The Second Peter Hyams Rule

Step 1: Make film that everybody likes.

Step 2: Use that as your opportunity to make a film that you’ve always wanted to.

Step 3: It is a great, great film.

Step 4: Being a visionary, no one gets it.

Step 5: Your career is ruined (possibly), but what’s much much much worse

Step 6: You start making crappy films. Your soul is dead.

Step 7: Write an article that bemoans the current critical mass, so to speak. If anyone should be supporting filmmakers when audiences don’t, and should have the taste to know when something is a classic, it’s film critics. And you don’t.

Step 8: Being a visionary, no one gets me.

Basically, having to rely on the opinions of others for what is ‘real’ or ‘true’ or ‘in quotes’, filmmakers are stuck with the versions of reality of a bunch of people that are by definition lack of visionaries. This has ruined the filmmaking careers of many, as by example. And my career as a blogger, 1) by calling blogging a career, and 2) by not turning this into eight great film careers ruined by opinions that weren’t mine. To wit:

Fargo → The Big Lebowski → Intolerable Cruelty

Alien → Blade Runner → Legend

War of the Worlds → Citizen Kane → Never got to make Life of Christ 

Rear Window → Vertigo → The Birds, also, never got to make movie with Jimmy Stewart regaining his sight at Disneyland, but that was because of Psycho. Well, someone’s got to argue with me, even if it’s me. It’s a list!

Meet John Doe → It’s a Wonderful Life → Here Comes the Groom

Dead Ringers → Naked Lunch → M Butterfly

The Sixth Sense → Unbreakable → Signs/The Happening/and down and down and down

Three Kings → I Heart Huckabees → The Fighter

300 → Watchmen → Man of Steel

Se7en → Fight Club → The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Inexplicably, there’s more here. Apparently I was originally going to call it ‘cum hoc ergo propter Black Rain’, so I do have a penchant for the confusing. And for discouraging people to read more.