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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 dollars producing a movie and a similar amount 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.
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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