itstartedwithawindmill at 2009-12-29 18:15:50:

Michigan's film office has Continental Divide listed as a filmed in Michigan. I don't remember it well enough to know and was surprised that it was filmed in Michigan.

Scott, I'd be interested in your opinion of why success (or even the desire to create) provokes hostility in the haters of the world. Seems to me that proximity to success only increases the hate.

Scott at 2009-12-29 20:11:23:

@itstartedwithawindmill: One need only look at the strike/lockout in 2008 to see an amazing level of vitriol leveled against the WGA and its writer members. Many reasons for that, much of it having to do with a long and often bad history between the Guild and AMPTP. But there is in my view another dynamic also at work: Most producers and studio execs are not creative. That is, they can't do what screenwriters do. Some of them may have a pretty well developed understanding of story [many, in fact, do not], but to write a script from scratch or know how to adapt some source material into a screenplay or fix a preexisting problematic script - they don't know how to do that. And the fact is, if you don't have a script, you don't have a movie.

So what does that translate into on a primal level? Fear. On some level, I figure that most of the people on the 'other' side are fundamentally 'afraid' of what writers can do and they themselves can't. It makes them beholden to writers.

Now that gets translated in many, many ways, almost none of them looking much like fear, but rather actions intended to demonstrate to writers that it is they (producers, studio execs) who have the power - which, in effect, they do re hiring and firing, greenlighting a project. But they know writers have creative power - and they do what they can to minimize that fact.

Then comes the work stoppage - and the masks come off. And what we saw in 2008 was a remarkable level of vitriol. But in my view, something of that was about their fear of creative types, rather than out and out spite.