Dispatch from the Lost Riviera

On the art of story development, and on stories we are developing.

What a time to be alive!

There have been many times in my life that I’ve despaired of my inescapable fate as a writer. There was nothing else I was any good at, or could get paid to do, or enjoyed.
I hated jobs and careers. I had no choice but to choose this path in life, for better or worse. But now, today, I am certain it was for the better.

Uncompromised Writers of America: this is your time to shine!

Lost Riviera Studios is a new creative startup focused on story development. Story development is just what it says: developing stories, mostly to turn into some sort of filmed or otherwise longform content (or, what your grandpa would call movies and shows).

In the traditional system, the development execs deep inside the bowels of a studio spend all day sifting through scripts, reading coverage of scripts, hearing pitches, assigning newly published books to interns to read that they may want to option, and generally scouring the Earth for story ideas they think would make profitable products.

If they find an idea they love but it’s a book or a pitch, they pay a writer to turn it into a script or a pilot. Any finished scripts then have to be greenlit by a chain of increasingly stupid and woke production executives and bosses.

But the first curator (or gatekeeper, if you’re nasty) is the development executive.

When you look at the next year or two of products coming down the conveyer belt from the traditional system, you’re seeing the product of intense story development that is now in the hands of some of the worst people bestriding the Earth.

The gatekeepers have lost their gatekeeping skill. The visionaries have lost their vision. This is why you are seeing factory-issued IP, and sequel after sequel. “Originality” is a luxury they can no longer afford and don’t understand.

Get that? Back to normalcy. Back to fun. Back to entertainment that—trigger warning—has no political ideology other than universal human truth.

The Current Landscape

This week I took my youngest to see Inside Out 2. It was cute, not terrible but not great.

But before the main attraction we had to endure at least five previews that were all sequels or prequels of existing IP: Mufasa from the Lion King is getting his origin story, Despicable Me 4 (worst IP in history after Shrek), Bad Boys 2, and finally, worst of all, a Beetlejuice sequel.

Meet Ennui, the only emotion you experience at a movie.