Rant & Rave Season 8 [Spoilers]: When you are cool like a cucumber, as evil as the mother of madness, but never as perfect as the pet!

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Le Cygne]

1 hour ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Chapter 3 - the failed pilot

Iain Glen (Jorah Mormont): "It was a bit ragged, and in some ways, ill-conceived, and no one had great conviction. Since the wedding was shot at night, quite a lot of money had been spent on seeing absolutely fuck-all."

Hibberd: "One frequently cited issue at HBO was that the pilot lacked 'scope'. Thrones was supposed to be an epic fantasy, but the production felt 'small', particularly for its steep budget and exotic locations."

Michael Lombardo (HBO): "There were some concerns about whether we were getting enough wideshots. Are we getting the coverage we need? We hired the best costume designer and the best art director and shot this in Northern Ireland and Morocco, yet there was very little scope. I remember the quote was, 'We could have shot this in Burbank'."

Iain Glen: "Some bigwig at HBO said, 'Why the fuck did we go to Morocco? You can't see fucking diddly squat, we could have shot it in a car park!"

Gina Balian (HBO): "Somebody said, 'It looked like it was shot in my backyard'."

- Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, pages 40-42

 

.....the HBO executives directly told them there weren't enough wideshots in it.  Meaning....meaning the whole thing was filled with a lot of CLOSEUPS, or mid-frame at best, just....just showing off "These Performances, These Faces".  They had no idea how "Cinematography" works.  That's what they kept urging the camerawork to be like SINCE DAY ONE.  They "learned" NOTHING.

But the horrifying detail here is that the HBO leadership, NOT the directors under them they ignore, but the HBO LEADERSHIP, directly pointed out to them that they weren't using wideshots enough, TO THE POINT that they directly cited "then why did you bother did build expensive fully realized sets if you weren't going to show them in wideshots?"

.....this...this was a PERVASIVE problem throughout the show.  Worse Season 5 onwards after they got infinite renewal from the Red Wedding in Season 3.  They were "playing nice" in Seasons 1 to 4, then in Season 5  Benioff narcissistically insisted "I know better than the experts" and shifted BACK to that, tighter control over directors, insisting on nothing but static non-moving closeup shots.....to show off and pander the lead actors.

They can't claim ignorance.  They were directly warned and it nearly resulted in the entire project being canceled.  HBO CITED this as a specific complaint.

This wasn't ignorance.  They were trying to spite their internal critics who told them "cinematography doesn't work like that, you are not a cinematography expert".  

And of course, an extensive of this is specifically the screen darkness issue - skipping ahead, in the chapter on Season 8's Long Night battle, Cogman defiantly insists "this is what night scenes are SUPPOSED to look like!".....deflecting the complaint, "then why did you spend millions of dollars on a fully realized set you intended to be non-visible in darkness?"

SINCE DAY ONE!

Yes to all of this.

Iain Glen (Jorah Mormont): "It was a bit ragged, and in some ways, ill-conceived, and no one had great conviction. Since the wedding was shot at night, quite a lot of money had been spent on seeing absolutely fuck-all."

You are exactly right, Benioff/Weiss/Cogman thumbed their noses at anyone who dared challenge them, out of sheer spite and entitlement. They did the same thing all over again. Just like they kept making Sansa Jeyne. And all the other mistakes they never stopped making.

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Ghostlydragon]

10 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Martin told them his future book plans in the break between writing Seasons 3 and 4, around Christmas 2012.  Before that, they had to "play nice" because they didn't know how Martin was going to end the books - YES he had an outline, they chose to ignore it - but up until that point, he could dangle that in front of them "there's this amazing thing in a future book, do what I tell you and I MIGHT share it with you"

 

Their desire to drop Rickon....keep in mind, this could only have affected Season 4.  They're admitting they grudgingly put him in Seasons 1 to 3 under a vague promise from GRRM he has a future storyline - then when they didn't LIKE that storyline....well, they had to keep him in Season 4 only because he was already with Bran.  

What I'm saying is in Season 1 they only grudgingly gave him a handful of scenes and never wanted to build him up, but had to bow to GRRM's order that he does more later.  By Season 6 they'd seen the outline, self-consciously rejected Rickon's future story, and promptly killed him off WITHOUT A SINGLE LINE OF NEW DIALOGUE.  

But this explains why they were always dragging their feet to give him...any dialogue of substance, in the first FOUR seasons!  He has a few lines here and there and yeah he's a child, but they could have done more.

I'm sure his future role will be him becoming Lord of Winterfell with Wyman Manderley as his regent some time after Stannis defeats the Freys and Boltons.  But since D&D didn't want to do that, look at what happened to everyone involved in that storyline 

[Le Cygne]

The book is spin. HBO and producers admitting such and such was a problem, but it was overcome later, is spin. It's taking something known and controlling it, repositioning it as an achievement.

And then they went back to the old mistakes, so the spin is nonsense. The book is not written to make sense. This is not an objective fact finding book, this is Hibberd doing what he's always done.

The funny part is that they look worse than ever.

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Le Cygne said:

The book is spin. HBO and producers admitting such and such was a problem, but it was overcome later, is spin. It's taking something known and controlling it, repositioning it as an achievement.

And then they went back to the old mistakes, so the spin is nonsense. The book is not written to make sense. This is not an objective fact finding book, this is Hibberd doing what he's always done.

The funny part is that they look worse than ever.

It's more revealing than it's intended to be.  Nobody can think it paints Ding & Dong in a better light.

[Cas Stark]

It's pretty funny that their very first effort was so dark you couldn't see the sets....and they ended up circling back to do the exact same thing years later, with the battle at WF and really, much of the last 2 seasons so fucking dark you could barely see what or who was in the shot.

I wonder if Netflix will be as indulgent with them as HBO, which historically was known for giving its creative people almost total free reign.  

[Dalinar]

57 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

It's pretty funny that their very first effort was so dark you couldn't see the sets....and they ended up circling back to do the exact same thing years later, with the battle at WF and really, much of the last 2 seasons so fucking dark you could barely see what or who was in the shot.

Wasn't the "dark mode" in the Long Night episode Sapochniks idea? 

 

57 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

I wonder if Netflix will be as indulgent with them as HBO, which historically was known for giving its creative people almost total free reign.  

Nentflix is a pretty shitty company to be honest. They take every show down, no matter how good it is, if its ratings don't explode right from the begining. Shows like GoT, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire etc. would have never seen a second season on Netflix. Geting canceled by Netflix is by no means a quality matter. 

[Cas Stark]

4 minutes ago, Dalinar said:

Wasn't the "dark mode" in the Long Night episode Sapochniks idea? 

 

Nentflix is a pretty shitty company to be honest. They take every show down, no matter how good it is, if its ratings don't explode right from the begining. Shows like GoT, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire etc. would have never seen a second season on Netflix. Geting canceled by Netflix is by no means a quality matter. 

Was it?  I don't know, the show became unnaturally dark, especially the scenes they shot in the 'North' a couple of seasons before the last one.

I agree, Netflix over pays for everything and then when it doesn't ignite right away, they cancel it.  Almost everything, even if you don't like the particular show on HBO is very good quality on objective measures like acting, production, etc.  Netflix is all over the place, some things are super high quality and others are totally cheesy.

[Dalinar]

29 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Was it?  I don't know, the show became unnaturally dark, especially the scenes they shot in the 'North' a couple of seasons before the last one.

Yeah, if I remember correctly, Sapochnik mentioned it in the "inside the episode" that he made the episode dark. It was not D&D's idea. He said somewhere the lines like he wanted to make the episode horror-like, bring the horror to the viewers and to try and to show how an attack during the night would look like. Something like this. 

[kissdbyfire]

Well, that episode was pure horror, no doubt. Just not how it was intended, but horror nonetheless.

[Nowy Tends]

34 minutes ago, Dalinar said:

Yeah, if I remember correctly, Sapochnik mentioned it in the "inside the episode" that he made the episode dark. It was not D&D's idea. 

You don't remember correctly. D&D insisted that they wanted it very dark. Listen to the Blue Ray commentaries: they refused to listen to the staff.

[Nowy Tends]

15 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Hibberd: "The rough pilot and the revision plan were handed to HBO's co-president Richard Plepler, who was the ultimate decision-maker. The company had already sunk $10 million into this dragon drama. Would they double down?"

Would the show runners have had a second chance if they had been two middle-class offspring, children of teachers or accountants or engineers?

Is it possible that they were "protected" by Benioff's father position/influence?

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[Dalinar]

1 hour ago, Nowy Tends said:

You don't remember correctly. D&D insisted that they wanted it very dark. Listen to the Blue Ray commentaries: they refused to listen to the staff.

Ok. Thanks. Thought it was the directors idea.