this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Bad writing for film and television really irks me because of how avoidable it is. I'm not talking about mediocre or lackluster writing, but the actual bad writing.
TV shows and movies are tremendously expensive to make. Every part of it costs a fortune except for one: the writing. Even if a studio or production company was paying for a whole team of writers to work full time it's still only a fraction of the cost of paying film crews, actors, editors, and VFX artists.
Given the relatively lower expense, relative lack of time constraints, and enormous importance of the script to the overall quality of the product it absolutely boggles my mind that production companies consistently fuck up the writing process.
It's like reading a news article and seeing horribly constructed sentences and typos. Like, this is your main job! I know there are a lot of English majors out there who would love to find work.
Dropped subplots is like reading a news article with sentences that are
Great, now I have to find page B12.
This guy has birds and a good morning ritual.
I got the results of the tests back. I definitely have breast cancer.
You're tearing me apart!
they truly are 😔
At least for some of those there's an excuse of needing to get the news out ASAP, but there's no reason an in depth piece or an online article that's been up for a few days should be butchered.
I've been building a list called "The Micro or Low Budget Sci-fi" https://letterboxd.com/mattcoady/list/the-micro-or-low-budget-sci-fi/
Basically movies that cost almost nothing to make and use great writing to build up the world. Our minds are really good and fleshing out the rest as long as their given good writing as a foundation. Productions could save a lot of money with good writing. It blows my mind you could sink $200 million dollars into a project and not have an absolutely flawless script.
Hey, thanks for sharing!
It's completely beyond me why scripts get rushed out the door before they're at the very least solid. Sure, a production company might make their money just a little bit sooner but they run a massive risk of losing all of their money making a movie that completely bombs.
It's impossible for every script to be a masterwork, but holy crap it seems like an audience wanting a competent script is too much to ask. It's not like there's a shortage of aspiring writers that can take a crack at a script until it's at least passable.
Ever heard of Time Lapse from 2014? It involves a camera that takes pictures 24 hours into the future.
That is such a good movie.
Well maybe right. What draws a general audience? A flashy trailer of the sun exploding or someone talking about their family issues?
Why not both?
I never said they're mutually exclusive. There's tons of big budget explosion movies that have great scripts. Dark Knight, Casino Royale, Matrix, The Bourne movies, Heat. The best movies have legs and continue to sell for years after release, exploding sun only gets you a good opening weekend.
It's crazy cause if you hear writers in tv talk about it, they'll get contracted like a month or two before they have to finish the first batch of scripts. Writing in Hollywood is as much about learning quick writing shortcuts/tropes to move the plot along to get the product out on time as it is being able to develop a plot.
That's what sticks in my craw. If I'm a studio exec who's going to invest potentially hundreds of millions of dollars it's beyond stupid to jeopardize that to get a payout a little faster.
It just seems stupid to put a time crunch on the most important phase of your investment. I don't see how taking a greater risk of a project being a flop is worth getting the script a few weeks sooner.
My pet theory is that this is because of the assembly line way of thinking of studios. Script -> Casting -> Shooting -> VFX -> Editing -> Profit.
It takes time to develop a good idea and script. If you force a writer to adhere to a strict schedule you'll get a rush job and bad writing. As long as money keeps flowing in, their assembly line theory is validated.
i wouldn’t be surprised if a big part of it is that the higher ups don’t know much about what good writing actually is, or they’re too focused on ratings and they don’t dare deviate from “what works”. it also wouldn’t surprise me if writers weren’t allowed to make “major” changes to scripts after seeing how the writing looks after scenes have been recorded, because it might be “too expensive to change”.