IN LOVE and ROMANCE...I'm Hopeless.

ABOUT LOVE, HOLLYWOOD, and Well…LOVE

The Culture of Hollywood and Why Love Stories Become Twisted When Translated to Screen:

I’m hopeless. AND, I refuse to yeild...

This personal review of a ten year journey to get a film made, once promised to a publisher one year after the book came out, is a typical journey for stories where “love” is defined by those with the money, but perhaps not the heart for it.

In Hollywood it is a battle of, “Hard Love vs. Soft Love…” Case in point: “Jim, Hollywood isn’t really doing your kind of stories. They just aren’t hard enough.”

Suspicions confirmed, the sale of my “soft love” story, New York Times best selling The Last Valentine, was what thousands of fans had been asking about for years, and now ten years later it is where it belonged… Hallmark Hall of Fame and CBS. I never believed that “Hollywood” didn’t have interest in “soft love.” The list of enjoyable hits, even blockbusters is too long.

When it comes to love being “hard,” I realized too late, that he was speaking of the “head contrived love” stories but not the kind that comes from the heart. As long as his mental perspective was fixed, I wasn’t going to shift enthusiasm to area perceived as “not” profitable or at least “interesting” to Hollywood film making contacts.

The truth is, he and I are still friends, but live in different worlds. We come at romance from different experiences and paradigms. His world includes a lot of “Noir” (French word for “black” and meaning cynical, rough, violent, dark, etc. class of novels and film.) I refuse to allow any noir into my world. I mean ZERO. What that comes down to is differing views on “reality.” I’m in love with real love; the warm-hearted journey a man or woman makes in winning at it and…

I’m hopeless.

I’m just not interested in noir; aka “hard love.” Something is wrong with me. I want to understand (therefore explore) a love found in the most gentlemanly and heroic of characters… the kind that makes a woman swoon (and stay swooned) – a love that doesn’t demand, but gives, and then receives through no compulsion, obligation, or manipulated feelings – the soft, gentle, kind, filled to the brim with emotion that comes after the effort. It is a culture full of “we and thee,” not the Hollywood view that portrays movie after movie of a narcissist’s “about me and mine.”

Am I missing something here, Hollywood? Am I all alone on this? I don’t think so. In fact, I know Hollywood is losing money from those who WANT to enjoy a great movie filled with realism – the reality of “how love works” not “how it does not.” Even the Soaps acknowledge love affairs they portray as built upon moral quick sand leading to personal and collective destruction.

I’m hopeless, and that seems to be the bottom line to my romantic notions.

To me LOVE, “amore,” the stuff of true passion, is not the knocking around of bodies flailing away in fits of myopically narrow-minded and so-called “love-making” by the literati of cheap noir novels and film at large – but it is the committed touching of the breath and soul of a partner through willingness to believe in, and cherish her. THEN let the holding, touching, and being one with her begin. I like marriage, for example. I mean, to me that kind of commitment is romantic. If I failed at it, I would try again until I got it right. It is in the EFFORT that the reward of ROMANCE is achieved. It is in loving (the verb synonymous with giving) that loving (the verb synonymous with feeling) is received. Where am I going wrong here?

I learned late that I was dealing with one kind of producer in trying to get a beloved “soft” love story produced. The 1,000’s of pieces of fan mail can’t touch a mind whose heart is not in it. The idea of a gentle love that isn’t believed in cannot be written by even an Academy Award winning film-script writer given 2 chances (true event in the epic journey of The Last Valentine to screen) if his heart isn’t in it. The truth about love in Hollywood often is, “hard is hot” and “soft is cold.” In terms of the heart “soft” is very hot to those of us who like great story lines and don’t want orgasmic gratuity or cynicism to interrupt it.

The exception is CBS and their fabulous alliance with Hallmark Hall of Fame; a realization of what makes a great love story. Stories that have heart are remembered forever and a good story line with “heart” is what it is all about with those producers. We can all be grateful for that.

I believe Hollywood at large is missing out on huge revenue potential from those of us who have “given up” in search of something to “watch” and often just “opt out.” (Hopefully good news for publishers.) Ever said, “There’s nothing on!” or “I can’t find a decent movie!” That is really saying something when there are over 100 channels to choose from vs. the four we had when I was young.

Though I feel friendly toward them, my past book-to-film making team have a different view of what a “good love story” is made of. That’s why it took ten years. They see “hard” and I see “soft.”

Finally, years after the promises, I was able to encourage a script written by a lovely person who is now a dear friend, and she found the perfect production partner to create the long hoped for Hallmark Hall of Fame production, The Last Valentine, becoming a CBS movie of the week in 2009.

I recount this for one simple reason. I’M HOPELESS… and VALENTINE’S DAY is coming up. I’m not giving up on writing gentle love stories for book and film, nor giving up on an audience I believe in and who daily continue to express their belief in me. Love is soft… It was never supposed to be “hard.” The world in its splendor wasn’t created with tunnel vision in mind. Neither was love.

Though 4 years old now, this well thought-out news article bears review – IF Hollywood wants to thrive and enjoy our business and confidence once again.

ON FILM AND TELEVISION AUDIENCE TUNING OUT


Spring 2004 USA Today in “LIFE” section with heading CAN TV BE SAVED? 12 Ways, by Robert Bianco.

The Audience

We can find the answer, I believe, in what happened at the last Super Bowl. The Super Bowl at its height attracted 140 million U.S. viewers. On any given night, only 35 to 40 million people watch network television. That is a differential of approximately 100 million people who don’t watch. And it was, in my opinion, those people who were most offended by what they saw and it was those people who spoke out and were heard.

Therefore, network television panders and caters to the base tastes of a minority of people, the lowest common denominator. It is this minority that keeps the networks and their affiliates in business. If the networks and affiliates gave the people what they really want and not what a perverse minority demands, based on the numbers alone, their ratings would almost triple.