Hollywood Scripts Can't Save Themselves

One of Hollywood's dirty little secrets is that studios frequently turn to so-called script doctors to do last minute polishing on screenplays. Quentin Tarantino has been known to add his personal touch to films and John Sayles (perhaps one of the only true independent filmmakers) often does it to earn money to finance his own films.

As this article in Variety points out, the top level Hollywood script doctors can earn as much as $300,000 a week. This sounds outrageous at first until you read further into the article and find that this doesn't mean the writer comes in for a week or two and is then finished. They're basically on call until the product is completely finished. And these writers want to keep getting these gigs so they take those calls.

Still, it's incredible to me that studios will shell out that kind of money to do touch up work on their films. Okay, when the total budget of the film is $30M (on the low end) then a quarter million isn't really that much. But as a critic (and one who is more tired every year of terrible Hollywood screenplays) I wonder how they can justify spending that kind of money and still have the end result be that the script is consistently the worst element of a Hollywood movie.

Think about this for a moment. Hollywood movies are by far the best in the world in terms of sheer production value. There is no national cinema anywhere in the world that can consistently match Hollywood for costume design, art direction, location shooting, cinematography, musical scores, editing, sound mixing, visual effects - all the technical aspects of filmmaking are 100% top notch in Hollywood (when they put the effort in). Don't get me wrong, there are wonderful films from virtually every country in the world, but you can always tell that the talent and money is not thrown into production design and technical prowess. Directing and acting are both frequently just as good anywhere you turn.

So given Hollywood's ability to turn out wonderfully crafted product, why the hell is the writing almost always mediocre at best and dreadful at worst. I'm not even talking story writing here (although that is frequently garbage in the big studio pictures) but just simple dialogue writing. If a studio is putting loads of money into the development of a script, then the actual writing of the script, then shooting the script and then finally paying $300K a week for a top writer to do touch up work, why can't I walk into a Hollywood movie without hearing contrivance after cliche upon hokey sentimentality and wisdom?

The Variety article hints at the possibility that with so many people getting their hands on a screenplay, it loses its unique voice. You end up with a mishmash of styles. That hardly ever seems the problem to me. Seriously, take another look at 2012 and just listen to the dialogue. Ask yourself if you can really imagine anyone speaking the way those characters speak.

I can write clunky wooden dialogue. Why won't someone pay me that kind of money? Oh, because unlike Akiva Goldsman (Academy Award winner for A Beautiful Mind, but not for Batman & Robin), I've never won an Oscar.