It’s All In The Movies

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The problem with humans…. No wait, if I start like that, it’s like answering “what do you know” by starting with “in the beginning there was chaos” Ala Mycroft in The Moon is a Hard Mistress.

One of the problems with humans is that we are part clankers.

No, hear me out. It’s like this: we have our basic hardware but we learn. We learn constantly, and we learn from the things we’re fed.

This has been our greatest strength and what has made us masters of the planet. Even more so when we learned to forge stories, so we could absorb them and not have to make all the mistakes ourselves.

And so, we learned from stories: don’t bring the wooden horse into the citadel; don’t mistreat guests; don’t trust the enemy, don’t go into the forest alone, don’t trust the tiger.

And the cultures that learned best from stories were the ones that survived best, and whose children went forth and populated the world.

Which is why our ability to be trained like clankers. Because as with clankers, it’s all what we’re trained on, isn’t it?

And we’re addicted to stories, and continuously try to tell more and better stories.

I tell you people, visual story telling might be the end of us.

There are complex theories as to how the texts exchanged between Charlie Kirk’s assassin (don’t say his name. Let him be consigned to damnatio memoriae) and his lover are faked because “no one talks like that.”

But they do. They do in movies and probably in games (I don’t know about games, because I don’t play them, but I see a lot of movie telling in them. Perhaps it is an exigency of visual story.) They write things that normal human beings wouldn’t write, because they’re signaling to the audience.

They’re the good guys. He’s committed an heroic deed, in his own life, and he’ll escape detection, because the good guys always do.

It’s like this story, of the collapse of an ultra woke bookshop that you have to have a heart of stone not to laugh like an hyena:

The collapse of a leftist bookstore.

And this is for you the x-less (thinking that life has passed you by.)

What is riveting about this is that they seem completely baffled that the bookstore is failing. Because, think about it, in movies it works that way. You signal you’re the good guys — and they’re doing everything movies told them the good guys do and saying everything the good guys say — and then you win.

Of course, in Hollywood you have the filmmaker’s magic on your side, and of course it works for them, because it is their beliefs and their logic.

I’m saying this on our side too: They keep shooting our guys! We need to shoot theirs or we’ll lose.

Ah, but that’s in games, and in movies. In reality, in the seventies, they killed and blew up the forces of order, who never responded in kind and instead fought them with law and reality, and they went away for decades. And this form is weaker, and frankly stupid.

The true battle is ideas. They want to silence us because they’re that scared of our words. If we fight them with bullets, we give them the opportunity to say there is no choice, to paint us with their crimes and their evil.

They are losing. Falling into war now will only let them win. Because it will destroy the society they want to destroy. Why should we fight on their side.

This is not a movie, nor a game. We don’t have storytellers on our side. It’s not a matter of evening the score.

The true battle is of ideas, and ideas will shape the next battles, the next century and beyond.

Real life is not a movie. Real life is not a game.

And they were never told about reality, much less taught reality.

Look, I have nothing against movies or games. And each art form has its own short hand, or stories would be just “reality” and who wants to play in that? Most people with a soul want to play in something where the result is what you want.

The problem is that our movies and our games, and all our story telling has been high jacked by a philosophy that’s contrary to life and reality.

And what it teaches our children is how to hate their culture; how to do things that don’t work; how to destroy and die.

Consider this your clarion call: If we don’t counter this poison in our culture right now, we will be committing suicide. It’s like teaching clankers who control cars that there other cars are sponge. It is like teaching clankers that launch satellites that gravity has been abolished. It is like taking poison and expecting to thrive.

Yes, we need new stories, stories that aren’t shaped by the old gatekeepers who forced us to kiss the ring and build nonsense into our stories, but there’s more than that. This is the third generation raised on leftist poison. They abjure the obvious things, of course they do, as we did in our time, but they don’t know anything else, and so their touchstones for how reality works are all the basic, old leftist lies.

It’s time to teach: teach about true history, true economics, true stories. Do it in conversation, do it in lessons, do it in your life and your actions, do it in everything, and hope, hope the children absorb enough that we can correct for the evil lies poured into the world these last hundred years.

And maybe, maybe we’ll skate by.

119 thoughts on “It’s All In The Movies”

  1. First?

    Falling into war now will only let them win. Because it will destroy the society they want to destroy. Why should we fight on their side.

    That is a very, very good point. Let’s not throw Br’er Rabbit into the briar patch.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. A good point indeed. You could also state it as the classic, “Never interrupt the enemy when he’s making a mistake”. Their mistake is in thinking that a few acts of violence by nutcases will topple society; it won’t if we don’t let it, and it’s essentially all they have in their bag of tricks. When it fails they “got nuthin'”.

      Feels strange with my background to be advocating patience, but there it is…🤔

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      1. Dear Lord, Bob. I’m a depressive and a berserker, and I’ve spent the last ten years pushing hope at people and telling them to abide yet without pulling out the cartridge box. How do you think I feel?
        What’s worse, i feel that He wants me to do this (which is amazing as when we started this I was more agnostic than not. But there it is) which can only mean He has a sense of humor.
        Kind that puts itch powder in your pressure suit.

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        1. Ok now hear me out… you hit them with sticks. Over and over again. Every time they act up or block roads or loot and burn, you send an army of strong men to hit them with sticks. If the broken windows theory holds true, you won’t get to where they are burning and looting, but if they do then they do, and you hit them with sticks for it. Call it behavioral corrective therapy if it makes you feel better. Its been tried and it’s been proven to be very very effective.

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      2. Communism is basically ‘with this one weird trick, you can drive people into an unthinking homicidal rage, where you can easily scam them’.

        The cases where it ever worked, seemed to work, or was made to seem to work were situational.

        And basically, less food stress, more information, more people deeply traumatized by their shit, means folks with the strategic depth, and intel to thwart them more effectively.

        And, they have been failing for literal decades, with situations much closer to what they were prepared for.

        The spree killers are terrible, but they’ve been terrible for decades, and people haven’t taken the scams.

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  2. “in Hollywood you have the filmmaker’s magic on your side”.

    S. M. Stirling called that “The scriptwriters are on your side”. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

    And yes, he had a character say that when the character had gotten into a situation where a movie character would have “bounded right up and won” or when another character found that Real Life is different than the movies/TV.

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      1. Also, it is important to fight for the stories, and against the people who want to gut them and wear the skins to hijack them to their own sour purposes.

        The people across the intertubes fighting against that story skinsuiting by KK and JJ and all the others around the world who hate what the fans love are fighting for society itself – we are what brought us to where we are, and those trying to undercut and retcon and reboot those stories out of existence, and overwrite them with their own arrow-based “corrections”, are worthy of opposition.

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          1. That’s a little of this and a little of that – the clankersv trained on BBC crap will undoubtedly be quite confused for the rest of time, but there’s plenty of evidence that the internal weightings and tweaks and fiddly programming bits are way, way, way biased, at least the ones developed up to now which were programmed and weighted and tweaked by humans, so they represent those respective HR department’s candidate screening biases.

            Going forward, with coders being replaced by clankers across the board, the clankers will be biased by the clankers which coded them, on and on to a world without end, turtles all the way down.

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            1. Going forward, with coders being replaced by clankers across the board, the clankers will be biased by the clankers which coded them, on and on to a world without end, turtles all the way down.

              In all seriousness, one of the certain ways to drive a clanker crackers is to allow it to only feed on other clankers.

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              2. Because “AI” amplifies certain kinds of noise, and even different kinds of “AI” tend to amplify very similar kinds, so hook enough of them together and the noise-to-signal ratio at the output closely approximates infinity? That fits with my (outsider’s) summary picture of things.

                “AI is a lot like your well-read but dotty aunt or uncle; use them to get a broad overview of things but never, ever trust even one detail for anything truly important, always check yourself.”

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        2. Thank you! Been in those trenches just over a decade. Gets kind of tiresome to be told it’s “just comics/movies/TV shows/stories, why are you so worked up about what’s not real?”

          One, character assassination is not made less bad by the target being fictional. Two, and far more important, if you’re going to be swimming in stories, it’s better when they’re not the equivalent of sewage. Latest piece on the subject, with some suggestions on how to improve matters – JesterBell’s somewhat new to the fight but she’s worth listening to: https://open.substack.com/pub/upstreamreviews/p/a-great-disturbance-in-the-fandom

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          1. Personally I like the idea of turning their own crap against them – for example, they had the emo goth kid kill Han by stabbing him through with his out of tune lightsaber, but have since established multiple times that stabbing through the gut with a lightsaber is barely a flesh wound, which means… Han Didn’t Die.

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            2. XD Oh, now that would be a great lead in to fixing the franchise…or at least giving us some very good fanfic!

              Also, having seen that trick pulled so many times beforehand…I already had a “bad feeling” about The Force Awakens, finding out they offed Han just clinched my certainty that the sequel trilogy was going to be bad. Granted, I didn’t realize how bad, since they were so good about cloaking it before. They exceeded expectations there. I wish they hadn’t.

              :brightens: I did my own fanfics for Episodes 7 and 8, though. Still need to finish 9, but if anyone’s interested, this is 7: https://carolinesnewsletter.substack.com/p/fan-fiction-the-force-awakens

              And this is 8: https://carolinesnewsletter.substack.com/p/fan-fiction-star-wars-episode-viii

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            1. :nods gravely: Characters were my friends and stories were my escape even in childhood, when the world was quite truly being unfair, such as when the car ate another alternator. (Loved that car, but if ever something went wrong, odds were it was the alternator – again – and that meant a tow on top of the repairs.) My favorite characters were there when I needed them, and they could hang out with me any time. It made the world Right for a while.

              So when someone goes after that? After what might be a person’s sole escape, sole option for keeping their sanity in this mad world? If they go after the thing that gives someone joy, hope, and a little patch of calm? Oh, no, they don’t. Hands. Off.

              Now.

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              1. I still cherish some emails I exchanged with Dr. Pournelle because Fallen Angels was the first time that I found out there was some kind of fannish subculture– it wasn’t just “probably won’t harass you to tears for liking Star Trek,” which was mostly my relatives anyways.

                Books let me know that I wasn’t really unspeakably weird. I was just not the current fashion, and I can deal with that.

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                2. Im getting closer to the current fashion, judging by all the gnomes around these days.

                  I was a gnome fancier before gnomes were all the rage.

                  A certain sign the end times are near, probably.

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                1. Could have been what was causing the problem. It was a long time ago and that old beauty is long gone, sadly. I think we got it fixed eventually, but for a while, it was, “Yep, alternator again.”

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                2. I had a ’75 Celica whose voltage regulator ate the alternator. Got a new battery from a store near work (some 20 miles from home), got to the local Parts-r’-Us franchise and did the swap there. (It’s not paranoia to have a toolkit in the trunk. I’ve owned two British sports cars and KNOW it’s going to go sideways eventually.)

                  IIRC, the late, unlamented Super Beetle had a bad regulator. OTOH, the engine was trashed and I got laid off before I could order the bits to build a new one. The remnants were gifted to the Vdub shop nearby before we left Cali.

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                3. Older cars (into the 1970s) had a separate regulator in a metal box about 2x2x1 inches, mounted on the radiator core support or the inner fenderwell near the alternator. You unscrewed or unplugged the wires to change the regulator.

                  Later cars (1980s-ish) had the regulator mounted on the back of the alternator. They weren’t too hard to change.

                  1990s-ish cars often had the regulator inside the alternator, where it was much harder to get at.

                  2000-up cars, just finding the alternator can be an adventure, where helpful engineers placed it underneath the engine, or under plastic dress-up covers, or simply require removing half the engine accessories to get to it. Some later Cadillacs allow 3-1/2 hours for a factory trained mechanic at the dealership just to change an alternator.

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              3. Conan of Cimmeria would have known the proper response to craven cowards such as this, who have no respect for the singers of tales! Nay; no respect for the singers, nor for those feasting on the sagas as one feasts on mead and meat! For tales have kept many a soul alive who would otherwise have succumbed to fear, famine, and worse. To the Outer Dark with such shirklings of truth!

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                1. I’ve stalled on a project because 1) I need to go back and create a story-Bible for all the terms and magic, and 2) I need to study bardic traditions, especially satire as punishment in more depth. The protagonist is a Celtic (DalRiada) bard, half Irish, half Pict.

                  You didn’t mess with bards, especially a bard with a Gift, who has allies on both sides of the borders.

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                  3. You might want to look at some of Caitlin Matthews’ Celtic spirituality books. (It’s been long enough not to point at specific titles, alas.) Applicable right to the time/place you’re aiming for, the old single kingdom, Common Gaelic days. The subspecialty you’d likely want is the filidh or “poet” who was, IIRC, only one step below the king in line (“after the King’s portion”) at a feast.

                    And poetic satire was indeed serious stuff — classed as white or “speckled” or black in escalating levels of virulence — and could (it is said) cause boils, lingering illness, or just plain death.

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                    1. Thanks. I have to be careful with her work. Some of it is fine, some gives me really uncomfortable vibes. (Although not as bad as the book about the quest for the Holy Grail that included guided meditations. I didn’t dare even read those sections, the feeling was so bad. As in “Don’t touch the door, don’t peek through the keyhole, don’t even step on the welcome mat,” vibes.)

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          3. When I develop a roleplaying campaign, I like to look at what’s real because it’s a richer and more unexpected source than fiction is. Human cultures, for example, have beliefs and customs weirder than most alien cultures made up by SF writers—if you find the right culture.

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            1. Minor peeve of mine is the “trying to be alien” effect.

              …a lot of worldbuilding doesn’t bother trying to make it work, they just want to make it “different,” and they mostly make it flat and paint by the numbers, to the point you can figure out their personal biases and what they’re Take That!-ing against.

              “I wrote this story to show that [THING] is wrong!”
              “Believe me, I can tell.”

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              1. What I’m trying for is heterotopia, and often for what TV Tropes calls “blue and orange morality.”

                For example, there was one of my campaigns where a group of British teenagers strayed over the borders of the realm of perpetual twilight, where one of them became important and acquired a bodyguard. There was a scene where one of the kings of the seelie whom she had gotten involved with used his powers of glamour to make her do things she was uncomfortable with, and the bodyguard speared him through the heart. She was tried then for murder of so and so, and the evidence was presented, and she was aquitted, and then she was tried for murder of the King of So and So, and my players were quite perplexed. (And then a delegation from his kingdom came in, and said, We didn’t lend him a share of our glamour to let him do THAT, and we disclaim him as king, retroactively.)

                My single most favorite SF novel _ever_ is Courtship Rite, which does the heterotopia thing big time.

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                1. Now that is likely to avoid the big pitfalls– I like the trial for the Positional Authority, too, especially with it being dismissed by those it’s in the name of.

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              2. …a lot of worldbuilding doesn’t bother trying to make it work, they just want to make it “different,” and they mostly make it flat and paint by the numbers, to the point you can figure out their personal biases and what they’re Take That!-ing against.

                I just read a review of a Sheri S. Tepper book that downgraded it a star because “the author was unintentionally advocating for eugenics.” Oh, dearie, there was no “unintentional” about that. He other works and her day job prove that.

                (I still like some of her work, but I have to read with the filter on of “oh yeah, that’s right, she’s very strongly opinionated on that topic.” It helps that it’s all several decades old, so it serves as a reference point of “that is where the perspective WAS instead of where it IS.” The Revenants is particularly amusing from that perspective.)

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                1. How true. She did a book where people who intended to wipe out most of mankind and did all of it were praised and lauded for covering it up.

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                  1. I’ve marked a page where I’m going to do a compare and contrast with Lois McMaster Bujold. Just a couple of paragraphs on each side, but you’ll be able to tell the worldview difference quite clearly.

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      2. Even before all the recent events cut loose, I knew the rule of law was going to be important to the current WIP. Because that’s one of the key differences between civilization and barbarism: Do the laws apply to everyone?

        Finding a way to haul a barbarian warlord into a court of law is the tricky part….

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  4. The modern world has indeed attempted to blot out reality instead of telling useful stories, but most people have just opted out. The classic stories like Dostoevsky and Heinlein are still out there even if the Orwellian left is trying to obliterate them. They’re just nowhere to be found in the schools. People need to educate themselves like Dylan in the New York Library, ideally with an appropriate mentor.

    Your link to the crazy bookstore reminded me of the movie You’ve Got Mail (circa 1998). The heroine does everything right running her independent bookstore (yes, I miss those), but still loses to Tom Hanks and his giant chain bookstore. In the end though IIRC, she is able to get the guy and still humanize a corner of the new store.

    I have hope in things like Taylor Sheridan getting his TV series’ and mini-series’ produced and aired.

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  5. It helps to get the ‘rot’ out of schools too…

    https://www.kcci.com/article/ian-roberts-des-moines-schools-superintendent-detained-by-ice/68080086

    So, the super of the largest school district in the state, and largest city in the state turns out to be on the lam.  I am willing to bet not a single person or board member is held accountable for this – background check?  What background check – this guy is perfect!  While Des Moines isn’t a “liberal” city and Iowa is fairly conservative we’ve got pockets of liberal insanity like anyplace else.  It’s also a real hoot that the guy is driving a school district (gun free) vehicle with tax exempt state plates and has cash and a gun with him – just on the way to the office I guess! 

    From what I gather so far, a normal citizen type could do an open records and history background on this guy just using the internet and find a lot of sketchy stuff.  DEI hire indeed. 

    It will be very interesting to follow up on this next week and see what else floats to the surface with this mess.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. For what little it’s worth, while they are the largest school district– that doesn’t mean as much as it might elsewhere. The districts are kept relatively small.

      My daughter’s gaming group covers at least four districts, though I think we’re the only pure homeschooler.

      The timing on this is lit because the big story yesterday afternoon was how DSM had nearly half of the top 25 worst schools in the whole state, and that’s not “oh just happens to be the lowest percent” it’s “in bottom of all these scoring considerations, no really it’s actually very bad.”

      They only have sixty-some schools total.

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      1. In my state every county has its own school district – 78 of them. Plus I-don’t-know-how-many cities and towns that have their own independent school districts. Some are just one or two schools.

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          1. When I grew up in Virginia it was one per county or independent city (cities are not part of a county in VA). Whereas in, for example, South Carolina, you can have multiple districts per county, and many rural counties do even when it doesn’t seem to make sense. The two counties around Columbia, the state capitol, have a total of five and one of them is actually combined between both counties. Like a lot of stuff in SC government, it’s weird.

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    3. In my state, an business-owned vehicle is “an extension of the workplace”, and things like smoking, alcohol, or guns are considered the same as if they were in the office.

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  6. Number one son is further out on the spectrum than the rest of us. Every once in a while, he’ll say, with all sincerity, something in a different way. We then try and find out what movie or book he got it from. It’s always from somewhere. So yeah,people often do talk like that in Al sincerity leaving aside the constant use of memes and catchphrases

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    1. We all do it. Our speech and writing are deeply affected by what we have heard and read. Being cursed with a good memory for minutia of what I have read, I often find myself paraphrasing/adapting quotes and phrases that fit the situation more fittingly than my own independent words.

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        1. My siblings and I do the same.

          Dear hubby says, ” Being around your family is like being sucked into a pod of alien being beings.”

          Poor dude. His kids are the same way.

          Non stop Princess Bride, LOTR, Star Trek, Serenity, random soccer and other sports arcana.

          The sad thing is, even though our kids were homeschooled, they are all lefties.

          Don’t let them even go to college.

          Just don’t.

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          2. Eh, they’ll probably get better:

            Plusieurs de mes amis m’engageaient à répondre par le trait célèbre de Burke: « Celui qui n’est pas républicain à vingt ans fait douter de la générosité de son âme; mais celui qui, après trente ans, persévère, fait douter de la rectitude de son esprit. »

            – Anselme Polycarpe Batbie, 1872

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          3. Yeah, getting through without being lefterized (yes, that’s a word; freshly made) has been a dicey proposition for a very long time, but was worthwhile nonetheless. Was. I wouldn’t recommend college to anyone for any reason right now…and I say this as someone whose job, until 6 years ago, was to convince people to go to college.

            But there could still be hope. I went “liberal” when I went back to college to finish my degree and then over the next 15 years, despite being immersed in the higher-ed milieu, slowly corrected back; not to the exact positions I was raised in, but to something very similar and better informed for having made the journey.

            My kids, the one who went to college is very left-leaning, but was already that way before she went; it doesn’t seem to have turned her head very much. The one who didn’t is 100% a leave-me-the-hell-alone-ist (as am I) but hates political topics, so I don’t know much more than that. So…shrug. All you can do is try to raise them with good principles and hope their virtues as adults outweigh any misguided decisions (and they’re probably thinking a similar thing about my “misguided” principles and decisions from their perspective).

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  8. Whenever I see some alleged Republican on X saying things like: “6 months and Trump hasn’t hanged any Dems! Nothing ever changes! We’re so cooked!” I think it must have sounded better in the original Russian. Or possibly Chinese.

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      1. How fast or how decisively we actually /need/ to do things depends a bit on how close to the bone we are, how much strategic depth we have, and a bunch of weird stuff about how our peace consensus and interior thought work.

        I can definitely understand being stupid angry.

        (I’m a little tired for that today, but at times in my life I was not in the best place.)

        Anyway, on closeness to the bone, well, I am kinda fat.

        I think the key thing is that most of the actual Americans are still salty about the ACW, and don’t want to create dangerous precedent or piss off anyone actually sane. We don’t really agree on much beyond that the peace we had was pretty good, we want it back, and that a lot of the communists are just wackjobs.

        Sucky legal situation, not a bunch of great outcomes, but there are so much stupid things that we could do that would actually make things worse.

        (Though, situation now is over all looking up a ways, but that is me with my head under a rock, in autistic mode for the information warfare.)

        We are eight months in, and I am a bit disappointed, but we shall see. I don’t need to have an opinion on all of the big picture stuff.

        In theory, there should be more intel and security agencies than just the Russians and PRc stirring the pot. In practice, I don’t think I have had trolls urging me to ‘do the needful’, so I figure that maybe the Indian security agencies are not doing a clumsy job of stirring the pots.

        Eight months in, and there is room for quibbling over what of the things has actually happened. But, well, Trump has been very moderate for a liberal Democrat that the Democrats decided to pretend was Hitler. From that, I was not exactly expecting a Mongol citizen of Rome that identifies as Abraham Lincoln.

        Trump seems to have seriously attempted to do good things.

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      1. I once read an article where a linguist was talking about translating a very old Chinese document. Unfortunately the ancient Chinese move euphemisms and indirection.

        “So, what’s it about?”

        “As far as we can see, it’s either about flowers or it’s erotica. There’s no real way to tell.”

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  9. Oh, and speaking of the movies, this weekend sees a way too long, way too expensive One Battle After Another starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Plot involves leftist domestic extremists attacking immigration facilities and a white supremacist villain who gets aroused by pregnant black women wielding guns.

    Hard to imagine a more ill-timed release, but I can’t imagine a good-timed release for something like this.

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    2. I mean, it’s based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, so it was guaranteed to have zero audience (besides snooty academics and some tiny portion of the only-listens-to-NPR crowd) from the get-go.

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      1. Once upon a time long long ago I tried to read Gravity’s Rainbow — someone had given it a decent review. I didn’t get very far, because it really didn’t seem to be going much of anywhere.

        Later on, I read a summary. Don’t, because it doesn’t. Evidently the title is the very best part.

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        1. OK, so perhaps I should be more specific: It’s based on a Pynchon novel that even his acolytes call a lesser work. About aging ’60s radicals in hiding trying to deal with the utter “corruption” of America under the Reagan administration.

          Just in case anyone thought the literati being boringly predictible was a recent phenomenon.

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  10. There are movies with good economics in them, even if they’re outnumbered by the socialist sludge. Comedian Andrew Heaton even did a series of Youtube videos about some of them (including a few with just awful economics, of course). The ones on Ghostbusters and The Shawshank Redemption are especially good, but the fact that he (and the folks he was working with) dug up an ’80s Rodney Dangerfield comedy for one has always particularly pleased me.

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    1. Back to School is a masterpiece in its own small way. A major plot point is that the professors don’t understand how the world works, and Rodney Dangerfield’s character does. As a bonus, you get to see RD reciting Shakespeare with true emotion and soul. Sure, it’s followed by a gag, but that moment is priceless.

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  12. And as a more general appeal to the crowd:

    You, yes you, have a cinema-making machine in your pocket. And whether you know it or not, the rest of the tools of cinema are easier to be had than at any point in history up to now.

    You don’t need expensive software to write a screenplay, you can do write it in plain text using the Fountain markup language, and there are multiple tools for converting that plain text file to a properly formatted PDF for porduction, including ‘afterwriting.

    If you can’t think of something to write, there is a lot of great stuff in the public domain. Garet Garrett’s The Driver would make a fine historical/economic epic, as would Merwin and Webster’s Calumet ‘K’. Quite a number of SF authors have had works ascend into the public domain, too, including [Philip K. Dick][https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/33399), Andre Norton, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, and more. And if you want to be a bit less ambitious in terms of production, plenty of noir novels are in the public domain, including John D. MacDonald’s A Bullet for Cinderella, many of Ed Lacy’s novels including Enter Without Desire, and Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest ascended to the public domain just this year.

    Need to learn (or refresh yourself) on technique? Lots of Youtube channels will teach you for free. I recommend D4Darious, but there are plenty of others if you don’t like him.

    Can’t afford expensive editing software? There are free and open source alternatives, including Flowblade.

    “But you can’t do science fiction on a microbudget!” you say? Balderdash! Follow CreateSciFi on Youtube for examples of how to build SF props and models from dollar store items (among other things). And Christopher Mihm has been making largely scifi flicks every year for the last twenty years, each on a roughly ten thousand dollar budget. These delightful romps include The Giant Spider and Danny Johnson Saves The World, to say nothing of the post-apocalyptic spaghetti western Guns of the Apocalypse, and there’s a genre we need more of!

    But what about soundtrack music? Even if you don’t want to invest in an account with a clanker to create music you have full rights to, and don’t know any musicians (really?), there is a lot of recorded music you can use freely, including composers who require only that they be given attribution, like Kevin MacLeod, Josh Woodward, and Stellardrone, and others who commit their work to the public domain by implication, like Co.Ag Music, or directly, as you’ll find on FreePD.com.

    Am I leaving out a lot? Of course! But the tools are there, closer to hand than ever before.

    Remember: Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi, a feature film with gunfights and action in the early 1990s, on seven thousand dollars. Steven Soderbergh made a “secret” movie using only iPhones (Unsane) just to see if he could.

    And finally, if you worry that you don’t know enough to make a movie:

    The only way to learn cinema, is to make cinema!

    — Jess Franco (Jesus Franco Manera), who made over 150 films, many of them on microscopic budgets with a cast and crew of less than a dozen people.

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    1. Note that traditionally the best story map to a full length feature film script is a short story, so you don’t need a huge LOTR scale idea to bring it to video.

      This is one reason why making films from novels is so difficult – it is basically a compression exercise on what not to include without losing the thread. Short stories are roughly the idea, plot and character development density you want to carry into a movie script for a full length feature, so shorter films don’t need a lot of words on paper.

      The general idea is one page of movie script is one minute on the screen – and scripts are double spaced with lots of white space compared to prose.

      And if you want to work to understand scriptwriting the way every single Hollywood exec thinks is how a movie script has to be structured, down to using the book as a rote formulaic guide for what story beats should happen by which page of a full length feature film script, go over to ‘zon and search for “Save the Cat” by Blake Snyder.

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        1. It really, really depends. “Length of base work” is less of a concern than “can it be done on a tight budget in a few weeks or weekends”.

          So if you have a choice between Philip K. Dick’s The Variable Man novella, and Ed Lacy’s Dead End, based purely on feasibility I would go with Dead End because, while it’s novel-length (though it was expanded from a novella, “Be Careful How You LIve”), it’s a relatively contained story explaining how two guys came to be hiding out in a room together, and what happened when they couldn’t hide any more. The Variable Man involves time travel, space war, and a space station.

          (Both are in the public domain, btw.)

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      2. Hey, Deej, we probably could make a movie of my story in Things From Outer Space. (I’m trying to remember the name.) A car, two actors, a dog. Some little special effects to show tentacles, but totally doable. Oh, yeah, And Your Little Dog Too. That’s the name.

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      3. Note that traditionally the best story map to a full length feature film script is a short story…

        Very arguable.

        And no, don’t get Save the Cat. Blake Snyder is not to blame for all the ways that has been abused, but if one must read screenwriting books, Syd Field’s Screenplay is the foundational how-to, William C. Martell’s The Secrets of Action Screenwriting is the best overall for nuts and bolts of putting a script story together, and Linda Seeger’s Making a Good Script Great and Richard Krevolin’s Screenwriting From The Soul are both very worthwhile. (Martell also has a book on making your own film with limited resources. I have it, but haven’t read it yet, but he had 18 or 19 scripts produced in the direct to video market, so he knows how to write to budget.)

        Oh, and scripts are not double spaced. They have a very specific format, and yes, lots of white space for good and sufficient reason. But not double spacing. (You may possibly be thinking of sitcom format, which is a slightly different kettle of fish.)

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        1. I have Straczynsky’s screenwriting book, but that appears to be out of print.

          Also note I said execs like the “Save the Cat” formula, possibly because the beats-on-page-X thing is easy for business side people to understand and enforce, not that it’s good for larnin’ how to write good. Your suggestions are undoubtedly way better for actually learning the craft. My idea is to use the Cat book as enemy intel.

          And yeah, the formatting stuff, among other fiddly bits, make using one of the dedicated script tools preferable over trying to make something like Word do it.

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          1. Straczynski’s book was pretty good. Certainly there are many worse, and unlike most authors of such book, he’s a working scribe.

            And Save the Cat is also from a working screenwright, and not awful. But the author died, and… well, there’s a long diatribe about how it became the next McKee template. Martell is better because he not only lays out beats and page numbers, he explains why and that they are flexible.

            And McKee’s Story is useful if approached with enough salt and caution, which is why I didn’t include it.

            As for the formatting stuff, I recommended the Fountain syntax for a reason.

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              1. Yes, but screenwriting is a very specific skillstack, so I named a few of the best ones, because it’s not something you can just stumble into.

                Screenwriting to a limited budget and set of resources, even more so.

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              3. The first few episodes of Babylon 5 weren’t perfect, either. I thought Crusade showed a lot of promise, even after the executroids mucked it up.

                See, when somebody who has created paramount greatness like Babylon 5 comes before you and says “I have another idea…” you be thankful he’s willing to work for you, give him a lot of money and stay out of his way!! You don’t micromanage him and his creation to death. JMS proved he can create something awesome. What did the executroids prove?

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    2. the rest of the tools of cinema are easier to be had than at any point in history up to now.

      I give you: Samuli Torssonnen’s “Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning.” It’s on Youtube. And he and his friends made it… twenty years ago.

      I found it ROFL hilarious, and even more so when the (Russian) Federation gated through to the Babylon 5 timeline…

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    3. And finally, if you worry that you don’t know enough to make a movie:

      …step back and consider how many movies that *do* get made, by experienced directors, producers, scriptwriters, and studios, aren’t worth your time to watch.

      If you’re like most people, that would be “most of them.”

      see also: “traditional book publishing”

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      1. If you made every possible mistake, broke every rule of cinematography, cast the wrongest actors…how much worse would your movie be than what we see out of Hollyweird these days? 😮

        “I picked the wrong script, the wrong director, the wrong actors…where did I go right?” – Max Bialystock

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      2. I have always said that any good movie is something of a miracle.

        And my quoting Jess Franco was deliberate because, in spite of the fact that he worked with Orson Welles for a time, and had a long and highly productive career, some hold that he is one of the worst directors of all time.

        But he kept making movies. And he mostly made them on his own terms.

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    1. And so are Robert Heinlein, and H. Beam Piper, and Keith Laumer, and Cliff Simak, and Jack Vance, and Alfred Bester, and Lloyd Biggle, and John Campbell, and Hal Clement, and Sprague de Camp, and Gordon Dickson, and Colin Kapp, and Murray Leinster, and Edward Llewellyn, and C.C. MacApp, and Larry Niven, and Andre Norton, and Eric Frank Russell, and Charles Sheffield, and George H. Smith, and L. Neil Smith, and Christopher Stasheff, and SM Stirling, and Vernor Vinge, and James White, and Roger Zelazny, and…

      Living or dead, they’re the same number of clicks away as Sarah Hoyt or Larry Correia.

      Once upon a time we had to depend on “libraries,”

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  14. Right now, I think my personal movie should be called Murphy’s Choice. Either that or go to my quarter-Danish roots and blame Loki.

    Today’s medical adventure had Our MC (ain’t gonna call myself a hero–don’t want a piano dropped on me) for a routine retina check. Nope. Macular issues in the left eye, plus a lot of floaters. Asked about a redo of the vitrectomy surgery (done 8 years ago), but that’s a “do once” procedure.

    So now, I have a tiny pellet of steroid gunk in the eye, and an appointment (with hotel reservation) for 6 weeks. The pellet wears off in 3 months, so if it works, I’ll be Westside 4 times a year, assuming Murphy gives me a break.

    Be nice if some parts of my body behaved better than expected. /Whine

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  15. Oh, good lord … another new release I can’t wait not to go see… or even stream.

    Sigh – late to the comment thread, this late in the weekend. But I spent Friday and Saturday at the Giddings Word Wrangler book fest, which has now been going on for 20 years … local authors (that is, Texas authors!) submit books to a library committee who picks for a place in the two-and-a-half day festival; doing presentations to local schools, and being in the library for a day of school trip visitations, and half a day for everyone else! Yes – it is a library (and slightly afflicted with wokism, as they had a display of so-called banned books!), but the books and authors selected for Word Wrangler were a nice cross-section of good stuff! And this being Texas, everyone was thoroughly nice!

    I do wonder now, if The Critical Drinker might have a point, about current TV and movie writers tending to be people who have never done anything else for a living, before writing … this producing cr*p which has no relation to reality or real people. The writer with the table next to mine was picked for his detective series … and he turned out to be an amateur historian (which I knew of because one of his history books was a reference that I went to for one of my own books) but also a retired pediatric neurologist. Huh. Not a detective … but still – he did something else professionally for years. That has to absolutely ground a writer in a real world…

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    1. That and they tend to be so orthodoxically echo chambered (totally a phrase) that you look at how they portray recent history and go “dafuq?”.

      My wife got into The Morning Show. It’s overwrought but not all that badly written. Then they have people dying in large numbers from Covid. Then Jan6 is this giant riot. etc.

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  16. I am late to this party, but TMIAHM is probably my most reread scifi novel. And amazingly it keeps on coming true: AI, surrogacy, Elon.

    And in SF there is the key. Many SF authors are writing and publishing on Amazon and getting very serious numbers of readers. The SF novel I’m rereading at the moment is from Chris Nuttall, who has gone this direction. Good stuff.

    The next iteration is AI. Very soon independents will be able to generate full movies using it. And that will cut lefty-controlled Hollywood off at the knees. I think we’ll have a fine time of entertainment.

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