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When a writer is hired by a studio for an open writing assignment to adapt a novel or write some ‘high concept’ horseshit into a script for the big screen, (that will in all likelihood only last two weeks in some out of the way art cinema) he has to be prepared to treat it as if he were embarking upon a colostomy examination at a welfare clinic. Try to imagine a bunch of completely un-visionary, uncreative ivy league bankers posing as studio executives, making every decision based on fear, crawling up your ass with their big shark like teeth gnawing at your insides. It would be easier to teach chimps to master a Rubix cube then to make these creative Nazi’s see the light of anything remotely original. These Abu Graib-interrogation-like “pitch meetings” are set up by the species of the spineless agent parasites who are in the front and back pockets of all the studios in town.
It’s a simple system, the studios own the agents and the agents enslave/control/manipulate the writers to do as much work as possible for the lowest possible cost. The writer is the weakest and most importent component of the Hollyowood mediocrity machine, and yet the irony is that without a script there is no Hollywood. Without a script there is no movie, no jobs for actors, no jobs for directors, no jobs for anyone. Willaim Goldman has been quoted often as saying “Nobody knows anything in Hollywood” as far as what will and won’t work at the box office. This goes doubly-so for studio executives who are hired and killed off faster then a MC Donalds funded slaughter house.
There is nothing romantic or cool about screenwriting anymore in a doomed world. With reality TV talking over 80% of television, and now entering into cinema, the day of the scripted writer is numbered. There is even a team of computer geniuses from MIT trying to create program that will write the perfect screenplay based on database of every script ever written. The screenwriter is dead. Somebody really should throw a funeral, there are s plethra of unemployeed writer whores who would be eager to write the obituary. Their obituary that is and in a sense ours too…
I wish this article had some actual anecdotes and advices from real screenwriters, or maybe some form of measurement between what older writers were making as opposed to new writers. This was just a diatribe about how shitty Hollywood screenwriters have it, and a fairly short and vague one at that.