..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

A Dickens of a Time

The writer Bob Klane, whose acerbic wit has infused such films as Where’s Poppa? and Weekend at Bernie’s, observed in his dour way that it took seven generations to weed out bad family traits. What he neglected to mention was that it took but three generations to instill a new set of rotten family values.

Now, while I can’t claim to know a great deal about genetics or genealogy, I do know one or two things about writers, screenwriters and the fractious relationship they’ve had with the rest of the film industry. We all know the old joke about the Polish movie actress and the screenwriter (if not, ask a friend). The basis of that quip - and an enduring image of a neurotic, self-deprecating, tanless, bad dresser - dates back to the time when movies began to speak and transplanted New Yorker Herman Mankiewicz sent his buddy Ben Hecht a telegram with the carrot of a $300 a week job at Paramount. It read, in part: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”

Writers, in broad strokes, were loathed. They were cliquish, carried themselves above it all and existed in a world far removed from the sets and locations where films were actually produced. However, their number one perceived sin was that they wrote for money. Toss some coin in one’s direction and he will do his dancing bear act; efficiently but without passion.  Money is his god, rationale and justification.

All this admittedly crosses over into hyperbole. Nonetheless, the sole thing that staved off a pogrom against film scribblers was that they put the words and directions on paper. And unlike the perception voiced by cynic-screenwriter Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard that audiences “think the actors make it (dialogue) up as they go along,” they don’t, and non-hyphenate directors need scripts as map and blueprint for what ultimately goes up on the big screen.

The Hollywood screenwriter is a pacifist at best and often a conscientious objector in practice. He/she neglected to defend the barricade as it was stormed by waves supporting the auteur theory. Steven Spielberg, a benefactor of the latter, has even gone on record stating that film writers ought to show more spine and stick up for their work when it’s being dissected and critiqued. It’s difficult to conclude that the working condition, environment and attitude toward the cinematic wordsmith is at rock bottom. Such things cannot be quantified empirically but it’s fair to deduce that his/her stock has been a sub par performer of long standing. And the current mantra in the corridors of power is no new scripts.

We all know the old canard that insists that anyone can write. And it’s sort of true if arranging a string of words simultaneously in a configuration that resembles a sentence is the foundation of this belief. However, writing is a bit like the game of musical chairs in reverse. In the game, the winner is the person who’s seated as one by one the chairs are removed and but one remains. In writing, those aspiring to the craft begin to drop off like autumn leaves as they are asked to add another and another and another sentence to their initial thought. It would be too frightening to even consider the notion of a new paragraph.

Turning back the clock more than a decade, I recall screenwriter Leon Capetanos talking about going to Disney for a pitch meeting. He expected to encounter a room full of stony-faced development execs seemingly impervious to his latest idea. What actually took place was a respectful, attentive hearing for the proposed screen story the studio would agree not to develop. Then, in the passage of a heartbeat, the senior exec shifted gears and turned the tables on Capetanos. He and his lieutenants began to pitch their idea of a story to the screenwriter to gauge his reaction. It’s at that juncture that the wheat is separated from the chaff. I can’t remember specific examples but the pitches were on the order of: a guy goes back home for a high school reunion.

Capetanos spent the rest of the meeting attempting to explain that a story needed some sort of dramatic arc. What these suits had was, generously speaking, the germ of an idea. For about a year, I would hear similar tales of writers being put on the hot seat by development people and not knowing quite how to react. No one was ever quite sure whether he or she was being auditioned as a possible writer or simply that being present was viewed as an affirmation of the term “creative” executive. To the best of my knowledge none of these “stories” were ever developed and the reverse pitch quietly disappeared into the shadows.

More than simply seeing this as an aberration of a process, on reflection it now appears to be a turning point in the kinds of films being made by the Hollywood majors.

At this point, it’s probably a good idea to look at the current top 10. Four (including the top three) are sequels, one is a remake (The Italian Job), another was adapted from a comic book (The Hulk) and another is an animated version of a mythic figure seen many times on screen in live-action adventures (Sinbad). The remaining three titles include a broad comic star vehicle (Bruce Almighty), a sort of animated franchise (Pixar’s Finding Nemo) and a quite novel zombie horror film (28 Days Later). This week the additions to the list will include a film inspired by a theme park ride (Pirates of the Caribbean) and a picture culled from the pages of a graphic novel (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).

When you add up the list, it would be easy to conclude that there’s not a whole lot of original thinking going on in Tinsel Town. That brief window when Capetanos was being presented studio pitches might have extended to the present had the executives merely offered a menu of remakes, sequels and movies that fit the most obvious traits of a star whether that was a Clint Eastwood western or an Eddie Murphy comedy.

However, two other elements go hand in glove with a virtually uninterrupted annual diet of predictable pictures. Those things are the rise of the MBA and the erosion of the studio system as a developer of movies.

We all know the Hollywood history of immigrant scrap metal dealers that morphed into movie moguls with a nose for what the public wanted to see. They shed their colorful pasts for the vision of a homogenized American they fostered on screen. The next generation of studio honchos tended to be more corporate and in the ensuing years have been diminished to fiscally responsible administrators of cogs in giant conglomerate machines.

People will scream until they are blue in the face that you cannot run the film industry as if it were manufacturing the same sort of product as auto makers or sporting goods dealers. There is an emotional component to going out to the movies. We tend to identify specific films to key events in our lives in a way that other products cannot be engrained. For instance, the first movie I took my wife to see was Romancing the Stone is a more common memory than I was eating Special K at the time or wearing Calvin Kleins.

Well, it’s an interesting argument with sound examples and a cohesive logic. But, ultimately you can run a studio as if it were an assembly line operation producing an ocean of soda pop every day. You can generate audience profiles of past movie going habits and project by region, age, gender, ethnicity or race what your sample (or any part of it) is likely going to want to see in the future. It’s possible to look at sequels of past hits and determine, on average, how they will perform based on whether one, two or three creative elements are in the second film. And it’s also very true that armed with all this data, one can give the green light to the movie equivalent of New Coke. And while there aren’t dozens of examples of failures on that level in most major industries, movie misfires of epic proportion are a too common occurance. Cleopatra and Heaven’s Gate are obvious historic examples but pall beside The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Windtalkers and K-19: The Widowmaker from that distant time of 2002.

The studio upside for a shipwreck on the order of K-19 is that it was co-financed with financial partners that included National Geographic and Intermedia Films. I’ve talked in the past how the majors love to share the risk on films with questionable commercial appeal. However, what’s often pleasant about this sort of financial co-venture is that a studio doesn’t have to go through the painful birthing process of developing something into a screen story. It can simply lean back and inspect the pedigree before making its decision, or make its involvement contingent on certain financial or artistic changes to the presentation. As one veteran producer observed recently, studios are evolving into banking institutions. Producers and production companies increasingly go to them for what amounts to a loan with conditions. They hold the deed and exact a price for their participation. It’s a neat business transaction with none of the messy artistic stuff to gum up the works.

And where does that leave the writer who either does not want or requires a respite from assignments with numbers in their titles? Well, there are a couple of possibilities. Should the writer wish to pursue his effort in the mainstream, he/she would be well advised to involve one of the current top 10 movie stars. By hook or crook or by any means necessary, one must get that performer to fall in love with the screenplay.

However, if actually getting it made is more important than name talent or personal remuneration or anything else, one either has to have a second tier name fall in love with the material or find a feisty independent that will join your fight. I cannot remember the exact dollar figure ($4,950?) but Bobby Bowfinger got it right about the actual measly amount of cash needed to make a movie. All it requires is a writer of passion and action - two things uncommonly rare in that field of artistic endeavor.

SPIKE THIS, SPIKE THAT

Shelton, aka Spike, Lee came to terms with Viacom Tuesday and the corporate world exhaled a collective sigh of relief. You may recall that the pugnacious filmmaker insisted that when the average guy thinks macho, he thinks Spike Lee and therefore the proposed Spike TV was infringing on his well-cultivated persona. Several courts felt his claim at least merited consideration and the brakes were put on the launch of the cable label.

The actual details of the settlement have been sealed. However, the fact that the court had the caveat that should the verdict be against Lee, he would be liable to pay part of the costs involved with delaying the debut. Minimally that would carry a $500,000 price tag. I’ve seen estimated losses in the press that range from $17 million to $30 million and with that sort of drainage, it might be prudent to salve a bruised ego by any means necessary to effect a solution.

 

- by Leonard Klady