Of Writing and Industry

My last post was about that book, "How Hollywood Works", and I was in the middle of the shock of getting inside details about the cinema industry.
Well, after reading the book some thoughts came.
Hollywood's machine seems like a bloody one, the survivor of the toughest arena.
But what about not having a cinema industry?
I came from a country where there's none.
Yes, in Peru some people do the effort and make some movies every year. But "quality cinema"?, that's other issue.
From the less than a dozen of movies that are made per year there, maybe ONE can be called "good" or perhaps "nice".
The rest, to be honest, is mostly B.S.
I had an experience there, some years ago, when a script was commissioned to me.
It was a TV miniseries, 8 chapters of 30 minutes each one, with social content, a good idea.
I did my best. Each chapter had a very good beginning, middle and end, leaving enough suspense at each end to make the audience wanting for more.
I was proud of the final drafts.
Then came the surprise.
The Director assigned for the project (a middle age, local guy with a couple of bad movies in his resume) came to me saying "I don't have enough material for each chapter. In the 'format' that you're using (he was very sarcastic when mentioning the word 'format') I simply don't have enough, you need to write at least the double for each one."
However I insisted that he had enough, that each page was a minute on screen, and more pages will make each chapter too long, he insisted.
Well, he was the director, so I did it.
The result: Each chapter was so long that in the end he had to cut each chapter in a point where there was no suspense at all. He simply shoot and, like a bad tailor, cut the chapter when he reached the half hour limit.
The final result was like a bad soap opera directed by Ed Wood.
What happened? THE GUY, A "LOCAL FILMS DIRECTOR", SIMPLY DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO WRITE OR READ AN SCRIPT WROTE IN THE STANDARD FORMAT!
That bad memory-experience came back to me when thinking about the book that I just read.
If there's no Cinema Industry, if you don't have all the tools, "formats", and all that stuff that decades of experience has created, then you have what I had: Improvised people, doing improvised stuff and finally a bad product.
Yes, a finished film or TV series or miniseries is a product.
You can complain about many things of the Hollywood machine, there's a lot to complain about.
But it is an industry, and that, no matter the negative aspects, is a pro, not a con.
Life is tough, screenwriting is tough, broke your back trying to get your material into the industry is tough, but that's how it is... like life.
Let's leave the complains behind and go to our stuff: write, write, pitch, get rejected, write again, write more, pitch again...
Maybe in the end you could finally get some of your beloved material produced.
If not, then you have the experience. And that makes you stronger to write more.
FADE TO