On Listening to Too Much Dan Carlin (03)

Another downward spiral in the suicide plunge that Hollywood took was the financial disaster that followed in the filming of such "franchises" as Battleship, Monopoly, Sorry! and Mouse Trap. Believing that "synergies" could be created by making a movie out of a bestseller in another genre, Hollywood could not "get it" that strong sales in one area might not translate to strong sales in another area. Silly things like story, character and the like got lost in the shuffle.

When franchise after franchise failed to live up (in a very spectacular fashion) to initial expectations, the studios imploded. Some closed their doors, some declared Chapter 11 and hoped to come back, some flew apart like an engine revving to the point beyond which centripetal forces took over.

One of these studios tried to reverse the trends of the stupefaction of cinema by filming "more intellectual" properties. While versions of the works of Shakespeare and Dickens did well, other properties did not. After several successes, which led to purchasing and financing more and more properties, which led to stretched purse strings, this studio too went under when it hired Terry Gilliam to make a movie of a property even he could not boil down into a cinematic bite: Douglas Hofstadter's award-winning Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

Even Gilliam could not film the impossible.