the watch of time

Script Development – Say Goodbye:

(a) “If you’re hoping to be a screenwriter in Hollywood, you will be rewritten.  That’s just the way it is. They treat you like you’re on a factory line.  You’ll be fired because ‘they can’t really tell a love story’, ‘they can’t do action properly’, ‘they’re not funny…’  You’ll be fired for different reasons, but it’s the way executives pretty much cover their asses when it comes to the movie coming out.”

(b) “I wrote the script and [the film company] said, ‘Wow, it’s really good, but it’s a love story, and what we really want is a buddy film…’  And I said, ‘That’s interesting. It’s completely not what I wrote.’  I’m used to getting notes where someone says, ‘Okay, act two needs some work’.  I’m not used to getting notes where they say, ‘Let’s change the genre’.  I just couldn’t swing with it.  I couldn’t do it, and I was replaced.”

(c) “The situation had this unfortunate engineering flaw built into it, for my purposes, which is the producer had a certain movie in mind, the director had a certain movie in mind, and what I was able to give them pleased the director, but not the producer.  When you’re a screenwriter trying to serve a creative vision, it helps if you’re not trying to serve more than one master.

You really do chalk it up to creative differences.

A career is filled with disappointments like that. Every career, no matter who you ask.”

Excerpted with quotes from (a) John D. Brancato & (b) Jose Rivera & (c) Frank Darabont

                                                                                                                    Tales from the Script (2010)