A couple of years ago Kacey Musgraves broke through big time with her insanely catchy country song "Merry Go 'Round," which features the following lyrics:
We get bored, so, we get married
Just like dust, we settle in this town.
On this broken merry go 'round and 'round and 'round we go
Where it stops nobody knows and it ain't slowin' down.
This merry go 'round.
When Musgraves sang about broken merry go 'rounds she was puncturing the idealized notion of small town America and observing how things tend to stay the same with countless desperate souls trapped in prisons of circumstance, not afforded the opportunity to escape to bigger towns.
I couldn't get that out of my head when I sat down to pen this reaction to Hollywood's recent run of directorial hirings. Taika Waititi will reportedly direct Thor: Ragnarok for Marvel Studios. Seth Grahame-Smith is in talks to direct The Flash for Warner Bros. Now Straight Outta Compton's F. Gary Gray is the finalist to helm the next Fast & Furious movie. For the record, that will make Waititi Marvel's first non-White director, and F. Gary Gray will become the first African-American behind the camera of a Fast & Furious movie since John Singleton directed 2 Fast 2 Furious in 2003. Grahame-Smith, on the other hand, is the latest white guy with no feature-length directing experience to be given such a huge break.
In reporting the news about Grahame-Smith, BirthMovieDeath's Devin Faraci was very sensitive to the political ramifications, "He's a white male with zero feature directing experience being hired to make a big budget tentpole movie while women and people of color with actual CVs didn't get the call [...]The lack of experience is going to make Grahame-Smith a target of those who (rightfully) decry Hollywood's mentality of hiring white guys as a default, no matter their experience."
Selma's Ava DuVernay poured one out for her colleagues on Twitter, specifically reaching out to fellow female directors Victoria Mahoney ( Yelling to the Sky), Lexi Alexander ( Punisher: War Zone), Patricia Riggen ( The 33, Girl in Progress) and So Yong Kim, which is a group of women encompassing multiple ethnicities.
She could have also added Rachel Talalay, who has gone from Freddy's Dead and Tank Girl to Doctor Who and recently made it perfectly clear that she'd kill to direct a big budget comic book movie.
Taika Waititi being picked for Thor 3 is progress. The same goes for F. Gary Gray and Furious 8. They are both hot directors at the moment. Waititi's vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows is quickly turning into a cult classic, and Gray's Straight Outta Compton just made a ton of money for Universal. So, of course Universal would turn out around and award Gray with the chance to take over the premiere action franchise of the moment.
There's likely a similar principle at play with Grahame-Smith and The Flash. He's probably getting the job because WB already has a long-standing relationship with him as a screenwriter. WB thinks of itself as a filmmaker-friendly studio, standing by Zack Snyder and rewarding him with Man of Steel even after a failure like Sucker Punch and patting Ben Affleck on the back after Gone Baby Gone and The Town by making him the new Batman and promising him the chance to direct a solo Batman movie or one of the Justice League sequels. Grahame-Smith's hiring is an extension of WB's tendency to reward-from-within. It's not like he didn't work for this break; he's just had a fair deal of good fortune, based upon THR's profile of him.
The near 40-year-old worked a low-level job in cable development after graduating from Emerson College, honing his skills on the side by working on the occasional web series. Then he met and formed a partnership with David Katzenberg, the son of DreamWorks Animation legendary CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg. While they developed and pitched TV shows, he made money on the side with books like The Big Book of Porn and The Spider-Man Handbook. His first real breakthrough, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, wasn't even his idea. It was suggested to him by his editor, and he threw it together in just six weeks. It sold nearly 800,000 copies in its first year, changing his life overnight.
MTV picked up The Hard Times of RJ Berger, a Katzenberg co-developed show about a high school kid with an enormous penis. He signed a new publishing deal and followed up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Tim Burton bought the Abraham Lincoln film rights before the book was even finished, and recruited Smith to not only adapt it to the screen but also to adapt Dark Shadows. Shortly thereafter, Smith and Katzeneberg signed a development deal with WB, and he's remained one of the hottest writers in town even though his movies keep bombing.
By the start of 2015, Grahame-Smith had officially become a part of WB"s "Lego Brain Trust" along with directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and editor-director Chris McKay. He will produce 2016's Lego Ninjago and write 2017's The Lego Batman Movie, which McKay will direct. It seems highly logical that the topic of The Flash must have have come up, and after Lord and Miller chose to direct a Han Solo Star Wars movie instead of The Flash WB's next stop was probably Grahame-Smith, who was already known to be prepping an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes as his directorial debut. As of this writing, he's attached to LEGO Batman, Stephen King's It, the Gremlins remake, a film adaptation of the YA novel Scorpio Races, Beetlejuice 2 and Something Wicked This Way Comes.
His Flash movie might have a fantastic script, especially since he'll be working from a treatment by Lord and Miller, but will it at least look good? No idea; one assumes they'll hire a kickass cinematographer to hold his hand through it. Will he stick with this or will someone else end up directing The Flash when it comes out in 2018? No idea. Roberto Orci was supposed to direct Star Trek 3 despite a complete lack of experience, and he was forced out after the studio didn't like his storyline ideas. So there's that. Will The Flash even happen if Batman v Superman and/or Justice League bomb? Probably not.
What seems to be happening right now is that in the push for more diversity behind the scenes of our movies Hollywood has responded with the assumption that female-led films like Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel requires a woman's touch while only a person of color can truly communicate the tale of Black Panther. White guys, on the other hand, can direct whatever they want because they always have. Plus, hiring the ones with no experience cuts down on the director's salary. Hiring Waititi for Thor: Ragnarok is encouraging on one level because his ethnicity doesn't neatly match up to the material, but it shouldn't have to, just as the person directing The Flash doesn't have to be a white guy just because Barry Allen is. However, I don't think WB actively sought out a white guy for The Flash. It more comes down to opportunity and access, and Seth Grahame-Smith is someone they've worked with for years. The same kind of working relationahip helped F. Gary Gray at Universal.
However, if I'm honest about this, the first thing I thought when I read about Seth Grahame-Smith and The Flash was not the diversity merry go 'round. Instead, I was merely annoyed that there's still going to be this Flash movie which has nothing to do with the TV show.
