The Dark King
Well-Known Member
It is not Seth Grahame-Smith’s fault that he has been hired by Warner Bros. /Time Warner TWX +0.00% to write and direct The Flash even though he has zero theatrical directorial experience. We all know how this song goes, with a relatively inexperienced white male filmmaker being handed a major franchise while female filmmakers and minority filmmakers with quantifiable resumes sit on the sidelines and wait for their bite at the apple. Yet if there is blame, it belongs to those who made the hire not the person who accepted the job. And with the season premiere of The Flash again about to show the world that DC Comics already has a practically perfect live-action incarnation of The Flash, it is ever more interesting that Warner Bros. has entrusted their trickiest property (because there is already a terrific version in existence that supplies everything you’d want in a Flash adaptation) to yet another mostly unproven, white male filmmaker with almost no quantifiable credits to his name. I hope he pulls it off.
What’s odd this time that the writer/director of The Flash has barely directed anything and has written two major features that were rejected by audiences. In this case, his experience argues against him getting a job writing and directing a big-budget film version of The Flash. It is of course our hope as fans of DC Comics and The Flash that he will do a decent job and produce a solid film alongside whatever David Ayers, James Wan, and Patty Jenkins have up their sleeves. But what stands out about this pick, especially right after Walt Disney DIS +0.00%/Marvel picked Taiki Waititi to helm Thor: Ragnarok, is that Mr. Grahame-Smith hasn’t even been terribly successful at the things he is known for in the industry.
Seth Grahame-Smith has never directed anything beyond a few episodes of The Hard Times of RJ Berger in 2011 (he also wrote twenty episodes of said vulgar MTV show that he helped create along with David Katzenberg). I watched those two episodes yesterday. While they are “fine” for what they are, they are frankly less visually dynamic than any given episode of almost any Disney Channel sitcom (like Dog With A Blog, which also stars Beth Littleford as the matriarch). That’s not an insult, as the show is clearly following a specific low budget, dialogue-centric template, but it’s also not anything that shows off any kind of directorial verve. I can only hope that the show’s bawdy adolescent male conquest fantasy mentality isn’t itself something we’ll see in The Flash.
In terms of his theatrical screenwriting, he adapted his own novel, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter into a 2012 feature film that received poor reviews and made just $116m worldwide on a $69m budget for 20th Century Fox . He also (along with John August) wrote the screenplay to Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, which received poor reviews and made $245m worldwide on a $150m budget. He did a rewrite on Fantastic Four, which isn’t going to help anyone feel better about this. He has also written a screenplay to a theoretical Beetlejuice 2 and is penning the upcoming LEGO Batman Movie. Beyond that, he was a cinematographer on a few minor things in the late 1990?s and most of his would-be producing credits are on theoretical films (Beetlejuice 2, Ninjago, the Gremlins and It remakes) that might not actually get made.
Maybe his screenplays for Beetlejuice 2 and The LEGO Batman Movie are brilliant, or maybe his pitch for The Flash was so inspiring that the proverbial powers-that-be couldn’t resist. This is an odd pick not just because he is a relatively untested white male filmmaker chosen for a huge job in a time when even casual observers are starting to notice how rarely minority filmmakers or female filmmakers get the same would-be opportunities. This is an odd pick because he actually does have a slight track record that would seem to point away from giving him the keys to a mega-budget franchise without first giving him something else, anything else, to test his ability to direct a major theatrical motion picture. Heck, if they wanted to give it to an untested director with geek-friendly screenwriting experience, I’m sure Jane Goldman is available.
Now for the record, the ongoing construction of the DC Comics universe has been relatively solid in the whole diversity department. For example, James Wan and Patty Jenkins are directing Aquaman and Wonder Woman, while said Aquaman will be played by Jason Momoa and the Flash himself will be played by openly queer actor Ezra Miller. Yet we should remember that James Wan got the Aquaman gig after years of successful genre work and four straight hits (Insidious, The Conjuring, Insidious 2, and Furious 7) while Patty Jenkins directed Charlize Theron to an Oscar back in 2003. That’s the frustrating thing about all of this for those with skin in the game. Experienced filmmakers who are not white males have to basically be the best at what they do in order to maybe, possibly be considered for the kind of massive jobs that untested and/or inexperienced white filmmakers snag as a matter of course.
What’s additionally disturbing this time is that most of Grahame-Smith’s work consists of theoretical movies that might not get made and screenplays for films that audiences didn’t like. I’m aware that it’s not entirely fair to pick on Warner Bros. /DC Comics on the eve where Marvel has gone and hired their first non-white director for what will be their seventeenth film. But the track record for utter novices delivering artistically successful blockbusters isn’t promising (The Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Tron: Legacy, Snow White and the Huntsman HUN +0.00%, Maleficent). It’s indeed frustrating to acknowledge this pattern happening over and over again even with the results not necessarily justifying said pattern. And in this case, it’s a little more striking than usual because the mostly untested white male filmmaker has a track record that arguably speaks against being given a film like The Flash.
But that’s not Seth Grahame-Smith’s fault for accepting what is the opportunity of a lifetime, and any criticism should be directed at those who hold the purse strings and actually do the hiring and firings in the production chain. And as we await the second season premiere of the shockingly good and rather successful Flash television show on CW, this curious and potentially frustrating pick again highlights why The Flash is the most challenging film in the would-be DC Comics cinematic universe. They can’t just make a Flash movie, they have to make a great Flash movie that differentiates itself from an established television show. And they just gave the project to a relative novice. I hope he’s a fast learner.
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My take? Damn. Tis all I can say....
I never thought of it that way but they make a good point.
Then again why can't poc find financing for our own shot without having to beg Hollywood who only gives a fuck about white male (Jews mostly)
