John Wilson and the Movie Industry’s Love of the Mold

John Wilson wanted to make a documentary about concrete. He was told nobody cared, that it needed a star, a formula, something marketable.

The problem with contemporary cinema is that it knows perfectly well what audiences want, especially before audiences know it themselves.

Producers know it, distributors know it, marketing experts know it, data people know it, algorithm people know it, and possibly even the person sitting at the back of the meeting who still has not understood what the film is about but has already decided that “this doesn’t work.”

John Wilson wanted to make a documentary about concrete

Ideal material for electrifying a financiers’ meeting: gray, motionless, devoid of superheroes and, construction accidents aside, not particularly prone to sequels.

John Wilson came from How To with John Wilson, the wonderful and strange HBO series capable of starting from a parking spot or a bottle of wine and arriving at human loneliness. But when he began pitching The History of Concrete, the problem immediately became clear: how do you sell a film about concrete?

Wilson says that when How To ended he no longer had either the HBO contract or a writers’ room behind him, and he found himself famous enough to appear in $2,000 Jeopardy! questions, but not famous enough to easily find the money for his first feature film.

The market recognizes a prefab more easily

So Wilson is advised to add more reassuring ingredients: a celebrity, a famous musician, in short something that gives the project a recognizable shape. He even attends a course on how to build and sell a Hallmark movie, one of the most narratively codified products in the American industry. And every request he received from financiers became material for the film.

The result is that The History of Concrete, while talking about concrete, ends up talking about everything we have stopped seeing because it now seems like natural structure: cities, the market, even the way we think a film is supposed to be made.

And that film, which had seemed too strange even to finance, eventually found Josh Safdie as executive producer, Magnolia Pictures as distributor and sold-out first screenings.

The problem, in short, was not the concrete. It was the prefab.