Cybersurfing: Shyamalan’s Hollywood Horror Story
In “Shyamalan’s Hollywood Horror Story, With Twist,” the New York Times offers a brief profile of M. Night Shyamalan, whose THE HAPPENING is scheduled for July 13 release. You will have to sift through quite a bit of text to find a few tiny quotes from the writer-director, and none of them will tell you anything about the film.
Instead, the article appraises his current status in Hollywood – as the outsider who hit big with THE SIXTH SENSE and SIGNS but fell out of favor when THE VILLAGE and LADY IN THE WATER underperformed. Shyamalan added fuel to the fire when he criticized his former bosses at Disney over their reaction to his script for the latter film, which he ended up making at another company (Disney”no longer valued individualism,” he said in Michael Bamberger’s book The Man Who Heard Voices).
Curiously, the article perpetuates the image of Shyamalan as an arrogant man who dislikes being questioned or criticized. The few quotes included are all of a defensive nature: He blames Disney for the marketing campaign of UNBREAKABLE; he suggests that the criticism he has received is because he refuses to conform to the Hollywood template; he insists that people who question his decision to leave Disney wanted him to just “take the money” and “whore” himself out.
I don’t know whether reporter Allison Hope Weiner cherry-picked these quotes to make Shyamalan look bad, but it would have been nice if somewhere in the article he had admitted that maybe – just maybe – Disney objected to LADY IN THE WATER not because they “no longer valued “individualism” but simply because it was not a very good script. I mean, being a maverick outsider is great and all, but you also have to delibver the goods.
[...] the approach of this article (and of a previous New York Times article that I briefly discussed here) reveals something too often lacking in entertainment journalism: a good critical perspective. In [...]