JohnB wrote:
Michel Lemieux wrote:
The original BoB and Pearl Harbour movies were almost documentaries....... just delightful...
But neither film was that warmly received, and neither was a huge financial success.
The purpose of show business is:
-to make money
-to entertain
Neither film did that well in either category for the general public.
Yeah the problem with "almost documentaries" is that it's like sitting in a lecture hall and all information you receive is spoken:
"Now we're down to the Observer Corps"
Unless you like airplanes the movie isn't entertaining. And if it's not entertaining it doesn't make money. And if it doesn't make money the kinds of things we like to see on the screen don't get made.
And that's the second aspect of this: people who love to see movies with airplanes represent a small fraction of the movie-going public We like the flying iron: to most people they are no more important than the cars used in other movies.
As I wrote earlier in this thread, writing a WWII air combat movie script that is both informative and entertaining is really hard. So I'm not getting my hopes if for this movie or for Ridley Scott's BoB.
I would be most pleased if I was wrong in not getting my hopes up for these two flicks.
One writer who figured out how to both tell an entertaining story as well as inform was Martin Scorsese. If you look at Goodfellas or Casino, you had the characters talking to you off screen while you watched them. They explained stuff to you. You learned about the mob culture or Las Vegas casinos at the same time you saw what you were learning in action: you were hugely entertained.
I don't think that scheme would work with Midway or BoB. It' d be funny though. Imagine Yammamoto talking offscreen filling you in on how great the plan was though maybe yeah it's a little complex but we can't lose; or "Stuffy" Dowding talking off screen.
But now that I think of it. It just might be a winner to have, say, Keith Park talking to you offscreen while you are watching the info go from the radar station to the filter room to the WAAF's at the Big Board to the squadrons climbing out. Scorsese did exactly that when he showed how the skim from Vegas gets collected and sent back east. Park could explain to you what was happening, and how the Dowding System worked WHILE you were watching it happen. That could actually work.
But it'd have to be Joe Pesci doing it