fumanstan

I'm surprised there's so much hate for Chris Columbus.

RyoHazuki

Me too. Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, and the 1st two Harry Potter movies and he's a hack? Come on.

veloce

When I think of hacks, I don't think of guys like Joel Schumacher or Michael Bay. I personally think those two guys suck more often than not, but they sure do have personality. Hacks don't have any personality. Hacks to me are directors like Gary Fleder or Greg Hoblit.

It's no coincidence that they are TV as well as feature directors. Some people work in both and distinguish themselves in both, but some don't. There are plenty of hack directors that have careers in both TV and movies but who are they? Who knows them? Who cares about movies by hacks like James Hayman, or Michael Dinner? You know their work, but not because of them. You've heard of their television series, but not because they directed a given episode.

I think there are hacks, but there also reformed hacks. I mean, think of guys like Curtis Hanson. Total hack, but then he went and made LA Confidential, Wonder Boys, and 8 Mile (the latter not as good the former two, but still a good film).

And of course, there are also guys brought from overseas to Hollywood who lost whatever made their work distinctive after they started working in America -- think Lee Tamahori, for example.

Just my $0.02!

DrRingDing

hey, when i defined what i believed to be a "hack" in my second post, i did point out that a hack can competently make movies. i just don't see any flavor to him. if i see a film without knowing who the director is and i can still identify who directed it, there's flavor. by that definition, as well, there are a lot of "hacks" in the industry... i guess, in my opinion, Columbus happens to be the most successful, getting to dip his hands into some very high profile projects.

just a further elaboration of my $.02
-di doctor-

moocher

Peter Jackson?? Francis Ford Coppela?? Steven Speilberg?? Michael Bay?? Chris Columbus?? George Lucas?? These folks are responsible for making films that millions went to see more than once and these same people (millions of them by the way) went back to see even more films by them. They are responsible for billions of dollars of box office receipts.

I'm sorry but this definition of "hack" is flawed. A "hack" is someone who cannot competantly make a feature film but tries anyway. Yes, Ed Wood is a good example. Someone who makes a film that millions want to see is not a hack. I have seen very few names in this thread that qualify. Because you don't like someone's movies or their "style" does not make them a hack.

Now the question is who here will admit to having DVDs in their collection by these "hacks"? I would be willing to bet that there are very few here who have not spent some of their hard earned bucks on films by these "hacks".

But then again I do own the Edward D Wood collection so what do I know .

drjay

I'm gonna have to go with Hitchcock and Kurosawa. Friggin hacks with no talent at all. I mean jeeze, Hitchcock, why don't you cameo yourself again. And Kurosawa: we get it, you like samurais. Jeeze, get out of my DVD player.

Rival11

You're joking..............right?

MoviePage

The ultimate hack: Ron Howard.

I define a hack as a director who takes stories with great potential and reduces them to their utmost manipulative levels of easy sentimentality, and who removes all levels of complexity so that the movies will be more appealing to the small town folks, in a TV-movie-of-the-week fashion.

drjay

Damn I was hoping for more emotional responses.

Kal-El

truedat.

Rival11

Couldn't tell if you were serious or not - good stuff.

But you were joking..................right?

kenbuzz

Spike Lee, hands down.
















Oh, you said biggest "hack" director. Okay, well let me change my vote.














Spike Lee

grunter

Strong agreement.

moocher

Apollo 13?? A Beautiful Mind?? I thought these were pretty good films but if you're talking Grinch I would agree. Regardless, I wouldn't consider an Oscar winning director a "hack".

Man you guys are tough. Is there anybody you actually think is any good??

Kerborus

Michael Bay. His movies are mindless and shameless.

glassdragon

I'm gonna get alot of shit for this but i absolutely do not like David Lynch... Every movie i've seen from him is imo pointless and just plain stupid. I know a lot here like him but i can't say that i've ever enjoyed even 1 of his movies
Now i think hack is kinda harsh as he must have some fans to be doing this for as long as he has, but i honestly do not like his movies one bit.

tanman

Peter Jackson
George Lucas
Quentin Tarantino
M Night Shyamalan
Steven Spielberg














This thread can now be closed.

DonnachaOne

A movie's revenue isn't at all a benchmark of quality, and I'm very surprised that you'd think that. Also, the discussion isn't about what those you named (most of whome were named earlier only in jest) did a long time ago, but what they're doing now.
I strongly disagree. To me - and, to many directors who have said so - a hack is a director who's doing it just for the cash, investing the minimum of him/herself into the project. Phillip Kaufman may have made a classic with the The Right Stuff, but Twisted? Pure paycheck work. A hack job.

Ed Wood put his heart and soul - and what cash he had - into his pictures. It was his dream and his mission. However, he was a terrible director. Perhaps, when he was doing the low-grade porn in his later years, you could call him a hack. But when he invested as much as he could into his work, he was no hack - just very misguided and a barely competent director.

veloce

from 1924:

Fitzgerald and the Hollywood hacks
By F. Scott Fitzgerald

I WAS TALKING the other day with a Prominent Business Man who had just visited an eastern moving picture studio. He remarked that never in his life had he seen so much waste and inefficiency in a single day.

“Why, look here,” he began and, with such a pretty flow of words, told us how it could all be systematised. We forgot for a moment that this was an old, old story. When Prominent Business Men go through moving picture studios they always come out feeling very superior and contemptuous — because they imagine that turning strips of celiluloid into visible stories is as simple a matter as turning western cattle into eastern roast beef.

The real fallacy of the Business Man’s attitude lies, of course, in Laura La Plante’s eyes. When Laura has a cold — and Laura will take cold, even when she’s under a $200,000 contract — her eyes grow red and dim just like yours and mine, and the lids swell. You can hardly blame her, when she’s in this condition, for refusing to go before the camera. She imagines that, if she does, every inch of red-eyed film will lose her one admirer, one silver dollar, one rung on the ladder she’s been climbing for years.

“Fire her!” says the Business Man with a bold air. “Why, last week when my superintendent disobeyed an order . . .” But his superintendent was not the mainspring of a picture in which was tied up $200,000. In short, the moving picture is not a good profession for the efficiency bully. It is more often confronted with the human, the personal, the incalculable element than any other industry in the world.

But in one respect, there is much truth in the Business Man’s criticism of the movie. He wants to see centralisation and authority, and he sees none.

Is the responsibility with the producer? No — for he seems to be dependent on the director, who, in his turn, is apparently at the mercy of his story and his star. If in movie circles you mention a successful picture, David for example, you will hear the credit for its success claimed for the producer, the director, the star, the author, the continuity writer and Lord knows how many technical artisans who have aided in the triumph. Mention a failure and you will hear the blame heaped on each one of these in turn — and finally on the public itself for not being “intelligent” enough to like what they get.

Well, I am going to venture three opinions on the subject — three opinions that I think more and more people are coming to hold.

First — that the moving picture is a director’s business, and there never was a good picture or a bad picture for which the director was not entirely responsible.

Second — that with half a dozen exceptions, our directors are an utterly incompetent crew. Most of them entered the industry early and by accident, and the industry has outgrown them long ago.

Third — that any director worth the price of his puttees should average four commercial successes out of five attempts in every year.

Let me first discuss his responsibility. In most of the big companies the director can select his own stories — the scenario departments are only too glad when a director says, “I want to do this picture and I know I can.” The director who undertakes pictures he doesn’t believe in is merely a hack — some ex-barnstormer, who directed an illustrated song back in 1909 and is now hanging around Hollywood with nothing left except a megaphone.

The director chooses his cast, excepting the star, and he has control over the expenditure of the allotted money and over the writing and interpretation of the continuity. This is as it should be. Yet I have heard directors whining because they couldn’t find a story they wanted, and the whine had the true ring of incompetence. An author who whines for a plot at least has the excuse that his imagination has given out — the director has no excuse at all. The libraries are full of many million volumes ready to his hand.

In addition, directors sometimes complain of “incompetent actors”. This is merely pathetic, for it is the director’s business to make actors. On the spoken stage the director may justly cry that once rehearsals are over the acting is out of his power. But the movie director labours under no such disadvantage. He can make an actor go through a scene 20 times and then choose the best “take” for the assembled film.

And in a fragmentary affair like a movie where the last scenes may be taken first, the director must do the thinking for the actor. lf he is unable to, he does not belong on the platform of authority. After seeing what Chaplin did with that ex-cigarette-villain, Adolphe Menjou, and what Von Stroheim accomplished with the utterly inexperienced Mary Philbin, I believe that the alibi of incompetent acting will fall upon deaf ears.

Now directing, as the hack director understands it, is to be privy to all the outworn tricks of the trade. The hack director knows how to “visualise” every emotion — that is, he knows the rubber-stamp formula; he knows how every emotion has been visualised before. If in a picture, the hero departs from the heroine and the heroine wants him back, the hack director knows that she must take a step after him, hold out her hands toward him and then let them drop to her side. He knows that when someone dies in the street, this is always “visualised” by having a kneeling bystander take off his hat. If someone dies in a house, a sheet is invariably drawn over his face.

Very well, let us see how Chaplin, greatest of all directors, conveyed this latter event in A Woman of Paris. He realised that the old convention was outworn, that it no longer had the power of calling the emotions to attention, so he invented a new way. The audience does not see the dying man at all; it sees the backs of the surrounding crowd and suddenly a waiter pushes his way out of that crowd, shaking his head. At once the whole horrible violence of the suicide is plain to us. We even understand the human vanity of the waiter in wanting to be first to convey the news.

We may forget that incident because the picture is full of spanking new effects but, when it is over, every bit of it, despite the shoddy mounting and the sentimentalised story, seems vastly important. Chaplin has a fine imaginative mind and he threw himself hard into his picture. It is the lazy man, the “wise old-timer” — in other words, the hack — who takes the timeworn easy way.

All I am saying comes down to this — the chief business of a director is to invent new business to express old emotions.

An “original” picture is not a story of a lunatic wanting the North Star. It is the story of a little girl wanting a piece of candy — but our attention must be called with sharp novelty to the fact that she wants it. The valuable director is not he who makes a dull “artistic” transcription of Conrad’s Victory — give me the fellow who can blow the breath of life into a soggy gum-drop like Pollyanna.

Perhaps such men will appear. We have Griffith — just when he seems to be exhausted, he has a way of sitting up suddenly in his grave.

We have Cruze, who can be forgiven The Covered Wagon, if only for the amazing dream scene in Hollywood. We have Von Stroheim, who has a touch of real civilisation in his make-up and, greatest of all, Chaplin, who almost invented the movies as a vehicle for personal expression.

There are half a dozen others I could name — Sennett, Lubitsch, Ingram, Cecil B. DeMille, Dwan — who in the last five years have made two or three big successes interspersed with countless reels of drooling mediocrity, but I have my doubts about them; we must demand more than that.

As for the rest of the directors — let a thick, impenetrable curtain fall.

Occasionally, a picture made by some jitney (five-cent) Griffith is successful because of the intelligence of self-directing stars — but beware of such accidents.

The man’s next effort is likely to show the true barrenness and vulgarity of his mind.

One more remark — I doubt if successful directors will ever be found among established authors — though they may, perhaps, among playwrights and not-too-seasoned continuity men. Author-directors have a way of condescending to their audiences. Bad as Rupert Hughes’s books are, they are seldom as silly and meretricious as his pictures. I suspect that his mind is on Minnie McGlook, the girl-fan of North Dakota, and not on his work — which is to believe in his story, to keep his whole story in his head for ten weeks and, above all, to invent new business to express old emotions. All we ask from any of them is a little imagination and a little true feeling for the joys and the hopes and the everlasting struggles of mankind.

Michael Corvin

I couldn't have said it better. I was getting ready to try, before I read this post. Well said Popcorn Tree.

Rival11

Man this is getting weird.

Rivero

George Lucas and Michael Bay. Neither has a clue on what makes an effective film.

Rivero

Correction: Took one of the longest, most unadaptable novels ever and made three exquisite films that captured the essence of Tolkiens work and will enchant viewers for generations. As for his other films, Meet the Feebles, Bad Taste, Forgotten Silver, Braindead and Heavenly Creatures are all pretty damn good.

Burzmali

As far as I know, the thread title asked for my 'opinion.'

I didn't realize you had the right to correct that chief. Thanks for playing.

"Exquisite films" - lol are you serious man? The films are the most corny nonsense I've ever seen. they didn't capture the 'essence' of the books. they took the plot, took the visuals from some artists, and added in some nice effects. end result: typical hollywood fare dressed up in some new clothes called fantasy. big surprise, a tolkien story was a success. pretty hard to screw up IMO with 300 mil and a story like that.

a non-hack might have tried to be a little more original with his visuals. might have had less cheesy lines in the script. "a diversion!" "let's hunt some orc" right. jackson is nothing more than a b-level horror director, which was evident in lotr. too many times did his vision sink to places it shouldn't have touched. 9 hours worth of cheese and cheap hollywood tears rolling down cheeks with some decent action interspersed.

i would give up all 3 lotr movies for 1 ridley scott directed dune movie.

FinkPish

While I totally believe you are entitled to any opinion you want to have, however much I disagree with it, I can't see how Jackson could even approach being called a hack.

I think the great thing about the LOTR movies is that they are so familiar and comfortable. They just seem "right," for whatever reason; somehow Jackson and his crew managed to capture what mass culture seemed to have stored up in their minds as the quintessential fantasy world. To me, he scored on all levels, and while they absolutely did approach what you call "typical hollywood fare," that essence came from the books more than what he created on his own. That is why so many elements might have seemed so schmaltzy and cliched to you, because Tolkein did it first and everyone else borrowed from him.

I hate saying I feel sorry for people who don't like certain movies, but I have to say it here. I don't know if it is possible for anyone to dissolve any preconcieved notions they have about a movie, but in your case, I hope it is.