Success breeds its own failure in creative work because a successful writer or director gets less needed criticism, which creates self-indulgent, rambling works where the author doesn't tell us what's new, true and important (or interesting), but rather, books are movies that are are repetitive and full of off-point tangents. We all dislike criticism, in fact, the more correct the criticism, the more we dislike it, but it is far better to get criticism up front from a thoughtful individual, rather than the criticism of being ignored, if not now, then by posterity.

Tarantino's GrindHouse sucked because it was too long (189 minutes). His trademark snappy banter was just too self-indulgent. You can see why this happened, who could criticize Tarantino? Same thing with Peter Jackson's King Kong, which after his success in the Lord of the Rings, was allowed to ramble on for 187 minutes, in contrast to the much more entertaining original version from 1933 that went on for only 100 minutes (my sons and I have watched them both many times). Every tangent is thought of as brilliant, as opposed to annoyingly irrelevent, as if repeating a point or skill several times makes it several times better. Everything, even a Bach fugue or sex, has a point of diminishing and then negative marginal returns to quantity and complexity.

In the original movie, King Kong fights a T-rex, kills it with a wicked snap of the jaw, and then beats his chest (total time: 2 minutes). In Peter Jackson's King Kong, he fights not one, but three T-rex's, all while juggling the girl being snapped at, and then falling down a gully being caught by vines that allow everyone to fight in acrobatic swing fashion until they hit the ground, and then finally King Kong snaps the remaining T-rex's jaw and beats his chest (20 minutes). Yawn. In movies, plots should move not just the action, but the suspense, forward. It is much more suspenseful if I'm not looking at my watch.

In books, writers should give the best couple of reasons why X is a good idea, not every reason why X is a good idea. Often the arguments are inconsistent, so from a naive point of view more is better, but from a logical point of view, they cancel out more than add. Too many arguments, or too many references, reflects a weak point. Dawkin's The Selfish Gene was 266 pages, Hayek's Road to Serfdom 240, Philip K. Howard's Death of Common Sense 213, Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter 280.

Movies should all be less than 120 minutes, books under 300 pages. Of course, there should be exceptions for great works like The Godfather and Godel, Escher, Bach, but these are very rare. And this is the problem, because too many creative people think their work is as good as the Godfather or Godel, Escher, Back