Despite recent news that the massive, pop culture convention would be going virtual in July, plans for the fall gathering have moved forward. Comic-Con International has announced their plans to hold an in-person convention in 2021.
The three-day event titled, “Comic-Con Special Edition” will take place over Thanksgiving weekend Friday, Saturday and Sunday, November 26 through the 28 at the San Diego Convention Center.
Like a few other pop-culture behemoths, Game of Thrones cast a huge shadow and spawned many would-be imitators. The Marvel Cinematic Universe led to a dozen copycat “cinematic universes”; Lost spawned a ton of TV shows that went down endless cryptic rabbit holes; The Dark Knight cursed us with a decade of “chaotic-evil dude who has magic blow-everything-up powers and gets caught on purpose” movies. The thing is, people always take the wrong lesson from these successes—they focus on the froth rather than the churn, the tip rather than the iceberg, and what a popular thing turned into over time, rather than what made it popular in the first place.
Here are seven of the wrong lessons that everyone learned from the phenomenal success of Game of Thrones—one for each of the Seven Kingdoms. (I miss writing listicles, can you tell?)
Editor’s Note: Image at top is from my collection, George R.R. Martin, author, at Comic-Con, San Diego, CA.
By Martha Ostergar, KSL.com Contributor | Posted – Mar. 13, 2021 at 2:49 p.m.
Right Up Our Alley
THE ALLEY — We’ve all seen “single-shot drone shots” in our time on the internet. It doesn’t seem to be that hard when you know how to fly a drone. You just fly over something pretty, do some post effects to make the colors pop, and voila, you’ve got something pretty nice that people love watching.
The film is called “Right Up Our Alley,” and it showcases a typical night at the Bryant Lake Bowl bowling alley and theater in Minneapolis. And it’s all done in a single shot.
What’s a mystery all about? The ending? Well, of course, you say—the denouement, the unraveling of the clues, the big reveal. If it’s too easy to guess the ending before that very moment, or if the ending doesn’t seem to mesh with the clues provided by the author you’re disappointed with it. It’s a lousy mystery, right?
Really? Ever re-read a mystery? Even though you know the solution? (If you’re like me, of course, you can re-read it a year later because you’ve forgotten the solution, but that’s another matter.) But what’s the pleasure in re-reading if the entire pleasure is in the solution dangled like a carrot before you? Tom Stoppard, the great British playwright, opines that a play which depends on keeping its secrets isn’t worth viewing twice—which he found out the hard way. Which brings us to the mystery of Sherlock Holmes. If you’ve read a Holmes story, chances are you’ve read another, and if you’ve read two, you’ve probably read them all and re-read them all, and chances are you’ve picked every bone of that corpus clean, with a great deal of relish. Why on earth would you do that? Where’s the mystery in that? I’ll spill my solution up front: the mystery is in Holmes. It’s been said that next to Jesus and Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes has had more ink spilled about him than any man, real or fictional. Holmes is the black box of literature. Doyle’s genius is not in what he reveals, but what he conceals. The rue depth is not in the notes, but the silences.
In April 2019, thousands of Hollywood writers fired their agents en masse. The move convulsed the entertainment industry. It looked like an impossible David and Goliath scenario: The Writers Guild of America had declared war on the immensely powerful talent agencies, several of which had mutated into full-blown media conglomerates over the years, backed by private-equity money.
The WGA argued that these agencies—in producing their own projects and creating package deals that combined writers, actors, and directors—no longer had the best interests of their clients as their first priority. The packages, they believed, were riddled with conflicts of interest and weren’t necessarily the best deal for writers.
“This has the potential to be a really, really big bang,” one veteran TV writer told me in March that year.
Nearly two years later, the bitter struggle concluded with a plot twist: The writers have triumphed. One by one, the agencies signed on to WGA’s terms, agreeing to phase out the widespread practice of packaging. William Morris Endeavor (WME), the last agency holdout, finally came to an agreement earlier this month.
Editor’s Note: Sometimes, it’s true.. the pen is mightier than the sword!
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