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TALENT IS LIKE ELECTRICITY
My Fellow Writers,
I so badly wanted to talk about reality television today. I even had a nice "Prostitution Island" joke to share. I was also going to pitch a few new ideas for new reality television shows (including "First to Vomit Wins"), but I'll have to share those for another time.
But I've just lost three hours of my life to a bad script. Nothing strange about that - except that this one was written by an Academy-Award-winning writer.
This unnamed writer has done brilliant work in the past - and no one will ever be able to take those accomplishments from him. I know it sounds presumptuous and arrogant of me to dare critique his work, but trust me on this - this script was seriously flawed. At well over 130 pages long, it was the toughest kind of epic - a fictionalized account of historical events. Brutal, violent, and almost utterly without bright moments. But those things can all work in a script. The troubles came in other aspects - the ponderous dialogue, convoluted structure, vague characters, contrived relationships, etc. - and resulted in a script that was difficult to finish.
I'm not doing this to denigrate anyone's talent - I won't tell a soul who I'm talking about, and I remain in awe of this writer's abilities. But there's something we can all learn from the fact that a great writer can write a mediocre script. It happens more often than you'd think. The reason why is simple and obvious -- because it's as hard as Hell to write a good script. It's mental childbirth.
Talent is not enough. To borrow a phrase: talent is like electricity. It's not automatic. It needs to be applied, both consistently and in great bursts. Talent alone will not build a writing career for most people. This should actually come as a comfort to those of us who didn't kick out our latest script in two days. Screenwriting is not magic - though I do find that a few ritual sacrifices and dark pacts every now and then can really generate a good line. (Okay, perhaps I'm more prone to use a thesaurus than the Enuma Elish.)
Let me continue being presumptuous for a minute, and talk about what I think went wrong with this script:
First, I believe that the writer had little personal connection to the material. I have no knowledge of how this project came to be, but it seems as if it was just an assignment to turn a novel into a screenplay. The writer did it because he's known for epics. But because he had no personal connection to it, it seems as if the novel is only half-adapted. Long stretches of dialogue - likely pulled directly from the novel - mark too many scenes and slow the pace to a crawl. The characters never rise above the chaos of the structure. There's no central storyline that holds everything together. All of these things would be fine (even "experimental" or "avant garde") if they were well-executed. They're not, and so the script is rife with lost opportunities. It's humorless, and yet also lacks the drama or suspense to make it truly compelling.
Secondly, I don't think a qualified reader (e.g., a fellow writer, development executive, producer, agent, or even friend) read and critiqued this script before it was sent out. I imagine that it's tough, as a big writer (like this guy), to get people you trust to read scripts. After all, he's a truly talented writer - a wealthy, successful, Oscar-winning talent. One might think that nobody's really qualified to critique his script, but, well, One would be wrong. In this case, a qualified and honest reader might have helped force the writer to clarify his muddled structure, and to pull up the things that really do work in the script.
Actually, this is a tough one for me. I applaud the writer's agents for sending out the script without compelling him to rewrite it. I don't believe it's an agent's place to decide whether or not a script is creatively ready - though I'm well aware that most of the agents (and managers and even lawyers) out there love to give notes on scripts. It's the old-school maxim of "Sell it, don't smell it." But in order for that rule to work, writers have to make sure that the script is in the best shape possible EVERY time. In this case, the writer probably has a manager - and undoubtedly has plenty of writer and executive friends. He should have made more of them read it and give an honest analysis and criticism. I'm only guessing that he didn't, since the script was a very difficult and slow read. It's hard for me to accept that readers would think this script lives up to the potential of its premise.
Third, and related to the premise issue, is that the underlying novel was extremely difficult material to adapt in the first place. I can't talk about the subject matter, or that would give it away, but suffice it to say that it's a historical period that we don't often see. The names, politics, and philosophies are unfamiliar. The rules of the world are constantly changing because it's in chaos. It seems that the writer was almost too true to the novel - doing too much to capture the novel's interior and dark tone. In doing so, the writer shortchanged the more cinematic aspects of the story, including the characters and the central plot of rebellion.
So I return to one of the points I made in a column a few weeks ago: never send out a script before it's ready. And if you think that means rewriting it a couple of times after having one buddy read it, well, think again. Because if writers like this guy - who has had a number of successful movies and a long career - can have trouble getting a script right, then the rest of us, with unproven talent, are faced with an even greater challenge. Elevating ourselves as writers means that we all have to put in the extra and impossible effort to make sure our scripts are movies. Pick the right concept - the one that you would write if you could only write one movie for the rest of your life - and do it justice like no one else can. So, to finish on the metaphor from above: If talent is like electricity, then persistence and high standards are the generators.
I'm off to do some writing. I hope that some punk columnist will someday talk trash about one of my scripts as if he knows what he's doing.
With all due respect to my betters,
Grady
P.S. I can be reached at EmailGrady@aol.com with questions or comments, but I'll never tell or confirm who the writer is. I'm the world's best secret-keeper, and the writer is far too talented to be judged by anyone for one mistake.
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