Three movie wishes

[MmzHrrdb]

Say a genie pops out of thin air and decides do allow you three wishes with which you can alter the course of film history. What would you use yours on?

A few groundrules:

1. No wishing for film figures to come back to life unless they died prematurely - no wishing for Jules Dassin or Stanley Kubrick etc. to come back to life, but F.W. Murnau or Natalie Wood would be acceptable.
2. Make your wishes tangible - for example, Francis Ford Coppola stopped making good movies after 1979, more or less. If I were to say "I wish FFC had kept on making good movies," that's not really a tangible wish. However, if FFC had stopped making good movies because he went insane after losing a leg in a car crash or something, I could wish for the car crash to never have occurred.

My wishes:

1. Orson Welles was given complete creative freedom and massive budgets for his entire career. Welles is already in my top three directors, and in my opinion, by far the most talented man to ever direct films - and he accomplished all his great works despite studio butchery throughout his career. Imagine the heights he could've scaled without their meddling.

2. James Dean never dies in a car accident. He's kinda gone out of vogue in later years, and some people think of him as marked-down Brando, but I'm of the opinion that he was both a genuinely excellent dramatic talent, and, more importantly, an absolutely magnetic screen presence. He was a more talented Tom Hanks, somebody you couldn't help but love on screen, and I imagine he would've starred in a lot of great roles.

3. Star Wars doesn't get made for another 10 or 15 years. I have nothing against Star Wars - the original trilogy is fantastic - but it came at a time of incredible creativity in Hollywood, and I can't even imagine the additional number of great, personal films that would've come out of that era if Star Wars hadn't shifted Hollywood so quickly towards big-budget blockbusters. Look at some of the American films released within a few years of Star Wars in either direction: Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Annie Hall, The Godfather Pt. II, Network, Apocalypse Now, A Woman Under the Influence, The Shining, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Raging Bull, Days of Heaven, Manhattan, Dog Day Afternoon, The Conversation...the list goes on. I think we lost a lot of great movies when Star Wars was released.

[MmzHrrdb]

1. Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow are riding in the same car, and just as Apatow reaches for his bong and nudie mags in the back seat, it pummels into another car containing Uwe Boll, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who are having a B-grade discussion on whose movies suck the most balls. Ulli Lommel was originally going to tag along with them, but since his movies show at least some promise in the visual department, he vows to change his ways after hearing of the accident.

2. Kubrick makes more movies; or at least is given eternal life to make as much movies as he likes.

3. Mario Bava and Dario Argento are given a large budget to produce a trilogy of violent giallo films together, with Bava directing, Argento producing, and starring Daria Nicolodi and Malcolm McDowell.

[Jeb]

1. Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg were never born

2. George Lucas never made the new trilogy of Star Wars films

3. Michael Bay is involved in a tragic highway accident which results in a huge explosion. After the incident, he vows to never use special effects in his movies ever again.

[Pickpocket]

1. Kate Hudson realizes she has no talent and stops acting and/or kills herself. I mean she's not even hot. Cute, yes but how does someone get role after role after role when she's made one good movie (which she wasn't even the star of) out of like 20? Also, I would like Nic Cage to stop saying YES to every script that gets sent to him.

2. Charlie Kaufman writes faster but with the same quality. Same with PTA, Jarmusch, etc.

3. Tom Cruise never reveals what a religious moron he is.

[MmzHrrdb]

Off the top of my head...

1. Kubrick finishes his Napoleon project.
2. Films shot in black & white don't practically vanish with the end of the 60's.
3. 2D animation is not phased out in American movies with the advent of CGI.

I'm sure there are a couple others that might be more important if I thought about it for a little while.

[prowler]

the welles one was the first that came to mind... some others:

1. less censorship in the 40s-50s, allowing guilty people to go unpunished (among other things, but this one's the one that bugs me the most, it accounts for so many stupid deus ex machina endings)
2. better preservation of old movies, so they wouldn't have to be affected so much during restorations. an example would be vertigo: the "before" looks really bad, and the "after", heavily modified, although better, didn't look quite right to me.
3. i wish the romanian film scene weren't so shitty (although it has been getting better i guess)

[Stain]

George A. Romero and his associates get the copyright stuff right on Night of the Living Dead, so they get the financial rewards they deserved for having made such a landmark motion picture.

Request for clarification: is it possible to make one of the other two wishes a meta-wish? That is, a larger event in history that winds up changing the history of cinema because of all the repercussions in every direction.

Example: "Tukhachevsky coins a phrase: 'Purge him before he purges you,' and removes Stalin. Red Army not weakened by purges and the Wehrmacht doesn't go through it like crap through a goose in the early stages of the Nazi invasion of the USSR. All the smart people killed by Stalin (after all, anyone with any brains at all would oppose that murdering son of a bitch) live instead and greatly improve life in Russia/USSR with their contributions, including better movies. WW2 is significantly shorter, so everyone has more money and resources which of course leads to more and better films."

[KGB]

Great idea, I wish I had the creativity to play myself. I agree with many here, I especially loved Jeb's Michael Bay commentary.
Well, hell, I guess I'll try.

1. German government change their filmmaking subsidy policy (I even wrote a post about that in the few posts I wrote for the Criticker blog) and Uwe Boll can no longer take advantage of an ambigious law to make easy cash. He loses his house, his wife divorces him, he loses his mind and proceeds to build a castle made out of cardboard beneath the highway. Ken Loach makes a biopic about him, wins every artsy prize imaginable and continues believing he is God.

2. Georges Méliès, a true underdog of cinema, an artist, a magician, an illusioner, the inventor of cinema as an art form when not even the Lumiére brothers believed in him, the first great director, recieves the merits he deserves. Yes, he was president of the European Film Board or whatever it was, but WWI, which brought to crisis the european cinema and gave the oportunity for american cinema to rise, took him out of bussiness, and around 95% of the 500+ films he directed over his carrear were melted to make boots for soldiers out of the film celluloid. Méliès theatre ran out of bussiness and his house was a donation by the film board that felt pity on him. His last photo, selling cheap toys in a train station stand, is heartbreaking. So yes, I'd wish WWI wouldn't directly affect Méliès' bussiness.

3. Hollywood producers sit down, each in his mansion, and collectively realize, "shit, those japanese horror remakes are awful".