How to deal with scriptwriter who is against changes!

[Lee Saxon]

This is why the majority of companies buy the script, then have their writers rewrite it before they think of doing anything else.

Frankly, I don't know why you'd put up with a lippy screenwriter. Once they've written the script, they should be basically out of the picture.

Ugh

 

[Rolf Silber]

If you can't create a legitimate argument for your choice then it needs to be re-examined.

True for both writers and directors - but in the end the movie is "owned" by the director. He better has those legitimate arguments for changes made. If he has them he is in his own right and all discussions end. But if he does not listen to a writers arguments before ... he is a moron..... a movie may collapse because people fiddle with the statics of the dramatic construction and are not really good at that....

 

[Ted Spencer]

True for both writers and directors - but in the end the movie is "owned" by the director. He better has those legitimate arguments for changes made. If he has them he is in his own right and all discussions end. But if he does not listen to a writers arguments before ... he is a moron.....

That would be correct. It usually plays out in an 'I'm pretending to listen' kind of way though. Same effect...

a movie may collapse because people fiddle with the statics of the dramatic construction and are not really good at that....

And *way* too often do...

Paradoxically, it seems only series TV (at least here in the USA), the 'lesser' medium to cinema, has fully embraced the primacy of the writer. In recent years it's created a particularly odd effect where even megabuck Hollywood films all too often feature far worse 'scripts' (or what's left once the dogs have had at 'em) than their small-screen siblings. It didn't used to be that way...

There's a great cautionary tale on this subject here:

http://sex-in-a-sub.blogspot.com/2010/05/robbing-from-poor-writer.html

 

[Allan Black]

Thanks for that sub link, enjoyed it and a sig I can sing to .. albiet out of tune.

Cheers.

 

[Rolf Silber]

Paradoxically, it seems only series TV (at least here in the USA), the 'lesser' medium to cinema, has fully embraced the primacy of the writer.

Now I have to walk very carefully because I am on "thin ice" as I consider myself to be a "directing writer" and have written scripts for other directors and directed scripts by other writers at times. And this is an American forum and I am working under considerably different circumstances over here - so things may be distinctively different on certain levels.

I have experienced block-headed directors who - for an effect, a lousy idea, a technical plinky-di-plank - ruined scenes or whole scripts or at least tried it (often the scripts would survive this somewhat) or - worse - re-wrote things until they became un-recognizable heaps of dung. Yes. Such things do happen. But, guess what, I ask myself when this happens (and it happened only once to me and I took my name off the credits) where was the effing producer? If a film is "lost" through the idiocy of a maniacal or just lousy director - who has let him run into the minefield? Who owns the leash? Producer.

He or she is the only one who can balance the situation if changes in scripts are demanded by a director and the writer does not want them. So the producer better has an understanding of scripts, why they may or may not work. And he or she may have to take a decision at a point to change the people involved in the process - be it the writer or the director - and take responsibility for that. And, yes, it's seemingly easier to change the writer than the director. So writers may feel the get it with the "thick end" more often than directors (but tend to forget that its usually the director who gets torn apart if the movie dismantles).

But, yes, as a writer you may lose because of that but also because you can not change one thing: Your script is not the movie. The script is a simulation of a possible movie. There is no law that the movie has to be as it was written in this simulation. Actually no writer worth his money should expect that his script will be shot one-to-one or he/she is utterly naive. I shout - "who wrote this s**t" - at my own scripts at times when on set because I found out that something that worked on paper like charm does not work at all in the real world.

The writer usually is protected from this experience. But, yes, he also falls victim to lunatics at times. So my consequence as a "writer only" has become over the years: Take the money and run. I do not want to be involved after I have given them my script. And if "they" want to really butcher it I go away quietly and take my name off.

On the other hand I have stumbled over scripts that had pretty good ideas or even were well constructed in one way but would not really work in others. What do you do then? Your sitting there with a nice, nervous writer who is so much in love with the wonderful words he coined... and there comes me as the beastly director who gives the script a good scrubbing... which I have to do. I have to to make it really work. Because writers also have a tendency to sit in the wonderful magical forest of their own imaginations sometimes and have no idea that actually they have lost the movie ten pages earlier.

And some react, if you try to point that out to them, with bouts of depression or they become maniacal themselves. Because for them the script worked perfectly. Yes. And it did. Even worse: They had the perfect leading lady, the perfect set, the perfect DoP, the perfect budget, the perfect weather and the perfect audience that would totally and deeply fall in love with his/her incredible script because..... because all of that only happened on their writing desk.

I had to kill scenes or dialogues at times because they were not working or a writer had been fallen in love with a language belonging more to a theatrical stage than to a movie. I have experienced writers who destroyed their own, rather good ideas by getting stuck in the swamp of subtext that they considered to be intellectual deep and forgot that you need a text before you can have a sub-text. Writers can be incredible blockheads too. Believe me. I know. I am one.

There is a deep and unsolvable antagonism here - and it can only become manageable by the involvement of a good and intelligent producer. That writers become producers more often now happens in tv-series in your country it seems and this may be one of the reasons we find so much interesting ones today. But once a writer becomes a producer (or a director) he also has to face the "other realities" and has to leave the forest of his imaginations - as great and wonderful that may be - and work with the dire realities. Which is, imho, incredibly healthy .... and frustrating at the same time.

Most of the people I have come to love in this art & business are people like Billy Wilder or Paul Haggis - writers who are directors who are producers at times. If you want to have "control" over you ideas or if you want to protect them - you have to direct and/or produce them yourself. Or you need to find yourself an environment where you work with people whom you can trust.

The writer in your example.... I know why he is upset, I understand his frustration, he is maybe totally right, but.... they never made his movie, didn't they?! They made a different one. And probably the more terribly one, yes. So what would I try to say to him? Take the money and run would be my advice. And if you mess with the elephants of the trade you know what happens if they step on your toe. Re-read William Goldman. Use the money the mighty monsters gave you for ruining your work and do your own stuff meanwhile. And then write a nice low-budget comedy or drama or else and go and direct or produce it and stop sobbing.... take your script, your helpful friends, your camera and your talent and show us your stuff.... that's it.

A writer always has one chance others don't have: Nobody can make him stop writing except himself. Nobody.