It's been suggested quite a few times in my hearing that TATU are not really lesbians but are only pretending. Is nothing sacred? Says a commenter here:
TATU are the most retarded act i've ever heard of. they're what is truly wrong with america these days. some stupid no-talent broads (that aren't even that attractive) can pretend they're lesbians and suddenly be played all over MTV. that photo and their video that consists of them making out as the whole concept, prove that they're only trying to make money, and they knew that lesbians sell, especially on MTV which tries as hard as it can to make gays acceptable by showing guys or girls making out all the time. i'm just sad that it keeps working.
Setting aside the matter of this commenter's retarded way with capital letters, and the general absurdity of getting so worked up about pop music, for goodness sakes, this puts me in mind of an idea for a mainstream Hollywood romantic comedy of the boy-bonks-girl, majority-sexual-preference sort. And there can't be enough of those, in my view.
Our story is set in MTV land. One or both of our boy-meets-girl duo is/are pretending to be gay, for the purposes of pop career advancement. The story is how they manage to identify themselves as a potential couple despite all the surrounding gayness. Or something, My earlier version of this story was set in a college, where I understand that some people also pretend to be gay when they aren't in order to achieve political advancement, but I think showbiz is better, if only because politics is hard to do in a way that doesn't alienate half your audience. And if the politics was authentic college politics, it might alienate almost all of them. But showbiz, unlike college politics, is something that the big demographics out there could very happily and identify with. One of the rules of mainstream movie making is that the stars of them must be normal people whom it is possible to admire unconditionally, which rules out campus politicians.
Perhaps there will be comments which tell of this story having already been invented somewhere else. It would certainly be a blot on the homo sapiens copybook if no-one has ever had a similar idea. I mean, it wasn't hard to get to. However, with movies, everything depends on getting the details right, so getting the "plot" right only takes you so far.
Coincidentally, British TV showed the episode of Friends this morning where Phoebe's husband shows up, a person not hitherto known about, and reveals that he is "not gay". He's an ice skater, you see, and he always tried to pass as gay in order to fit in with his friends. "On some level I think I always knew", "Sometimes I would sneak off to bars, get drunk and wake up with a girl beside me", etc. Excellent. And beautifully done, by Lisa Kudrow of coure, and by an actor called Steve Zahn doing the husband.
But I digress. What I really want here to say now is something about the idea of public and collaborative literary effort, done in some place like a blog. The current "business model" for literary activity is based on great secrecy, and great emphasis on who owns which particular bit of the creative product. But suppose that between us, we (i.e. I and my little band of commenters) started swapping movie stories, here and on other blogs, as I imagine they do already in many other internet locations now unknown to me. What's to stop us concocting an entire script, using the economic model of linux programming, i.e. just being satisfied with the credit.? At some point in our creative process, Hollywood swoops in and steals what we've done, and makes its movie, pocketing all the proceeds. Our only reward is that we get to say: "Hey we thought of half of that", probably adding "… and our idea was … and if that had been done, it would have turned out far better!" And we can link back to the original (time specific) discussions where we first thought of it all. And we get our hit rates and our egos boosted.
Not much of a reward, you may say. But we don't now get paid anything to write about movies after they are made? So why would we object to not getting paid for deciding about some of them beforehand? That's a fun hobby, isn't it? Why be greedy? What's the problem? Some folks get paid quite a lot to drive ships. Others pay a lot to drive ships? Both of those things seem to work. So why can't the same principle apply to movie plot development and script-writing?
After all, given how easy it now is to copy movies once they're finished, the actual making of movies may one day quite soon become a largely voluntary and unpaid process.
Good movie ideas have a sort of objective, impersonal rightness, like good car engines or good computer programmes. And objects of this sort lend themselves to collaborative activity. And collaboration between teams of people is a whole lot easier if you aren't bothering about secrecy, and if secrecy means no one gets paid, well, just get lots of people to pitch in. That way no one person has to work too hard.
