LogFAQs > #937906933

Zeus posted...

I'm pretty sure Dracula: D&LI was Mel Brooks's real-life attempt at a Producers-style scam.

I feel like it was just the natural outcome of getting older.

His creative peak was basically about a decade long (give or take a few years), where it seems like everything he did was more or less perfect. From about Blazing Saddles to Spaceballs, it's hard to point to a weak movie. Even the ones that aren't as generally popular are extremely well-crafted (and have their fans).

But then he did Robin Hood: Men in Tights, which, while still good, was kind of uneven. The cracks were starting to show. Then, with Dracula: Dead and Loving It, those cracks basically overwhelmed the movie (I don't consider it a coincidence that it was also his last film). I usually sum it up as "Robin Hood: Men in Tights was a great movie with a few weak spots dragging it down, while Dracula: Dead and Loving It was a weak movie with a few great spots pulling it up."

That movie (and everything George Lucas did post-1989) was a large part of my thesis years ago that all creative types tend to calcify post-success, and as they age their creative genius tends to dry up, so they're left producing lesser and lesser works that never compare to their original successes. At the time I mostly attributed it to a slow and inevitable decay of creativity as age sort of slows down the brain, but since then I've also sort of accepted that the initial success itself might be the cause of the collapse - essentially, when you succeed, you get too used to praise and financial security, become more risk-adverse and less open to criticism, and slowly lose your original spark.

Since I came up with that theory, I've seen a few exceptions to it, but most of the time it seems to bear out pretty well. Age and success are the bane of art.
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family