Mark Harris just wrote a chilling and fascinating article for GQ that you’re going to want to read if you love movies. Harris’ “State of the Union” lays studio movies out on the autopsy table. And it ain’t pretty. This article will help you understand what’s happened to movies, and why you may feel like you are no longer being told stories but being hit over the head with giant, loud, plastic PRODUCT.

It’s a very educational read — equal parts scathing, inspiring and deflating. Hopefully, it will make you want to rally behind making (and buying tickets to) something better. The article is so good that I want to whet your appetite with the opening paragraphs here. We need a revolution, and we need it badly.

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You want to understand how bad things are in Hollywood right now—how stifling and airless and cautious the atmosphere is, how little nourishment or encouragement a good new idea receives, and how devoid of ambition the horizon currently appears—it helps to start with a success story.

Consider: Years ago, an ace filmmaker, the man who happened to direct the third-highest-grossing movie in U.S. history, The Dark Knight, came up with an idea for a big summer movie. It’s a story he loved—in fact, he wrote it himself—and it belonged to a genre, the sci-fi action thriller, that zipped right down the center lane of American popular taste. He cast as his leading man a handsome actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who happened to star in thesecond-highest-grossing movie in history. Finally, to cover his bet even more, he hired half a dozen Oscar nominees and winners for supporting roles.

Sounds like a sure thing, right? Exactly the kind of movie that a studio would die to have and an audience would kill to see? Well, it was. That film, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, received admiring reviews, became last summer’s most discussed movie, and has grossed, as of this writing, more than three-quarters of a billion dollars worldwide.

And now the twist: The studios are trying very hard not to notice its success, or to care. Before anybody saw the movie, the buzz within the industry was: It’s just a favor Warner Bros. is doing for Nolan because the studio needs him to make Batman 3. After it started to screen, the party line changed: It’s too smart for the room, too smart for the summer, too smart for the audience. Just before it opened, it shifted again: Nolan is only a brand-name director to Web geeks, and his drawing power is being wildly overestimated. After it grossed $62 million on its first weekend, the word was: Yeah, that’s pretty good, but it just means all the Nolan groupies came out early—now watch it drop like a stone.

And here was the buzz three months later, after Inception became the only release of 2010 to log eleven consecutive weeks in the top ten: Huh. Well, you never know.

“Huh. Well, you never know” is an admission that, put simply, things have never been worse.

READ ON at GQ.com

It’s in the air…

This week’s Entertainment Weekly declares a “Fairytale Renaissance” in live action movies.

Warner Brother’s spooky live-action “Red Riding Hood” hits theaters this month.

“Syfy’s original movie “Red“ follows a modern descendant of Red Riding Hood as she hunts werewolves.

The NBC series “Grimm” is going to basically be a serious, live-action “Hoodwinked,” as a detective investigates modern “Fairytale based crimes.” (The detective is even named NICK, for pete’s sake!)

For once, it’s nice to be ahead of a trend instead of chasing it.

I’m intrigued to see what Hollywood comes up with. Fairytales are timeless, and even though these are more reboots chasing original classics, at least they might remind everyone of the pure place where real storytelling comes from.

I’ve already gotten several comments about Twitchy’s voice in the “Hoodwinked Too” trailer. Yes, it’s me and yes, it’s different. It’s nice to know that so many of you are big enough fans that you noticed this from only TWO LINES in the trailer! As I’ve said before, different people are running this show now. I can only offer my advice so many times. Director Mike Disa was incredibly inclusive of me when he didn’t have to be, but there are simply some things he and his team chose to do differently. Each time I recorded my dialogue for the fast talking squirrel, I let them know what the “formula” was for creating the voice in the last movie: 50% faster in Pro Tools. That’s it. But they chose to vary the speed, depending on the line, and many times just pitched the voice higher without any speedup at all. Since I recorded everything anticipating the speed up to “gibberish level,” I delivered the lines according to that. So that’s why Twitchy is going to sound different.

Every time I was invited to screenings or invited to comment, I would say, “Twitchy’s voice sounds different, you need to be aware of that.” From what I can tell from the many blank stares and the end result, nobody really cared. Again, I got nothin’ but love for Mike Disa! He had his own set of headaches getting this to the screen, believe me.

And to address the amount of crass humor in the trailer — yes, this is indicative of the jokes in the film, sorry to say. Not much I can do when I’m not the director. I have it on good authority that Weinsteins were eager to push for more “Shrek humor” and kept tweaking the jokes with punch-up writers ’til the last minute. I’m disappointed by that approach, and it’s my hope that those ruder moments don’t overwhelm what we originally wrote. I say I “hope,” because I haven’t seen the final movie yet. Yeah, that’s weird.

If you go see “Gnomio & Juliet” this week, you’ll probably catch the trailer on the big screen. Let me know how the farts sound in THX.

Well guys, I guess hell has frozen over because “Hoodwinked Too: Hood Vs. Evil” is finally committing to a release date: April 29.  And even though that is the fourth date that I’ve heard, the TRAILER has officially gone online this morning, so I think it’s real this time. And yes, it will be released in 3D.

You’ll see that the sequel is distinctly different from the original in look and tone, but a film is shaped by its director and I did not direct this one. Forgive the abundance of fart jokes and crotch kicks — those were not in the script we wrote (okay, ONE… but that was really a “nerve gas joke”). Also, this trailer has some sound effects and lines that aren’t even in the movie. I guess the Weinstein machine thought it needed ONE more fart sound and ONE more joke about Twitchy not wearing pants. It’s weird to write something four years ago, have it evolve in others’ hands, and then finally see it hit the screen. And I’m going to miss the unique musical stamp Todd put on the first movie with all his original songs — not here on this one.

However,  I’m very proud that our characters have been loved enough to live on and to generate a second movie. It’s a whole new adventure with them, with some new twists.

And now I guess I can refer to myself as a co-creator of “The Hoodwinked Franchise”…on those days when I’m feeling really egotistical.