi-military technology, clearly designed only for heisting, like that circular glass cutter thing.
• All sidearms should have silencers.
• Crew scene: one of those assemblages of 15-second cut scenes where the leads assemble a new crew of highly skilled individuals with endearing personality quirks while groovy music with a good beat plays in the background. The guy most critical to the operation should be unavailable for some reason (I suggest an explosion) so they have to take his hot daughter instead. They should be reluctant to do this until she proves herself in the middle of the movie by getting them out of a jam.
• In fact, there should be several of those musical cut scenes throughout the movie, any time something is being organized or set up.
• Female leads should be hot. BUT hot with some actual meat on them. Give me Thora Birch from American Beauty, not what’s-her-face blonde chickie. And please no Carrie-Anne Moss butterfaces^[?].
• Male leads should be hot, but in that charming boy next door way like Matt Damon, not in the love-me-because-I’m-beautiful Brad Pitt way. The old guy who knows the business better than anyone can be hot in a Robert Redford way.
• To establish cerebrality, there needs to be an off-topic dialogue scene between male lead and female lead about some esoteric point of academia. The standard offering here is to have them discuss things like the proper use of a semi-colon (ref: You’ve Got Mail) or schools of fencing (ref: Princess Bride) or American history (ref: Good Will Hunting). In honour of the great Oliver Sacks, who has recently written a book on the subject, I suggest a discussion of ferns.
• Girls Kissing.
• As part of the setup for the big action sequence, one of the crew must assemble a sniper rifle either from a padded case or from parts smuggled in. There should be at least 50 pieces, and each one should snick into place with authority. There should be much banging of clips into weapons, and loud testing of action.
• The girls kissing should be tentative though, experimental — not porn kissing. Sweet.
• One of the crew will perforce be a computer hacker, but it should totally be a chick, and she should get her lines right, technically. She should study the hacker character played by Hugh Jackman in Swordfish and then do the exact opposite.
• A car chase scene better than Ronin or The Bourne Supremacy. It should make use of the masterful calibre of writing evidenced in Die Hard 3 when Bruce Willis has Samuel L Jackson kill the ABS relay before attempting his crazy 360 spin while braking and shooting the bad guys maneuver. Genius.
• OMG. Samuel L Jackson should totally be in it. Also Seth Green, Christopher Walken, and Tim Roth. Wil Wheaton can be in it if he takes my idea to his hollywood people. (Hi Wil)
• Near the end there needs to be a one-on-one fight scene featuring a highly technically accurate and well-choreographed weapon battle using a real-but-obscure weapon. Notable reference material includes the short-blade knife fight in Under Siege and several of the fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Unacceptable would be a Jackie Chan-style fight where he uses a chair and a flamingo to parry shotgun blasts.
• Maybe one of the girls is hot for the other one, but the other one is unsure. It would be good to build up tension throughout with occasional brushes past each other and glances and such.
• A critical component of the plan should involve some hideously dangerous chemical/device/knowledge. It must be so dangerous that the crew-member responsible for it gets a 2 minute monologue where he expounds upon said danger. (Ref, in no particular order: Nicholas Cage talking about VX Gas in The Rock; the fat guy in Die Hard 3 talking about binary liquids; Tommy Lee Jones talking to Will Smith about everything in MIB; and freaky arab guy talking to chickieboo and Brendan Fraser about the book of the dead in The Mummy.)
• Male lead should be betrayed by other male lead, which no one suspects, except hot female lead, who shoots him in the back just when we expected him to shoot first male lead. For some reason the fire suppression system should go off (I suggest an explosion.) If the scene is outdoors, it should start raining, or a nearby water tanker should explode. The female lead should get wet, is where I’m going with this.

The problem is, my movie is too radical for Hollywood. Too good, more like it.