Q&A: July 2006 Archives

A: Failure Is An Orphan.

The emailer asks a question that deserves a serious answer, although theoretically it should be obvious.

Screenwriters are supposed to be in charge of the story of the movie. Screenwriters, therefore, should be responsible for the quality of the story, and screenwriters should receive the praise or the blame for the story.

Doesn’t work like that. First of all, which screenwriter? The credited screenwriter? The uncredited screenwriter? Moving beyond that, screenwriters are employees of production companies. Those companies often ask the screenwriter to make changes, deletions or additions that the screenwriter warns them against. They may occur regardless.

Then there’s the editors. A screenwriter can write a screenplay, a director can cast and direct the film of the screenplay, and an editor can take the footage and create a different story than anyone intended. I’m presuming, of course, that the director is just one person, but that’s not always the case. Anyone interested in film should take the time to watch Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. Both films originated from a story by William Wisher and Caleb Carr. The movie was first shot by Paul Schraeder. The studio, unhappy with Schraeder’s film, then hired Alexi Hawley to do extensive rewrites and hired Renny Harlin to direct large amounts of new footage.

The two movies are similar but dissimilar. They have overlapping footage, common story points, but they also have widely divergent footage and divergent story points.

It’s absolutely fascinating to watch both films. It’s the only instance I can think of where we, the audience, get to see the rewrite process in film form. Why is this so rare? Because it’s absurdly expensive to reshoot half of a movie with a new director. Nonetheless, by watching these two movies and seeing how similar footage serves the story in different ways, you quickly get a sense of how editing, pacing and style can affect how one experiences a story.

In the final analysis, however, directors are typically made responsible for the film’s quality. This responsibility and the authority that goes with it may not be justified, but at the very least, they’re commensurate. There’s a truism in Hollywood: when a movie flops, the director suffers but the writer doesn’t.

For better or worse, the industry views the writer’s goal as writing a script that justifies the green light. The director’s job is to make a successful film. And so, the director typically gets blamed for the story of the movie, but the writer skates away happily.

A lot of writers like this. I don’t.

Because I want writers to be filmmaking partners with directors, and because I want the job of the screenwriter to be understood as “write a movie”, I want writers to shoulder some of the burden. I want writers to share equally in the praise and blame. We deserve it, frankly. Mind you, I’m not talking about film critic reviews, which routinely blame screenwriters when things are bad and ignore them when things are good. No one cares about critics. Seriously. No one. I’m talking about the business, where success has a thousand mothers and failure is an orphan. If we’re partners and the film fails, we have to own that with the director.

But if it succeeds…