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Hollywood is a fickle creature whose imagination is tinted by its financial health. In good times, independence is more accepted and chances easier to take. In more challenged times, chances give way to the known.

I do not believe that all the good ideas have been taken or that all the good stories have been told. I write fan fiction and I work very hard not to repeat a story or use something I've seen elsewhere. While freely admitting that ideas and plots can be repeated from author to author, the uniqueness comes in how they are played out and the interaction and make up of the characters. That's what keeps it fresh and new.

Oftentimes, to make something unique, you have to allow for the new factor. You have to be open to the possbility of taking a viewer to a place they've never been before, or to see something in such a way that it makes them feel something unexpected. A new location, a different perspective between two characters, or an action not used in a certain situation before: these make plots and films stand apart from one another. It's called taking a risk.

Unfortunately, in Hollywood, they don't allow for uniqueness or risk taking when they choose to reuse a plot, something brought about more when money is tight. If one genre succeeds with a tale of woe using plot devices A, B, and C, those same ploys are used for the next production. No matter what your history of success may be, in tough times, you just don't have much freedom to go out of bounds.

One of the mainstays in Hollywood these days seems to be the remakes, something I have great disdain for. While a few remakes become retoolings that honor the original (like "The Fugitive", for example), too many others are just slapstick tools to give Eddie Murphy and other comics something to do. For every successful retooling like "Charlie's Angels" or "Ocean's Eleven", there are five unsuccessful flops like "Wild Wild West" that make you wonder if the producers had even watched the original. Money: it's all money.

I favor character interaction and intelligence over slapstick, but apparently slapstick is cheaper to make. The wonderfully thoughtful films from the likes of Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg are harder to get a green light for, and if you're a newcomer on the scene, forget it. It's a sad state of affairs, but that is how Hollywood has always operated. Their imagination will return, when our world overcomes it's financial hardships of the day. That's when the new stories will resurface.

Learn more about this author, Marcia Studley.
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