Popular moviemaking

Strangers on a Train, as I’ve already mentioned, is a fun (if somewhat silly) movie, and it's also quite derivative of the previous Farley Granger/Hitchcock matchup, Rope. And while they both mess around with some of the same motifs—the idea of a “perfect murder,” a homoerotic subtext between a pair of men, one passive, one dominant—Rope is clearly the superior film, both in its psychological complexity and technical experimentation. The Wikipedia article on Granger that I linked to says, though, that Strangers was a box office success while Rope was a bit of a flop, proving that, even fifty years ago, audiences preferred zany coincidences and ridiculous setpieces involving killer merry-go-rounds to brilliant but dour excavations of man’s capacity for evil. The silly and the contrived, it seems, will almost always play better with the masses.

And if you want to test this out by “working” your way into the heralded ranks of Hollywood directordom, all it takes, apparently, is cash: drop a half million dollars of family money on an NYU student film and you’re in. Don't have any interesting ideas or talent? Don't worry; as long as you can hire enough pros to essentially make the flick for you, you just have to show up and look good. Directing a movie and running for office seem more and more similar every day.