10 years of Bitter posts - When Good Scripts Go Bad

When I started the blog, one feature I thought I'd get more milage out of was "When Good Scripts Go Bad." It seemed like an interesting way to pick movies that turned out less than good, but that read so much better when I saw them in script form. It sounded like a good idea in concept, but in practice, writing those posts was less fun.

I don't shy away from writing dissections of TV and film that I felt fell short. Studying those mistakes can be instructive, and there is plenty you can learn from failures. I think what I discovered was that in framing the reviews in the way I did, it made the post too much about ME and less about the work. Also, every post was determined to have the same punchline - "I read it, it was great, but I was wrong and the movie sucked."

That doesn't mean it wasn't instructive in helping demonstrate the difference between a great script and a great movie. That disparity absolutely exists. The problem was that in most of these cases I experienced, the reason for my bosses passes almost ALWAYS came down to business reasons. After I've told you once or twice that, "this script came with Tony Scott attached and there's no way in hell these guys wanted to work with him" or "they didn't get it, but it was more that they saw no commercial potential because later that year they developed two scripts that clearly they didn't get either."

That's why this was an experiment I did only twice and when I was halfway through a third post following the same pattern, I could already sense I was repeating myself. I found I enjoyed dissecting failed films much more just as a straight review rather than forensically looking back at the original script and using conjuncture to presume how it ended up going from A to B.

One of my earliest mistakes in getting a script wrong was DOMINO, a Richard Kelley script directed by Tony Scott.

I had the then-rare distinction of reading a really clever and engaging script for my bosses at the time. It had a complex plot, a clever non-linear structure, some funny showbiz cameos, and some really well-executed twists. In short, it was one of the most original scripts I’d seen and also one that I would have been willing to stake my reputation on. The script in question? Richard Kelly’s Domino, the story of a former model-turned-bounty-hunter, based on a true story (sort of.)

Unfortunately there was not shortage of reasons why my boss felt that the script was an inappropriate fit for us at the time, and there were factors I wasn’t expected to know about, so the company quietly passed. I spent the next year lamenting the fact that my bosses had let such a sure-fire hit movie get away. During that time, whenever someone asked me if I’d read anything good lately, I was quick to reply that Domino was one of the best scripts I’d ever seen and that it was sure to be a hit when it came out. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but in hindsight it certainly feels like I was staking all my script-reading credibility on this movie, at least as far as my rep among my friends was concerned.

Long story short - the movie that was released was not the movie in my brain. But it took YEARS for me to see the final film, which was plenty of time for Richard Kelley to become cemented in my brain as a writer who was vividly creative and clever. It meant he started ahead of the game the next time a script of his crossed my desk...

Here's what I had to say about my enthusiastic coverage for SOUTHLAND TALES.

There was some incredibly clever writing in that script, as well as a truly unique premise. But it wasn't realized exceptionally well. Isolated pockets of it worked so well that as a reader you really wanted the whole thing to come together and be more than the sum of its parts. I got this just before a weekend and it was such a priority that I was going to be reading it alongside the VP of Development, the SVP of Development, the assistant to the President of Development and the President of Development himself.

After my first read, I could never have explained half of what went on in that script. It was just all over the place and full of complex, scientific concepts and technobabble about the nature of time and reality. There were enough ideas in there for three completely different films. But the one-third of it that I really understood, I really liked.

I read it a second time, and understood it only marginally better.

I read the script FOUR times over the weekend, taking notes each time until I felt I had puzzled out most of the narrative. Then read it a FIFTH time as I wrote up the synopsis and tried to bring some order to a very chaotic script. I gave it a consider, citing its imagination, even as I knew it only worked about 50% and that was with immense effort on the part of the audience. To bulletproof myself, I mentioned the commercial viability of all of the talent attached.

I probably should have known better when it was taking that much effort to decode the script, but in my defense, the parts of the script I immediately liked were so good that they MADE me want to put in that time.

Of course, if you read that post, you'll see that I also was envisioning those scenes in an ENTIRELY different tone than they ended up being done in the movie. I supposes that exposes the limitations of coverage - sometimes your own imagination can steer you wrong, unless it's the fault of unclear writing.

I was early in realizing this, but sometimes the posts focused on the day-to-day work of being a reader were rarely fascinating to those who weren't readers themselves. It made me realize I'd need a different approach in discussing the script problems of completed works.

When a script takes a decade to get made, maybe it doesn't want to be born

I don't often have time to listen to podcasts, in part because I already have so many on my playlist that I keep falling behind on ones that everyone constantly recommends.  Because of this, I'd avoided getting hooked on How Did This Get Made? until I saw a recent live show at the Largo and could resist the siren call no longer. Each episode is about an hour long and covers a different notoriously bad movie.  The intent seems to be that the movies aren't just merely terrible, but entertainingly terrible. I can attest that some of my favorite episodes are the ones dissecting Superman III and Jaws: The Revenge.

I began by looking up the episodes for films that I had seen and once I tore through those, found that hosts Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas and June Diane Raphael were funny enough that it was entertaining hearing them flip out over movies I hadn't seen.

As it happened, one of my early picks in this category was the episode revolving around the Robin Williams/Barry Levinson collaboration Toys. My only recollection of this film was that it came out around the same time as Aladdin, that the commercials mostly consisted of Robin Williams riffing in an empty field, and that it was considered an incredibly awful film. As both Williams and Levinson were coming off a hot streak of films at the time, this was not dissimilar to if Christopher Nolan and Jennifer Lawrence teamed up for a film that made Pluto Nash look good.

Drew McWeeny of HitFix was the episode's guest and brought up a fact that I'd heard, but completely forgotten - that for years, Toys was considered one of the greatest unmade scripts in Hollywood. Levinson spent almost a decade and a half trying to get it made.  Only coming off of a four-year streak that included Good Morning, Vietnam, Rain Man, and Bugsy did he have enough clout to make this dream project.

And it bombed. Horribly.

It's unfortunately not uncommon for directors to totally blow all the capital they built on previous works by ramming through a long-gestating passion project: Kevin Spacey's Beyond the Sea immediately sprang to mind as such a film and I bet a number of you can fill up the comment sections with more examples.

And that's not even getting into the films made when a director is too big to be told no, such as M. Night Shyamalan's The Lady in the Water.

This might give a creative mind something to consider - if it's been almost impossible to get a particular script going even after you've "made it" and you have to be virtually untouchable to force it into production, maybe there's a reason for that.  At the very least, consider that this "trunk script" might not represent your work at its best.

There's a very recent example of this: Matthew Weiner's Are You Here.   As this Entertainment Weekly article explains, this was a passion project of Weiner's for over a decade. He wrote it between his first two seasons of The Sopranos. (He started on that show in 2004, so presumably this script's first draft was written in 2004 or 2005.) The article says "it took him eight years to get the script to Owen Wilson, two breaks from Mad Men to shoot it, and two more seasons to finish and edit the film."  The math on all of that seems dubious as it pushes the timeline past the present, but let's just say it took a decade or so to go from script to finished film, which became his feature directorial debut.

Let's also stipulate that Matthew Weiner is not a bad writer.  Mad Men is critically acclaimed and is pretty clearly his voice and his vision. He's not a hack, but he's not infallible either.  And within all of this, let's not overlook the most important detail - the Matthew Weiner who wrote this script a decade ago is not the same Matthew Weiner working on each episode of Mad Men. 

Yes, in a literal sense, it is the same guy. But I've always believed that writers grow and develop with each subsequent work. If you're doing it right, you should be getting better, particularly in the earlier stages of your career. By 2005, I think I was on my fourth screenplay and I thought I was getting pretty decent. Today, I would never show ANY of those scripts as a sample of my writing talent. As valuable as they were to my growth as a writer, I'm far better subsequent to writing those.

I actually read Are You Here a number of years ago and I immediately identified it as a "trunk script." (The term is used to refer to a script that a writer hauls out from the bottom of their stack, as if it had been locked away in a trunk.) This script came after a stretch of really sub-par scripts for work. It had been such a bleak week that when I saw the name "Matthew Weiner" on the title page, I was elated that at least one assignment that week wouldn't crush my soul.

I have not seen the finished film, so I can't render a verdict about it. However, having read the script, I can tell you have zero interest in seeing the film and there's not been a single review that changed my mind about this.  I had to sit on this opinion for a few years, as I didn't think it was fair to bash the script before the movie came out.  I was very aware that when that day came, it would be an excellent object lesson for a lot of writers, though.

It ended up being one of the most boring reads I'd had in a while.  I've read worse, I've read a LOT worse, so I'm not trying to claim that it was one of the worst scripts in existence. However, if it wasn't for the extremely acclaimed name attached to it, this thing would land in the PASS pile so fast it would break the sound barrier. I actually contacted my employer to confirm this was indeed the work of THE Matthew Weiner and not a similarly-named scribe because it contained so many hallmarks of an unseasoned writer.

For starters, the script was 138 pages long. That's a red flag with ANY script unless you're talking about some sort of epic.  This was not an epic. It was a story about a man whose father dies and leaves him an inheritance in the form of millions of dollars worth of Amish land in Pennsylvania. His sister is challenging the will and while he deals with that, he also struggles with his feelings for his young step-mother.  So in terms of concept, this isn't necessarily the sort of high-concept tale that makes for a immediately compelling read.

Even as a character-based story, it floundered. Part of what made the script laborious was that there was little sense of pace. I recall the reading of the father's will came at nearly 45 pages into the script and the script didn't make the road getting there interesting. A lot of the same points about the characters were hit again and again.  Without a strong concept and plot forcing things to advance scene-by-scene, the script was left to lean on the characters. I've seen this work before in other scripts, certainly in scripts that I praised even though they ultimately went nowhere at the companies where I was working. This script just didn't have momentum. It felt like a first draft, and a first draft from someone who was still learning how to make character drama engaging in a screenplay.

It got made eventually, probably because Matthew Weiner was just too big a name for someone to NOT take a chance on his passion project. I'm sure that the thinking was "Well, this is the guy who did Mad Men and no one got that until it came out either. I'm sure he'll make something great here too!"  Sometimes you take a gamble on something like that and it turns out to be Star Wars or The Matrix. And then sometimes you end up with a film that scored a 7% on Rotten Tomatoes and apparently had a box office so unremarkable that Box Office Mojo doesn't even have figures for it.

I have been blinded by that sort of thinking in the past too, so I can't really fault it. Early in my career, I read Richard Kelly's excellent spec script DOMINO. I championed it to my bosses, to no avail. (Their pass was more business-related than having anything to do with the quality or the commercial prospects of the material, I should note.) Having already been convinced that Richard Kelly was a genius writer operating on another level (though oddly, I wasn't blown away by DONNIE DARKO,) I was ecstatic when his next screenplay hit my desk.

That script was SOUTHLAND TALES.

I was convinced I'd told this story on the blog before, but I can't find it in the archives. As this is already a long post, I'm going to shunt that tale into it's own post for tomorrow.


I still stand by my praise of DOMINO's script, but I'm all too aware that I raved about SOUTHLAND TALES because I was a DOMINO disciple and I wanted SOUTHLAND TALES to be just as exemplary.

I'm sure that's how these passion projects eventually find their producers, someone wants them to be as good as everything else that creator has done.  The producers are staking their career on that writer's rep. For you, the writer, when your entire filmography is essentially collateral, you need to make sure that property is worth it.

And from what I see, that is the failing often. Writers and directors fly too close to the sun on their passion projects without running them through the checks and balances their early work faced. Perhaps their brilliance came out of compromise, or at least having to justify and fight for their vision.  Mostly, it needs to recognize that early works are often better left in the past.

If even Matthew Weiner can make the mistake of spending years on a "trunk script," what makes you the unsold writer so confident of everything in your catalog?  I hear so often from writers who say they have a dozen scripts "ready to go right now" and those are the writers whom I will never, ever read from because they have zero awareness of their own abilities.  If you've really taken an honest shot with 12 scripts of brilliance, SOMETHING would have happened for you by now. At a minimum, you'd be repped.

I've written about 10 spec screenplays and of those ten, I'd maybe use five as writing samples. MAYBE. There are two that I'd really lead with. and the other three are back-ups that are at least solid enough that a buyer might feel there's something the could work with.  I've got a similar ratio in my pilot scripts. 

More importantly, if I'm lucky enough to get a particular film made, I already feel like I'd be more inclined to develop something new as the follow-up rather than reach back four or five years to a script I've grown beyond.  I don't know if there are many old ideas that are so original or meaningful that they're worth blowing all your clout on, but I'm aware that opinion is informed by seeing so many of these projects crash and burn.

If you aren't your own worst critic, you'll learn that there are plenty of people who'll line up for that particular gig once you pass on it. Just ask Matthew Weiner.  But let's be honest, the guy is still going to be untouchable in TV.  Are You Here won't hurt that in the slightest. He probably is going to find it harder to direct his next feature, though. I can't help but wonder what might have resulted if his directing debut had been a script he wrote

The big takeaway - if Matthew Weiner can still make the mistake of sending out a old script that should have been cast aside or rebuilt entirely, what makes you think that everything in your portfolio deserves to be made?  Always move forward and don't cling to that early effort as the one that must be made.

How do readers get hired and do they get in trouble for recommending scripts that bombed?

Glenn asks:


I'm curious how studios, production companies, etc. hire script readers they feel have the skill set to determine film worthy material verses those readers that are more apt to be relegated to second-tier screenwriting competitions. I often hear about interns and fresh out of film school students getting these positions in both venues so what sets a good reader from a mediocre one? Beyond the years of experience and who you have worked for, how does someone with a high level of expertise get hired? Does anyone ever track or question the number of films a reader placed under a recommend or consider status that made money verses those that bombed? 

Let me clear up something here - if interns are ever reading anything, it comes from the slush pile and from the lower-priority scripts that aren't expected to be any good.  The stuff that comes in from the reputable agents always goes to the execs, their assistants and the experienced readers.  The interns and the PAs who are new to the biz usually cut their teeth on that lesser priority stuff.  In my direct experience, the execs these interns/PAs are reporting to will usually mentor them and help them learn the ropes of writing coverage.

Agencies have their own methods of training their mailroom employees.  I can't speak to that too directly, but again, they're not reading the priority material.

How does someone with a high level of expertise get hired?  The same way they get hired for any job.  Job postings go out, assistants and readers with some experience under their belt send out resumes, have their personal references call in, and so on.  Often the company will want to see some coverage samples.

This also sometimes leads to something I really hate, which is when the person doing the hiring hands you a script and says, "We'd like you to do coverage on this script."  I get the logic behind this - they'd like to see how you break down a script that they already know so they've got a good way to size up how well you are at accurately summarizing a screenplay and giving insightful comments on it.

On the other hand, you're basically asking the person to do for free something that they'd get paid for.  You wouldn't hire an assistant by having them come in for a day or two and run the desk for free, would you?  So then why is it acceptable to get free coverage for someone who has a strong resume, solid samples and references willing to vouch for them?

Anyway...

As far as your last question, in general, it hasn't been my experience that someone will keep track of a reader's suggestions and punish them if their recommendations subsequently bomb.  Let's not forget - a reader is just there to thin the material.  It's not the reader's CONSIDER or RECOMMEND that got a movie made - there are always plenty of development people above them who make that call.  If the project got as far as being made, the blame is out of the reader's hands.  It's more likely that a reader recommending subpar material will find themselves out of a job simply because their bosses keep having to read terrible scripts, thereby proving that the reader is useless to them as a "first filter."

I also have found that - with production companies - there's also little risk to you if you panned a script that the company later decided to make.  Agencies are another story - owing to the fact that some agents are incredibly thin-skinned crybabies when it comes to the slightest bit of criticism directed at projects that their clients have even the most tenuous connection to.  If you think an agent isn't capable of overreacting to even a mild PASS, you haven't written coverage for them long enough.  (And if you happened to be an agent and those last few sentences have pissed you off, thank you for proving my point.)

A few months into my first job as a PA at a production company, I was given an assignment to read an important spec for the company President.  By this point, I'd been doing coverage for all the other development execs for at least three months and I'd gotten pretty good at it.  But this was "the show" - my chance to impress.  Fortunately, I had an entire weekend to read this script.

Just my luck, it was a sci-fi film with a fairly complicated premise and story.  Even though the writer had been around the block a few times, it still was dealing with some fairly heady concepts and tricky plot twists.  I read the script once and wasn't sure I understood it all, even after taking notes.  So I read it a second time, and then a third time as I wrote up my synopsis.

After I had my synopsis done, I kept rewriting it until I trimmed the length by an entire half page.  It took me the better part of the day to read and write up, but I eventually distilled the story down to its most essential components and actually made some sense out of the story.  I dare say that even the script's writer couldn't have wrung more coherence out of the story.

Oops.

I made a nearly incomprehensible script make sense.  And when the story made sense, it was easy to see the stuff in there that could be cool.  The comments were critical, but not especially cutting.  It was a PASS, but it read like a gentle PASS.  I think you can guess where this goes.

Long story short - the synopsis I wrote was later used to entice buyers for the foreign presale.  For a while, I worried that my critical comments would come back to haunt me.  As it turned out, no one cared in the slightest that I spoke ill of a project that we made.

They cared less when the film was (eventually) released and it bombed.  Hey, I tried to warn them.

In another instance, a script I was assigned to read ended up being one of the worst professional scripts I had the displeasure to write up.  It was only through sheer force of will that the words "sucks" and "shit sandwich" did not appear in my coverage.  Instead, I aggressively pointed out every last plot hole and conceptual flaw.  I didn't flat out state it, but it was impossible to not read this review and not question everything about the script, including the writer's own proficiency.

Here's where you probably expect me to tell you that they went ahead and bought it the very next week.  Well I'm not going to say that.

That's because they had already bought it just days earlier.  Did they tell me that when they sent me the script? No.  Did I know beforehand?.... Does it matter?

This particular film crashed rather hard in wide release.  The reviews were intensely unkind.  The box office was worse.  There were no reprisals, unless you count the fact I had to sit through the movie.

Now you're probably wondering, did I ever recommend a script that subsequently bombed? Not exactly.  Nothing I endorsed to a company was later made AT that company and bombed FOR that company.

I did, however, recommend DOMINO.  My bosses at the time passed, frankly, in large part because of the director.  As much as I loved the script, I hated the movie.  But for more on that, read this entry.