Screwing the Writer
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19:53 GMT on 19 May 2003
Diana Hsieh posts about Ari Armstrong's concerns with the writer hired to adapt Atlas Shrugged to a screenplay.
Hart managed to turn a great pro-reason, pro-science book by Sagan into an apology of faith. [...] Contact is a good movie because it is based on a good book, because Zemeckis has a lot of talent, and because the cast does a good job. Hart, though, turned the theme on its head.
[...]
The rest of Hart's resume does little to ease my anxiety. Hook and Dracula were fun but intellectually vacuous. And Frankenstein, shall we say, was an apt title for that particular movie.
The mere fact that Hart ended up as the screenwriter indicates to me the studio lacks either an understanding of the subject material or money (or perhaps both). I will breath a sigh of relief when, once again, an announced filming of Atlas Shrugged falls through.
Mr. Armstrong appears ignorant of the status of writers in the production process. This is not a slight against Armstrong, not nearly enough people are aware of the grotesque, meat grinder process all scripts are put through.
William C. Martell, a screenwriter with 17 produced scripts to his credit, and every single one of them mangled, describes the process in a Daily Tip titled "Ch-Ch-Changes!" thusly (all emphases mine):
1) Joe Producer reads this new script by Will Shakespeare called ROMEO & JULIET and loves it. There's romance, action, family drama, and that amazing double twist ending! He buys Will's script for $250,000 against $750,000 - that's 3/4 of a million bucks! He takes it to the studio to get financing. The studio says: "We love this script! We want to 'fast track' it... But downer endings don't test well. We can't give you the production budget unless Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after at the end." Now the producer has a choice between shelving Will's script and taking a loss, or having Will rewrite the end and having the studio put the film on the release schedule for next year and start casting the leads.
When Will sold the script for $250k against $750k, that deal included two rewrites and a polish. So included in Will's first set of rewrite notes is "happy ending"... and Will is expected to make those changes. It's part of that contract Will signed, and getting the full $250k (plus the $500k production bonus) depends on Will doing the required rewrites. Will makes a tough choice, and Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after.
2) The studio tries to find a bankable star to play Romeo. Though Will's dream may be to find a great unknown actor who really fits the role, the studio realizes the audience pays their $9 before they've seen the movie... and a big incentive to pay for that ticket is a star in the lead. [...] The studio needs a name in the lead - any name - or the whole project is dead on arrival.
So the script goes out to potential Romeos. [...] Hey, even Chris Tucker gets a copy! One problem with this Romeo character is that he's young, and there are very few young movie stars. Seann William Scott was in DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR and both of the AMERICAN PIE movies... but can you see him as Romeo?
Well, Brad and Leo and Ryan and even Seann are booked, but there's a big name star who is interested in changing his image, and thinks playing Romeo might help. Ah-nuld is interested. VERY interested. And Ah-nuld is on the studio's list of approved stars - he may cost $25 million, but his films are almost always hits. Ah-nuld is money in the bank... even if he is a little old for the part. So they hire Ah-nuld as Romeo, and Will's next rewrite changes Romeo and Juliet from teens to "star age" (mid- thirties to mid-forties, even though Ah-nuld is mid-fifties).
But Ah-nuld wants more action, less love. The story is about two families at war, right? Why can't he kick ass? Why can't he fire machine guns and jump out of helicopters? Instead of the conflict between families being mostly off screen, why not make it mostly on screen? Wouldn't that be more exciting, not to mention more what the fans expect from an Ah-nuld movie?
An-nuld wants the producer to hire Walon Green to add action stuff. Will Shakespeare is fired (he'll never get all of his $250k!) and Walon (WILD BUNCH) Green is hired.
Romeo is now more like Rambo
At which point, may I point out, Will has lost what laughably little control he had over his own work.
3) Next they need to find a director that both the studio, Ah-nuld, and Joe Producer can agree upon. After dozens of meetings, they decide on Chuck Russell (THE MASK, ERASER).
Now Chuck likes FX movies - he began working on horror and sci-fi movies like the remake of THE BLOB and is known for his use of special effects. So he wants a rewrite of ROMEO & JULIET that features a handful of fantastic cutting edge FX scenes. "What if we re-thought the whole thing? What if Juliet was an alien? What if this was like INDEPENDENCE DAY... but a love story?"
[...]
[The Studio wants] an "A list writer" to do a draft, so that they're sure the script is of high quality. Now, you and I might just be able to read a script to tell if it's any good, but producers may never actually read the script - they might just read coverage. Even if they did read the script, they may not know the difference between a good script and a bad script... even though you might think that's a basic part of their job. So a producer will hire a brand name writer, known for quality, to make sure the script is good. Everyone talks it over, and they agree to hire Frank Darabont (Chuck's buddy) to do a rewrite.
[...]
8) On and on into the night. Each person hired brings in a screenwriter who completely changes the character, story, and plot of the script. When the film finally gets made, it has been 'improved' so much that it no longer resemble[s] the script that Shakespeare guy wrote that everybody loved. It might even suck... but they've spent so much money on the project, and the film is ready to shoot - so they film a script that everyone might agree is crappy before the money floats away.
Then we pay $9 to see it and wonder why Hollywood makes crap like this.
(You'll need to link to the tip and read the whole thing to see how the thing ends up being directed by Frankenheimer, co-starring DeNiro and Sharon Stone, with additional re-writes by David Mamet. And that is far from all.)
As you see, the writer has virtually no power in Hollywood. Everyone from the studio on down to the star has more power, more control over the material, and can remove the writer from the process at will. Even if they don't understand story structure. Even if they've never read the material. Even if their lips hurt when they read. If they can read at all.
That, you may think, is just a hypothetical. Okay, let's take a look at a concrete real world example.
Consider what happened to a brilliant script by Zak Penn called Suspect Zero, as related by Moriarty over at Ain't It Cool News:
Every now and then, a script sells for a lot of money, and it becomes the hot read in town. Sometimes, the films end up being really good (THE SIXTH SENSE) or big hits (INDEPENDENCE DAY, AMERICAN PIE), and sometimes, they end up being spectacular misfires (THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT) or interesting failures (THE LAST BOYSCOUT). I do my best to read each of these big spec sales when they happen, and what Išve noticed is that more often than not, the scripts that sell aren't the films that come out. Instead, they are promises of what the films might be. A great spec script... the kind that generates real discussion in town... is a script that gets the reader all hot and bothered, no matter how the film finally ends up.
SUSPECT ZERO was one of those scripts.
[...] There's a reason Penn's script generated enormous heat in town and got him a deal at DreamWorks and got him rewrite work on REIGN OF FIRE and got him the gig on X-MEN 2. It's a great concept, executed with little or no adornment. It's clean writing, well-researched. [...]
The opening scene of the script set the tone right away. HAROLD SPECK sits alone in a diner, one of those middle of nowhere side of the interstate places, in the wee small hours of the morning. He's a nondescript little guy, reading the paper, quiet. A disheveled man, O'RYAN, takes a seat across from Harold in his booth and begins talking to him. It's apparent right away that O'Ryan has been watching Harold for some time. He starts talking to Harold about life on the road, about how lonely it can be.
And as they talk, O'Ryan slides a photo across to Harold. Then another. Then another. And Harold freaks out as he sees them, even though the audience doesn't. He calls O'Ryan sick, then goes to leave. Before he can, though, O'Ryan grabs Harold's hand, squeezing it to force it open. He looks at Harold's middle finger, which extends at least an inch and a half longer than the rest of his hand. Harold snatches his hand away and storms out. Once he's on the road, he realizes that O'Ryan is in his car with him, and there's a struggle. O'Ryan forces Harold off the road and into a small, seedy rest stop, and just as O'Ryan attacks Harold, we cut to --
THOMAS MACKELWAY. Former cop. Hotshot new recruit to the Bureau who feels like he's stuck in a shitty job in the San Angelo, Texas FBI Office. He's our lead. He's pretty much your standard issue lead in a film like this, much like David Mills in SE7EN. Almost but not quite a blank slate. On his first day, he gets pulled into the investigation of the murder of Harold Speck. Seems that after he was murdered, his car was pushed so that it was straddling the state line between Texas and Oklahoma, making it a federal case. When Mackelway investigates Speck's car, he finds a case full of knives and other carving instruments, and the discovery of lime on the outside of the trunk leads to the grim cargo of the trunk, the bodies of two dead young women. A search of Speck's house reveals more bodies buried in a crawlspace. He was obviously a working serial killer, which raises the question: who killed him, and why?
Examination of Speck's body leads Mackelway to EVBD, or Episodic Violent Behavior Disorder. It's a common chromosomal deficiency in rapists, murderers, serial killers. There are physical markers that show up whenever EVBD shows up, "linked attributes." One of those is an elongated middle finger. Bruises on Speck's wrists show that his hand was forced open by someone looking for something... looking for that middle finger. In his conversations with Fran Kulok, a medical examiner, Mackelway advances the theory that they're looking for a modern-day Van Helsing, someone hunting serial killers, our modern-day vampires. He and Kulok end up on O'Ryan's trail, and they are viciously attacked and beaten for their troubles. O'Ryan challenges Mackelway, dares him to come chase him down. He carves a clue in Mack's flesh.
All of that is just the first act of the script. It's so well-built, such a sure-handed thriller, that I was willing to go anywhere with it. I wanted as wild a ride as possible, and I knew that it would be handled well. When a writer does his job building a first act, you can't help but get sucked into it. Even if the form is familiar, style and presentation goes a long way. Penn tells his story with absolute conviction. There's a quiet earnest quality to it that makes it work. There's not a single pretentious flourish to the script.
[...]
Keep in mind, what I'm describing is the script that sold. Zak Penn's script. And there's a reason for this. I'm trying to paint you a picture of what might have been. I'm trying to explain to you why people like Steven Spielberg got excited when they read the script, so that when I explain to you what Cruise/Wagner and Intermedia have done to the script in their recent draft, the shooting draft that Elias Merhige is preparing to put in front of the cameras, you can understand the level of the travesty. You can get some sense of how you've already been sold out as an audience, and just what sort of pretentious prattle they're going to try to pawn off on you.
[...]
The difference is apparent right from the beginning. At first glance, it looks the same. Harold Speck. Diner. Middle of the night. O'Ryan across from him. But there's little details that are different. O'Ryan doesn't check Speck's finger. He gives him drawings instead of photographs. There's a real different vibe to the whole thing.
Mackelway is still new to an FBI office, but this time he's been busted down from a better job because of a screw-up in evidentiary procedure. He screwed up and someone terrible went free. As he's getting settled into his office, someone starts sending him mysterious faxes of missing persons reports from around the country. As he works to figure out why, he catches a case. It's Harold Speck, dead in his car. Parked on state lines so it becomes federal. And when Mack starts to investigate, lime on the trunk leads him to open it so he can discover...
... nothing. No dead bodies. Instead of a major clue that leads to detective work, Mack is suddenly struck by a strange psychic vision of wheat fields and gunfire. Meanwhile, in a motel room somewhere else in Texas, O'Ryan is having the exact same psychic vision. O'Ryan begins to draw, and ends up with a picture of that wheat field, of the muzzle-flash. And of Mackelway.
Okay... what the f[--]k? Psychic visions? Are you people out of your minds? It was already as high concept as you ever need a film to be. A serial killer who only kills serial killers chasing the serial killer to end all serial killers. And the best part of Penn's script was the research. It was accurate. That thing with the elongated finger... that's true. I heard Spielberg went home after reading the script to check his children's hands. It's creepy and effective because it's real.
[...]
There are so many things wrong with this draft that there's only one way for it to get better: pull the plug, go back to basics, and start again. Someone has overdeveloped this film, and it's time to just accept that. I know how it is when execs become determined to justify the money they've spent on a film. They have to have something different, something that completely breaks from the original.
But I always thought the point was also to have something good.
Moriarty tends to run off at the keyboard (this is, perhaps, a quarter of his review, probably less), but man, doesn't this just break your heart?
(The film has been shot and screened, as reported here, starring Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley. From the crap draft Moriarty described.)
Now I'm not defending Hart (remember him? The guy adapting Atlas?) per se, I just think people shouldn't rush to besmirch his writing abilities based on movies that, in all likelihood, do not reflect them. The only film he may have had a say in was Hook which, granted, was terrible and which, yes, he did have an Executive Producer credit on, which, indeed, means he had some power, not just an extra credit (as his other "producer" credits most likely were). But remember, boy wonder Spielberg directed it, and nobody but nobody tells big Steve what to do, unless he asks them to.
He could very well be a terrible writer. He could just as easily be brilliant. The point is, neither you nor I have read word one of his actual work, and what's on screen is a poor indicator of what was on the page.