Rather than wasting valuable time and creative energy to make quality films, I developed an unrelenting production method, in which all talent was either on set or rehearsing the next film. I tolerated neither relaxation nor frivolity, and as soon as someone was off a project, I jammed them into something new, even if the script wasn’t a good genre fit.
I was confronted with an escalating array of management decisions. Would it raise staff morale to install that bubble-gum machine? Was it worth upgrading my high-strung action director’s trailer? Should I send over a photographer to watch my leading lady stumble around drunk between scenes? (It might piss her off, but we’d get great press.)
We needed to invest in a laboratory to research technologies that would keep me a step ahead of my cut-throat competition. Those creaky old black and white cameras had been fine in their day, but if I could be the first studio to engage such bleeding-edge innovations as 16mm film, audiences would flock to fork over their hard-earned dollars. I assigned one group of tech geeks to a think-tank on which fashions would be hot in the 1930s, while a science nerd in another room stood in front of a chalk board, furiously scratching out formulas to design a machine that would make fake rain on an outdoor set.
I began to feel a kinship with the legendary assholes of Hollywood. Critics are quick to give the finger to Louis B. Meyer, painting him as nothing more than a cold-blooded shark who churned out mealy, lowest-common-denominator crowd pleasers. But faced with the economic imperatives of early-20th-century filmmaking, Meyer-esque filmmaking feels like good, hard common sense: lowest common denominator movies create the highest denominations of profit! And in the 1940s, that money, my friend, is what paid for me to build the public-relations firms that got my stars in front of all those newspaper and radio people.
Compared to the challenge of staying financially afloat, it was easy to make the actors happy enough to stay with my studio. All I had to do was keep them on the magazine covers by decking them out in the latest threads. In the ’30s, all the guys wanted gangster suits, but by the ’50s they insisted on the leather jacket look of that no-talent hack Marlon Brandon, or whatever the hell his name was.
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But I’m proud of our technical accomplishments in those years. We were the first studio to develop dolly rigs, camera cranes, and stereo sound, and it was cheap tricks like those that allowed me to pluck 18-year-old bimbos right off the street and plunk them into my films – for nothing! Here’s a secret: audiences didn’t care that my actors sucked and my stories were dull. The reason people packed my theaters? One word: Technicolor.
Take 8: Complications
It is unbelievably difficult to build chemistry between stars. In The Movies, it can take years of game time to get actors to develop a decent friendship, let alone get some starlet in your trailer. Relationship-building involves tediously dragging your leading twosome through open parks, bars, and restaurants, because no one in The Movies has any spontaneous chemistry with each other. Left to their own devices, your actors will remain completely neutral towards each other through their 50-year careers. It’s as if they lacked even the barest slice of personality. And oncce you do go through the trouble of seeding a relationship, it leads only to some surface-level interaction: a paltry romance at best, or maybe a good friendship. (Sorry, my dear Phoenix readers, there won’t be any Brokeback moments in The Movies – romance is for straights only.)
The game can grow really exhausting for a number of other reasons as well. In order to make The Movies accessible to a younger audience, the user interface is a series of word balloons and pop-up bubbles. They are fun at first, but when you get into the white heat of a complex game at 2:30 in the morning, you want speed, and all of the extra clicks to get things done become a drag. And the game further ticks you off by running slower and slower as more characters and more complex sets show up on screen.
Click the screenshot to watch a music video for the song "Breathe" by the band Acracy made with Activision's The Movies
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Take 9: Time is Money
By the 1960s, a few hundred thousand dollars here or there wasn’t going to make much difference one way or another on my balance sheet. Keeping productions in motion was a much larger problem. Once, my screenwriting department got overexcited about a brand new sound stage we’d just built for a World War II-type battlefield. It was a beautiful set, with a half-destroyed skyline and plenty of bombed-out building fronts, perfect for last-ditch rallying cries and Gestapo shoot-outs. My writers wrote that particular set into the next couple of scripts they churned out, and while I was filming the first movie, my number two team ground to a halt for an entire month because the first three scenes in their movie take place during the war. Just as I noticed this problem, the director of the first movie got so stressed out from directing his fourth movie in two years that he ran off the set to stuff his face with veal cutlets in the V.I.P. lounge of my studio restaurant.
I had to let the poor simp gorge himself enough to get his mood rating a hairline above poor, and meanwhile, two movies were totally stalled out. Finally, when he was adequately fattened up, I dragged his sorry ass back to scene 17. When all else failed I’d throw money at him, increasing his paltry salary and hiring a personal assistant to boost his fragile ego.