…Is often very, very small. And yet it could be the absolutely biggest thing you need to know:
by Charlie Jane Anders
Hollywood people often say that it’s a miracle there are any good movies at all. Because so much can go wrong, and so many random things have to go right, for a movie to avoid being a hopeless disaster. I can believe this, because in general the difference between the good and bad versions of the same story is often razor-thin.
This is kind of a depressing thing to realize, because you would kind of hope that it would be easy to tell if a story is going to work or not. Like, either your soufflé rose or it didn’t, right? And you ought to be able to tell if a story is “clicking” or if it’s just kind of a mess, because the pieces either fit together neatly or they don’t.