Here's why movies are bad (don't blame the writers)

Writing in Screen International, scriptwriting teacher and consultant Phil Parker notes that the percentage of original stories (vs. adaptations) in the UK film industry has gone down. Is the problem that there aren’t enough good scriptwriters turning out original material? Parker thinks not. Here’s his take on the problem:

 “This generation has created a culture based on simplistic notions of screenwriting and development theory learnt on script-guru weekends and driven by producers, and directors who know that cast and/or budget, sometimes just a saleable idea, are the key to getting a film funded, not the quality of the screenplay. Writers were frozen out, writer-directors (more than 300) were ultimately treated as expendable talent, and too many poor films were, and are, made.”

 I’ll second that! Not long ago I was asked to rewrite a script scheduled to start production soon and discovered that it was one of the worst scripts I’ve ever read. Yet the director had charmed an impressive cast into signing on, with the promise that the script would be fixed later. The company first asked the original writer to try again—which yielded a script only a little better. Then the director and another writer tried to rewrite it in the director’s native language and asked me to “punch up” their script—but there wasn’t time to get it translated so I’d have to work from the foreign-language version (which was a language I don’t read or speak, so that was a non-starter).

 At last word the production was going ahead. A disaster in the making? We’ll see. I suspect that if I described this process in a novel (hmm….) people would consider it unbelievable.

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