Dear Gossips,
Dakota Johnson is still in New York promoting Materialists, but as part of the press push, she and Celine Song gave a joint interview to the Los Angeles Times which paints a portrait of two artists finding instant understanding and a desire to make a rom-com, but like, a thinky rom-com. For Celine Song, the writer/director of Materialists, the film is based on her experience working for a matchmaker for six months, long enough to gain a lasting impression of the “candor and vulnerability” of the clients, and also “the management of people’s feelings of desirability or lovability — as well as rejection or worthlessness”.
As for Johnson, she says “I really love a rom-com,” but I don’t believe her because one time she said she liked limes and then it turned out she does not, in fact, like limes. But I DO believe her when she says the rom-com scripts she’s been sent are “not good” because a lot of rom-coms are bad. The genre is so strict, I don’t think we really appreciate how hard it is to make a good rom-com. The part of the interview that really struck me, though, is when Madame Web comes up in conversation. It is now a notorious bomb, and unfortunately for Dakota Johnson, she’s the face of it. But she refuses to wear it, bluntly stating, “It wasn’t my fault.”
Madame Web is such a huge mess I don’t think 100% of the blame should fall on Dakota Johnson, because that is a film that definitely got f-cked with at the studio level. And Johnson knows that, saying “a lot of creative decisions are made by committee. Or made by people who don’t have a creative bone in their body. And it’s really hard to make art that way. Or to make something entertaining that way.”
She’s not wrong, and the create-by-committee dominance in Hollywood is in part due to the culture of fear in the industry right now, as the whole industry is on like its third contraction in twenty years. But it’s also in part because a lot of the people in charge, especially at the major studios making big budget franchise films like Madame Web, aren’t movie people, they’re finance people. A big reason Kevin Feige has been so successful is that he started as a production assistant on set. He actually knows how to make movies. Like physically get them made, start to finish. That is an increasingly rare skill set among the executive class.
There is a long history of outsiders coming to Hollywood and trying to “fix” the industry only to end up fleeing with their tails between their legs because Hollywood isn’t like any other industry, but technology has enabled the non-creative class to narrow the competitive edge with their actually creative peers when it comes to producing movies, and more and more non-movie people have proliferated in Hollywood in the last 20 years than ever before (a problem AI will only make worse).
No one is mourning the failure of Madame Web, least of all Dakota Johnson, but we shouldn’t forget the lesson of it, or Morbius, or Kraven, or really, Sony’s whole misbegotten Spider-Man spin-off universe. You cannot reverse engineer a good movie. The harder you try, the worse the outcome will be.
Here's Dakota heading to Late Night with Seth Meyers yesterday in New York.
Live long and gossip,
Sarah
