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Will the Writers Rescue Hollywood?
With new money and new respect, will the writers rescue Hollywood?
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Reversal of Fortune (1990) |
For decades studio executives have searched for a fool-proof money- making formula, and they've tried everything from allowing directorial carte blanche to financing big-budget sequels to issuing virtual blank checks for superstar talent. Now it seems they believe success might just start with the written word, and they're taking steps to anoint die screenwriter as savior.
Indicative of this trend is a groundbreaking deal creating a unique partnership between Sony Pictures Entertainment and a group of more than 30 of Hollywood's top writers. The deal, announced in February, guarantees a percentage of profits for the writer and scripts for the studio, and it may also insure that the writer finally gets a voice in the creative process.
Hollywood has long been fond of the image of the major studio as a big circus tent supported by a few strategically placed poles: the blockbusters and franchise films that pay all the bills, from the air conditioning in the bungalows to the security guard's salary to the CEO's bonus. If that metaphor is true, then, who's inside the tent? The production heads must be the ring- masters, diverting our attention from one stage to the next. The actors are the ones swinging on the trapeze and swallowing fire. The directors are, it could be argued, the clowns, entertaining us with wheezing, recycled gags. And the elephants are certainly the films themselves, lumbering around endlessly in a circle. So where does that leave the writers? Do they feed the elephants, or are they the ones following behind with the shovels? Some writers would say they perform both tasks. But the much-publicized Sony deal indicates that writers are finally getting some of the respect they've long been due. Someday they might even get to ride those elephants.
Ron Bass is the Joyce Carol Oates of screenwriting. After selling the nights to his third novel 16 years ago with himself attached as writer, he left a successful law business with seven movie deals already in the works. Since then, he has won an Oscar (along with Barry Morrow) for Rainman, and has written, among others, the scripts for Waiting to Exhale, Men a Man Loves a Woman) Gardens of Stone, Sleeping With the Enemy, Black Widow) Dangerous Minds, The Joy Luck Club, Mat Dreams May Come, Stepmom, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Entrapment, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and The Shipping News. He currently has 10 to 12 projects in, as the saying goes, "various stages of development," including a TV movie starring Andy Garcia and a comedy he's writing with Will Smith. He begins writing every morning between 3 and 4 am, and works 14-hour days, 7 days a week. In addition to writing new scripts, rewriting others, and adapting novels, he produces as well, filling his days with meetings, screenings, and post-production sessions. His company is called, of course, Predawn Productions, consisting of himself and seven others. And he does it all with a No.2 pencil and a notebook because, he says, "When you correct on a computer, it's gone." Bass, who is married with two daughters (one a teenager, the other in college) taught himself to read at age three, when he began to suffer from a mysterious illness that confined him to bed for several years. He wrote short stories and completed a novel by the time he was 17. When he showed it to a high school teacher he had a crush on, she said he'd never be able to sell it. He burned it. "I didn't write another word for 17 years," he says. He considered careers in philosophy and politics (he interned in Washington during the Kennedy administration) , before going to law school at Harvard and eventually becoming a movie lawyer. "But I always thought it would be the coolest thing to be a Faulkner or a Dostoevsky," he says. So he reworked the novel he destroyed, published it, and wrote two more before he decided he liked the quicker pace of screenplays. Bass is now in the first year of an exclusive three-year writing and producing deal with Sony, which includes the adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha, to be directed by Steven Spielberg. Bass has discovered that adaptations of serious commercial fiction is the kind of work he loves the best. "I have a good eye for how to tell the same story in a different medium," he says. "In print, it's about what happens within people. In film, it's what happens between people." MM |
The historic deal, announced in February, gives screenwriters two percent of die gross profits of the pictures they write. Under the agreement the studio will recoup its negative, P&A, and certain miscellaneous costs, but writers get paid before distribution fees are deducted and other gross participants grab their cut. The actors and director still get their huge percentages (sometimes as high as 40 percent for talent), but the writer now gets a slice before the pie is eaten up, and they get a financial reward for writing the kind of script that makes money. "If you've written a really good script you attract a really good director and a really good star," says screenwriter Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune, Fallen), "but with all of their accounting procedures you never go into the profits. Under this deal, none of those onerous provisions kick in. As a writer, you can experience profits."
Kazan was part of a high-profile quintet of Hollywood scribes who began working on the deal in informal, closed-door meetings last summer. Frank Pierson (Dog Day Afternoon), Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society), Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams), Ron Bass (Stepmom), and Kazan, along with attorney Alan Wertheimer, presented the deal to Columbia- TriStar (owned by Sony), and the studio, in Bass's words, 'jumped at the chance."
More than 30 writers now qualify for the deal, which states that a writer must have been paid at least $750,000 for a feature script, $1 mil- lion for a spec script, or been nominated for a Writer's Guild of America (WGA) or Academy Award. By accepting, the writer agrees to write at least one script for Sony over the next four years. The deal remains open for seven years to any writer who meets these standards. Kazan says the new contract is not about establishing a millionaire's club. "What writers need most is respect, and that means being included in the process. When the writer says that something doesn't work, the possibility should be considered that the writer knows what he's talking about."
Bass believes he and his fellow honor roll writers are paving the way for a new perception of the writer's role on the part of the studios and the public. "When glass ceilings are broken and writers are seen as partners of directors, actors and studios and part of the core creative team responsible for a movie's success-and they participate in the financial rewards of that success-it's an indication of their importance."
Robin Schorr, senior VP of production at Trimark Pictures, one of the few truly independent "mini-majors" out there, applauds the new deal.
"I think it's fantastic. If anyone deserves a bigger piece of the action, it's the writer. They're the engine of the business:' But Schorr, who worked for uber-producer Kathleen Kennedy (E. 1') for 10 years and finally left the mainstream side of the business because she wanted to see better films get made, also believes the trick- le-down effect of the deal will be glacial.
"The hoops you have to jump through are tremendous:' says Meg Richman, a is-year screenwriting vet who has a solid reputation in Hollywood, but still finds herself in pitch meetings being forced to create the entire movie on the spot, outlining the plot and in1agining characters, only to have her ideas dismissed. "The authorial vision is not respected:' Richman wrote and directed her independently financed feature, Under Heaven, in 1997. Five years ago she wrote a script based on Somerset Maughanl's Up at the Villa, which is now being made into a movie starring Sean Penn, although her script was completely rewritten by the director's wife.
She and her fellow writers believe that economics alone won't improve scripts. But they do believe that giving the writer a greater voice will help change the way films are made. "What's more likely to have a positive effect on scripts:' says Bass, "is the tonal change in the relationship change between writers and studios:' Bass, it can be argued, is one of the few top- flight screenwriters who already have some control over the final product. He and Amy Tan adapted her novel, The Joy Luck Club, and he decided with that film to become a producer as well. "Nobody does their best work when they feel dictated to; when they fell their creative opinion is not respected.”
The corruption of a writer's vision begins when producers, directors, actors and other writers rework, rewrite, and improvise the heart out of an original script, and then executives pre-test the fi1m to ensure they can attract the widest audience possible. By the time a fi1m finally opens, a writer's words and rhythms are usually pasteurized.
"A lot of writing is affected by the process:' says Daniel Pyne (Pacific Heights, White Sands), who two years ago sold a spec script for $1.5 million, only to watch it tumble into the gulag of turnaround. "If this Sony deal can mitigate the process that would be helpful." In his book, Adventures of the Screen Trade (1983), William Goldman (All The Presidents Men), wrote that once a writer hands over the screenplay he becomes "this weird thing, some vestigial lump, like a baby born with a tail." A writer lives with a script from the day he's hired to the day it must be delivered six months to a year later. It's like handing over a child to an adopting family.
Too often the new parents turn out to be a band of miscreants.
"It's pretty obvious that most films are terrible;' says Kazan, though both he and Bass are reluctant to believe that it's the writer's fault. They believe it has more to do with "product tampering."
"No one goes to the costumer and says, 'You know what, I know you made a good costume here but I'm just going to cut off the sleeves. 'Why should it be different with the writer?" Kazan tells of being on the set when a writer changes one line of dialogue he's written and it doesn't make a difference. But then the actor changes another line and the whole meaning of the scene changes. Soon a script's structure, its very backbone, is broken. Kazan, who subscribes to what he calls the "haughteur" theory of film- making, believes it's often a director's hubris, which abuses good writing.
It's a schizophrenic business;' says Pyne. "The studios are in the commerce business and we're in the art business. When they cross we can support ourselves. When they don't, we can't." Pyne wrote six feature scripts before he figured he had one good enough to send out. He feels that the quality of writing in Hollywood is as good now as it's ever been, that it's ! die marketplace-that undiscerning Godzilla of greed-that destroys good intentions. "A lot of people are depressed and discouraged or have become very cynical about the state of movies, even studio people," says Pyne. "lt's like a monster that no one person can control. As a group, we're failing to deliver good movies. “Good movies take chances. They focus on relationships, they follow a single character's point of view, they tackle idiosyncratic subject matter, they are intelligent and have a unique voice and they sometimes don't end happily. They are not programmed toward a particular actor's set of tics or a director's flourishes. They don't appeal to broad, homogenized demographic groups and therefore don't bring in the kind of money to support the gargantuan infrastructures of the movie studios. Hollywood is like any other business: the studios are in it for the money, and they make that money on megahits. They simply would not survive if they made films only for niche markets. Imagine how long Boeing would last if they started making nothing but hang gliders. As Bass puts it,"1 sometimes wonder about people who rail against Hollywood not being more courageous...as if the studios owe it to the rest of us to lose money so we'll get to see a really cool movie." He says that for every courageous film Hollywood makes money on, there are a dozen more brave movies that failed at the box office.
Some would say that Bass is part of the problem, given the oversimplified conflicts in films like Stepmom, Waiting to Exhale, and My Best Friend Wedding, but he does point out that he is writing about people, not explosions. And he offers his literary adaptations of difficult material as proof of his desire to get better films made. In the last year he's tackled the time- shifting narrative of Snow Falling on Cedars; the interior imaginings of the paralyzed narrator of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; and the richly textured oddities of The Shipping News. But he also believes that the market knows what it wants. "1 think that if we kept all the action adventure movies and special effects movies and slasher movies and dumb bathroom humor movies out of the theaters; if instead we put in only what some people feel is high-quality, classy entertainment-well, 1 don't think that's America and 1 don't think it works."
Kazan remembers the time in the '60s and 70s when the studios were making' serious, interesting films and there was an audience for them. Now, though, studios want that enormous hit, instead of several smaller hits that each make a little money. "You see somebody win a $50 million jackpot and you think, "Why am I playing the 25-cent slots?"
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| My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) |
Unfortunately, “sure-thing” mentality is now mainstreaming the indie film movement as well, "In the past, the two prime enemies of indies were Hollywood's mainstream, innocuous fare and television's simple, broad content;' wrote Emanuel Levy, film critic for Daily Variety and professor of film at Arizona State University, in his analysis of the current crop of movies at Sundance this year. He pointed out the dearth of provocative, original films, and the abundance of bland, slick crowd-pleasers, such as Happy, Texas and Tumbleweeds. Levy, whose book Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film will be published in August by NYU Press, believes that in 1998 "there was a narrowing of the gap between Hollywood and independent cinema:' not only in riskier big-budget films like Out of Sight, A Simple Plan, and Bulworth, but also because the production of indies is now firmly in the not- so-independently owned hands of boutique studios like October, Miramax, Fine Line, and Fox Searchlight. Like Robin Shorr, Levy believes the Sony deal will motivate all writers to write better, but he also shares her concern that economics are threatening the experimental risks that novice writer-directors need to take to keep the art of fi1m vital and visionary. Schorr, who admits she "gets discouraged when terrible movies are successful:' feels that every time a Fully Monty or Four Weddings and a Funeral breaks box-office records, dIe specialty studios will only want to make more of those kinds of films. Say all the nice things you want about Miramax's Shakespeare in Love, but it certainly doesn't look like Pi, or feel like Happiness, or sound like Celebration.
"Somebody figured out if you, make a certain kind of fi1m you'll make a certain amount of money:' says Dan Pyne, when describing the indie world's trend toward bland dating comedies and fluffy relationship movies, films that Richman and Schorr feel lack intensity and a sense of high stakes. Both are tired of the teenage crook-coming-of-age fi1m, which accounts for nearly 70 percent of the scripts pitched to Schorr. "I pass on them over the phone:' she says wearily. Schorr produced Richman's debut, Under Heaven, and says that even though she looks for edgy material with a unique point of view, a script must also have foreign pre-sale value and elements that are marketable in the U.S. Comedies are more successful than dramas, and any- thing dark doesn't play well outside of New York or L.A..So will the writers save Hollywood? Even though every movie begins with a writer's vision, the director and the stars are still considered the most important people on a fi1m. And the price paid for a script is still a small percentage of a film's overall budget. The WGA minimum for a script on a picture with a budget under $2.5 million is just under $30,000; the minimum script price for a film with a higher budget than that starts at $60,000. Richman was paid $150,000 for three drafts of a script she wrote for Fox Searchlight, even though she only had to write one of them. Pyne's $1.5 million for his turn- around script, Blameless, was against another $500,000 once the fi1m went into production. And Bass, when he was a freelance writer, commanded in the range of $2 million per script, with a $750,000 production bonus. But there is a perception within the industry that if a studio buys a script for $2 mil- lion, they have to spend $50 million on the movie, rather than, say, $10 mil- lion. This leaves some writers wondering why their words aren't worth just as much as the salary of the actor who has to say them.
But writers agree that money can't buy good writing. Gross points alone won't completely reverse old trends, and the lowest common denominator won't demand better movies. Better movies, if they are to come, will start with the writer. "Writers must write things they believe in:' comments Schorr."lt's a terrible mistake to emulate something else that's been successful." Bass agrees that knock-offs don't work, and that "the irreducible element of a good movie is that it has to have a good script."
Kazan feels that, "if writers truly becomes partners, they can do a lot to save Hollywood." This echoes Goldman's plea for partnership at that fateful moment when a script is turned over: "At this time of great knowledge, conceivably at the time of his greatest usefulness, the screenwriter is cast aside."
Hollywood is and always will
be a place where the cynic eats lunch with the optimist; where
the waves of discouragement and enthusiasm break along the same
shore. The Sony deal could be the heralding of a new day for
the screen- writer, or it could just as easily be another desperate
studio tourniquet. As Pyne so succinctly puts it,” The horrible
and the great thing about Hollywood is that everything is true
until it's not true anymore." MM
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This story was published in the April/May 1999 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Charge of the Write Brigade / With new money and new respect, will the writers rescue Hollywood?
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