Saturday, July 18, 2015

What's More Important? Style or a Good Idea

It appears that content or a good idea can be more important than style. For example, would Lolita, despite it being extremely well written, be as well known if it weren't about the sexual seduction of a 12-year-old nubile nymphet? A number of critics and writers believe that Lolita would be on the level of The Enchanter or Laughter in the Dark but not the novel that made Nabokov rich and (in)famous.

The Blare Witch Project (1999) began with a budget of $600,000 and a 35 page outline for a script that was sans dialogue since the dialogue was improvised. The filming lasted only eight days and was done by a "cinematographer" with only two days of training. However, the innovative independent film's content trumped it's amateur techniques and feel and made a whopping $248.6 million at the Box office. 

Then you have examples like San Andreas (2015). The film received a mediocre 3 out of 5 stars from IMDb, 2.5 out of 5 stars from Rotten Tomatoes and 2 out of 5 stars from Metacritic, but the 3D disaster film made $459.8 at the Box office after being filmed on a budget of $110 million.

And I'm not the only writer who can't fully understand why Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is a cult classic. But it may have something to do with the level of emotion that Salinger put into the book while writing it in the trenches during World War II.

Thus it appears that a good idea, which is of course subjective, can be more important than style. 


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