Read Online Writing Movies For Fun And Profit! by Thomas Lennon, Robert B Garant - Free Book Online

YOU REACT.
    Again, this is your chance to be awesome. DO IT—BE AWESOME. Don’t pout, don’t kick up dust, don’t complain, and don’t do anything that could be described as “douchey.” No matter how mad it makes you, be gracious. Because there’s a 99 percent chance you’ll get fired, and a 55 percent chance you’ll get REHIRED! (Better odds than blackjack!) It happens all the time. You will, if you play your cards right, get fired from and rehired to your own scripts all the time. When you make it to the very top, you’ll find that you’re usually replaced by or are replacing the same writers too!
    Here’s a flow chart of how the fire/hire system should work, if you remember to be wonderful:

     
    There’s also a seedier underbelly to this already seedy underbelly, and that’s this: whoever replaces you might be a bit unscrupulous in making changes to your script. Watch out for this, especially with writers who haven’t had a lot of films produced. They’ll change character names, locations, and props. If you get rehired to fix one of your old scripts— CHANGE THEM BACK. Why? you ask.
Why would they change something that works for no good reason?
    FOR CREDIT! (See Chapter 30 , “Arbitration or Who Wrote This Crap?” and read about how screen credit turns into royalties that can be traded for hydrogen-powered motorcycles and Victoria’s Secret underpants.)
    Remember: getting fired takes practice. You’ll be angry the first few times. After that it gets easier! (See Chapter 33 , “I’m Drinking Too Much. Is That a Problem?”)

10
WHY DOES ALMOST EVERY STUDIO MOVIE
SUCK
DONKEY BALLS?
     
    Short answer: development.
    … But let’s back up for a second.
    A lot of movies get screwed up even though they have a perfectly good script. Maybe the movie gets miscast. Maybe it’s a bad director or not enough money to pull off the movie, not enough
time
to pull it off. Or no chemistry between the leads, or maybe the leads flat-out hate each other. Sometimes on-set egos, power struggles, or laziness get in the way. Sometimes the cast doesn’t trust the script, sometimes they don’t trust the director. And, scariest of all—
    Sometimes, even if everyone involved in the movie is
great
and passionate and talented …
sometimes the movie just doesn’t come together.
Sometimes things work on paper that just don’t get translated to the screen . Let’s face it—
    Most movies suck .
     
    Ninety-five percent of them. This is not a new phenomenon. Since the beginning of movies, the majority of movies in any given year haveALWAYS sucked. The year
Casablanca
came out, Warner Bros., also came out with dozens of other movies YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF. Because they sucked.
    And you, as the writer, can’t worry about that: you’re just the writer. (“ ‘
JUST
the writer’?!? B-b-but … it’s
my
movie!”) First off—no, it’s not
your
movie. It’s
the studio’s
movie. You sold it to them, remember?
    Second: you can’t worry about things that are beyond your control. You’ll go nuts.
    Will people blame YOU, the writer, if your
genius
script turned into a turd of a movie? Yes . Some people will. A lot of people. Walk it off.
    There will also be people who
don’t
blame you. A lot of folks in the industry will say, “I don’t understand why that movie sucked, I heard the script was great.”
    Either way, after the script is done, there’s nothing you can do about the subsequent creative decisions, good or bad.
    When you accept this fact, you’ll sleep better.
     
    What
should
you worry about? Worry about
your
part of the process: the WRITING.
    Let’s talk about how movies get screwed up DURING the writing process. There’s a word for that in Hollywood. And that word is:
    Development.
     
    Now, despite popular belief, not everyone in the movie business is an idiot. There are lots of smart, talented people working in the studios. Problem is, like in any industry— there are a lot more idiots than smart