“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.” Robert McKee
“Did you hear the one about the actress who was SO dumb she slept with the writer to further her career?” Old Hollywood gag
OPENING STATEMENT
Billy Wilder, William Goldman, Waldo Salt, Carl Foreman, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader, David Mamet, Ben Hecht, Nora Ephron, Ernest Lehman, Robert Benton, Paddy Chayefsky, Robert Bolt, Neil Simon, Robert Towne, Michael Tolkin, Lawrence Kasdan!
Just a handful of the great screenwriters that have worked the Hollywood studio system creating magical cinematic moments, iconic characters, memorable dialogue to both critical and commercial success. But are such brilliant writers becoming a dying breed in Hollywood? Brutalised victims of a nefarious oligarchy run by corporate accountants and bean-counters without a creative bone in their body?
A business now happy to dish up stale remakes, half-baked reboots and pass-their-sell-by-date sequels. Movies which treat your average popcorn-munchers like a proverbial mushroom – keeping them in the dark –feeding them cinematic ****!
Gone is the lonely, whisky-saturated artist! Gone is the representation of humanity delivering comedy and tragedy from his or her soul. Gone are the human cigarettes smoking a thousand coffin nails while hammering out their masterpieces at the typewriter.
The art of screenwriting is on a life-support machine and is heading for a Flatline City. The screenwriter has been slain; murdered and replaced by join-the-dots-committee-product churned out by countless producers, executive producers, associate producers and an army of techno-geeks. Have the machines finally won and terminated the screenwriter? Is Hollywood guilty as charged? I say yes!
Hollywood has finally killed the screenwriter!
THE CASE FOR THE PROSECUTION
Michael Tolkin’s brilliantly written Hollywood satire “The Player” (1992) illustrated the Hollywood of the 1980s and 1990’s and encapsulates my case perfectly. A struggling writer (Vincent D’Onofrio) is murdered by a Hollywood producer, Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) in a rage, because the said writer is accusing him of rating commerciality over quality product. The producer even goes as far as screwing, marrying the writer’s wife and becoming Head of the Studio! Bad Hollywood producer!
Ironically, the 80s and 90s were a golden era for the screenwriter in terms of commercial gain with big players such as Joe Eszterhas and Shane Black being paid enormous sums for ultra-commercial movies such as “Lethal Weapon” (1984) and “Basic Instinct” (1990). But this isn’t about earning power of the screenwriter; it’s about what I perceive to be the death of screenwriting standards based on recent movies seen at the multiplexes.
Even a flashy 80s buddy-buddy movie such as “Lethal Weapon” (1984) with its mix of mullets and bullets and classic mis-matched-cop-partner dynamic had a solid structure, great villains and memorable set-pieces; aspects which are sorely missing from many big budget Hollywood movies of recent years. Who can forget “the jumper” scene from “Lethal Weapon” (1984), which establishes Riggs’ (Mel Gibson) loose cannon status, making him – haircut aside – a character who hooks you in from the start? Shane Black was a fine action writer but for even more prolific and amazing screenwriting look back further in time to Ben Hecht, Billy Wilder and William Goldman.
Hecht was a novelist and playwright who virtually invented the “screwball comedy” style with rapid-fire dialogue and wrote classics such as “Scarface“ (1932), “His Girl Friday“ (1940) and Hitchcock’s “Notorious”(1946).
Wilder was another screenwriter and the quality of the writing committed to screen shone through such as in “Some Like It Hot” (1959), “Stalag 17″ (1953) and the brilliant “Sunset Boulevard” (1950); a gothic satire on the perils of fading fame and a movie where once again a screenwriter comes to a grisly demise.
Lastly, novelist William Goldman (whose fantastic books on Hollywood Which Lie Did I Tell and Adventures in the Screen Trade are essential reading for any film fans) was famously quoted as saying of Hollywood: “No one knows anything!” But Goldman sure knew how to write a screenplay and his movies “Marathon Man” (1976), “The Princess Bride” (1987) and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) created many unforgettable sequences. A visit to the dentist can never be the same after watching “Marathon Man” (1976).
What these three legendary writers have in common is they created smartly structured screenplays with intricate plots and characters who you actually gave a damn about. Their stories contained suspense, romance, humour, and dare I say it, had an actual plot which kept the audience gripped. They did not rely solely on bombastic special effects but were interested in human stories. But I’m not against special effects as long as they serve the story.
Stanley Kubrick pioneered special effect techniques in his poetic sci-fi masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) – a movie which favoured visual storytelling over a character’s journey or arc. Kubrik used technical advancement to serve the narrative. If the technology didn’t exist he’d ask someone to invent it, as in “The Shining“ (1980), which was one of the first films to use the ‘Steadicam’ to powerful effect.
A quick glance at some of the biggest grossing movies in the last 15 years does not bode well for the defence’s case. While I freely admit that there is great technical accomplishment in the following films, I just wish they’d spent as much time working on the screenplay. James Cameron, for example, has made some amazing movies like “The Terminator” (1984) and “Aliens” (1986), but his box-office smash “Avatar” (2010) is ruined by a poorly established lead protagonist.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has very little back-story – other than he was a twin and cannot walk – and over the course of the film he goes through an incredible journey from corporate guinea pig to native warrior. There is no “jumper” scene to introduce Jake and consequently we know nothing about this man. His journey is further hamstrung by a Swiss-cheese plot, a succession of clichéd characters and butt-clenching dialogue.
Do we really believe that Jake is the chosen one who will reunite the natives? No – but who cares! It’s all looks so pretty and the planet is so beautiful and this is such an important movie because it criticises evil capitalists who are destroying the native’s world; all the while taking gazillions at the box-office, leaving a carbon footprint bigger than Hiroshima and feeding the very corporate capitalism it critiques. Likewise, Cameron’s screenplay for “Titanic“ (1997): a movie you could quite easily forward to two hours in and not have missed very much; aside from an assortment of clichéd cardboard cut-out characters, sub Romeo & Juliet romance and patronising Oirish representations of third class passengers.
Tim Burton has presided over some of the most successful movies of recent times without bothering with narratives that either work or make sense. Of all the recent remakes “Planet of the Apes“ (2001) was the worst and unnecessary. Why change a classic?
I’m sure a straight remake of the Charlton Heston original would have been welcomed by cinemagoers not familiar with the original. Instead we received a movie which lurched from one poorly written scene to another with an ending which had no reference to anything we’d seen in the film previously. Similarly, in “Alice in Wonderland“ (2010), the eponymous Alice’s rites of passage journey made little sense. In this instance, having gone on this wonderfOther movies which have eschewed the need for a quality screenplay include the predictable “it’s the end of the world” movies of Roland Emmerich. Watching “Godzilla“ (1998), “Independence Day” (2001) and “2012″ (2010) make one wish for the apocalypse now! Michael Bay’s “Transformers” (2007) was a half-decent popcorn movie because of the wow-factor and some relatively interesting writing: Jim hiding the Transformers from his parents being a welcome break from the constant metallurgic war-mongering. But by the time “Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen“ was released the robot porn juggernaut had shot it’s nuts and bolts and we were left with lingering shots of Megan Fox, more Nagasaki-sized explosions and a story as substantial as an anorexic’s breakfast.
This is just the tip of the iceberg and not just an excuse to bash big budget studio movies. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight“ (2008) and Pixar’s “The Incredibles” (2004) are big budget studio movies with screenplays that entertain and do not treat the audience like idiots. But these are rare exceptions because somewhere, sometime a shift has occurred in Hollywood where the art of screenwriting, the screenwriter themselves and respect for the audience has been pretty much been destroyed.
SUMMING UP
But why has the art of screenwriting died?
In the past the screenwriter was often plucked from the theatre or proven novelists and poets: writers who treated words and real human stories with awe and wonderment. Now any literary design is shafted in favour of visual effects and fetishistic 3-D sick-fests. Humanity is being forced to forget its’ literary roots and is being nuked back to the stone-age with technologically enhanced cave drawings that carry all the emotion of a Big Mac!
We’ve just had one of the biggest worldwide financial crises but Hollywood is still spending billions on movies with overblown and overhyped gimmicks such as green-screen and 3-D. Oh for the day’s where resources were limited and Hollywood was influenced by major European movement which led to more imaginative ways of telling a story. Both low budgets and Expressionist cinema led to some of the great film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s. I say: we cap movie budgets to try and inject some lateral and original thinking into the Studios.
Another possible reason for the fall in standards is the saturation of screenwriting courses and degrees across the industry. Are these courses creating homogenous and business-savvy writers who are more geared toward commercialism rather than finding a unique voice? Or is it that there are original thinkers and writers out there but Hollywood is aborting such talent at birth and not allowing them to grow. Of course, novels continue to be adapted by Hollywood but the penchant for unimaginative and unnecessary remakes and reboots is growing stronger and stronger; as is the virulent spread of sequelitis and where Lucasfilms’ is concerned prequelitis. Sequels and prequels and remakes are not necessarily a bad thing if time is spent developing the project with decent writers who have a passion for the project, want to tell a great story and have some respect for an audience. I say: challenge the crayon-clutching audience rather than feed their already shrinking, firework-blinded, goggle-boxed minds.
But perhaps the art of screenwriting is not dead after all? There is some amazing writing on screen at the moment but it’s NOT at the cinema. There is a place where the story and characters are allowed – like a fine wine – to develop over time. If the cinematic art of screenwriting is dead it still lives and breathes on television. Shows like: THE WIRE, MAD MEN, BAND OF BROTHERS, THE SOPRANOS, SIX FEET UNDER, DEADWOOD, and GENERATION KILL arguably provide a powerful, much more meaningful experience than most movies released today. If story, as Robert McKee states, is the currency of human contact, then Hollywood is arguably bankrupt!
Thankfully, there is gold to be found on the box at home.
Article written by Paul Laight
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