Old and unloved Hollywood rekindles its spirit with Chicken Soup For The Soul movie
REOPENING THE DREAM FACTORY
There once was an old city called Hollywood, which had spent its youth inventing so many wondrous works of imagination that its friends nicknamed it “The Dream Factory.” Hollywood liked this nickname very much. For years it strove to find new ideas to entertain those friends, seeking out the world’s best storytellers to aid it in spinning yarns, the likes of which no one had ever seen.
But time passes, as it does, and eventually the factory closed. Hollywood grew older and wearier. Also, its wife died of cancer.
One day, Hollywood was trudging slowly to work, when suddenly a young production company named Alcon Entertainment passed it by. Alcon noticed that Hollywood was looking a bit ashen and weak—and knowing that God loves us in our most desperate hours, because that’s when He knows we’ll pretty much agree to whatever, even a new Blade Runner movie—it stopped Hollywood on the street.
“What you need is some Chicken Soup For The Soul,” Alcon said to Hollywood, offering it a copy of the 1993 self-help manual that had spawned decades of sequels and spinoffs full of short stories and heartwarming platitudes, in which old people and teenagers are talked out of killing themselves because someone is nice to them for one day.
Hollywood was skeptical. It had tried this sort of thing before, developing movies out of books like He’s Just Not That Into You, What To Expect When You’re Expecting, and Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Yet somehow it still felt empty inside, having given its love over and over again to popular brands, hoping their popularity could help it recapture some inner spark, only to discover that being popular is not the same as being interesting.