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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.
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 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".
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