Trapped In Movieland

Over four years ago, on the weekend before 9/11, John Podhoretz explained a big reason why modern movies by and large stank: it’s the writing, stupid, to paraphrase James Carville. During Hollywood’s golden era, moviemakers knew that while they could craft iconic images, they weren’t the best source of original narratives:

So they tend to steal their stories from elsewhere. And in the first half-century or more of the movies, that meant they turned to other media for material