‘Why Creative People Are Betrayed Over and Over’
Today I kept writing my essay about how and why The Outsiders was released in 1983 at 91 minutes, then re-released in 2005 at 114 minutes. It’s about how in 1983, a Lone Star High School librarian and a number of students in Fresno; an author in Tulsa, Oklahoma; a director in San Francisco; and an actor in Los Angeles, were betrayed by a Hollywood film studio. I’m calling the essay:
Inside ‘The Outsiders’ (2005) – Betrayal of the Creators by a Studio
Gene Phillips’ biography of Francis Ford Coppola provides a little bit of the detail for my essay but other research I’ve done has rewarded me with several newspaper articles published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Sight & Sound, Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, which have added to my insight into how a confluence of events can result in a film’s creation under unlikely circumstances, and its subsequent destruction in too-familiar circumstances, by non-creative forces. It is with not-inconsiderable-irony that I show how in Hollywood, more often than not, the outsiders are the people who actually create the creation – make the films – and that the insiders, the Studios, so often destroy the creation.
The uncomfortable relationship between the people with the money and the people with the talent is once again illustrated in yet another instance of – and I’m changing the wording of the cliché/paradox to suit my purpose – a resistible force (the creators) being stopped by an immovable object (the film studio), this time with S. E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders (1967) (the victim).
That The Outsiders (1983) was then reconstructed twenty years later into its current form, The Outsiders: The Complete Novel (2005) is almost as miraculous as how it came to be, which began in 1980, which is a separate essay, which I’m calling:
Inside ‘The Outsiders’ (1983) – The Miracle of Creation
An extraordinary series of events led to Francis Ford Coppola’s knowledge of, and decision to write and direct the film adaptation of, S. E. Hinton’s novel, which resulted in The Outsiders (1983).
