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Why are blockbuster movie scripts so... bad?
I've been going to the movies more in the last year than I have in the previous decade, because I have a coworker turned friend that likes to watch films in theaters and it is a cheap way to hang out with him (protip: bring your own snacks and drinks in a backpack instead of buying from the concession stand and watch the morning matinee instead of purchasing the more expensive evening tickets). And what I keep noticing is that, while they are very pretty, the writing in them is absolutely, uniformly awful.
I'm not even talking about politics here. I'm talking about how nobody in Mufasa ever stops to think about "wait a minute, how do I know that Milele even exists?!" the way a level 1 intelligent character would. I'm talking about how half the runtime of Jurassic World Rebirth is pointless action sequences that contribute nothing to the plot. I'm talking about how Brave decided to waste its amazing prologue by focusing the movie around the mom turning into a bear.
If you are already spending $200 million producing a movie and another $100 million marketing it, why can't you just throw in an extra million to hire Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin (or, hell, Eliezer Yudkowsky) to write your script for you?
But... it doesn't seem to be a question of money? It is certainly possible to find much better writing in direct to video films than in theatrical films, despite their much lower budgets. Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap, while there were have been some very solid entries in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. I recently watched Justice League: Gods & Monsters, and I was hooked from the first scene of General Zod cucking Superman's dad to the end credits; I wasn't looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie is going to last, the way I do when watching a blockbuster.
Previous discussion.
I think writing in general, including novels has declined and in part I think it’s down to how we create writers. These are not people who had traveled widely and read, they go to college to learn to write (or make films) they are taught structures and methods, but because everyone is going to the same programs and learning the same methods and having the same experiences, there’s not much to draw on. So you get a lot of people writing without very much understanding of how people react in a given situation, and the dialogue sounds a bit off because the person that’s on the screen is someone’s blind guess at what a person like that is like.
That’s obviously wrong.
You’ve got the George Lucases of the world: studied film at USC. No interesting life experiences. No ability to write human dialogue. Clearly capable of making a movie anyway. His whole cohort of Coppola and Spielberg and so on have similar stories.
Then there’s the Wes Andersons, whose ivory-tower philosophy degrees don’t appear to have prevented them from writing competent films. Or branch out to weirdos like Hideo Kojima. It’s not like he had an exotic childhood. He just thought movies were cool, so he started writing something resembling screenplays.
I agree that George Lucas had not a wide variety of interesting life experiences, but I think illicit race car driving hobby that ended in nearly-fatal accident is plenty interesting, far more than run-of-the-mill sheltered millennial can boast of. But I agree his personal life experiences provided enough material for only one film (American Graffiti) which isn't bad but not the work Lucas is famous for.
I propose a synthesis: Great films require great directors, scriptwriters, actors, camera work, costumes, special effects, score. Some of those, I imagine, are skills someone can learn if he/she has the requisite talent and aptitude and opportunity to learn (such as in a film school). However, when it comes to the story elements and character portrayal, the film school can be beneficial but it is not the only nor the best source. School education has tendency to teach formulaic standards that please the professors. So it helps when the directors and scriptwriters can draw from real experiences- while it is not necessary if they can draw from imagination and someone else's real experiences. Likewise, it is not necessary but it helps when actors can do the same thing (during the filming of Lord of the Rings, Sir Christopher Lee corrected Peter Jackson on what kind of sound a man makes when he is stabbed in back. I doubt many actors today can claim similar knowledge.)
It is necessary that the scriptwriters are very good at writing, which requires superb talent or relentless practice and usually both.
In Star Wars the original trilogy we have a bit of both: Lucas draws not from personal biographical history but from previous films he saw as a kid that were more connected to reality and they had other writing talent and producers and directors. Star Wars (1977) is a collage of samurai epic, westerns, WW2 airplane action films, and Flash Gordon. When Lucas draws from Dam Busters (1955), he takes inspiration from a film based on a genuine military operation. Kurosawa's samurai films have a more tenuous connection to history, but it is a connection nevertheless, and as inspiration it was new to the US mass audience. Flash Gordon is work of imagination, but contributes the pulp setting and plot elements. Concerning the script-writing skill part, for The Empire Strikes Back, they brought in Leigh Brackett for the first draft, who had written countless amount of pulp space opera and screenplays for noir and John Wayne films, and later Lawrence Kasdan to polish the dialogue. For Indiana Jones, they had Lucas, Spielberg, and old adventure movie serials.
As an aside, Francis Ford Coppola is a great director who did nothing too exciting growing up, but one of his particular skills as director has been in choosing great occasionally high-brow script material. I don't think people today realize how many of his films are either directly based on or inspired best-seller novels. Everyone seems to know that Apocalypse Now is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam (and Joseph Conrad had plenty of varied life experience), but it is not as common knowledge that the Godfather was based on novel by Mario Puzo ("The novel remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 67 weeks and sold over nine million copies in two year") who also wrote the script. The Outsiders and Rumble Fish are novels by S. E. Hinton. Original inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula is, you know, in the title. I think the only film of his I've seen that is based on original script is The Conversation. In comparison, Spielberg appears to be a directorial wonderkid, winning competitions at age 13 and sneaking into Universal Studios as teenager.
The generation of film-makers today have two major endogenous weaknesses: Firstly, they draw from pop culture products that are now twice or thrice-removed from the 'real' source (instead of WW2 aircraft dogfight films, the Star Wars sequels were inspired mostly by previous Star Wars) and the creators have PMC childhoods followed by college and adulthood which are more boring and scripted than 60's kids had. Secondly, both low-brow pulp fiction and high-brow literature are dead. Of pulp era media products, only the withering remains of comics are left. Pulp provided scripts and training ground and filter for aspiring writers whereas high-brow literature provided an aspirational ideal, and occasional script, too. DC and Marvel have been mostly successful at reanimation of decades-old characters and tropes.
Now I believe the weaknesses mentioned above would not be fundamental obstacles alone- the directors and scriptwriters could draw inspiration and verisimilitude from elsewhere if they had to, but then myriad of separate obstacles grind down that possibility: propensity to be blinded by activism; attention deficit among the audiences; economics influenced by streaming services; economics of producing CGI heavy blockbusters to sell toys and-or theme park rides; all sound plausible contributors to decline of the cinema.
Right, I think this is a big part of it, but…
No! Not with any consistency, at least. Maybe I’m just skeptical of the evergreen argument that the current generation is coddled and sheltered, but it just doesn’t add up. George had exactly the kind of wealthy educated youth that Maiq was complaining about. It even fits the theory about not understanding dialogue! But because he was successful, his life must have been interesting, must have been in some way better than those miserable PMCs.
I think that’s pretty silly. I think you could sample veteran directors at random and find plenty that had boring, upper-middle-class upbringings. Or pick a young one and find something at least as irresponsible as George’s hobby. Not do I think it would correlate very well with critical or audience success, because I think your other factors are carrying all the weight.
This is really important. We have unprecedented access to the preserved corpses of existing projects. For the unimaginative, that’s a license to play it safe. Reboot the continuity and deploy a new line of toys. For the visionaries, though, having a rich world in which to play has its own advantages. We get commentary, metafiction, callbacks and fanservice. It’s opportunity. But it absolutely warps the market for intellectual property.
Entertainment is a commodity. You can’t sell Star Wars today because that spot is taken. You have to do something legally and perhaps even creatively distinct. Shot for shot remakes are a bizarre attempt to clear that bar. So are reboots. So are pivots to streaming, or AI, or whatever economic models promise market share without mining for good ideas.
The millennials barely even come into it.
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Hence all his military choreography looks like it's being acted out by aircraft, not spacecraft.
His trench run didn't have inherent verisimilitude because spacecraft really need to keep thrusting forward to maintain a constant velocity, it had relative verisimilitude because essentially none of the audience has an intuitive feeling for Newtonian mechanics in a vacuum, so "why don't Luke's wingmen just spin around and shoot back?" isn't a thought that we find unavoidable.
I wonder if some modern lack of relative verisimilitude is simply because we're a more culturally fractured society now. You still don't have an astronaut in the writers' room because there just aren't enough astronauts, but there's also lots of other occupations and activities and demographics that the writers room wants to write about (because they're interesting to watch), has no expertise with (because these days people with relevant experience are less likely to be acquainted with scriptwriters), but now gets burned by mistakes about (because lots of their intended audience is acquainted with those experiences).
It gets to the point where a little bit of realism can become a fun trope subversion in itself. When Sterling Archer has tinnitus or we see a montage explaining why Hawkeye is going deaf, seeing the reminder that guns and explosions are actually cripplingly loud is amusing, even to people who go to gun ranges and always wear ear protection, because seeing Hollywood get it right in fiction is a pleasant surprise.
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Your use of the singular indefinite article is very appropriate. George Lucas is capable of making a movie. As in, one. Which he did fifty years ago, which he's been coasting on ever since.
I don't know if you have other people in mind of the same ilk as Wes Anderson, but as for the man himself, I've seen two of his movies and found them both insufferably annoying and precious throughout.
While I have a soft spot for Fantastic Mr. Fox, I’m not really going to disagree. I got Anderson by randomly sampling 90s films. Here’s a few more:
While I tried to pick a different movies, these were literally the first three I clicked.
I stand by my theory that getting a liberal arts degree, plus a film masters, has been pretty normal for decades. The view of writer or director as Romantic auteur is what the kids call “cope.”
I don't think your examples really support the argument you're making. @MaiqTheTrue's argument, as I understand it, was similar to one made by Kevin Mims here: writers in the past tended to have some kind of life experience outside of writing which they could draw on in order to tell compelling stories, whereas modern writers tend to study writing itself, and hence have nothing to draw on other than other stories they've read by other people, resulting in their novels/stories/screenplays giving the impression of palimpsest. I did not interpret their argument to mean that "if you have a liberal arts education, your stories will suck".
Per the narrative above, Jonathan Hensleigh obviously falls into the former category, not the latter: he practised law for seven years, unambiguously professional experience outside of writing itself. Likewise David Mamet: he variously worked as a busboy and taxi driver in Chicago (imagine the kinds of crazy characters he must have met) before taking up writing full-time. Ed Solomon I'll grant - but if your first example to illustrate your point that "you don't need life experience to tell a compelling story, you can just go straight into writing professionally" is the dude who wrote the Charlie's Angels adaptation and Super Mario Bros. with Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper, it doesn't strike me as a terribly compelling one. (Obviously Solomon has written more commercially successful and critically well-received screenplays than those two, but it seems worth pointing out that the latter is widely considered one of the worst films ever made and one of the worst cinematic adaptations of a video game - and there is some seriously stiff competition for the latter accolade.)
So of the three examples you provided of successful Hollywood screenwriters, two of them did, in fact, have some kind of professional life experience outside of writing to draw on when writing their screenplays, which seems to affirm @MaiqTheTrue's point rather than contradict it.
I'll concede the point that studying film in college before going on to being a director seems to be a pretty normal career progression, and has been for decades - but given that this thread was about the poor standard of writing (as opposed to directing) in modern Hollywood films, that observation doesn't seem especially relevant. At no point did @MaiqTheTrue argue or even imply that films are worse now because directors study film in college instead of getting life experience first. While I don't doubt that having life experiences to draw on is valuable as a director, directing a film is an intrinsically more technical craft than writing one - the director needs to have at least a passing understanding of lighting, lenses, shutter speed, depth of field etc. in a way the screenwriter doesn't, and hence are well-served by studying these elements in a formal setting.
How am I supposed to interpret this, then?
I think there’s a no-true-Scotsman where each of these boring, normal careers gets recast as something exciting and meaningful. Is a stint working as a busboy really that unusual? Is speeding? Surely someone in today’s Hollywood has cleared this bar.
High-schoolers can volunteer in foreign countries and people will wave it off as PMC strivers padding their resumes. But when a rich kid stumbles into film school he must have collected some valuable experience. It’s a double standard in service of the age-old complaint. Those darn kids just don’t respect their elders.
Well, now you're just straight up putting words in my mouth. I never claimed that volunteering in a foreign country doesn't count as meaningful life experience. Nor did I ever claim that working as a lawyer is exciting or meaningful, merely that it's clearly something distinct from writing.
I'm sure they have - but if it's significantly less common for successful screenwriters to have cleared that bar than it used to be, that could be one contributing factor towards the decline of writing quality that is described in this thread.
Sorry, I'm not trying to speak for you, specifically.
I am assuming that maiq, who thinks the people in charge of crappy media got their jobs "without ever meeting a person that isn’t upper middle to upper class professionals," would view such volunteering as a stunt.
Sure. But is it? Do you have any reason to believe that the modal screenwriter used to be more in touch? Because I keep running into examples that look pretty similar to today's.
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He made at least two movies (ANH, ESB). Maybe as many as four (THX-1138, American Grafitti)
He neither directed nor wrote the screenplay for ESB. His only role was a "story by" credit.
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It doesn’t have to be specifically weird experiences, but there has to be some kind of life experience outside of LA childhood-> rich people high school -> film school pipeline. And without ever meeting a person that isn’t upper middle to upper class professionals, living in the country, going to parts of third world countries that are not tourist zone, or the like, it’s almost impossible to create those kinds of stories and have authenticity to them. Rural Tennessee is not LA with everyone talking with a southern accent. Military people do not banter like teens at their first job at Starbucks, nor do they disobey orders on a whim.
But that is literally what Lucas did. Screwed around getting into car accidents in high school. Ended up in a fancy college for exactly what he wanted. Made a shitload of money. If at any point he had some enriching experiences in third-world countries, he’s not advertising them.
How many of our greatest writers actually fit your Renaissance man archetype?
I'd say Tolkien, Twain, Orwell, Heinlein, and Hemingway clear the bar. Theodore Roosevelt does too, though he was a man who wrote books more than an author.
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I think the prequel trilogy proved that Lucas wasn't the single voice behind the writing for Star Wars: he had to bring in new editors (including his then-wife) to redo the first movie, and then shared writing credits on Empire and Jedi with Lawrence Kasdan. When in charge of everything, the writing quality got noticeably worse, although maybe I'm still too salty about the "Special Editions".
Come to the 4K77 side. We have cookies!
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I think there's some truth to this argument, and I've seen people point out examples like how Tolkien was a World War 1 veteran which helped to shape his writing, versus modern TV shows which show military officers in some scifi or medieval setting bantering with each other like they're coworkers at a Starbucks. But I also am left thinking that this just moves the question back a step.
Everyone knows that life experiences can aid in enriching one's fictional writing. Everyone knows that sheltered people exist. Everyone knows that echo chambers exist. People educated in colleges are often even more aware of these things than the typical layman. Therefore, if I'm a sheltered college graduate wanting to write the next great American novel or the script to some TV show or film I'm pitching, I'm going to try to do as much research as I can to get out of the limitations brought on by my sheltered upbringing and limited experiences. I'm going to dive into research - at a bare minimum do a search on Wikipedia, which it's quite evidence that many of these writers didn't even care to do - to present the characters and settings in as believable and compelling ways as possible, reflecting what someone with true life experiences of those things would have written, even if I myself never had those true life experiences to draw from.
It seems evident to me that very little of that kind of research in order to break out of one's own limitations is occurring in professional TV and film writing. Perhaps in all fiction writing. This speaks to a general lack of passion or pride in the work they're putting out, a lack of desire to actually put together something good. Perhaps it reflects the education that writing is primarily about expressing your true self or whatever, not about serving the audience. Which would also, at least partially, explain why so much criticism is directed at the audience often when these projects fail because the (potential) audience refuses to hand over their money to them for the privilege of viewing them.
Even many people who are aware, in principle, that echo chambers exist seem to have a remarkably poor time recognising when they've found themselves inside one. Echo chambers, like "biases", are things that happen to other people. I'm actually not persuaded that the average person with an undergraduate degree would be better equipped to recognise that they're in an echo chamber than the average person without an undergraduate degree. Kind of reminds me of the cowpox of doubt: if you've been told that uneducated people get sucked down the rabbit hole of far-right echo chambers, you might think to yourself "phew, good thing I have a degree, that'll never happen to me!" Which might make you even more susceptible to ending up in an echo chamber - perhaps not a far-right one, but an echo chamber of some description.
Empirically, I can't disagree. What I find confusing is that, everything you wrote here is also basically common knowledge. Everyone who knows anything about bias knows that the bias of considering oneself above the biases that other people fall for is very common. As such, if you observe other people's biases and think yourself above them, the obvious conclusion would be that you're falling prey to such a bias and should break out of it by challenging yourself with objective research that challenges you.
At least, if you're motivated to write a good work of fiction that can appeal to people outside of your echo chamber. I have to conclude that a high proportion of major fiction writers have no such motivation. The hunger for status within one's echo chamber is often greater than the hunger for money, I suppose.
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Tolkien also was very well-read, both in history and fiction.
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You need to know that you’re missing the experience to know you have to look it up on Wikipedia. If you only worked part time as a teenager, you just assume all jobs work like that; if you assume that everyone anti-trans is just a Christian bigot, you don’t have to look up their views, you just write a religious idiot.
I very much disagree that college students know that they are sheltered and don’t have life experiences.
You're probably correct on this. But it's still confusing to me why. Everyone knows that everyone is missing something due to having limited experiences. Everyone knows that they fall under the category of "everyone" and therefore they must be missing something. It doesn't take much research to find out that life in the modern West, even as a lower class person, is extremely sheltered and protected compared to the norm of humanity. College students have disproportionately high access to research material and disproportionately high experience doing research. If they truly want to write a good novel or film script about a setting or characters they have little personal experiences with, any mid-level intelligent person in that situation should be able to put 2 and 2 together to realize that they need to step out of their bubble and dive into research to learn about lives and circumstances far different from their own.
Which is why I have to conclude that these people don't have motivations to write good fiction.
It can be difficult to properly pierce one's bubble. I was a bookish kid. When I became aware of that I had zero experience of grittier side of life, my first instinct was to explore gritty darker shady parts of life ... in form of reading more books and watching the Wire. Later I have realized I did not obtain a realistic experience.
Genuinely adventurous researcher must act like an old-school journalist, travel to places and meet people he/she would never talk to. You have to be clever enough not be hoodwinked by first charlatan in the way. You must have enough background knowledge to contextualize what you see but not let be too influenced by your background "context" so that you fail to see evidence that contradicts it. Most of the research done and readily available today is .... not that.
And if you were invested in researching and writing a period-accurate historical drama, it is not given that anyone else is interested in historical accuracy.
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