Hollywood Scripting

[Wombaticus Rex]

Wombat, the quoted matter seems to change voices so that the last part is a commentary on the first, can you clarify this?

It's just some shit I c/p'd from wikiquestions or wikianswers, not sure which...I was thinking I should just write my own summary but then the sun came out so I went and played guitar on the porch instead.

[barracuda]

Is that to say that all film is propaganda?

All film is propaganda. All stories are propaganda, in the sense of "propagation", or transmission of specific moral focus by telling. Narrative itself is propaganda, as every viewpoint necessarily has a point-of-view or a polemic or even a morality attached to it. Even Hugh's film Sir No Sir is propaganda - it's simply propaganda from a perspective he personally agrees with.

What we’re missing is evidence illustrating the way in which the (“covert”) corruption is actually inserted into specific scripts. The “who, what, where and how” it’s done. If it is so pervasive it must also be perceived in its process.

This has been exhaustively attempted before. See: Primary sources for the keyword hijacking theory.

[lupercal]

Here's how it's done:



I imagine the technology has changed, as have the players and messages, but films have been micromanaged by regulators, advertisers, censors, OWI overseers and sundry others agents, often in conflict, on the level of the single word (example from a skirmish over "In Which We Serve," a British war import peppered with profanity: yes to "hell" and "damn," no to "bastard," in one scene only, for this film only), costume, character, ending, film title, etc, officially and with voluminous paper trails stashed in multiple archives, since 1930.

[JackRiddler]

Here's how it's done:



I imagine the technology has changed, as have the players and messages, but films have been micromanaged by regulators, advertisers, censors, OWI overseers and sundry others agents, often in conflict, on the level of the single word (example from a skirmish over "In Which We Serve," a British war import peppered with profanity: yes to "hell" and "damn," no to "bastard," in one scene only, for this film only), costume, character, ending, film title, etc, officially and with voluminous paper trails stashed in multiple archives, since 1930.

And before. Pretty much.

[barracuda]

Yes, we have voluminous direct historical evidence of the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code by Hays, Breen, Lord and Quigley, etc., in the form of letters, documented meetings, production notes, and more. Your example seems to work against Hugh, for this is exactly what is strangely missing from his theory regarding the actual mechanics of his proposed method of propaganda manipulation, i.e., documented instances of keyword hijacking specifics: changing character names, colors and shapes to create priming opportunities for meme reversals and deflections.

[Searcher08]

What we’re missing is evidence illustrating the way in which the (“covert”) corruption is actually inserted into specific scripts. The “who, what, where and how” it’s done. If it is so pervasive it must also be perceived in its process.

This is where HMW goes silent. It isn't even necessarily the scripts - he has said it is the trailers and the box and cast and actors and character names. What then happens with The Lord Of The Rings?

One thing that should be said is that Milton Erickson worked in the context of psychotherapy. In one to one interactions in a demonstration or therapeutic context. Posting an introduction of techniques that are used in trance utilisation indicates what? Perhaps HMW can point to a single instance of inclusion of an Ericksonian technique in a movie? I dont know about the US , but in the UK even showing a trance induction on TV is prohibited by law. The Erickson Institute
are very demanding about credentials for people wanting to learn it btw - you cant just so and say "Hey, I'm interested, teach me".

I asked someone I know where external influencing of the sort HMW described would come in and she (who worked in the TV side of things) said that each network has an internal 'vetting deartment', so if a character said "shut yer big slobbery Irish gob!", this might go against a list of what is acceptable for programs of that broadcast time and audience. Seth MacFarlane would get a pass though. She indicated that what drove much of the script development was not the creation of something new but actually a very risk-averse process, much more like 'Health and Safety' where the fear of being sued or creating bad publicity for the sponsor was not 'a factor', it was a completely debilitating background culture. She had written TV episodes which were cheeky, sparky and edgy... and had them 'dumbed down' with 'We might offend...X,Y,Z' to the really mundane.

peartreed,
I was really interested in your involvement with The Lone Gunman. You said there was no problem with the government about it. I was wondering how did the cast crew writers react when 9/11 happened? I found that episode very compelling - my purely subjective impression was of feeling someone was trying to get the word out about what was coming up, no evidence to back that up though!


It might be worth exploring...
Are there potentially different 'injection points' in TV vs movies?
If Hollywood directors / creatives would be involved in very big budget music videos (eg the Ke$ha one previously listed) - because (IMHO much more than film) things like this (skip to 1:30)

[lupercal]

Your example seems to work against Hugh, for this is exactly what is strangely missing from his theory regarding the actual mechanics of his proposed method of propaganda manipulation, i.e., documented instances of keyword hijacking specifics: changing character names, colors and shapes to create priming opportunities for meme reversals and deflections.

It isn't strangely missing, it simply hasn't been declassified and publicly archived yet. That's a process that takes decades of the kind of research Hugh is doing now. For example it took 71 years for the 1936 Breen letters cited above to show up in this 2007 Columbia University Press book:

http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0- ... ods-censor

And Breen wasn't making any special effort to hide his tracks that I know of. So a corroborating paper trail is asking for a different shrubbery altogether, isn't it?

[barracuda]

Surface? Those documents have been sitting in the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills for 70 years, waiting for anyone who was interested to come by and take a look. Even Hugh is allowed in to view the collections.

The Paramount Pictures Censorship Department records span the years 1935-1959 (bulk 1935-1948) and encompass less than one linear foot. There is correspondence, both general in nature and with the Hays Office, related to some ten films released between 1937 and 1947; as well as Production Code Administration correspondence related to reissues from 1935 to 1938. The files appear to be from the office of Luigi Luraschi in the Censorship Department and include letters from Joseph I. Breen as well as internal Paramount correspondence with Albert Deane in the Foreign Department and Hiller Innes in the production office in New York. There is miscellaneous, unrelated, correspondence between Paramount's New York and Hollywood offices from 1959.

I'd do it myself, but I have chimeras of my own I'm chasing at the moment.

[lupercal]

^ the Herrick library appears to be the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science library which, not surprisingly, is dedicated to Academy Awards shows. The "Paramount Collection" cited by Doherty is most likely the extensive collection at UCLA:

http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/collections/paramount

From Doherty's list of abbreviations on p. 474:



He does list the Herrick library but he abbreviates it as "AMPAS."

[barracuda]

I'm sure the UCLA library is a great resource as well, but the letters you referenced seem to be from the Special Collections at Herrick. See footnote #9 on page 328.

I could be wrong though. It's happened before.

[lupercal]

Full disclosure: the Breen citations are from an article by Karen Keely entitled "Scientific Selection on the Silver Screen: Madcap Eugenics in College Holiday" published in a 2006 Ohio UP collection, "Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency And American Mass Culture in the 1930," ed. Currell and Cogdell. Link:

http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Popular+Eugenics

p.s. the library will be closing in thirty minutes.

[JackRiddler]

This is shaping up to be a thread worthy of some reference material.

Here's something to keep in mind:

At Times 90% of Audience for TV
And at the Multiplex in the USA
And for All Broadcast News Media
Today Belongs To Six Companies:

- Disney-ABC-Pixar-Dreamworks-Marvel-lots of radio
- Sony-Columbia
- Comcast-NBC-Universal - note: a cable company! With a joint venture with Microsoft
- Viacom-CBS
- Time-Warner-HBO-WarnerBros-DC-AOL - note: a cable company!
- Newscorp-FOX-20th Century Fox-WSJ-etc.

Thesis 1: Most of the work in predictably shaping feature film and TV program propaganda is already done by corporate culture, ideology (most of all habitual or ambient ideology), careerism, prevailing political-economic winds, the standard formulae and narratives and tropes, and demographic paradigms about the national culture and subcultures that are being marketed.

In fewer words: by capitalism, authoritarian statism and militarism.

There is also an overt state censorship system in place via FCC, MPAA, the kind of internal legal compliance measures mentioned by peartreed above, and subsidy of production by the Pentagon Office and other agencies. (There are also the famous state and city "tax incentives," which is a misnomer because they're direct subsidies, but these ironically are given out liberally to any production willing to shoot in a given state or city.

Thesis 2: While this renders direct control by covert state-based agents or parapolitical operators largely superfluous, it should also provide an ideal environment for such control to insert itself.

.

While we're at it...

Let's Add Most of the Internet Traffic:

- Google-Youtube (50% of video online by views), also owner of blogspot.
- Hulu, a joint venture of Fox, NBC and others.
- Netflix is 88% owned by institutional investors (i.e., banks) and thus ready for a merger at any time.
- Microsoft
- Apple-iTunes
- Yahoo
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Tumblr

Add another two to four telecom-cable companies.

Plus the agenda-setting print media:
NYT, WP, AP, Thomsen-Reuters, Bloomberg, Gannett, and Bertelsmann.

Plus Clear Channel. (A big chunk of the broadcast radio as well as of the musical content is in the hands of companies already mentioned.)

I suspect the above covers the vast majority of US media content produced by paid professionals, something around 90 percent of the networks and platforms that deliver it by broadcast, cable, online, telephone or to a theater, and something around 90 percent of the total US audience for TV, video, movies, news and other day-to-day content.

The ownership is smaller than it looks, and more mergers are coming.

.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Um, check out how the plot of a psyops tv show called 'Rubicon' just became a psyops 'news' story about Hugo Chavez.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34686

Seems eee-vil plots are hidden in crossword puzzles...almost as if by...'alphabet' agencies....woo.
Fact fiction who knows...mirror mirror on the wall...oops - that's a different psyops movie genre now playing.

released March 30, 2012-




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_na ... en_Dwarves

The following is a list of names of the Seven Dwarfs from multiple versions of the Snow White story. There are many adaptations to the story of Snow White; including animation, film, books, plays, etc. This is a listing of the Seven Dwarfs names based on release date. The original Snow White story, written by the Brothers Grimm, did not feature names to any of the dwarfs.

'Snow White' 1987
Biddy, Diddy, Fiddy, Giddy,
Iddy, Kiddy, Liddy
.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_(1987_film)

http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archi ... te-st.html

G. Gordon Liddy reaps high profit from Watergate stint
KAY BARTLETT Associated Press
SUN 09/13/1987
.....
He's in demand on the lecture circuit and has three very Liddyesque businesses going. He has appeared in a few episodes of " Miami Vice," has a role in a made-for-TV movie coming this fall, and is negotiating other movie and television deals.
.....

[beeblebrox]

^^
The thing we as humans need to figure out is, who were the assholes that first sprayed us with water? Also, whoever they were, they are most likely gone now, so it's time for us to stop beating the shit out of eachother.

Is this really a mystery? History and trauma, fear and tradition. Our own ancestors, all the way down to our parents and peers. The bandits, the conquerors and warriors. Mass rapists with horses and swords. Genghis Khan, who is now thought to be an ancestor, through countless bloodlines, to the majority of the world population. If I'm not mistaken. The founders and priests of the organized world religions, which are the most obvious examples of behaviors we follow and don't question because we learn them as children. Handed down through many generations long after the supposed motivating events, the burning bushes and Roman oppressions and prophets' visions, ceased to be relevant, or even remembered, if they ever were. Predators and experimenters and innovators and protectors, rebels and fools, mothers and fathers through billions of acts all had roles in overdetermined convergence. Yet this is not the whole story. Over and over, our kind of monkey has found ways to climb the ladder after all, to re-script the story, to end the beatings and get to the banana. Sometimes it was even the bad guys who were reproducing the system who also facilitated this. Do you doubt this? Would we even be having this conversation?

.

Yeah, I knew I was going to regret making this statement the moment I posted it. I meant to imply that there was possibly some outside influence that was responsible for starting the cycle of violence and abusive behavior that we as a species have not yet overcome, IMO. This is not necessary, though, as you pointed out. Humans are capable of this sort of behavior all on their own, without any outside influence. It's all part of the evolutionary process I guess, but I wouldn't say we've found a way to climb the ladder just yet. Once we have evolved to the point that we can coexist without trying to destroy each other, while maintaining this planets ability to support life, then I believe we will have succeeded as a species. Until then, we're no different than those monkeys in the experiment, we're just a lot more dangerous.

[JackRiddler]

So here's a relevant prior:

Toward an Evolutionary Typology of TV Cops
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30729&hilit=cop+drama

In response to a description of six stages observable in the evolution of TV cops...

I am not fond of breaking evolutionary histories into stages. It does violence to the beauty of nature. I would rather look for a limited set of forces acting to produce an outcome. In this case, selection seems to be chiefly at work, but (unusually) in a context of increasing bushiness of the evolutionary tree. We went from a very few niches and a situation of competitive exclusion when there were relatively few television outlets and major film studios and distributors, to a rapid radiation of increasingly specialized and differentiated forms when the number of outlets (available niches) exploded in the late 1990s. At the same time, we have seen very strong selection favouring parallel evolution of a limited number of key traits in all these various forms. For shorthand, we can call these key traits the CSI complex.

Some clearly see strong external (environmental) selection in the form of elite control of production. Others will see internal constraints based on previous system configurations. In evolutionary history, the past constrains the future, and makes certain developments more likely than others. I tend to see a strong role for internal constraints and weak opportunism on the part of rather fractious elites. In any case, the shift from Dragnet to CSI is for me clearly patterned and the result of the operation of forces, rather than a purely historical and undirected development.

In response to DrVolin's beautiful post... let's indeed go with evolutionary theory and list the possible selection, morphological, and niche factors, as a prelude to hypothesizing how they weigh and relate.

brainstorm... the categories are not clear-cut

VARIATION
Producers and writers
Actual cops and crime trends, perceived and real
Available templates (e.g., books to adapt)
Ideology/dominant or official
Ideology/specialized
Spook and psyop influences or initiation of projects
Studios
Influences of the era in programming
Influences of zeitgeist and current events
Budget!

SELECTION
Audience/ratings
Audience/fandom and subcultures
Audience/adverse reactions, protests
Advertisers
Producers and writers
Studios
Critics and media reception
Hidden sponsorship (i.e., counter to ratings, not just spooks but powerful fans)
Media corps/owners
Pick-up by foreign television
Budget
Censors!

MORPHOLOGY
Ancient form of story, esp. morality play
Attraction/parameters/demands of genre
Formal demands of plot and character
30/60-minute block format and other time constraints (commercial break)

NICHE
Number of channels and producers
Syndication possibilities
Advent of specialty channels
Advent of video/DVD/Internet
Minimum ratings required for viability

For a start...