As those in the want-to-be-filmmaking community may have noticed, Amazon.com recently announced the formation of Amazon Studios, where they believe “21st-century technology creates opportunities to make and share movies and scripts more easily than ever.”

Sounds great, right?

Well, probably not.  For reasons that clearly demonstrate a total lack of understanding of how movies get made, Amazon has decided to use a crowd-sourcing model of artistic creation.  In Amazon’s words:

Any participant at Amazon Studios can revise a script or test movie.  But, as explained above, revisions do not replace each other, they are simply alternate versions.

This, in a nutshell, is exactly why there are so many terrible movies hitting theaters near you.  Studios hire a writer to write a draft of a script.  They producers don’t like it, so they bring in another writer.  This version is also not up to par, so a third writer is brought in for more revisions, etc.  This process goes on until studios literally have to start shooting or they’ll miss their pre-set release date.

Good movies, on the other hand, often go like this: a writer writes a fantastic script.  A talented director shoots it.  No one else is brought in.

This is (obviously) remarkably simplistic, and there are hundreds counter-examples for both those scenarios.  But this idea is not novel or new.  The biggest difference in Amazon’s model is they’re not actually paying anyone to do any of the writing.

No writer worth a damn should bother.  Amazon is treating the creative process like an ant colony.  Individually, ants are practically useless.  They get lost, confused, stuck, or squashed.  But when you pool the collective trial-and-error of hundreds of thousands of individual ants, they often come up with great solutions to problems.

Writing should not be this way.  Could it be?  Maybe.  If you sit thousands of monkeys down at typewriters (as the saying goes), eventually something good might come out.  But you’ll get something good with much greater efficiency if you hire someone good to write it.

Emphasis on hire.

Shame on you, Amazon.  I expected better.