Monday, August 27, 2007
netflix, why are the writers anonymous?
Sorry that my first blog for the Netflix community should be critical, as I'm an enormous fan and a grateful customer of Netflix (and there aren't so many corporations of which I'm inclined to say that.) But what propelled me to set up this blog tonight was the sudden realisation of a very telling featur, or rather lack of feature. When you look at the credits for a film, they don't even bother with the writer. I was just checking out the Oscar credits for Kramer vs. Kramer, which I haven't seen since it came out. I see it won best screenplay in its year (along with director, actress, etc.) but guess what- NO NAME. Talk about "the death of the author," eh?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
i'll tell ya why to the best of my ability: when the movie display page was redesigned a few years ago, we wanted to make it simple. the cast and crew listing on those pages is verrrry narrow and concise. It is by no means "full featured." That being said, we were trying to strike the right balance between simple and helpful.
Adding info that isn't useful to most people is a tough line to hold. Did we cut too far? Many would argue we did. Personally, i would love to see the writers listed (my brother is a screenwriter, best known for "Groundhog Day"). Netflix has nothing against writers. But this is a problem for relatively few subscribers, and for us to add it would add details for everyone to suit the needs of a minority. Still -- so many of us at Netflix really want to add the writer on principle (and refine this movie page in the process) this is a frequent and highly topical discussion today. I'll let you know (via my blog) when the decision is made, and when the movie pages would be revised if it is, in fact, going to be added.
Now Robert: why did you launch a blog for this instead of just emailing me, or posting a question on the Netflix community blog?
- cheers,
rubin, from netflix (http://blog.netflix.com)
Post a Comment