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SHYAMALAN, M. NIGHT (1970– ). American writer and director.
Wrote, directed, and produced: The Happening (2008).
Wrote and directed: The Sixth Sense (1999).
Wrote with Greg Brooker: Stuart Little (1999).
Appeared in documentaries: The Sixth Sense: Reflections from the
Set (short) (Charles Kiselyak 2002); Between Two Worlds (short)
(Kiselyak 2002); Making Signs (Laurent Bouzereau 2003); The Buried
Secret of M. Night Shyamalan (tv mock documentary) (Nathaniel Khan 2004); Inside
the Village: A Movie Special (tv short) (2004); Reflections of Lady on
the Water (2006).
Still, noting that his career has not exactly prospered in the manner
of his one-time role model, and wondering why he has become the most despised
man in Hollywood at an age when Spielberg was beginning to garner lifetime
achievement awards, Shyamalan might fruitfully take a long, careful look at Spielberg's
filmography and contemplate the unthinkable—that perhaps, just perhaps, once
or twice along the way, M. Night Shyamalan did something wrong. Manifestly, only
a genuine piece of work could drive me to praise Steven Spielberg, but let me
give the devil his due: Spielberg at least could recognize his own limitations:
he more or gave up writing his own scripts, and was generally content to let
other screenwriters adapt other people's stories; he listened to his colleagues
and could at times be persuaded to avoid obvious mistakes; he sometimes passed
projects on to other directors that he thought were better suited for the tasks;
he did not harbor any illusions that he was a great actor and cast himself in
all of his own films. In addition, while Spielberg definitely had things to
say, and had games to play, he did not allow his own obsessions to entirely
outweigh the need to provide audiences with tolerable diversions, so that he
proved occasionally capable of producing more-or-less satisfactory films such
as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1983) and Minority Report (2002). To
sum up everything that has been disastrous in Shyamalan's career, suffice it to
say that he decided to do things a little differently.
Instead of further chastising Shyamalan (why bother, when so many
others are devoting themselves to the chore?), I would prefer to consider the
man as a symptom of a larger problem afflicting the contemporary film industry:
that all too often, today's decisions about filmmaking are being made by people
who really don't know anything about filmmaking. Say what you will about the many
evils of the old studio system, but Louis B. Mayer would never in a million
years have green-lighted a project as shoddily constructed as Signs or
as risibly silly and repellent as The Village. Now, though, the people
who sign the checks generally lack Mayer's gut instincts and, overly swayed by
the cult of the auteur, are unwisely inclined to trust the judgment of a
director who has had a few hits—which will work well enough if you're hiring,
say, Martin Scorsese, but can have ruinous results if you're hooking up with
the likes of, say, Michael Cimino or M. Night Shyamalan. Really, why should we criticize
a man because he consistently comes up with stupid ideas that he develops into
lousy scripts? Isn't this, on reflection, a rather commonplace flaw? Shouldn't
our real fury be directed at the people who give him a hundred million dollars
to actually make and release films like his forthcoming flop, The Happening?
So, how would Mayer have dealt with Shyamalan as a contract employee
for MGM? No doubt the man would have been yanked out of the director's chair,
reclassified exclusively as a writer, teamed up with a trustworthy
collaborator, and assigned only to write screen adaptations of sure-fire source
material. And the result would have been film credits like Stuart Little —an inoffensive,
dopily charming divertissement, well within the range of his talents,
that with The Sixth Sense would be the only highlights of a Shyamalan
film festival. Alas, as long as there are people in Hollywood with lots of
money and little intelligence, we will instead have to endure the sorry
products of M. Night Shyamalan's grander ambitions.
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