Since you can only nitpick a movie after you’ve already paid to see it, where is the economic incentive for anyone to do this?
The actual problem is even more complicated than that, though. The movie business is run by producers—the people who put up the money. They may have experience in the film business, but since there is no universally agreed criteria as to what constitutes a good investment, it is subject to bias, nepotism, superstition, etc. Favors are owed to people, the star or director has a pet issue that must be addressed to get them on board, etc.
This means that to a great extent the artistic direction of a film is determined by committee, many members of which have only the most superficial understanding of what is going on or what the film is about or anything else, and have no real desire to understand more deeply because such an understanding would not do anything useful for their own interests.
IOW, it’s a values alignment problem of the same type that produces other forms of civilizational inadequacy, and the mere existence of better writing tools can’t help it, for the same reason that the vast storehouse of existing wisdom and literature of telling effective stories on film doesn’t help it that much either. The screenplays have to be effectively written to get bought, but once they’re bought the connection between what was first written and what actually gets filmed can be quite tenuous indeed.
Since you can only nitpick a movie after you’ve already paid to see it, where is the economic incentive for anyone to do this?
The actual problem is even more complicated than that, though. The movie business is run by producers—the people who put up the money. They may have experience in the film business, but since there is no universally agreed criteria as to what constitutes a good investment, it is subject to bias, nepotism, superstition, etc. Favors are owed to people, the star or director has a pet issue that must be addressed to get them on board, etc.
This means that to a great extent the artistic direction of a film is determined by committee, many members of which have only the most superficial understanding of what is going on or what the film is about or anything else, and have no real desire to understand more deeply because such an understanding would not do anything useful for their own interests.
IOW, it’s a values alignment problem of the same type that produces other forms of civilizational inadequacy, and the mere existence of better writing tools can’t help it, for the same reason that the vast storehouse of existing wisdom and literature of telling effective stories on film doesn’t help it that much either. The screenplays have to be effectively written to get bought, but once they’re bought the connection between what was first written and what actually gets filmed can be quite tenuous indeed.