Freaky Tales and Johnny Canuck
and the Splendor and Misery of Seeking, of Scarcity
Last week I saw the movie Freaky Tales. Was it objectively great? …It was pretty good. But I enjoyed it immensely, because it is a set of interlinked East Bay stories, and I live in the East Bay. I frequently pass 924 Gilman, where movie punks fight movie Nazis. I’ve heard—felt—the Oakland Coliseum crowd erupt for Too $hort; he and a Warriors point guard are major characters. I recognized sets, characters, Easter eggs. I knew the scene, and the history, of its mise-en-scene. It’s very rare for Hollywood to spend millions on a story which so specifically targets a particular time and place that is not a major market.
I was reminded of “Johnny Canuck and the Last Burlesque,” a Montreal Fringe Festival I saw when I lived there many years ago. Its fortyish minutes were one of the most entertaining theatrical experiences of my life—and one that could not possibly play anywhere but Montreal, not even elsewhere in Canada, because it was so Montreal: the franglais dialogue, the in-jokes, the Quebecois characters. It was glorious art, but so of and for a particular time and place that it’s a minor miracle it made it to the stage at all. It played fewer than a dozen performances and vanished forever. A filmed version was of course unthinkable.
But much less unthinkable now.
Suppose you were a big fan of Tom & Jerry cartoons. Suppose you harbored vague desires to write & direct your own fanfiction Tom & Jerry clips. Amusing but ridiculous, right? I mean, you could write ‘em, but to construct even a minute of quality animation requires time, effort, and technical ability well beyond any—
—oh.
Between that, and Runway’s Gen-4, and the new versions of Sora and Veo, and the Ghibli craze that swept the Internet last month, and Kling, and so on, etcetera… the means of cinematic production are drifting tantalizingly close to the masses of people who previously would have had to content themselves with fanfiction, or fan art, or maybe, if they were very lucky and talented indeed, a one-off Fringe Festival show.
That’s exciting! We’ll see a crude “screenplay to storyboard” product in months, if not sooner. (It might be technically possible now.) That will be followed by “screenplay to entire scenes.” Of course, at first those scenes will be stitched so crudely together they’l seem the cinematic equivalent of Karloff’s Frankenstein…
…but bit by bit, they’ll get smoother, and better, and their characters and settings will find consistency, and they’ll offer shot-by-shot style and filter and edit options, Dutch angles and montages and cinema vérité on demand ... and creating my sleepy Canadian hometown’s equivalent of Freaky Tales will become something accessible to a dedicated gang of bored teenagers over a summer, rather than a major Hollywood production with hundreds of credits and a budget of millions. Similarly, future Johnny Canucks will be immortalized professional-quality films available to everyone—though non-Montrealers will still need the Wikipedia page to get the jokes.
This is genuinely inspiring stuff, y’all.
…in its way. Though it will not be good for everyone. To quote the Hollywood Reporter on Ghibli:
the tide is with the customized and the automated — and away from originality … many executives think the only commercial path is to turn images and eventually audio and video into the kind of customization suggested by this OpenAI move — to digitize the Miyazaki no matter the cognitive dissonances, to tap into a collective machine unconscious no matter their jobs as foremen of the Dream Factory.
That’s way over the top, but it is true most films will be fanfilms, and mot fanfilms will be as good as most fanfiction, which, well, I’ll just leave that sentence unfinished. But hey, Sturgeon’s Law, and hey, Hollywood was strip-mining beloved franchises (sorry, “valuable IP”), rather than birthing original stories, long before modern AI emerged. Delegating creative responsibility to aimless teenagers is probably true creativity’s last best hope.
What feels far more bittersweet than that, for me, is the relentless loss of scarcity.
The splendor and misery of seeking, of scarcity
Johnny Canuck was, in its way, a masterpiece; but at the same time, its ephemerality was part of its appeal, and part of the reason I remember it so fondly. Only if you were lucky enough to be there—lucky enough to have worked to be there—did you get to experience it. That makes that intersection of time and place feel like it mattered.
This is true for many kinds of art … and it becomes less true when that art is available on tap at any time. The uncomfortable truth is that music was more precious to us when it was scarce. The uncomfortable truth is that an obscure out-of-print book you finally found after hunting for years in used bookstores is more likely to mean something to you than a selection from an e-book library you can command to your Kindle in seconds.
Last week in San Francisco a giant naked statue was unveiled as public art, after appearing at Burning Man years before. That sculptor’s previous work Bliss Dance, which also debuted in the desert, now stands outside the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Does it mean less there? It arguably means more, symbolically—captured by capitalism—but similarly, Burning Man art, once ephemeral, is more or less in the shop window for galleries, and valued less as a result. the art which burns in the desert isn’t necessarily better, but it does means more, and there’s more respect for it, because it’s scarce and ephemeral.
That said we will always find ways for art to invest specific moments and places with mythic significance. We might have to work harder for it, true. But the flip side is that making the tools of production available to the masses means art forms can expand to scenes and communities worldwide who previously had to fight their way through a thousand gatekeepers … and so 99.99% failed, gave up, or, generally, never even tried. Few will be blockbuster successes. But they’ll tell the stories of your time and place, with, eventually, the polish of today’s professionals. And some of them will be great.