We’ve all heard the explanation: a filmmaker explains the plot of an upcoming film that sounds strangely familiar. Before an accusation of multiple trips to the same trough is lodged, the filmmaker invokes the world ‘trilogy’ and evades trouble.
The case against these filmmakers is serious and profound. The names have been retained to protect the movie-going audience.
Defendants
Robert Rodriguez’s “Mariachi Trilogy”—Rodriguez created a stir with his first film, “El Mariachi”, not only for the kinetic style it displayed despite a paltry $7000 budget, but also for the pharmaceutical experiments the director subjected himself to in order to raise the money. His second film, “Desperado”, mined the same territory as his first but with a larger budget and Antonio Banderas. “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”, clearly an effort to reign in his previous two films into a Sergio Leone-style “Good, The Bad and The Ugly” statement. The film returned to the same ground once again, only with an even bigger budget and bigger star in Johnny Depp.
Kevin Smith’s “New Jersey Trilogy”—after impressing with his low budget, foul-mouthed abandon in “Clerks”, Smith opted to make his follow-up “Mallrats” a friendlier PG-13 affair. The final film in this triptych, “Chasing Amy”, is a return to content and form and is a bookend to his chronicles of life in New Jersey. How this explains “Jersey Girl” remains a mystery.
Barry Levinson’s “Baltimore Trilogy”—Levinson made a critical impact with his first film as director, “Diner”. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer assumed they were getting a beer-fueled high school romp and not a thoughtful character study about boys resisting manhood. “Tin Men” continued the setting, detailing the lives of aluminum siding salesmen who occupied the other side of the Baltimore diner of his first film. Levinson’s vision of a changing America culminated with “Avalon”, a film as tender and considered as his other Baltimore films but on an epic canvas. How this explains “Liberty Heights”, another nostalgia-soaked return to 1950s Baltimore, remains a mystery.
The Evidence
The first two examples bear similarities. Conventional wisdom in acquiring first-time films is that the purchase has less to do with the film itself and more to do with securing the filmmakers subsequent efforts. In both cases, follow-up films felt little more than remakes of the original, only with more money and less invention.
An argument could be made that Kevin Smith made his films from experience and that the recurring settings, characters and dialogue were a mark of a singular voice. Many filmmakers have stepped outside of their comfort zones (example, example) with entertaining results.
Robert Rodriguez is primarily an entertainer, so the auteur argument doesn’t apply. Rodriguez saw an opportunity to return to the same canvas with “Desperado” and spend more money on bigger explosions and stylized gunplay. The case for Rodriguez could be built on his role as a genre filmmaker—the stories never change, only the players and choreography. Yet other filmmakers (David Cronenberg, John Ford, and Sidney Lumet) have breathed new life into exhausted genres.
Barry Levinson approached “Avalon” as the final summing up of his experiences in Baltimore and, indeed, in America. He is quote as saying that he could have written another five or six Baltimore stories, but didn’t want to till the same soil. A noble sentiment, but one countered by years of medium critical reaction and cold box-office returns.
The Punishment
The notion of ‘trilogy’ should only apply to those films that were clearly conceived on a large scale. An obvious example is George Lucas’ “Star Wars”. Lucas wrote a script for a broad space opera and, concerned that he would never be able to make it on the scale he envisioned, rewrote that script’s first act into its own film. Once it became the box office phenomenon and cultural touchstone we know today, the return to the second and third act of his original story a natural progression and completion of the story.
In future, whenever filmmakers are compelled to return to the scene of previous successes, any mention of the ‘T’ word should result in banishment to the directing of infomercials and writing of daytime soaps. Then maybe they’ll learn.
Case dismissed.
