Power Line quotes a a long email from William Katz, whom they describe as having had "a long and varied career, as an assistant to a U.S. senator; an officer in the CIA; an assistant to Herman Kahn, the nuclear war theorist; an editor at The New York Times Magazine; and a talent coordinator at The Tonight Show".

At the Power Line site, he has a marvelous fantasy of Alfred Hitchcock pitching Rear Window to what he calls a modern "fetus in a three-piece suit" studio executive:

Now, clearly, that meeting never took place, but it's a slightly overdrawn version of meetings that do take place every day in today's Hollywood. They reflect the problem that I call TMCG –- too many college graduates, of whom, I freely admit, I'm one. The industry dare not speak its name, and it's rarely, if ever, discussed in these terms. But everyone knows the problem: To a large degree, Hollywood, in its executive ranks, has replaced talent with education, and what you get is the scene described above, where all the life, the emotion, the entertainment value of a story is ripped out, replaced with analysis and more analysis.

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly not saying that higher education automatically makes someone a bad filmmaker. There are wonderful artists who've had fine educations. Richard D. Zanuck went to Stanford. The late Jack Lemmon held a Harvard degree. But young people, in particular, are very much affected by the way they're taught to think in college –- and that approach has nothing to do with making movies.

The Duke of Wellington reportedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The movies of today were written in the classrooms of Princeton. But it's highly unlikely that a 2007 Princeton graduate would imagine anyone singin' in the rain. He'd take a cab. And by the way, Mr. Kelly, the umbrella is held over the head, to keep us dry.

Mitchell Parish was one of our greatest lyricists -- "Star Dust," "Moonlight Serenade," "The Stars Fell on Alabama." Some years ago he was honored in New York. He came out before the concert began and spoke to members of the audience. He said, "When you hear my lyrics, don't analyze them, feel them." It's wonderful advice for anyone in entertainment, but not the kind of advice you get in English 101. "Hollywood," David Lean, the British director of "Lawrence of Arabia," said, "forgot how to tell stories." It forgot because Hollywood forgot how to feel. When Bogart says goodbye to Ingrid Bergman at the airport in "Casablanca," we feel it, we don't analyze it.

And how would "Casablanca" fare in today's Hollywood? Not too long ago a local reporter sent out the script of the movie, under a different title.

Almost no one recognized it.

The TMCG problem has another effect. It separates Hollywood from its audience. A talent agency head boasted that half his interns come from Ivy League schools. Well, that's wonderful, and I'm sure they're good, intelligent young people. But I've seen that, too often, they don't think of themselves as the audience. The audience is "those people out there."

To be fair though, there's at least one contrarian at Cornell--his take on AMC's new Mad Men mini-series sounds remarkably like my own.