Tales from the Script (2009)
Tales from the Script (2009) – Damn, this movie is disheartening. The movie is about writing movies. It features interviews with many prominent screenwriters such as John August (Big Fish, Go), Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), John Carpenter (Halloween, Escape from New York), Guinevere Turner (American Psycho, Bloodrayne), Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging, Mi vida loca), Larry Cohen (It’s Alive, Phone Booth), Antwone Fisher (Antwone Fisher, ATL), Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist), and William Goldman (The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). Many of them have horror stories about the kind of creative restrictions that come about trying to get movies made in Hollywood. Turner’s story about how her feminist action movie Bloodrayne got repeatedly altered by director Uwe Boll (who barely speaks English apparently) is particularly upsetting. It already seems like you have a better shot of winning the lottery than getting your screenplay produced, but once you’ve sold that screenplay it might not get made or the producers or studios or stars or ANYONE really might want to insist on certain changes being made. It should be enough to make any aspiring screenwriter turn and run. Then again, if screenwriters could be dissuaded from impractical dreams they wouldn’t be screenwriters in the first place I suppose… sigh…
Persistence of Vision 