Why hasn’t anyone in Hollywood ever created the perfect movie? It wouldn’t be that hard. All you would have to do is take all the right elements, boil them in a pot and you would have an instant hit to rival Star Wars and Terminator 2 combined.
First of all, you’d need a script. No problem. There are literally tens of thousands of aspiring writers in LA waiting for their big shot. Most of them would be willing to submit a script just on the off-chance that they would gain notoriety from it. Just offer up a competition for a “Co-Writer” credit on any scripts you use elements from. Then you wouldn’t even need to pay for a decent script.
Now, the part where Hollywood messes up every time is who they let make the judgment call of what makes a decent script. Don’t let a single director or producer put their grubby paws on it. Just find the pickiest group of geeks in the area (Might I suggest a Linux Users Group or perhaps a Star Trek convention), let them all get together and read them all, and decide on what sounds corny and what will be put into the movie.
There are several great advantages to this. You wouldn’t have to pay them. They would almost certainly volunteer their time for free. Most of them won’t have active sex lives and they live for crap like this instead. Also, they would nit-pick the tiniest of elements and you can bet the script wouldn’t contain a single plot-hole or factual mistake.
Now, what would this movie be about you might ask? That is easy. Just combine the best and most popular genres and mash them all together into some super inter-galactic fantasy scenario where you can have the coolest and most popular elements all in the same movie. Picture it… a ninja and a pirate are trapped on a space station and being attacked by evil wizards who are hurling spells at them from their giant killer robots. Meanwhile, a super secret agent has infiltrated the military compound that contains the genetically enhanced killing-monkeys using futuristic weapons like “sonic swords” and laser guns.
Now, with your perfect script in hand, you pick the most popular stars with the biggest egos and offer them percentages of the gross to star in your movie. Also, you promise every single one top-billing on a series of posters where each one gets to be the star. You add a director to that mix and you are in business.
Find a studio that typically bankrolls really shitty movies and you sell them the plot. They won’t recognize the genius of the film of course, but you will have to simply tell one white lie and you will be in business. Tell them you are close to getting Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Segal to star in the movie where one will play a martial arts cyborg and the other is a kickboxer and they battle to the death with the Rock while spouting cheesy dialog. They will instantly hand you a check made out to cash for 1 billion dollars.
Take the money and spend most of it on production. Not the typical crap, but the bare essentials. Set design, editing, lights, the best camera equipment and some donuts and coffee. Make sure you buy sleeves of coffee cups from the trendiest of LA coffee shops and then secretly brew Folgers. The stars will be too coked out to notice the subterfuge and you will save about $10,000 per gallon of coffee this way.
Ok, this is the most important part of the process. You have a movie.. You have lots of raw footage to process and deliver in a spectacularly cinematic format. DON’T HIRE A HUGE SPECIAL EFFECTS STUDIO. Your costs will be astronomical. They will charge you 1,000,000 to render a single eyebrow on your super-monkeys. You need to do this next part on the cheap too, and you need people who are both talented and have lots of time on their hands to do it.
Once again, recruit an army of artistic geeks and give them all a killer Apple workstation in exchange for editing and rendering CG on your movie. Give them unlimited hot-pockets and Dr. Pepper and offer to pay for liposuction and tummy-tucks for the lot of them after the movie is complete. They will jump at the offer and your movie will look better than anything has ever looked before. The hyper-realism that will result can only be achieved by a super-geek at 3am on a Thursday in between D&D gaming sessions and looking at porn on the Internet. Rest assured, they will also nit-pick this part to death and your effects will be flawless.
Now you have your finished movie. It should have cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000 to produce. (Which will make the stars working for percentages of gross *very* happy.) Now you screen it, but before you do, write letters to every single special-interest group in America informing them of the travesties being perpetrated in the film. Pose as a concerned mother who has nothing else to do but lust after the pool-boy and watch reruns of “Little House on the Prairie”. This will incite all the publicity you will ever need. The movie will be so infamous that by the time everyone finally watches it, you will have made billions from the merchandise alone.
Release the movie to DVD exactly three weeks after it opens in the box-office. You will have already shattered all the records anyway beyond being touchable by any movie that follows. You will then make money hands over fist on the overpriced DVD editions which you will then proceed to change every 6 months like clockwork. Simply change the title menu on the DVD and redesign the cover-art and call it something else. Use the following keywords to help you keep things constantly fresh: Special Edition, Mega Ultra-Platinum Edition, Gold Edition, Special Enhanced Super Deluxe Edition, Killer Ninja Screaming Defecating Edition, Silver Screen Powerful Supernova Explosion Edition… etc.
The truly pathetic thing is that this movie will still be better than all other Hollywood films combined and it will have made more money too. You will have made enough money off this one film to buy every single movie studio in Hollywood and pay cash for them. Now that you own Hollywood and the MPAA, release every single movie ever made on the internet to be downloaded for a small fee. Don’t use any sort of DRM (Digital Rights Management) and let people also download a tool to convert the file to use on any device they wish. (DVD player, iPod, PSP, Palm, Etc).
You will then make more money in a month than the entire country of Japan will for the next 30 years. Life will be good and since you run things now, there will be no more movies with the line: “He’s holding me back! or “Meesa sayin nuttin.” And you will rest easy on your bed made of shredded 100 dollar bills, watching the best movie in the universe.
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